It was a good deal for the corporate conservatives. Many were socially moderate or liberal, but they got what they wanted in the economic sphere and didn’t have to worry much about the traditionalists’ agenda. After all, the social conservatives had to wait nearly 40 years after Reagan’s reelection before enough Supreme Court appointees were ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. For much of that period, especially on LGBTQ+ issues, popular norms became more liberal.
Donald Trump’s convention this week, and his choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate, suggests business is being asked to accept a new bargain that, in principle at least, is far less congenial to its interests.
Trump still promises big tax cuts and deregulation. He even told a group of oil executives earlier this year that he’d scrap President Biden’s clean energy policies and other environmental rules if they raised $1 billion for him.
But Trump is asking business to tolerate far more than Reagan’s sometimes-gauzy social conservatism. The generally free-trading corporate folks would have to accept much higher tariffs under Trump as well as sharp immigration restrictions they believe, with reason, would slow growth.
The convention itself will cause business further indigestion. Who could have imagined that Republican delegates would cheer Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien as he called out the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce as “unions for Big Business” and shouted passionately on behalf of “workers being sold out to big banks, big tech, corporatists, and the elite”? Ignore the Republican slogans posted around the hall and the obligatory mentions of Trump, and you might have thought O’Brien was addressing a Bernie Sanders rally.
In the meantime, Vance has made a name for himself by frequently breaking with Republican free-market orthodoxy. He has criticized “the postwar American order of globalization” that “involved relying more and more on cheaper labor” and defended a higher minimum wage.
He has predicted “a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers” in a second Trump term and chastised those who would privatize Social Security. He told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: “I don’t know why people think that you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
Particularly surprising was his praise for the aggressive antitrust work of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whom most in his party (and in business) have turned into a punching bag.
But business leaders — and many others — have reason to be nervous about the authoritarian side of Vance’s populism. For example, he has said that, unlike then-Vice President Mike Pence, he would have refused to certify Biden’s election in 2020. He joined his party’s new nationalists in praising Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban and has been a skeptic of aid to Ukraine. He also advised Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “replace them with our people.”
Almost immediately after Saturday’s shooting, Vance declared that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” The effort to delegitimize criticism of Trump clashes with the former president’s calls for “unity,” unless unity is defined as universal support for the Republican nominee.
Trump is clearly willing to risk some corporate alienation as long as Vance can send the right messages to the blue-collar voters who have been key to the former president’s rise. But the question remains: Is the GOP’s move away from market orthodoxy real, or primarily an electoral ploy?
It’s true that Vance is not alone in his dissident economic views. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) have both been increasingly critical of corporations and the rise of inequality. New conservative think tanks such as American Compass and a new generation of intellectuals such as Sohrab Ahmari have proposed far more interventionist policies.
Yet most rank-and-file Republicans in Congress remain passionate advocates of free-market ideas and depend heavily on financial support from business in their campaigns. They are far more eager to criticize regulators than those being regulated. Witness their attacks on Khan and their moves to overturn pro-union rulings under Biden by the National Labor Relations Board.
History is on the side of the market-thinkers prevailing. Trump’s first-term policies were very anti-labor. The major legislative achievement of the Trump presidency was a traditional GOP tax cut that mostly benefited corporations and the best-off, not the infrastructure bill he kept promising but couldn’t deliver.
The ideal outcome for Trump is that blue-collar voters take his and Vance’s populist rhetoric seriously while business groups ignore it. But unlike the bargain Reagan struck with conservatism’s competing wings four decades ago, Trump’s offer promises serious material losses to the side that gets his intentions wrong.
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