Burning down their own house

Republicans largely won the economic policy arguments of the latter 20th century and Donald Trump is throwing their victory away.

All Donald Trump had to do was keep doing what Joe Biden did. While Joe paid the price for inflation caused by the pandemic and the government’s response to it, the economy was largely recovering and humming along. The job market was strong and GDP was steady. Wages were even outpacing inflation.

But Trump couldn’t help himself. He had to burn it down, just like he does everything else. The economy added only 22,000 jobs in August and June numbers were revised to show we actually lost 13,000 jobs. The American worker is taking it on the chin.

One of the most striking things about Trump’s failures is the complicity of the Republican Party. The GOP essentially won the economic argument of the latter half of the 20th century. The free marketeers who told us competition and creative destruction were keys to our economic future drove policies that built trade relations with China and developing countries around the world. They argued that the loss of manufacturing jobs were the cost of cheap household goods and affordable new technology like smartphones. Those jobs would be replaced with high paying ones in the knowledge economy.

Democrats grudgingly embraced the view, beginning with Bill Clinton signing NAFTA. The shift caused a division between labor and the Democrats, as union membership dropped and blue collar jobs shipped overseas or were lost to that new, cheap technology. By 2008, Democrats had largely become advocates of free trade as much as their Republican counterparts. The Reagan conservatives essentially won both the argument and the policy debate.

While free market economics has its problems, it made the United States the wealthiest country in the world with the largest economy and it’s not even really close. The free market concentrated wealth so the domestic debate became how to distribute it more than how to create it. Democrats wanted a robust social safety net subsidized by those who benefitted most from the success of Reaganomics. Republicans fought to let people keep what they made regardless of their wealth or the inequality that free market economics caused.

While the country was getting wealthier, the people who were left behind by the trade agreements felt largely forgotten and hopeless. Twenty years after NAFTA, large swaths of the Midwest and South still had not recovered while cities on the coasts and the Sunbelt were growing and thriving. Former factory and mill towns were left with aging populations and a brain drain as the most capable people left for better jobs and opportunities.

Neither party did a great job of taking care of the people and municipalities harmed by free trade. Democrats at least tried, arguing for better health care, funding for schools, and more infrastructure. Republicans showed little sympathy but blamed scapegoats for the plight of those left behind, arguing that immigrants took their jobs and were coming for their culture, too.

Donald Trump preyed on the misery of the people who didn’t benefit from free markets. He blamed Democrats and immigrants, calling Mexicans rapists and murderers. He told people he could bring back the jobs that had gone overseas even though many of those positions were now automated and others paid too little to attract American workers.

Republicans jumped on the Trump bandwagon, making excuses for his racism and xenophobia to benefit from the wedge he drove between Democrats and working class voters. Pretty soon, they were believing their own spin. It was never much of a stretch to watch the Republicans embrace blatant racism since they built the party on the backs of the Jim Crow populists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. But to watch the party abandon Reaganomics is hard to understand.

At least bashing immigrants has a political upside. Throwing away a successful economic platform doesn’t really get you anything. Today, Republicans support tariffs that keep inflation higher than it should be. Their immigration policies are likely to drive labor costs up as the labor market gets stretched thin. At the same time they are beating up American workers, they’re about to cut health benefits, too. It’s not going to be pretty.

Republicans had the power to stop the carnage but they didn’t. Blame people like Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis who knew better but tried to split the baby. They refused to hold Trump accountable hoping they could reap the benefits while avoiding the pain. It didn’t happen. They didn’t just get conservative judges, they got protectionists economics and isolationist foreign policy. We have troops in the streets of our cities and government law enforcement that looks and acts like paramilitary thugs.

What Republicans really want is to go back in time to a place that only exists in their twisted imagination. At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt told the crowd, “Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean’s shores.” They want a country of white people, for white people, and by white people.

Donald Trump could have taken credit for Joe Biden’s success in leading us out of the pandemic. He could have embraced the free market principles that built the modern economy while using his populist credentials to bring better health care to working America. Instead, he’s going to burn it all down, trying to take us to a place that never really existed while the Republicans in Congress just watch it burn.