What a Pro-Worker Republican Party Really Looks Like

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The day after the election, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a rising star of conservative populism, declared: “Republicans in Washington are going to have a very hard time processing this. But the future is clear: We must be a working-class party, not a Wall Street party.”

Hawley is right that the Republican Party should become a pro-worker party. But it should recognize that continuing to embrace Donald Trump’s populist policies and bromides will work against that goal. Instead, Republican pro-worker policies should advance traditional conservative commitments to free markets and opportunity.

Many in the GOP, including potential 2024 presidential aspirants like Hawley and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, have apparently concluded that the key to taking back the White House is to stick to the Trumpian formula. According to this view, the president would have won re-election if it hadn’t been for the coronavirus pandemic, thanks to the strong pre-virus economy. After all, Trump won millions more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. The GOP gained seats in the House of Representatives, will likely keep control of the Senate, maintained its grip on state legislatures, and increased its support among Black voters and important Hispanic groups.

Pointing to Trump’s performance among Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Rubio concluded that the future of the GOP is “a party built on a multi-ethnic, multi-racial coalition of working Americans.”

Liberals point out that a lot of the populist pro-worker rhetoric on the right is just that: rhetoric. They are largely correct. The problem with Rubio’s and Hawley’s interpretation of the election results is simple: Trump did scant for workers during his four years as president.

His 2017 corporate tax cut will eventually raise workers’ wages, but his destructive trade war worked against that by depressing investment spending. Moreover, the trade war not only hurt the overall economy; it also hit manufacturing workers specifically by reducing employment in that sector. The promised manufacturing rebirth never came, and significant progress on reducing drug prices or strengthening health care for workers did not occur.

As for Hawley, his Trumpian populism is most evident in his insistence that the working and middle classes have not seen improvement in their economic outcomes for decades; his efforts to break up major technology companies; attacks on international institutions, and attempts to curtail free trade and impose heavy-handed drug pricing regulation.

Thus far, Rubio’s moves toward populism have been more restrained than Hawley’s, but he has openly endorsed the “need for a sweeping pro-America industrial policy,” criticized Wall Street and courted organized labor. Both Hawley and Rubio have joined Trump and congressional Democrats over the past few weeks in supporting the measure to send checks for up to $2,000 per person to nearly all households.

I’m all for the GOP placing workers in the center of its policy agenda. But the party’s current populist agenda is not focused on workers, and much of it would actually hurt them.

Moreover, it does not reflect conservatives’ commitments to free markets and personal responsibility, which are both right on the merits and popular among Republican voters. Instead of attempting to direct large segments of the economy from Washington, attack the foundations of prosperity and indulge narratives of stagnation and grievance, Republican leaders should build programs to help workers based on their party’s traditional values and principles.

They should start with a plan to repair the damage caused by the pandemic recession. The number of workers unemployed for six months or longer has increased every month since April, more than quadrupling over that time. Long-term unemployment is likely to remain a significant problem for some time after the vaccine is in wide distribution.

Rather than offering these workers months of extra unemployment benefits, the federal government should pick up part of the tab to help them move from high-unemployment areas to parts of the country with better job prospects. In addition, to fight poverty and increase workforce participation, Republican should champion the expansion of the earned-income tax credit.

Both of these policies use government power to advance economic opportunity while acknowledging that we all should earn our own success in the labor market. Republicans should also aggressively roll back barriers to employment like occupational licenses and safety-net programs such as disability insurance that discourage employment.

Conservative populists bemoan economic dynamism and want to use policy to prop up the manufacturing industry, pining for a return to an imagined past. But a conservative pro-worker agenda would look to the future with confidence, recognizing that the same market forces that are reducing manufacturing’s share of employment are giving rise to new middle-class occupations, and would help workers to capitalize on those opportunities.

A pro-worker conservative agenda should also include investments in job training programs that have shown promise. Work-based learning programs, like apprenticeships, harness market forces to determine what enrollees in job training programs are taught. This agenda should also expand opportunities for the formerly incarcerated to get jobs, including through reforms like “ban the box,” which regulate questions about criminal history on job applications.

These are all ideas that Republicans should be proud to embrace — and, to his credit, Senator Rubio has been a leader on many of them. But the party should recognize that wrapping its arms around Trumpian populism is not the way to help workers.

Those who do so are undermining conservative principles. They are also undermining policies that are key to increasing prosperity for all Americans — including workers.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

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