A generation ago, Democrats lost five of six Presidential elections; in 1992, Bill Clinton, calling himself a New Democrat, ended the streak. Clinton didn’t repudiate the whole Democratic platform—government activism on behalf of ordinary Americans remained the Party’s core idea—but he adopted positions on issues like crime and welfare that were more closely aligned with the views of the majority, including some rank-and-file Democrats. The message, Wehner said, was as much symbolic as substantive: “ ‘We’re not a radical party; we’ve sanded off our rougher edges, and you can trust me.’ ” He went on, “The hope for some of us was that our candidate in 2016 would be the Republican version of Clinton”—a conservative reformer who, having learned from past defeats, championed economic policies that placed Republicans on the side of the hard-pressed, including non-white Americans, the soon-to-be majority.
For fresh ideas, such a candidate had only to turn to a group of Republican thinkers who call themselves “reformocons,” of whom Wehner is a leader. Last year, the reformocons published a pamphlet of policy proposals called “Room to Grow,” on health care, education, taxes, entitlements, and other topics. In an introduction, Wehner writes, “Americans do not have a sense that conservatives offer them a better shot at success and security than liberals. For that to change, conservatives in American politics need to understand constituents’ concerns, speak to those aspirations and worries, and help people see how applying conservative principles and deploying conservative policies could help make their lives better.”
The essays don’t upend Republican orthodoxy. They argue that government should intervene on behalf of poor and middle-income Americans, but in ways that apply market principles to public policy, taking power away from Washington and giving individuals more options. Some proposals are familiar: school choice, health-care savings accounts. Others are more daring—for example, having college education underwritten by private investors, then repaid over the next decade as a predetermined percentage of graduates’ earnings. A few ideas, such as a wage subsidy that would increase the pay of workers making less than forty thousand dollars a year, building on the Earned Income Tax Credit, could easily garner bipartisan support.
“Room to Grow” contains a striking description of the American economic landscape: children born into poverty with little chance of escaping it, and middle-class families overwhelmed by the rising costs of health care and education while their incomes stay flat. It’s not that different from the story that Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Massachusetts senator, tells. After years of ignoring these stark realities—or of blaming big government, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan—some Republicans have begun to sound more like Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt.
The reformocon project shows how extreme mainstream conservatism has become in its opposition to anything involving the state. The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure, and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes. The reckless, and ultimately doomed, shutdown of the federal government by congressional Republicans, in October, 2013, precipitated the first conference of reformocons, in Middleburg, Virginia, and that led to “Room to Grow.”
When the 2016 Presidential campaign began, an organizer of the conference, April Ponnuru, became a policy adviser to Jeb Bush. Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, read an essay by Wehner and Michael Gerson, a speechwriter in the Bush White House, titled “A Conservative Vision of Government,” and expressed approval to an aide. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, sought policy advice from several reformocons, including Yuval Levin, who, as editor of the quarterly National Affairs, is the group’s foremost intellectual. Earlier this year, Rubio published a book, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone,” interwoven with the personal stories of struggling Floridians. Most of the policy ideas came directly from “Room to Grow,” a debt that Rubio acknowledged effusively.
To the reformocons, the Republican Presidential race appeared to be stocked with candidates who were eager to take the Party into the twenty-first century. “I thought it was a group of people who would make that case,” Wehner said. He looked up from his oatmeal with a wan smile. “But then came Mr. Trump.”
Donald Trump’s campaign first attracted attention, in the press and among Republican voters, when he disparaged Mexican immigrants. Since he entered the race, in June, slurs and feuds have been the mainstay of his media image. Less widely discussed are his positions on working- and middle-class concerns like trade, taxes, and entitlements. In his scattershot, get-out-of-my-way fashion, Trump has vowed to rewrite trade deals involving China, impose tariffs on the products of American companies that send manufacturing overseas, leave Social Security and Medicare alone, and raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. (“I want to save the middle class. The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”) To the reformocons’ dismay, Trump has commandeered their target audience and tainted their high-minded proposals.
Trump’s popularity isn’t based on ideology. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, he draws about evenly from Republicans who consider themselves “moderate to liberal,” “somewhat conservative,” and “very conservative.” More than anything, Trump supporters are defined by class: non-college-educated whites favor him at twice the rate of those with college degrees. Trump is attracting the very blue-collar Americans whom the reformocons were aiming to bind to the Republican Party. So far, at least, these voters, many of them angry and alienated, aren’t listening to the “Room to Grow” crowd. They’re thrilling to madder music.
Working-class whites remain the most coveted demographic in American politics, even as they shrink as a percentage of the electorate. Ever since Ronald Reagan became President, Democrats have worried about their declining share of this vote. In 2012, Obama captured just thirty-six per cent of white voters without college degrees, down three per cent from 2008—partly owing to the unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act, and skewed by Obama’s abysmal numbers among white Southerners. The emergence of the reformocons shows that more thoughtful Republicans have also grown concerned about the allegiance of the Party’s presumed base.
Last year, a Gallup poll found that forty-five per cent of Republicans think that the rich should pay more in taxes. Another poll, by the Pew Research Center, showed that more Republicans favor increased spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure than favor cutting those programs. Although government activism is anathema to conservative donors and Grover Norquist, it’s fine with a lot of Republicans making less than fifty thousand dollars a year. April Ponnuru’s husband, Ramesh, a contributor to “Room to Grow” and a senior editor at National Review, said, “Trump shows that Republican voters are not especially dogmatic conservatives—not as much as I’d like them to be.”
Reihan Salam, the executive editor of National Review, told me, “Trump is not someone I consider an ideal candidate—he does not represent my line of thinking. But he is proving that certain beliefs the professional political class had about who Republican primary voters are—what they respond to, what they care about—were just incorrect.” In 2008, Salam, along with Ross Douthat, the Times columnist, published a manifesto that presaged the reformocon movement: “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” Salam grew up in lower-middle-class, multi-ethnic Brooklyn. At Harvard, where he met Douthat, he became interested in wage subsidies “as a way to enhance the legitimacy of market economies,” he said. “There’s a natural marriage between a belief in a dynamic economy and a belief in solidarity and mutual trust, because the one tempers the other. Most human beings seek stability. A society where you allow this idea of a dynamic economy to pervade every aspect of life is very frightening to people, and certainly you’re not going to be able to build a political coalition around it.”
Salam, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, is critical of increased immigration and believes that Trump, though the wrong messenger, has forced an important issue into the open. He points to evidence that second-generation Hispanic Americans have less faith in the country’s promise than their parents did—that the vaunted American talent for absorbing people from other places is waning under economic pressure. Salam’s idea of a national community, united by a sense of mutual obligations and a belief in legitimate institutions, evokes the type of conservatism found in Europe. Trump, meanwhile, calls to mind Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi: a strongman, a nationalist, and a nativist, who appeals to voters of limited means by tapping into their gauzy aspirations, echoing their anxieties about decline, and assuring them a secure place in a country restored to greatness. Trump presents himself as a capitalist boss who won’t let capitalism tear apart the (white) social fabric.
This approach is far from the contemporary American right’s rugged libertarianism, just as Bernie Sanders sounds more like a European democratic socialist than like Bill Clinton. In this way, 2016—even more than the historic election of 2008, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—looks like a year of major political recalibration.
Trump’s campaign has offered a CAT scan of the Republican Party’s central nervous system, revealing its undetected growths, fissures, and abnormalities. His sustained popularity shows how contradictory and irrational the Party has become. It’s as if, in 1992, Democrats had thrown their support to Ross Perot, not Bill Clinton, because Perot—while departing from much of the Party’s basic ideology and offering only crude policy simplifications—voiced the submerged feelings of many Democrats whose presence hadn’t registered with national leaders and pundits.
Some of Trump’s positions so sharply violate Republican dogma—and his intemperance so deeply threatens the Party’s chances in the general election—that many conservative outlets are trying to destroy his candidacy. The Wall Street Journal has denounced him for supporting protectionist trade policies and higher taxes on the wealthy, especially hedge-fund managers and other beneficiaries of the “carried-interest” loophole, which allows them to pay taxes at lower rates than middle-income Americans. The Club for Growth, a conservative pressure group devoted to low taxes and small government, has aired ads deploring Trump’s past positions on taxes. (Trump responded with a cease-and-desist letter against the “pitiful little group.”)
No media organization has been more hostile to Trump than Fox News. After the second Republican debate, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, declared on Fox that Carly Fiorina had cut Trump’s “balls off with the precision of a surgeon.” Megyn Kelly, the Fox anchor, who has been the target of a stream of abuse from Trump, exclaimed, “You can’t say that!” Trump later tweeted, “@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future.” (Trump held out for a week before ending his boycott.)
“This is like a lunar eclipse,” Wehner told me in August, when many Republicans still believed that Trump would fade by September. “The damage he’s doing—while he’s leading in the polls, that’s the face and voice of the Party, and it’s toxic.” Wehner insisted that Trump is the antithesis of real conservatism: his confidence in his ability to fix America’s problems single-handedly shows no understanding of the restraints embedded in the Constitution and the separation of powers. “In no traditional sense could you call him a conservative,” Wehner said. “Conservatism in the spirit of Madison is the idea of taking popular passions and channelling them in a constructive way. Trump is doing the opposite—he’s taking popular passions and stoking them, by demonizing the Other.” Since then, Trump’s front-runner status has been challenged by another outsider, Ben Carson, who presents even more extreme ideas, but with a whisper instead of a shout. In late September, Wehner posted an essay on the Commentary Web site called “The G.O.P. Is Killing Itself.”
“Conservatism in the spirit of Madison” has almost ceased to exist. The outlook of the Republican grass roots, and of many Party leaders, is what Richard Hofstadter, writing toward the end of the McCarthy era, called “pseudo-conservative,” because “its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions.” Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump’s incendiary campaign. So did the spectacle, in 2009, of a Republican congressman calling the President a liar during a speech Obama gave to a joint session of Congress, and Party leaders comparing Obamacare to Nazism and slavery. Earlier this year, forty-seven Republican senators wrote the Supreme Leader of Iran and declared that the President didn’t speak for the country. There have been regular threats to close the federal government in order to accomplish limited political goals. (In September, another shutdown, over the defunding of Planned Parenthood, was narrowly avoided, despite the support of nearly all the Republican Presidential candidates.) On right-wing radio, Obama is constantly accused of tyranny and treason. Once the restraints are lifted, they’re hard to restore. Trump may be the bastard spawn of the Republican Party, but his parentage can’t be denied.
In mid-September, I travelled to a small town in southeastern New Hampshire called Raymond, where John Kasich was holding a town-hall meeting in a middle-school auditorium. Eighty chairs were arranged around a stool. One of the early arrivals was a twenty-six-year-old named Mark Lynch, who had come with his grandmother. Lynch, the son of a firefighter and a factory worker, had a crewcut and stubble, and wore a Red Sox T-shirt that exposed the tattoos on his biceps. He had just finished four years of service in the Navy and was training to be a policeman. Lynch wanted to hear what Kasich had to say, but he was more interested in the billionaire with the copper comb-over.
“Trump is tapping into this belief that politicians are self-serving,” Lynch told me. “He’s telling these donors, ‘I don’t need your money, I’ll finance my own campaign.’ If you look at what’s controlling government these days, it’s lobbyists and all these big corporations.” Lynch liked Trump’s positions on trade, taxes, and Wall Street. “People don’t want to see billionaires getting richer,” he said. “If Donald Trump, a billionaire in his own right, is saying billionaires in Washington and New York should be paying more—that says something.”
Lynch sounded a bit like a Sanders guy. When I pointed this out, his grandmother made a face. Lynch said that he couldn’t possibly vote for Sanders—“a self-proclaimed socialist from Vermont.” Lynch was a conservative, not so much on specific policies but in his values and in his ideas about America’s character. He didn’t want an overweening government creating costly programs and interfering in people’s lives. He just wanted a system that wasn’t rigged in favor of the rich and well-connected.
In Lynch’s eyes, his antipathy toward this privileged class didn’t make him an unwitting Democrat. “I don’t think Republicans are the party of big corporations and billionaires,” he said. “They’re for ordinary middle-class people.” The problem wasn’t conservatism but the dirty role of money in politics. Change would have to come at the hands of someone who wasn’t beholden to the system—a rich outsider like Trump.
Kasich entered the room, dressed casually, all in black. At sixty-three, he’s lean and combative, with a slump in his posture and a jutting neck. He served nine terms in Congress, and, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, in the nineties, he was a key lieutenant of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and a crusader for balanced budgets. As he never fails to tell audiences, he helped craft the 1997 deal that brought surpluses to the federal government for the first time in three decades, though most of the credit belonged to a booming economy. Elected governor of Ohio in 2010, and reëlected overwhelmingly last year, Kasich turned the state’s deficits into surpluses, while cutting taxes. This is the essence of his stump speech.
“I’m running for President ’cause I know how to land the plane,” he said, without mentioning the name of the candidate who could well crash it. “I understand that people are frustrated. My dad carried mail on his back. My mother was a blue-collar housewife. I understand anxieties about losing jobs and ringing up college debt. I know all this. But we can beat these things.” The way to beat them was to cut the deficit and say no to special interests in Washington. He offered no policy proposals to help the middle class, besides balancing the federal budget and deregulating business.
Kasich added a dose of spiritual uplift to this starchy message. “We need to live a life bigger than ourselves,” he said. “Life is not just about me, me, me, me, me. Do you agree with that? It’s about living a life that’s bigger than yourself. . . . I am the most flawed in this room, but at least I know I give grace and every day I can start over and try to do something positive.” There’s a strain of George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism in Kasich. (During a run for the Presidency in 2000, Kasich admitted to wishing that he’d thought up the term.) He often mentions the working poor in the same breath as the addicted and the mentally ill, as if all three groups needed charitable help. He has supported the expansion of Medicaid in Ohio, to the abhorrence of many conservatives; he likes to say that he’ll have this accomplishment in hand when St. Peter asks him what he did for the poor. “Be a center of justice and healing,” Kasich told the audience in Raymond.
Kasich, unlike Trump or Sanders, isn’t angry on behalf of the middle class. Ramesh Ponnuru told me, “Kasich’s problem is that he speaks down to poorer people—not to middle-class self-interest. The Republicans have a middle-class problem. The answer isn’t to leapfrog over it.”
As Kasich took questions, he kept needling voters, as if the friction helped him to stay engaged. Earlier this year, at a New York dinner with a group of leading economic conservatives, he antagonized his audience by arguing for Medicaid and bipartisanship. Kasich doesn’t throw clumsy punches like Trump, but he likes to dance and jab.
A tall, athletic-looking man asked Kasich, “Doesn’t cleaning the system out start with changing our campaign-finance system, starting with overturning Citizens United?” He was referring to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling permitting unlimited campaign spending by independent groups.
Kasich’s tone was dismissive. “So you change the campaign-finance laws,” he said. “How will it work? Probably not all that great. ’Cause what it gets down to is what’s in your heart.” He went on, “I got bigger fish to fry.” He mentioned the budget, entitlements, defense spending. “These are really big things. You got to have priorities.”
Kasich moved on to a chili cook-off at a nearby farm, where I asked him how he could reach an alienated Republican like Mark Lynch.
“All I can do is tell you what my record is,” Kasich answered. “And if it doesn’t work I move on to the next person. I can’t—” He pointed a finger at me. “What do you think I should do?” I started to describe Lynch’s views, and when Kasich realized I was talking about an ex-serviceman he found his sound bite: “Our veterans, they should be top priority.”
Lynch later told me that he was “very disappointed” by Kasich’s answer to the question about the campaign-finance system. “If you take care of the money issues in politics, it’s going to solve the problem of politicians going to Washington and either doing nothing or catering to lobbyists and big donors,” he said.
Lynch still liked Trump, but he was beginning to worry that Trump was offending too many people to be elected; Republicans couldn’t afford to abandon the Hispanic vote in Colorado and Florida. “My ideal candidate would be somebody who has a lot of Donald Trump’s views but is more polished,” he said. The best alternative, he felt, was Rubio. When I pointed out that Rubio was a Washington insider, Lynch sighed. “That’s the pickle I’m in, and a lot of people are in,” he said. “No matter who gets elected, it’s just going to be more of the same. That’s the problem with Washington, D.C. It’s this never-ending cycle of negativity and corruption.”
Over the past few years, the key phrase for Democrats has been “income inequality.” The relentlessly widening gap between wealthy Americans and the rest—accelerated by the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery—is at the heart of Sanders’s campaign, animates many of Hillary Clinton’s policies, and would make Warren an instant contender were she to enter the race. But “inequality” is a word that Republicans don’t like to use. Romney, during his Presidential campaign, characterized “inequality” as a code word: “I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.”
In 2012, Wehner co-authored an essay in National Affairs, titled “How to Think About Inequality.” He concludes:
The problem in America today is therefore not wealth but rather persistent poverty. And the right way to deal with income inequality is not by punishing the rich, but by doing more to help the poor become richer, chiefly by increasing their social capital. This means not simply strengthening the bonds of trust and mutual respect among citizens, but also equipping Americans—especially the poor—with the skills, values, and habits that will allow them to succeed.
In other words, the way to think about inequality is by looking down, not up. It’s not the wealth amassed at the top but, rather, the lack of “skills, values, and habits” at the bottom that accounts for the widening income gap. Oddly, Wehner’s essay barely mentions the economic struggles of the middle class. A close look at the three middle quintiles of income, where Americans with an education, a job, and a spouse can be found treading water or sinking, would have forced him to reconsider the notion that a lack of “social capital”—as opposed to just capital—explains the entire problem.
Even though the reformocons recognize the difficulties of the middle class, they prefer to focus not on income disparities but on “mobility,” which describes how individuals fare across their own life span and in comparison with past generations. Levin told me that the word “growth”—the unconvincing mantra of supply-siders—was losing its hold on conservatives. When Jeb Bush predicted that his economic policies would lead to four-per-cent economic growth, a level not seen since the late nineties, the claim was either ignored or derided. “ ‘Mobility’ is much healthier,” Levin said. “It’s the right lens to talk about the economy.”
But there’s a reason to look up as well as down the economic ladder, and it has nothing to do with envy or with punishing the rich. Economic stratification, and the rise of a super-wealthy class, threatens our democracy. Americans are growing increasingly separated from one another along lines of class, in every aspect of life: where they’re born and grow up, where they go to school, what they eat, how they travel, whom they marry, what their children do, how long they live, how they die. What kind of “national community” built on “mutual obligation” is possible when Americans have so little shared experience? The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility. As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen’s ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the over-all economy. (Critics call this the “financialization” of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession.
Inequality is also warping America’s political system. Greatly concentrated wealth leads to outsized political power in the hands of the few—even in a democracy with free and fair elections—which pushes government to create rules that favor the rich. It’s no accident that we’re in the era of Citizens United. Such rulings give ordinary Americans the strong suspicion that the game is rigged. Democratic institutions no longer feel legitimate when they continue to produce blatantly unfair outcomes; it’s one of those insights that only an élite could miss. And it’s backed up by evidence as well as by common sense. Last year, two political scientists found that, in recent times, policy ideas have rarely been adopted by the U.S. government unless they’re favored by corporations and the wealthy—even when those ideas are supported by most Americans. The persistence of the highly unpopular carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers is simply the most unseemly example.
The reformocons like to quote Lincoln, but not this memorable sentence: “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.”
Thus far in the campaign, the ideas of the reformocons have scarcely made an appearance among the Republican candidates. In Washington in June, Rubio—the favorite of the reformers—gave a speech to a group of them summarizing the arguments of his book. And he became the first Republican candidate to support paid family leave when, in September, he proposed a tax credit for businesses that offer their employees between four and twelve weeks off to care for newborns or sick family members. (Critics say that the tax credit wouldn’t offset enough of the costs in wages to induce companies to permit such leaves.) For the most part, though, Rubio has left the proposals in “American Dreams” on the shelf. “Rubio has the most interesting platform, but he’s not using it,” Ramesh Ponnuru said. Rubio, the son of a bartender and a maid who both emigrated from Cuba, “has established himself as the articulate, different Republican in a biographical sense,” Ponnuru added. “He’s not working to establish himself as a problem-solver. His campaign guys must be saying, ‘You have a good story, and voters aren’t interested in policy ideas.’ ”
In April, Rubio announced a tax proposal that hardly diverges from the Republican Party line. It offers families a twenty-five-hundred-dollar tax credit per child. But the proposal also reduces income taxes beyond the levels of George W. Bush’s cuts, making them even more regressive; cuts corporate taxes by ten per cent; and eliminates taxes on most investment income and inheritance. It gives a huge windfall to the rich, amounting to trillions of dollars in tax revenue. At the same time, Rubio promises to increase defense spending and pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Ponnuru offered an explanation for Rubio’s lapse into conventional conservative thinking: “The problem with the campaign-finance system is that it forces the candidates to spend too much time with rich people.”
Even though Rubio’s tax plan included the usual deep cuts for the wealthy, it was unacceptable to the Wall Street Journal, which criticized the child tax credit as a giveaway. Stephen Moore, the former president of the Club for Growth, explained his opposition to the columnist Albert R. Hunt: “The more you increase things like the child tax credit, the more you will move back to the 1960s and 70s tax system with higher tax rates.”
Jeb Bush, another hope of the reformocons, issued his tax plan in September. He framed it as an attempt to support social mobility and the “right to rise”—the name of his Super PAC, which, in the first half of the year, raised more than a hundred million dollars. Such rhetoric fooled some political reporters into characterizing the plan as “populist.” Though it does eliminate the carried-interest loophole, it offers the rich more than ample compensation, in the form of a large cut in income and capital-gains taxes. According to the Times, people making ten million dollars or more a year would see their effective tax rates reduced from twenty-six to twenty-one per cent, saving them an average of a million and a half dollars a year. Bush’s plan would drain up to $3.4 trillion dollars from the Treasury.
In the end, the reformocon candidates haven’t sounded that much different from Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, and Rand Paul. All of them have had more to say about defunding Planned Parenthood, shutting down the federal government, repealing Obamacare, balancing the budget, and building a wall along the border with Mexico than about the problems of the middle class. The mantle of economic populism has essentially been handed to Donald Trump.
At a press conference at Trump Tower on September 28th, Trump unveiled his own tax plan. “Too few Americans are working, too many jobs are being shipped overseas, and too many middle-income families cannot make ends meet,” he proclaimed. “This plan directly meets these challenges, and the challenges also of business.” What followed was a tax cut for just about everybody. Seventy-five million Americans—single people making less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and married couples making less than fifty—would be dropped from the tax rolls altogether. But the biggest winners would be the rich: Trump would reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to four, and would cut the rates of the top earners by fourteen per cent, below the level proposed by Bush. Even Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform blessed Trump’s plan. In the midst of an anti-establishment revolt, supply-side dogma has an unbreakable hold on Republican politics.
“Trump is as popular in Ohio as anywhere else,” John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, told me in September, in his office. The Presidential campaign felt far away—Ohio’s primary isn’t until next March—but the state remains key to the general election. “Part of it is that Trump’s an emblem of success, and the other part of it is he taps people’s anger,” Green said. “It’s not the same anger as a few years ago, when it was ‘Where are the jobs?’ Now it’s ‘Where’s our share of the American dream?’ ” Green, who does polling research on Ohio and American politics, went on, “A lot of white working-class votes are up for grabs in this election. In recent years, they’ve gone Republican, but this year the Democrats could get a slice of them.” The Republican coalition of business interests and the white working class, he said, “is under more stress this year than it’s been for a while.”
Twenty-five minutes down Interstate 77 is Canton, the city where William McKinley—the first truly modern, pro-business Republican President—lies in a black granite sarcophagus under a marble dome. Canton is one of those American towns where industrial decline and population loss give a sense of uninhabited space. The Hoover vacuum company, once headquartered in North Canton, was acquired in 2007 by a Hong Kong firm that moved production to Mexico and China. An abandoned brick factory is being redeveloped for white-collar service companies and apartments. Alongside the interstate, a former Hoover plant has become a megachurch with a congregation of thirty-five hundred souls, some of whom once assembled vacuum cleaners on the premises.
After a winter of continuous below-zero temperatures, many of Canton’s streets crumbled, and nearly a year later they remain impassable. The Democratic mayor, William Healy, laid the blame for the city’s infrastructure woes on climate change and John Kasich. In balancing Ohio’s budget, the Governor dramatically reduced state contributions to local governments while cutting certain business taxes and eliminating the estate tax. The result, Healy said, was a loss of seventeen million dollars to Canton—twenty per cent of its revenue—bringing spending below the level of 2007. The Mayor had to choose between keeping policemen and firemen employed or repairing broken streets. “That tells you the impact of John Kasich,” he said. “But on the national front, where you’ve got Trump, Kasich comes across as a moderate! Damaging as Kasich has been to my city, as mayor, if I had to vote for a Republican for President I would vote for Kasich over the entire field. That tells you where the Republican Party has gone.”
Around Ohio, local governments are being forced to choose between raising taxes and neglecting services, even though the state now has a two-billion-dollar “rainy-day fund.” In his stump speech in New Hampshire, Kasich claimed that his fiscal policies helped create three hundred thousand jobs. In fact, Ohio remains below its pre-recession employment rate, meaning that the state has lagged behind most of the country during the recovery. Zach Schiller, the head of research at the nonpartisan group Policy Matters Ohio, in Cleveland, told me, “Kasich’s claims to good economic performance? I don’t know if I want to say ‘deceptive,’ but they’re certainly misleading.”
According to Policy Matters Ohio, since 2013 Kasich’s policies, including a higher sales tax and cigarette tax, have raised average annual taxes on the state’s poorest fifth by seventeen dollars, given middle-income people a ninety-four-dollar cut, and returned seventeen thousand dollars to members of the one per cent. “We’ve engineered a tax shift to lower- and middle-income Ohioans,” Schiller said. “And we’ve reduced over-all tax revenue.”
Kasich’s tax policies have earned him the approval of Arthur Laffer, a native of nearby Youngstown, whose famous curve—supposedly demonstrating that lower income taxes generate higher revenue by stimulating economic growth—started the revolution in supply-side economics, forty years ago. Schiller pointed out that nothing in Ohio’s recent economic experience supports supply-side theory. The same is true nationally: growth has accelerated in periods when tax rates have been higher on top earners and stalled when rates came down. Kasich, who has positioned himself as the capable, reasonable, experienced “grownup” on the G.O.P. stage, is a supply-sider at his core. As long as Republicans cling to the warped logic of trickle-down economics, their efforts to help middle-class Americans will be largely rhetorical.
East of Canton, there’s a small steel mill owned by a Pittsburgh company called Allegheny Technologies, Inc. On a strip of grass outside the mill, around a dozen locked-out steelworkers were picketing under a white tent, with American flags, water bottles, and defiant signs: “Unfairly Locked Out for 32 Days”; “Greed, Power & Control Rule A.T.I.—Lockout Proves It!” The Canton area has a history of racial prejudice, but the picket line was one place where it was possible to find black and white men hanging out together.
A.T.I. had been requiring some of the hundred and thirty workers at the mill to put in twelve-hour shifts or seven-day work weeks. Families were showing the strain. In June, A.T.I. offered the union representing the employees, the United Steelworkers, a new contract, asking for a hundred and forty-five concessions. The company claimed that it was under pressure from foreign and nonunion U.S. competitors. However, executive pay had risen more than fifty per cent during 2014, and the total compensation of the chief executive, Richard J. Harshman, had risen seventy per cent, to nearly eight million dollars, in spite of the company’s poor performance. (Nearly half of A.T.I.’s shareholders had voted against the compensation packages.)
“I read those hundred forty-five items and got sick to my stomach,” Kurt Reynolds, a burly maintenance worker with a Hemingway beard, said. “I told my wife, ‘If this is what they want, they’re trying to break the union.’ ”
In August, A.T.I. made its final offer. Before the United Steelworkers could bring it to a vote, plant managers escorted employees from the mill and brought in replacement workers. The lockout began. Union workers were girding themselves for a long battle. “It ain’t nothing but corporate greed,” Rick Jones, who has worked at the mill for twenty-two years, said.
The subject of Presidential politics came up. Reynolds said, “Right now, the only one I’m seeing is Bernie Sanders. He has a history of supporting unions.” He noted that Kasich had tried to take away collective-bargaining rights from public-sector workers; the idea had been soundly defeated in a statewide referendum. A worker named Mike Yeater said that he liked Trump’s positions on “immigration stuff and issues like that—he’s got patriotic beliefs.” But after Trump told the Detroit News that union autoworkers needed to accept lower wages Yeater stopped paying attention to him. Another worker said that he’d been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” and that he liked Sanders but was also interested in Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor who is running for President on a platform of radical campaign-finance reform. No one mentioned Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush.
A steelworker named Jack Baum was sitting in a folding beach chair on Main Street, his eyes shielded from the sun by a wide-brimmed camouflage hat, his dark hair tied back in a ponytail by a red-white-and-blue bandanna. He had a thick neck and a bushy mustache, and he held a sign that said “Fighting for Good Jobs in Our Community.” Every now and then a passing car honked, and Baum waved.
Baum calls himself an independent libertarian. “I believe in the company’s right to make money,” he said. “It helps all of us. And I also believe in the worker’s right to bargain for a fair wage.” In 2004, as president of the local, Baum led difficult negotiations; managers and workers eventually came to terms by making concessions—they needed one another to keep the steel industry alive. “This time is different,” he said. “They brought new people in to break the union. They do not respect us. They look at us as a number.”
Baum believes that “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s classic novel about the Chicago stockyards, should be required reading for American corporations. “At the turn of the century, the boss would go home and sleep with your wife in order for you to keep your job,” he said. Unions, he explained, were “a necessary evil. We need them, ’cause without them—I don’t know if you’d see a return to the turn of the century, where children are working, but corporations still have that deep-rooted sense of ‘I’ll just work you. Family doesn’t matter, outside life doesn’t matter.’ ”
Baum is fifty-five, with a grown daughter who’s a nurse at Cleveland Clinic. His marriage fell apart under the strain of long shifts, and he lives alone, in a trailer. He has voted Republican all his life, except for two times, when he voted for Ross Perot. This year, Baum was supporting Trump. He didn’t agree with everything Trump said, but he liked his position on trade and his tax plan—the way that it cut working-class people’s taxes to zero but also gave businesses a financial break, “because it’s killing our industries’ competitiveness.” He thought that Trump was strong enough to bring jobs back to America, and he appreciated his willingness to tell both parties, “You can’t buy me.” Baum found Trump’s insulting manner refreshing, calling it “a mirror of the way they treat us.”
Baum wanted to see a forty-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone who took money from lobbyists. “The rich élitists are not just Republicans,” he said. “They’re Democrats, too.” He continued, “Our Founding Fathers told us we should be able to go from modest means to riches with our own efforts. This is a country of capitalists—everybody should be rich. The problem is, the rich don’t want anybody rubbing shoulders with them. The middle class hits that wall and can’t get over it. We’ve been cornered. If you’re in a corner, you have no choice but to fight your way out.”
In an essay in “Room to Grow,” Yuval Levin describes what makes conservatives different from liberals. Conservatives don’t emphasize the individual and the state; they focus on the space between—where families, communities, religious groups, associations, and private enterprises create a web of interrelationships. “What happens in that space generally happens face to face—between parents and children, neighbors and friends, buyers and sellers,” he writes. “It therefore answers to immediately felt needs, and is tailored to the characters, sentiments, priorities, and preferences of the people involved. This kind of bottom-up common life, rather than massive, distant systems of material provision, is what makes society tick.”
Levin’s description of American life sounds appealing, but it does not reflect the reality of the steelworkers’ lives. The “massive, distant system of material provision” is their company, which is far more top-down than any federal bureaucracy. Nothing happens face to face; immediately felt needs go ignored; families don’t matter. There is no “common life” except for the workers’ desperate effort to stick together as they look ahead to weeks or months without pay—or, perhaps, a future without a job. Global competition is making these workers disposable, and so they are turning for insight and inspiration to Sanders, or Piketty, or Trump. The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence, don’t grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished middle-class Americans actually live. They can’t face its heartlessness.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: George Packer
No comments:
Post a Comment