Republicans claim to have abandoned economic libertarianism and embraced labor. But their platform doesn’t mention unions, and the party’s stalwarts at the RNC suggested a second Trump term would let the good times roll for the rich with little for workers.
MILWAUKEE — The end of this year’s Republican National Convention (RNC) brought a lot of grand pronouncements from prominent party figures.
“This is officially a brand-new Republican Party,” tweeted Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the convention’s final night.
“The RNC was proof positive that the old GOP — socially conservative, economically libertarian, and internationally interventionist — was well and truly dead,” Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote for Compact. “Trump’s GOP is economically protectionist, socially moderate, and antiwar.”
“On economics and foreign policy, respectively, the libertarian and neoconservative appendages that have so badly disfigured conservatism are being excised,” wrote American Compass economist Oren Cass.
There is certainly reason to think this is the case. Vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance attacked the “ruling class” and “the people who govern this country” that have loaded misery after misery on American communities through bad trade deals, financial crises, and stagnating wages. Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien gave the first-ever speech from a leader of the union at the RNC, stridently denouncing corporate power and union busting decades after the last time the union endorsed a Republican presidential candidate.
But for all the party’s insistence that it has changed, there were copious reasons to doubt it. Look past the surface, and the GOP standing before us is fundamentally the same party that Donald Trump took over eight…
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Auteur: Branko Marcetic
