“I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice — I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” the right-wing impresario Bari Weiss told a Federalist Society gathering in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”
The assembled conservatives guffawed at hearing the quiet part out loud; in this case, the admission that tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the American right together.
And yet, less than two years after Weiss’s speech, the epoxy seems less sticky.
In recent weeks, polls have shown Republican voters becoming far more skeptical of cutting taxes for the rich. Reflecting that shift, GOP lawmakers are now trial-ballooning proposals to increase some levies on the wealthy. Some MAGA voices are attempting to articulate a Republican-leaning, tax-cut version of Democrats’ traditional redistributionist rhetoric, arguing that higher taxes on millionaires should finance bigger tax cuts for the working class.
All of this has the Washington swamp’s old-guard Republicans in a panic — one longtime anti-tax leader insisted that “there are traitors inside the Trump White House,” and another declared that “this is a potential crisis in the party — it sounds like Bernie Sanders economics.”
So what happened? Why is the anti-tax movement losing some of its unifying power among conservatives?
The answer may lie in the movement’s key revelation a half-century ago.
In the mid-1970s, the GOP was adrift, demoralized, and…
Auteur: David Sirota
