Plenty of conservative commentators have already remarked upon what the Establishment GOP can learn from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, but the jist of the lesson can be distilled from a recent Bloomberg piece– rethink unfettered free markets, open immigration, global free trade, financial deregulation, and supply-side tax policy, and start adopting pro-productivity, pro-working-class policies across the board. This includes greater infrastructure spending, industrial policy to spur manufacturing, trade protectionism, and restricted immigration. In the medium-to-long term, this is easily a recipe for winning back the white working class from Trump voters (though fiscal libertarian purists of the Cruz-Paul ilk will not be pleased by “conservative big government.”)
But the working class economic crisis is only one of at least four devastating structural crises threatening the Republic in 2016, and to solve the others we’ll have to learn from figures other than the Trump. In particular, the GOP can steal a surprisingly large number of policy ideas from the most vociferous critic of conservatism in American national politics today- avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
These policy ideas focus on the financial sector and on the influence of money in politics, and frankly, they have significant support from certain conservatives as well as progressives. For example, Sanders’s support of renewed Glass-Steagall legislation (which separates commercial and investment banking,) the breaking-up of “too big to fail” banks, and the end of federal subsidies to said big banks, are all ideas conservative thinker James Pethokoukis endorsed over at the conservative journal National Affairs. Senator Sanders also supports higher taxes on the top income brackets, which would free up funds for the Reformocon goal of middle-class and working-class tax cuts.
On money in politics, Sanders supports a range of reforms including spending caps, mandatory disclosures, and other (relatively common-sense) policies. As with all sensible reforms in this area, the focus of Sanders- as well as Richard Painter in ‘The Conservative Case for Campaign Finance Reform”- is illuminating the influence of big money, rather than eradicating it (which would be impossible in our Madisonian democracy, anyway.) On financial regulation, progressive taxation, and campaign finance reform, Sanders’s policies fall solidly in the Republican tradition through President Theodore Roosevelt, and it would be proper- even conservative- for the GOP to take similar stances.
The basic jist of Sanders’s ideas listed above?
Undercut the plutocracy. As Adam Garfinkle demonstrated in a lengthy essay a few years ago, “money in politics” is not just ugly or illiberal- it hijacks the policymaking apparatus through regulatory capture and thereby stifles innovation, and undermines the very spirit of representative republican government. And it’s the number one factor precluding progress in the other two great crises confronting our republic, and thus requires a Republican response beyond “it doesn’t matter.”
On the other two great crisis fronts- the fiscal and entitlements mess, and the increasingly sclerotic and unreformable federal bureaucracy- Senator Sanders has absolutely nothing to offer. He’s supported big-spending policies like universal Medicare and free higher education, while supporting business-killing policies like increased labor and environmental regulations. The combination of extra spending and growth-killing regulations’ effect on revenues would likely exacerbate our fiscal crisis to, as Paul Ryan recently argued, unacceptable levels. Can anyone seriously see Sanders supporting entitlement reform to attack the core of the deficit problem? Or demanding that the federal bureaucracy reform its operating procedures in the name of efficiency and public service?
So while Sanders might do a truly excellent job at fighting plutocracy and fighting the good fight in the plutocratic crisis, it is highly likely that he’d make the fiscal crisis and the bureaucratic crisis many times worse than they already are. One step forward, and two steps back. At least under a President Hillary Clinton we’d have no major reforms, but no backsteps, either, on all four major crises.
These four issues are what Republicans should be worrying about these days- how to secure middle-class jobs and lifestyles for the working class, how to undercut the ascendant financial plutocracy, how to reform governance to something worthy of the 21st Century, and how to put the country on a path towards a long-term solution to the debt and deficits. A coherent agenda on these four great structural issues- involving working-class economic populism and industrial policy, a reining in of the plutocracy, IT-driven decentralizing bureaucratic reform, and restrained spending combined with growth investments- would be fascinating to see. Unfortunately, there are only a few people working on these, though the number includes such names as Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senator Ben Sasse. No one has yet combined all these reforms into a coherent agenda.
We need to solve the four great structural problems of American politics- the middle-class social contract, the sclerotic bureaucracy, the ascendant plutocracy, and the unsustainable fiscal mess. If the GOP Establishment wants to be useful and relevant to the public and re-establish its legitimacy, these four problems might be a good place to start talking. But if it keeps doubling down on 1980s and 1990s era policies and diatribes, then we’ve already seen glimmers of what is yet to come.