The Labor Right

The new base of the Republican Party

In the very short time since Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet in Pennsylvania, two major events have transpired that may have an even more lasting impact on the future of the Republican Party than the failed assassination attempt. The first was Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. The second was a speech last night by the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, at the Republican National Convention.

If there is a nail left to drive into the coffin of the old Republican Party, J.D. Vance is it. Vance is, in his own words, “a very non-conventional Republican;” the libertarians at Reason call him “an enemy of free markets.” If you need proof of this from his voting record, my friend and colleague Lee Fang has collated it. The tl;dr version is this: he supports government intervention into the marketplace to promote outcomes that are good for ordinary people, even if they’re bad for corporate profits. It’s hard to think of a more basic description of what once constituted the political philosophy of “the Left.”

In a 2023 interview with American Compass (which Lee’s post brought to my attention), Vance provided a clear and straightforward description of his economic thinking. In a unregulated marketplace, he explained, a neuroscientist may be paid three times the salary to design a product that is harmful to the public — an addicting social media algorithm, for example — than to create one that is beneficial to people — a cure for Alzheimer’s, for instance. From this, an old school free market ideologue might conclude, tautologically, that a brain-damaging algorithm must be three times more valuable to the public than ending Alzheimer’s Disease, since the market rewards it as such. To Vance — as to most people in possession of common sense — it’s the opposite: it’s self-evidently an anti-social “massive market failure” that requires government intervention to repair. Such intervention, to Vance, would entail taxing the kinds of economic activities we don’t want, whether it’s encouraging internet addiction or offshoring jobs, and subsidizing enterprises that benefit us all, like curing diseases. This is the basis for the industrial policy Vance advocates for. If you’re a liberal over the age of, say, 35, it should sound very familiar.

For the towering heights of the GOP, it’s hard to overstate what a radical rupture this is from the past. For decades, free market dogma found its hardcore base in the Republican Party. The Democrats stood for a slightly sanded down, mildly lubricated version of the same ideology. The bipartisan middle ground became known as “the Washington Consensus,” and it’s what created NAFTA, paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, facilitated the offshoring of American industry, and instigated the financial deregulation that fueled the subprime mortgage crisis. American workers had long resisted this top-down state religion, especially through their unions, but it took the trauma of the Great Recession to drain it of its last drop of popular legitimacy. Its vanquishment opened the door to the populist conquest of the Republican Party that Trump walked through. (That opportunity was also wide open on the Democratic side, but Bernie Sanders lacked the political instincts to effectively leverage it.)

J.D. Vance’s political trajectory is the expression of this astounding transformation. “There is no path to a durable governing majority for the conservative movement that doesn’t run through a rethinking of 1980s and 1990s economic dogma,” Vance declared in his American Compass interview. “Vance is the leader of the post-financial crisis Republican generation,” is how my friend Matt Stoller put it to the New York Times.

There’s a video that went semi-viral last October and is now circulating again in light of Vance’s selection. In it, Vance approaches Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur on the United Auto Workers picket line in Toledo, Ohio, his hand extended. Kaptur fist bumps his open hand, awkwardly, then even more awkwardly declines to fist bump him back when he switches to her hand greeting of choice. “Good to see you Marcy,” Vance says, smiling. “Good to see you,” Kaptur responds, with a frown on her face. Then she follows up with, “First time here?” “First time here,” he responds. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “Of course,” he replies.

The video was widely interpreted as Kaptur, an old-fashioned, labor left Democrat, throwing shade at Vance, an impostor and an opportunist feigning support for the workers. But that’s not what I saw then in the video, and it’s even less what I see now.

You can count the number of House Democrats in Trump-leaning districts on one hand, and Kaptur is one of them. She has long made the case to her progressive colleagues that the Democrats are becoming the party of the affluent, while Republicans have become the party of the poor and the working class. She provides them with this chart to illustrate the change:

Of all people, Marcy Kaptur must have understood the significance of J.D. Vance winning a Senate seat in her home state. I suspect that she was so unhappy to see Vance on the UAW picket line not because she thought him a fraud, but because she knew that he represented something very real: a tectonic political realignment that posed an existential risk to her party.

So far has the GOP traveled in the direction of right-wing populism that the image of the pro-worker, and even the anti-corporate Republican no longer shocks or confuses most liberals. But Vance has taken the logic even further. You don’t hear him lip syncing the talking points of other Republicans: that they’re pro-worker, but not pro-union. Vance actively courts unions, which is why he showed up on the UAW picket line. He believes that as the labor movement’s rank-and-file continue to move toward the Republican Party, the leadership will eventually have to follow. “Labor should be on the side of the American Right for the next generation,” Vance said in his American Compass interview, “and it will be if we don’t screw it up.”

Many on the left would scoff at this notion. But last night, Sean O’Brien, the President of the International Brotherhoood of Teamsters, closed out the first day of the Republican National Convention. It was the first time a Teamster leader had ever addressed the RNC, but what was remarkable about the speech was less the fact that it happened than that O’Brien refrained from watering down his message whatsoever. He railed at “workers being sold out to big banks, big tech, corporates and the elite.” He vilified corporations like Amazon as everything short of treasonous. “Remember,” he bellowed, “elites have no party, elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” He called for labor law reform and the strengthening of union rights, calling corporate assaults on unions “economic terrorism.” He tore into corporations like Uber, Lyft and Walmart as “welfare recipients.” “Never forget,” he thundered, “American workers own this nation. We’re not renters. We’re not tenants. But the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime.”

This was not the speech of a union bureaucrat modulating his rhetoric and selling out his members to cozy up to corporate America. This was the language of a labor militant bringing the same fire and brimstone that he would deliver to his own membership to a new audience he expected to cheer it.

Skeptics on the left will accuse populists on the right of faking their enthusiasm for workers as a political stunt for short term electoral gain. But when I worked in the labor movement many years ago, we said the same about many of our Democratic allies. It may be true in both instances, but who cares? Such cynicism is cheap and beside the point. Labor activists understand that what matters is not whether politicians are sincere in their pandering to workers, but whether the leverage unions have over them is meaningful enough to deliver results. Politics are transactional, and right now, the Republican Party believes it must cater to the American working class. Workers should go right ahead and let them.