What Is Neopopulism?

Is this guy—William Jennings Bryan—really the ancestor of today’s “populists”?

Digging into a new media trend—and some “realignment”-related links.

“Neopopulism” has been having a moment, as the kids used to say. Over the past week, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and Eamon Javers at CNBC have written long, informative features about how “neopopulism” has come to define the political right and may even constitute a new political center.

Here’s Leonhardt:

The new centrism is a response to these developments. It is a recognition that neoliberalism failed to deliver. The notion that the old approach would bring prosperity, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has said, “was a promise made but not kept.” In its place has risen a new worldview. Call it neopopulism.

Both Democrats and Republicans have grown skeptical of free trade; on Tuesday, Biden announced increased tariffs on several Chinese-made goods, in response to Beijing’s subsidies. Democrats and a slice of Republicans have also come to support industrial policy, in which the government tries to address the market’s shortcomings. The infrastructure and semiconductor laws are examples. These policies feel more consistent with the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower or Franklin Roosevelt than those of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

Javers surveys how the policy landscape on the right has changed over the past eight years:

Conservative economic thinkers have now had at least eight years to construct an intellectual and policy framework around Trump’s instinctive economic populist message. 

What they have come up with is a set of worker-first, anti-corporate elite policy proposals, which are increasingly popular within the party, and in Trump’s economic circles. 

Taken together, the plans amount to a vastly different approach to the economy than the Reaganomic tax, regulatory and trade consensus that dominated the GOP from the late 1970s right up to Trump’s first election in 2016. 

 If Trump is elected president again in November, these proposals could be front and center in a second-term economic agenda.

Javers particularly homes in on Sohrab Ahmari’s commentary and Oren Cass’s American Compass think tank to sketch out some of the contours of this new, “neopopulist” paradigm. According to Javers, those policies could include:

• Impose a 10% global tariff on all imports.

• Block American firms from investing in China.

• Block Chinese firms from access to U.S. capital markets.

• Impose harsh penalties for employees who fail to comply with immigration laws.

• Eliminate H-2A and H-2B programs for seasonal and agricultural workers.

• Award H1-B visas to the highest-paying employers.

• Create a $100 billion National Development Bank for critical infrastructure.

• Repeal the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970.

• Reform corporate bankruptcy to mandate six months severance for all employees and one year’s tax liability for local communities.

• Require private firms hired by public pension funds to publish annual performance data.

• Impose a financial transaction tax of 10 basis points on secondary market sales of stocks, bonds and derivatives.

• Ban stock buybacks and eliminate tax deductibility of interest.

Javers and Leonhardt highlight figures like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton as leaders of this new paradigm on Capitol Hill.

With their instructive reporting, both articles are worth reading. They are refreshing break from the “eww! populism” that characterizes a lot of establishment-press coverage of populism.

To some extent, Leonhardt’s suggestion of a new, “neopopulist” centrism tracks with my account of the potential for a bipartisan, pro-worker “realignment” last May: “there does seem to be some possibility for bipartisan collaboration. Many key initiatives on reforming tech, rebuilding supply chains, and so forth have bipartisan support.” I have used the term “state-capacity dispensation” to describe this political pivot away from neoliberalism.

In part because I was writing on a reformist, pro-worker policy paradigm long before Trump’s 2015 presidential announcement, I’m also a little skeptical about overdramatizing the scope of this change—as well as its break from the past.

A basic premise of a lot of coverage of “neopopulism” (or “populism” or the “new right” or whatever) is that it represents some major break from “Reaganism.” We are told that the Reaganite consensus was about unfettered free markets, and the “new right” either heroically shreds that “dead consensus” or wickedly betrays the legacy of the Gipper.

However, I think such narratives fundamentally misunderstand Ronald Reagan’s political record as well as the bigger conservative constellation during the Cold War era. Judge Glock suggests this point here:

Both Trump and Biden did impose significant new tariffs, as populists demanded, but over 90 percent of their higher tariff charges came from China. Considering China’s transformation under Xi Jinping into an openly hegemonic Communist power, trade limitations against it would fall into a long and non-populist foreign policy tradition. During the Cold War, large bipartisan majorities supported limitations on trade with the Soviet Union and its satellites. Voters and politicians understood that some trade, though not all, with a geopolitical rival could be destructive. Similar limited actions against a rival today are not necessarily populist, whether neo- or otherwise.

As Glock notes, it was viewed as commonsense policy (even a conservative principle!) for the United States to minimize its economic connections with the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. A project of de-coupling with the People’s Republic of China—or at least trying to minimize its strategic leverage over the US—seems less a departure from the Reaganite consensus and more a return to it.

Or is contemporary populism to some extent an extension of Reaganite politics?

And that only sets up additional affinities between Reagan’s actual policy record and contemporary state-capacity politics: the voluntary import quotas on Japanese automobiles, the expansive defense spending as a vehicle for industrial policy, and the sweeping tax reforms to make Social Security more sustainable.

I think this speaks to a broader way in which the Cold War period had been misunderstood. Ironically, one could argue that the neoliberal “Washington consensus” was perhaps more ideological than the Cold War paradigm. End-of-history politics assumed that integrating all nations into a single global market was at hand—and only those on the “wrong side of history” would object. Neoliberal politics often tended in a theoretically absolutist, Wilsonian direction.

One thing I was trying to get at in this City Journal piece was how complex the Cold War conservative coalition was. The fact that it was not reducible to a single ideology was a source of its vitality. Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy observed the range of factions that it took to win the Cold War:

In a 2021 Modern Age essay, [McCarthy] wrote: “If liberal democracy won the Cold War, it was a victory made possible only by faith and country: by Polish solidarity, by Czechs who longed for spiritual freedom, by Russian dissidents who would not abandon their old faith.” He elaborated on these points in conversation, arguing that the Cold War should be seen not only (or even primarily) as a clash between Communism and liberalism but one pitting Soviet “ideology versus the traditional roots of a political and social religious order.”

Seen in this light, discussions about what policy steps to take in order to shore up the United States’s industrial capacity or improve outcomes for working families seem much less radical. As I observed in that City Journal piece, Cold War conservatives endorsed the accumulation of vast nuclear arsenals with the potential to eradicate much of humanity—perhaps one of the most terrifying displays of state power in human history. Compared to that, tweaks to the minimum wage or rolling back guest-worker visas do not seem like some dread “statism.”

However, that lack of radicalism cuts in another direction: There’s still a lot of overlap between the GOP coalition of the pre-Trump years and today, and this coalition might not exactly mirror the ideology of the Very Online. For instance, even many of the most devoted Trump voters are anxious about over-regulation. (Pretty much all the OG normie Trump voters I know—who have been in his camp from August 2015 onward—are also major critics of the centralization of power under bureaucrats.) As president, Trump cut many regulations, and I tend to think the GOP will struggle if it abandons its heritage as the party of growth. The paradigm of “national greatness + market vitality” is a throughline connecting Hamilton to Lincoln to a modern-day realignment.

The dynamics of Capitol Hill only compound the complexities of the GOP electorate. Both Leonhardt and Javers take the passage of the infrastructure bill and CHIPS as sign of a bigger transformation of Washington (and the GOP). But many of the most prominent supporters of those bills would be identified as part of the pre-Trump GOP “establishment”: Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, and so forth. This suggests the limits of trying to map some bigger ideological narrative onto the DC power-struggles over MAGA. Donald Trump is not a disciplined ideological actor, and battles over him are distinct from these policy debates. Mitt Romney has been a major critic of Trump, but his policy portfolio includes “realignment” themes on issues ranging from trade to immigration to family policy. Conversely, some of Trump’s biggest supporters on the Hill opposed CHIPS because they thought it was more “out of control” government spending. (Note: This is the diametric opposite of those who opposed it because they thought it did not go far enough as industrial policy.)

All this may mean that there could be more of a continuity between the establishment of the past and a “realignment” of the future. Far from consigning the GOP moderates of the past to the political wilderness, a new state-capacity dispensation might instead find them to be useful allies. When it was at its strongest, the Republican Party was often not dominated by a single ideology. Vital American political coalitions are always heterogeneous. (The attempt to create a purified, full-spectrum progressive Democratic Party has obviously led Democrats to one electoral disappointment after another after 2012.)

To end on an even bolder note: When a political paradigm has failed to deliver, reform might be establishmentarianism rightly understood.

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A few related links:

Matthew Continetti returns to a Pat Buchanan memo from 1972.

Michael Dunne looks at the future automobile wars.

Robert Almelor Delfeld considers what comes after neoliberalism.

Me on that Shadi Hamid and Martha Nussbaum debate over fertility politics (ICYMI).

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