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The "wonk gap" is here to stay, at least for a generation. The Republican Party has committed itself to a lot of ideas that repel smart people. Smart people can of course be religious or believe in American exceptionalism, but the Right has in my lifetime not *just* been committed to American exceptionalism and to Christianity but to the idea that it is *immoral to question or debate those views*, and *no* smart person could believe that.

The cultural Left is doing some damage to its credibility with some norms that insult people's intelligence, but the Right is in a really, really deep hole with smart millennials and Gen Z-ers, and all the issues with "wokeness" aren't nearly enough to help them climb out. No matter how angry I get at public employee unions or universities or the Sierra Club, I won't forget which ideological faction is more hospitable to the kind of person I am, and which spent my entire childhood trying to exclude people like me from civil society.

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The Right’s economic plan is what the Kochs, Adelmans, and that up-and-comer Thiel want, which amounts to lobbying mostly for their very proximate business concerns (lower taxes, relaxed SEC and finance rules, etc.) and some pet economic policy fetishes (scuttling public transit or universal health care, various ‘libertarian’ stances like anti-labor and anti-credentialism, etc.). Not that the rank-and-file are paying much attention, where all roads lead back to cultural and racial grievance and authoritarian romanticism. Which, as it happens, does not lend itself to the wonk approach—ahistoricism is an intellectual dead end (hard to marshal facts and win Nobel Prizes in service of the Lost Cause and other historical mythology) and it’s hard to apply wonkish economic or other data-driven arguments against “Wokeism” and related boogeymen of current Right discourse.

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You think Scott is right coded? I see him as left who does not like what the SJ left became. He even has said so himself I think. He is only right coded to those elements of the left that see any objection to their positions, however well founded and good faith, as right coded.

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Noah,

As always, a great read! I think the premise of your question, “What is the Right’s economic plan?” derives from a Left-coded mindset. For many on the Right, there is no economic plan because they are philosophically skeptical of national projects or national economic plans. I think the question has some cache in center-Right circles among those who amalgamate what they feel are the best aspects of Leftist thinking into a Rightist framework. However, the mainstream of the GOP has shifted from center-Right to definitive-Right. This “new” Right is generally leery of national projects of any kind, to include, increasingly the military(!). I think the current mainstream Right in America would disavow Federal economic plans and opt for a State-centric economic model. The center of gravity for the conservative movement has shifted Right-ward with an increasing emphasis on the primacy of State and Local vs. Federal government. The mainstream GOP favors a Calhoun-style “States Rights” philosophy. To stereotype, the present Rightist ideal is for a national citizenry that fits a pastoralist-burgher-frontiers/militiaman mold. Under this ideal, Federal action intrudes upon the rightful sovereignty of local governmental authorities and private citizens.

You can observe the passive manifestation of this mindset in Trump’s 2020 response to COVID, wherein he largely delegated public health decisions to the state governors. On the active side, the Rightwing mentality manifests itself in Gov. DeSantis’ actions in Florida where the State government reveals an activist nature.

Additionally, I think the Right’s main axis of intellectual effort right now aims towards the Culture Wars by which it seeks to establish the primacy of its ideal citizenry. Economic issues are important to the Right but only insofar as they affect the idealized pastoralist-burgher class I mentioned. This is where the Right’s intellectual ferment rests.

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Apr 20, 2022·edited Apr 20, 2022

I don't think telling those of us that like Scott Alexander and Bari Weiss that we're really Republican is a good idea if you want Democrat solidarity, since most of us are not Republican, and have voted D for a long time, but have been feeling hated by this party for quite a while.

But it does open the door to the idea that maybe the Dems have fully abandoned us, which is disturbing, but now that you've broken the seal maybe it's not the worst thing if centrism is really my goal. Maybe trying to pull the Rs to the left from the center is a less thankless task than pulling the Ds to the right?

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Their only plan, if you can call it that, is some version of “own the libs”. Trump, the Sequel, will raise taxes on people he doesn’t like: Doctors, The Tech Sector, anyone else in the non business owner parts of the Upper Middle Class.

In other words, tax liberals into oblivion and give the money to people who go to his rallys. Might as well call it the “steal the nerds’ lunch money” plan.

Their whole thing now is revenge, since what remains of polite society has rejected them. And they’re determined to get it.

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Does racial resentment count as a plan? That seems to be the only thing I've seen come out of the GOP for the last 6 years

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I think you're ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room: conservative media.

Conservative media helped drive out the intellectuals and attract the working class by cranking the culture war coverage to 11 for 30-40 straight years.

The one big bright idea that the few remaining stragglers have had in the last decade was to turn Trumpism into an actual ideology, which Trump himself promptly ignored. Instead, because the entire movement was based on a cult of personality, the victors who emerged from the scrum were mostly (1) whichever shameless aspiring-Lindsey-Graham managed to curry enough favor with Trump, and (2) the NatCons and various religious integralists who managed to parlay the fashionableness of various elements of Trumpism that overlapped with their own ideologies into permanent profile boosts for themselves.

At the end of the day, I'm skeptical that any effort to rebuild the right's policy competency is going to be able to rise above their noise machine without being fundamentally compromised by it. The NatCons and integralists, for instance, are only popular because the noise machine convinced a generation of conservatives that the native-born and religious traditionalists, respectively, were being persecuted. Without that juice, they're just where they were 20 years ago: wierdos in forgotten corners of the think-tank world writing ideological fanfic about policies that will never happen. _With_ the juice, though, they're still beholden to the juice machine: if they don't zig along with the latest moral panic, people go back to ignoring them.

Remove conservative media from the equation, and I don't think it's hard for conservative intellectuals to reassert a Reagan-style policy renaissance in the party. Reformicons like Will Hurd would have a decent shot at basically stealing every center-right policy idea that moderate Democrats have been trying to sell culture-war-obsessed red states on for the past 20 years -- housing reform, antitrust, pharmaceutical pricing, etc. -- and winning a landslide election, especially among minorities, all with some inspiring, homespun narrative about how they're helping the party grow from the ugliness of the Trump years.

But back in the real world, it's an uphill battle for him. And even if we charitably stipulated that Bari Weiss is merely cosplaying virulent culture-war Trumpism in order to make inroads for her true calling as a wonk, she'd be excommunicated the minute she tried to shed the costume. Sure, maybe the wonks-in-hiding may truly have some minute and growing influence within the GOP, but given the current fundamentals, it'll take _decades_ for them to beat out the last vestiges of the Dixiecrats who put the party on its long road to the hell of Trumpism, and actually shine on a renaissance platform.

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If you think at the moment the right in America has any policy idea other than owning the libs, you’re naive. A smaller faction of the left, call them the social justice warriors, similarly want to punish anyone who disagrees with them. I don’t think you can understand US politics if you don’t buy into those two points.

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I'd say the right has still the same plan, lower taxes and smaller government, it's just not a popular position, so they don't discuss it that much

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It was the Republican Party’s ideologically-driven Reagan Revolution in economic policy, essentially the aptly named, “Trickle Down Economics” and deregulation, that economically eviscerated the middle class and America’s heartland over the last 40+ years. America’s middle class lost its best jobs, its housing security, its agency, and its dignity.

I hear from Never-Trumper Republicans all the tie about wanting to reclaim the party and restore its values. But what I almost never hear is any stock-taking about how this “revolution” led to Trump and the authoritarian surge in our country. And I don’t see much of any rock-taking in this essay either.

If we simply go back to the Republican-led policies of the past, we will end-up right back here with an equally, massively disaffected middle and working class happy to abandon our democratic future to get back at the elites who have so abused and taken advantage of them. So, when you ask where is the Republican economic plan, first ask, “Have Republicans learned the lesson of Trump and are they prepared to re-examine and recast much of their economic assumptions and put country ahead of ideology?”

As FDR prophesied: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

It’s time to put “bettering the lot of our citizens” back into our prime directive.

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Scott would absolutely deny being a conservative. I don't think that tag fits him, either.

As the GOP compresses itself further, it will squeeze out the last bits of intellectualism remaining and we'll have a bereft and empty-headed Congress and, quite possibly, presidency. Happy 2022-24, everyone.

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I don't really see Trumpist economic policy being that different from Reagan's. The trade war on China is in some ways comparable to Reagan's trade war against Japan, for example.

The thing is that we don't really live in a world where the economy is everything anymore. Every company is a mini fiefdom with not just economic but increasingly political or even intelligence power, and every consumer can treat his or her cash as ballots for or against an agenda. The redistribution of dignity/respect/vanity/hubris is much more important than the redistribution of wealth in a world where most mouths are already fed. No amount of Big Macs/Pradas/yachts can bribe Putin from his aggression in Ukraine, and no amount of welfare can convince a Republican voter to support critical race theory, just because you can't kill or starve me if I don't convert to your belief system...

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What does it mean to have an economic plan when your economic plan has already won? As far as I can tell, the Reganite plan reigns right now and those who believe in it don't have much to do but defend it against those trying to chip away at it. There are various small optimizations that could be attempted, but like further lowering taxes, they have diminishing returns at this point. The only big idea economic targets that remain for the right are the New Deal era entitlement programs and they've correctly decided they don't have the support necessary to dismantle them at this time.

Our political system seems to have a bias against candidates having a platform to do nothing. Maybe the current antics on the right can be explained as an attempt to get around that fact.

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IMO the best framework for thinking about this is Picketty's one from his 2nd book: Brahmin left and merchant right. It's an international shift. College education has gone from 5% to 30-40%. Over that time, parties in the left went from being dominated by working class and oppressed minority voters to being dominated by the new middle to upper class college educated voters.

The oligarchic class still mostly dominates the economic policies of the parties of the right. But now the Brahmin left dominates the economic policies of the parties of the left. They might not be the aristocrats, but they're gentry and don't want government taking their money and giving it to the rabble either. So we get the shift on the right to a focus on nationalism, jingoism, anti-intellectualism, and grievance politics against the condescension of the cosmopolitan, elitist Brahmin left.

There almost definitionally can't be a coherent economic ideology on that kind of right.

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Why does it need to change? The right hasn't had a plan beyond "less taxes on the rich" for decades and it's been working fine for them at the polls.

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