A strange thing is happening on the right. A powerful and influential faction of the Republican Party wants goods to be more expensive, economic growth to be constrained and men and women back in factories — whether the rest of us want this or not.
In fact, you cannot understand President Trump’s attack on global trade (and trade with China in particular) without understanding this faction of the new right. Traditionalist, patriarchal Christians, populist economists and postliberal academics are engineering a Republican break with free trade and free markets that’s deliberately intended to remake the American economy — and American culture — from the ground up.
They don’t want to negotiate better trade deals. They want to reverse the globalization of the American economy. They want the 1950s back.
Movements that are designed to deliberately slow economic growth aren’t new. The left has long contained its own degrowth faction, often rooted in environmental concerns about greed and income inequality.
At the risk of oversimplifying the argument, I’ll put it this way: The single-minded quest for ever-higher living standards — for more stuff — is destroying the planet, creating a nation of self-centered citizens who possess little regard for the poor, and disproportionately benefiting a class of oligarchs who enjoy most of the fruits of economic expansion while the bulk of the citizens struggle to make ends meet.
Bernie Sanders offered a version of this argument when he ran for president against Hillary Clinton. In a May 2015 interview with CNBC, he decried what he sees as the high cost of consumer choice:
You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.
The right-wing version of the degrowth argument is different. Where the left is more concerned with the climate and overdevelopment, the right is more concerned with faith, family and … heavy industry.
The right’s argument is that the pursuit of free trade — while enriching the most educated Americans — has hollowed out American industry, destroyed family stability for the working class, undermined American masculinity (as more men migrate to laptop jobs or the so-called helping professions) and corroded our souls as we seek happiness in an endless supply of cheap goods.
In right-wing popular culture, the degrowth movement is most evident in the rise of what used to be called “crunchy conservatives,” a term coined by the writer Rod Dreher and subsequently popularized in his 2006 book, “Crunchy Cons.” The subtitle of the book says it all: “How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Home-Schooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party).”
Dreher was referring to a then-nascent movement of conservatives who embraced a simpler, more natural lifestyle that often matched the lifestyle of many of their more liberal peers — a world of organic foods, made-from-scratch home cooking and micro-farming.
I knew exactly who Dreher was talking about. When we lived in rural Tennessee, a number of people in my church described themselves as “homesteaders.” They raised their own livestock and they tried to live as self-sufficiently as possible. Some built their own houses.
As a cultural phenomenon, it’s fascinating. My homesteading friends even inspired us to try a bit of light self-sufficiency. We raised chickens, briefly churned our own butter (not as fun as it sounds) and even considered dipping our toes into the joys of goat ownership. But we moved to the suburbs, and my goat dream died.
Now homesteading has morphed into something a little different, the tradlife and its most indispensable character, the tradwife. Immensely popular social media celebrities now preach the gospel of their simple, traditional lives, but there’s a catch: The most popular influencers are often quite wealthy. Their money enables a “simple” lifestyle on large farms that are out of reach for a vast majority of Americans.
At the same time, populist and nationalist economists were deriding the Republican Party’s “G.D.P. fetish.” In a 2020 Times guest essay, Oren Cass, a Times Opinion contributing writer and perhaps the leading economist of the new right, made his case against growth:
But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency or life satisfaction.
Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness and strain of unpredictability.
The final piece of the puzzle comes from the so-called postliberals, the right-wing critics of liberal democracy and free markets, most notably Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at Notre Dame and the author of one of the most influential books in the modern right, “Why Liberalism Failed.”
In it, Deneen argues that liberalism itself, which conceives of “humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life,” has failed at a profound level. Liberalism, he says, “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.”
What’s the answer to the materialism and greed of modern free market life? It sounds a lot like the tradlife.
“Utility and ease,” Deneen argues, “must be rejected in preference to practices of local knowledge and virtuosity.”
“The skills of building, fixing, cooking, planting, preserving and composting,” he added, “not only undergird the independence and integrity of the home but develop practices and skills that are the basic sources of culture and a shared civic life.”
This new right places an almost spiritual emphasis on farm and factory labor. This is where men thrive, they argue. JD Vance has said, for example, “We believe that a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”
While there are solid national security reasons for decreasing dependence on Chinese manufacturing (especially to the extent that the American military is dependent on Chinese supply chains), Vance is taking aim at free trade itself.
In a post on X on Tuesday, he condemned the “limousine socialists” who “screech desperately for dependence on Chinese supply chains and inflated equities.” He doesn’t want military and economic independence from China because it’s a geopolitical foe; he wants to disentangle from foreign trade more broadly. Or put another way, he wants to divorce Americans from cheap goods, not simply cheap Chinese goods.
Jesse Watters, a prime-time Fox News host, said, only half-joking, “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this.” When you are out working and building things, Watters said, “you are around other guys; you’re not around H.R. ladies and lawyers. That gives you estrogen.”
Putting aside Watters’s bizarre rant, it’s important to acknowledge that the degrowth movement is reacting to real problems. Liberal democracies and market economies are very good at providing liberty and prosperity, but liberty and prosperity do not, by themselves, provide meaning, and the single-minded quest for prosperity can result not only in extreme inequality; it can also corrode the soul.
A nation that places self-actualization as the highest value will be a more selfish and brutal place than a nation that prioritizes loving your neighbor. My own prime directive is to love God and love my neighbor as myself, not to accumulate wealth, fame or influence.
In this sense, I feel a degree of moral kinship with critics of free markets on the left and the right. I share many of their cultural values and cultural concerns. I do not, however, share their belief that the government should limit my economic opportunities for my own good.
There are, in fact, reasons well beyond greed that free-market Democrats and Republicans have placed a premium on economic growth. In a piece at The Bulwark, Jeremiah Johnson, a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, writes, “Measures as varied as infant mortality rates, day-to-day happiness, academic achievement and human freedom are all correlated strongly with G.D.P.”
And that’s not all — as Johnson notes, “People in richer countries are safer from violence, have more leisure time, produce more beautiful art and live longer, healthier lives than those in poorer countries.”
There is also the profound moral question of how much the government should be able to constrain our choices. Generations of farmers and factory workers worked extremely hard to send their kids to college so that they wouldn’t endure the same hardships they endured — whether it was laboring on a farm from dawn to dusk or engaging in physical labor until their bodies were broken at a young age.
There’s immense pride in physical labor, certainly, but it is extraordinarily demanding. It is not a life that many millions of men and women would choose for themselves or their children.
It would be one thing if the decline in small farms and manufacturing jobs also meant that the real wages of working-class Americans have declined. But they have not. Despite what you might have heard, working-class Americans enjoy a higher standard of living (including higher incomes) than previous generations. The very rich do very well in America, but American prosperity is broad-based, and the American economy has been the envy of the world.
In Trump’s second term, the meaning of “Make America Great Again” is coming into ever-sharper focus. He wants to restore an American economy and culture that is long gone. He might live with fond dreams of the Gilded Age, but his allies love the 1950s and the image of the strong man grabbing his lunch pail and heading to the factory while his wife tends to hearth and home.
It’s unclear how starting a trade war with China or anyone else will bring back American manufacturing, much less create the kind of cultural revolution that the new right longs for. That’s especially true when Trump is attacking the rule of law and America is enduring extraordinary political instability. Those are not the optimal conditions for attracting new industrial investment.
It’s far more likely that Trump will immiserate and enrage Americans who want greater economic security and opportunity, but don’t believe they’ll find it making Air Jordans and iPads at new factories that will somehow spring up across the land.
There’s an additional moral dimension to the trade war. Deriding cheap goods is a luxury belief. Standards of living don’t just rise when wages increase. They also rise when prices decrease. A working-class American now possesses goods that would be completely out of reach if they were manufactured in American factories paying American wages.
In that sense, a price increase is the same as a wage cut. Trump should know this — price increases and the rise in the cost of living generally were the most important factors that put him in the White House. Inflation that is a result of a pandemic, supply chain shocks and too much economic stimulus is a tragedy. Intentionally increasing costs to deprive people of the lives they want is cruel.
Many of Trump’s most zealous supporters now scorn the very idea that economic liberty and free markets are part of the American ideal. They’re busy breaking a global economic system that brought unprecedented prosperity at home and abroad instead, all to restore a way of life that millions of Americans chose to abandon many long years ago.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about the civil liberty that’s often the most difficult to defend in the court of public opinion — due process:
No American right requires an underlying moral commitment to justice more than the right to due process. Very few American voters actually fear a knock on their door in the middle of the night. I’ve never met an American, outside of those from the most vulnerable and marginalized communities, who fears random arrest and indefinite detention.
For most Americans, “Defend due process or you’re next” is not a credible argument.
Instead, the best arguments for due process transcend self-interest. They’re aimed straight at the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. They appeal directly to the idea that each of us is made in the image of God — that each of us is endowed with unalienable rights.
On Monday, we published my interview with Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet minister and member of Parliament who challenged Boris Johnson and was expelled from the Tory party. We talked about what it’s like to face the wrath of the new populist right. Here is Stewart, describing the brutal social cost:
I am perceived as a traitor. That’s been a very central part, particularly of the social media discourse. But it’s more than that. You end up with a range of right-wing media, ranging from podcasts to television stations, that characterize me as representing everything that is wrong with the global elite. That there are two boxes that people operate in. There are the voters for Donald Trump or the voters for Boris Johnson, and they represent “real” people. And then there’s another category, which is the global elite, the establishment.
And as soon as I moved across, I became all those things: I became a traitor. I became an elitist. I became completely out of touch. I’m unable to read the room, I support illegal immigrants raping British girls. I endorse whatever dystopian features of our society exist. I’m responsible for destroying national identity.
And then, of course, because politics has become a sort of new type of sport, new things emerge. So I am corrupt. I’m degenerate. I am physically weak. There’s a lot of stuff about how many press-ups can I do. So for Vance, the attack was, “Rory is stupid.” But for a lot of his followers, they then say, “I bet JD Vance can do more press-ups than you can.” And: “You’re a girl. You’re not a proper man.”
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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