Pop quiz: Who recently said, “Our economy has entered a new and decadent Gilded Age, where working-class jobs disappear and working wages erode and working families and neighborhoods fall apart—while denizens of the upper class live a cloistered life behind gates. . . .Why should labor ever be taxed more than capital? They should not be.”
If you thought first of AOC, Shawn Fain, or Sara Nelson, you are sadly mistaken. No, those are the words of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican perhaps best known for his gesture of solidarity with the January 6th insurrectionists. Hawley is at the forefront of a new tendency within American conservatism that braids social conservatism (rebranded “anti-wokeness”) with protectionist economics and isolationist foreign policy. Calling itself “National Conservatism,” or simply “conservative economics,” the emergent trend links such coordinates as The Edmond Burke Foundation and American Compass think tanks, Catholic integralist Sohrab Amari’s Compact Magazine, and the halls of Congress. In its break with market fundamentalism, the rhetoric can sound downright progressive, even overtly materialist. Josh Hawley has said that he now opposes right-to-work laws and walked a Teamster’s picket line. His Senate colleague J.D. Vance has similarly feinted left by supporting Elizabeth Warren’s efforts to regulate banks, and voicing support for Lina Khan.
The extent of the resonance with longstanding progressive goals can induce vertigo, but the mere fact that some conservatives are rejecting neoliberal economics should not be entirely surprising. After all, during his presidency Donald Trump disrupted the economic bargain underlying the Republican coalition: rather than extol the virtues of a globalized economy, he complained that China was outpacing American manufacturing and imposed a series of tariffs on China, Mexico, Canada, the European Union, others. While there remain light years of space between such rhetorical concern for workers and the actual effects of Republican policy, this rupture has opened up space on the right for ascendant Republican politicians like Hawley and J.D. Vance to sketch out a distinctively non-Reaganite conservative political economy, which I’m calling Trad Dad Populism.
What is Trad Dad Populism?
Since hitting upon a winning formula in the 1980 presidential election, the Republican Party has counted on an electoral fusion of social conservatives, market fundamentalists, and foreign policy hawks. Trump changed all of that, most visibly by unleashing elements of the fringe right into positions of prominence and power. Social conservatives who had never felt like equal partners stacked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, succeeding where much more anti-abortion Republican Presidents had failed. Now they are defining themselves against laissez-faire by openly promoting active government.
In the race to lead a changed party, politicians like Hawley have borrowed leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo, telling the audience at this year’s National Conservatism conference that the Right has failed because “[i]n this moment of crisis, they’re busy tending the dying embers of neoliberalism. They’re reading their copies of John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. They’re still talking about fusionism and its three-legged stool. . . .In the name of ‘the market,’ these Republicans cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade, then watched these same corporations ship American jobs overseas and use the profits to hire DEI experts.” Although it rhymes with leftwing populism’s juxtaposition between capital and labor, Hawley’s Trad Dad Populism orients itself against perceived cultural elitism and decadence.
The Trad Dad Populist believes that the heterosexual nuclear family is the essential building block of a healthy American political economy. He emphasizes the lost past of the family wage, when a man’s work could support his housewife and children in a life of church, community, and middle-class consumption. The ideology revolves around a theory of social life derived from one reading of Christian morality, in which gender hierarchy is the backbone of social order, combined with nostalgia for a working class composed of white men in blue collar jobs—a portrait that is inaccurate for huge swaths of American history, including the height of mid-century growth (to say nothing of today’s working class, which looks entirely different). On this account, the most important deficit is not in the national balance of trade, but in American manhood, which doubles as the title of Hawley’s recent book. (I highly recommend this review of the book by Strict Scrutiny co-hosts Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw.) It follows that the prime targets of the Trad Dad Populists are feminists, queer & trans people, and immigrants.
Trad Dad Populists also dabble in a form of neo-nativism calling itself “pro-natalism,” a moral panic about the white birth rate disguised as patriotism. According to adherents, the “birth dearth” among American citizens leaves the country at an important disadvantage competing on the global stage, namely with China. The rallying cry to simply have more children blends anti-feminism with anti-immigrant sentiment, so that conservatives can – in the memorable words of a Claremont Institute writer – “seize the means of reproduction.” J.D. Vance seemed to align with pro-natalism when he called for parents to have more votes than non-parents and criticized Kamala Harris for not having biological children. Though these are stray remarks, they show how Trad Dad Populists like Vance define blended families like Harris’s out of recognition.
None of this, it should be noted, is particularly new. Hawley’s hero is Theodore Roosevelt, a paragon of belligerent masculinity who famously condemned “hyphenated Americans.” It’s not an overstatement to say that the field of gender history – including such classics as Bederman’s Manliness & Civilization and Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood – was built on studies of Teddy, so influential and notorious was his invocation of manliness as a national resource that could bring manifest destiny to the world. Not incidentally, Roosevelt was close friends with Madison Grant, a leading eugencist, and author of the influential book The Passing of the Great Race. Then as now, to evoke masculinity in this way conjured a white national savior against a feminized and racialized foreign enemy. Of course, the historical antecedents do not belong to the right alone. In searching for a paradigmatic nativist statement from AFL-CIO President Samuel Gompers in at the turn of the century, a friend lit upon a racist book he co-authored entitled Meat vs. Rice: American Manliness against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?
The Cultural Foundations of Political Economy
It would be easy to dismiss the rise of Trad Dad Populism as nothing more than grift. Vance’s public turnaround on Trump certainly encourages cynicism. Doing so, however, would overlook an important lesson about the relationship between political economy and issues that are sometimes dismissed at “culture wars.” Even if Trad Dad Populism has not yet had much policy bite, what’s important to see is how this social vision forms the foundation for a (much shakier) economic plan. Social values are not “merely cultural,” but constitute the broader agenda. Trad Dad Populists have a very clear sense of social order and are attempting to build an alternative conservative political economy around it. Seeing through this lens helps us make sense of recent events that seem to scramble our political assumptions, like watching Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in a primetime appearance at the Republican National Convention, or hearing Hawley bemoan the loss of good jobs for the working class.
Childcare policy is a good example of this order-of-operations. J.D. Vance recently acknowledged that daycare is too expensive, and suggested that government should “make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want.” In reality, he has only one model in mind. Relying on a report from American Compass, he claimed that “‘Universal child care’ is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.” Rather than survey the problem and build policy solutions to address it, Vance begins with his optimal family form and gestures at a care economy to realize it.
It can also provide a less cynical explanation for the sharp focus on transgender people among conservatives like Hawley, Vance, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who are vying for control of a post-Trump Republican Party. It’s partly true that that the party’s rhetoric machine has sought out a new scapegoat to energize a base that has largely made peace with gay marriage. The fear is not entirely manufactured, however, in the sense that the liberty to change sex or live outside a sex binary threatens the most fundamental elements of social ordering in the Trad Dad Populist’s worldview.
Moreover, in dismissing the Trad Dad Populist as a mere grifter, we fail to appreciate that the replacement for diverse, inclusive social values is close at hand. Throughout his speeches and book, Hawley makes clear that Christianity ought to anchor American politics. “The Christian political tradition is our tradition; it is the American tradition; it is the greatest source of energy and ideas in our politics—and always has been,” he told the conference crowd. “And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?”
