[The GOP used to do its wonky best to make the case that it was
the party of the pocketbook. But it’s all wokeness, all the time
now.]
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WHY REPUBLICANS ABANDONED THEIR ECONOMIC MESSAGE  
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Alex Shephard
March 28, 2023
The New Republic
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_ The GOP used to do its wonky best to make the case that it was the
party of the pocketbook. But it’s all wokeness, all the time now. _

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with his wife, Casey, Giorgio
Viera/Getty Images

 

When Silicon Valley Bank went bust
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earlier this month, Republicans pounced
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The bank, which quickly received assistance from the federal
government, was “too woke to fail,”
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according to Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. The brahmins at _The Wall
Street Journal_ editorial board also suspected
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that wokeness was what led the bank to fail: They fretted that the
bank may “have been distracted by diversity demands”—that is to
say, that there were too many women, minorities, and … for some
reason, veterans on the board to adequately measure financial risk.
Florida governor and pudding enthusiast Ron DeSantis concurred
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telling Fox News that the bank was too “concerned with [diversity,
equity, and inclusion measures] and politics and all kinds of stuff”
that distracted from its “core mission.”

Naturally, none of that was true: SVB’s failure was the result
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of high interest rates, depositor growth, and an old-fashioned bank
run, not diversity measures. The GOP’s response was nevertheless
revealing. Despite the fact that the markets were shaken by SVB’s
failures, leading to concerns
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about a wave of regional bank closings that could touch off a
recession, Republicans shied away from talking about the economy in
any material way. Instead, they stuck to their weird culture-war
scripts.

This should not be particularly surprising if you’ve paid even an
iota of attention to GOP politics over the past few years. The “woke
agenda” now dominates cable news—anything will do, whether it’s
uproars about children reading books about gay penguins
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or gas stoves
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or conversations about whether spokescandies should be hot or not
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(the right-wing position, to be clear, is that spokescandies should be
very sexually arousing). These oddball obsessions, which shrink to fit
any or all news cycles, have quickly swallowed nearly every other area
of the Republican policy apparatus. OK, a bank failed—but was it
woke? This is their response to everything now. No matter what story
is leading the coverage, conservatives will fit the news peg into the
woke-hole.

As Democrats head into what will be a difficult election year—they
will be defending several vulnerable Senate seats and almost certainly
running the oldest presidential candidate in American political
history—this tendency among conservatives is essentially an in-kind
donation. Republicans simply don’t have an economic message anymore.
They’ve given up on the hard stuff. It’s Mr. Potato Head,
diversity fearmongering, and the relative fuckability of M&M’s all
the way down.

What is especially odd about this is that Republican voters care about
the economy—very much so. A March CNN poll found
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of GOP voters rated the economy as their number one policy issue when
it came to selecting a presidential candidate. Only 7 percent chose
issues relating to “values, morals, and rights”—with only 1
percent picking “anti-woke” as a matter of concern. This trend is
broadly true of the entire electorate: Last month, Pew found that
“strengthening the economy” was far and away the most important
issue
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to voters, with three-quarters of respondents saying it should be a
top priority.

The economy, moreover, is a ripe political issue. Yes, unemployment
remains astonishingly low, but inflation is still rampant and hopes of
a “soft landing” are beginning to diminish. Wages have grown but
haven’t kept pace with rising prices. The economy remains
phenomenally unequal. And Republicans have a very recent example of
exploiting a weird, mixed economy for electoral gain: Back in 2016,
Donald Trump won the election in part by hammering the fact that
millions had been left behind by economic changes wrought by
globalization, promising to bring back millions of jobs and grow the
economy by 4 percent. That message resonated, particularly
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with voters who lived in areas where the economy was struggling and in
the industrial Midwest.

None of that happened, of course—in office, Trump’s economic
agenda was mostly bog-standard GOP policy
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(tax cuts for corporations and the rich) with a tariff or two thrown
in. Nevertheless, his platform in 2016—tariffs, rolling back
globalization, bringing back manufacturing jobs—worked as catnip for
the GOP base. Republicans have since abandoned it.

A big reason why is that Donald Trump managed to turn Republican
voters away from the old GOP economic agenda of lowering taxes on the
rich and gutting everyone else’s earned benefit programs without
ever fully replacing it with anything that resembled the populist
vision he briefly touted on the hustings. Trump made it clear that
rolling back Social Security and Medicare was not a winning electoral
argument
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Republicans have listened and have made half-hearted, dishonest
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pledges to protect those arguments. But this promise has merely slid
next to a contradictory one—that the party will reduce the deficit
and balance the budget.

Trump’s protectionist economic policies have gained little traction
within the party but they too point to a larger incoherence. The
Republican Party once fully embraced free trade. Now it doesn’t. But
where its actual preferences lie—beyond advancing policies that
benefit large-scale corporations and the wealthy—is still unclear.
Railing against wokeness has become the last resort of a party
that’s forgotten how to engage with the economy in any material way.
The media environment also plays a role. Anti-wokeness agitprop is
what sells on Fox, so the network devotes hours of programming a day
to whatever convoluted culture-war story it can concoct that day.
Republicans have realized that stoking a panic over culture will get
them plenty of screen time.

The result has been the creation of a closed loop in which issues that
don’t matter to most people—what bathroom people use, for
instance—are leading the country’s most important right-wing news
network and, as a result, seeding the discussions that the Republican
Party has with itself and its base. It’s possible that this will
change as the primary heats up and candidates are dragged into more
substantive debates, but it seems unlikely that Republicans will
return to policy wonkery or make the kinds of economic arguments that
they were making as recently as 2012. Republicans don’t really want
to talk about the economy anymore because, to the extent that they
ever had anything to say about money matters, they’ve gotten too
woke-drunk to remember any of it.

Alex Shephard [[link removed]]
@alex_shephard [[link removed]]

Alex Shephard is a staff writer at _The __New Republic__._

* Republican Party 2023; Woke and wokeness:
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