The populist wave now crashing on Washington threatens to permanently maroon conservatives. Many of the Right’s critics and fans alike saw Donald Trump’s dominance in the Republican primary as a rejection of movement conservatism. Sen. Mike Lee sees it differently.
“I certainly don’t see it as a rejection of the conservative movement,” Lee said in an editorial board meeting with the Washington Examiner. Trumpism “is distinct in some ways from [conservatism], but there are parts of it that are entirely consistent with the conservative message.
“And most of it, I think,” Lee added, “can be made consistent with the conservative movement.”
Lee, as he stares into the Trump typhoon, sees an opportunity for a new symbiosis where populist energy and conservative ideas combine to sweep away many of the country’s ills. Trump’s populism is not an “existential threat to conservatism, republicanism and constitutionalism,” Lee insists. There’s common cause to be made, and in fact, some philosophical compatibility.
Lee, in some ways, seems like the least likely conservative in the country to see common ground with Trump. After his GOP colleagues endorsed Trump in the general election, Lee never did. And perhaps no GOP senator hews as closely to the Constitution as does Lee, while no Republican president in a generation has shown as little regard for it as does Trump.
But it may be Lee’s ability to be abstract combined with Trump’s total disinterest in the abstract that makes compatibility possible. The sentiments of populism can dovetail, Lee argues, to the ideas of conservatism.
Seeking common ground with Trump doesn’t require a complete conversion for Lee. While he doesn’t like the word “populist,” you could say Lee began talking in populist tones a few years ago, inveighing against corporate welfare, calling for conservative action to address immobility and the “opportunity deficit,” as he put it in a 2014 speech at the Heritage Foundation.
Lee admitted that Trump’s “peculiar brand of populist, nationalist politics isn’t what I had in mind.”
Still, not only are conservatism and populism compatible, Lee argues, they can be a natural fit.
To begin with, populism isn’t a competing ideology with conservatism. “It just refers to a dynamic,” Lee says. It’s “politically agnostic.” Populism can serve the Left, the Right and the in-between.
Populism, as Trump sometimes puts it, is about returning power to the people. “I hope I was reading it correctly,” Lee said, “but I read into the president’s inaugural speech … a strong desire to restore federalism and separation of powers.”
Trump’s words that gave Lee hope: “Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another — but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People.”
If “power to the people” means “power out of Washington,” then populism can yield conservatism.
This seems to be the dynamic Lee foresees. Populism detects the problem, and conservatism provides the solution.
Trump, in his massive appeal to working-class voters, exposed a blind spot of conservatives, who at times “look indifferent to suffering and injustice,” as Lee put it at the Heritage Foundation Feb. 15, “because we may not see problems that require action.”
The Right isn’t the only side that missed the people Trump found, of course. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s Democratic Party wanted little to do with the blue-collar guys of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan. Both parties cater to the wealthy and the stable middle-class suburbanites. The Democrats also work to expand the welfare state for the poor. Yet this is more about the working man struggling to get by in a crumbling community. Lee invokes William Graham Sumner and Amity Shlaes and calls him “the forgotten man.”
Conservatism, to thrive in the age of Trump, needs to become a “conservatism for the forgotten man.”
“The forgotten man,” Lee said at the Washington Examiner office, “is the man or the woman who works hard every day to put bread on the table to feed his or her family and to be a good citizen.” He is “neither the Wall Street fat cat nor the immediate beneficiary of a government program designed to help the indigent.”
It seems to work this way: First, the populist president identifies the problems facing forgotten men and women — those citizens from flyover country too often overlooked by coastal elites. Then, a conservative Congress provides the solutions. “The principles themselves,” Lee said, “they don’t have to change.”
Some of the policies, though, will have to change. For instance, Lee’s post-Trump tax plan is different from his pre-Trump one. His new proposal would raise capital gains rates to equal income tax rates. In other words, capital will no longer be favored over labor (though Lee doesn’t use this sort of fairness language). This hike offsets a bold cut: the elimination of the corporate income tax — a tax Lee contends is largely paid by workers. The net result, Lee argued at Heritage, “would serve President Trump’s trade agenda” by “bring[ing] more of the global economy here rather than sending more of the American economy abroad.”
“Economic growth” Lee put it, “would reach Main Street, not just Wall Street and K Street.”
Globalization hasn’t spread the wealth evenly. “Today,” Lee said at Heritage, “global capitalism increasingly brings together rich people from rich countries and not-rich people from not-rich countries. This has made both better off than ever before. But who gets left out of that bargain? The not-rich workers in rich countries. In particular, the American middle class.”
He hopes his tax plan will address some of that. Immigration is tougher.
Lee points to studies showing that mass immigration helps the U.S. economy as a whole while hurting low-skilled native workers. Trump’s answer is fewer immigrants — possibly helping the low-skilled natives while probably harming the economy.
Lee, unwilling to have government tilt the playing field, doesn’t have much to offer in response: “We ought to have a good, hard look at our immigration policies,” he said.
These clashes will be frequent between a philosophy of limited government and a belief in free and open trade on the one hand, versus a populist nationalism on the other hand. Lee doesn’t pretend conservatives will always find common ground with Trump. But he hopes the new president promising to restore power to the people will see that the way to do that is through conservative policies.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
