In theorizing about what it takes to actually break up with someone after a long-term relationship, Jerry Seinfeld came up with an analogy. “Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine; you can’t do it in one push. You have to rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over.”
Since at least the early 1980s, the Republican Party was in a long-term relationship with economic libertarianism, but with Trump’s hostile takeover of the party in 2015-2016 we saw the first attempt at a breakup. Old flames die hard, however, and since then there has been a lot of rocking back and forth. But with the 2024 election, we finally saw the machine go over: The GOP has finally broken up with economic libertarianism — for good — and replaced it with multiracial populism.
The numbers were as staggering as they were revealing. The ethnic group most likely to support Trump? Native Americans. Counties that were over 25 percent black? They saw a four-point shift to Trump compared to 2020. And counties that were over 25 percent Hispanic saw a ten-point swing in the same direction. Trump won the southern part of Dearborn, Michigan, a Muslim stronghold that Biden won with 88 percent of the vote in 2020. Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, which is 40 percent black, making him only the second Republican to do so since post-Civil War Reconstruction. Trump even flipped the most Hispanic county in America to the GOP.
The Harris campaign’s main strength compared to 2020 was with white women with a college degree and populations making over $100,000 per year. This could not have been set up better for a new, multi-racial populist GOP — and in some ways should not be surprising given the views of J.D. Vance, the person a non-ideological Trump picked to lead his movement into the future. No friend of big business, the vice president-elect will almost certainly be attempting to remake the new GOP according to his populist agenda — one which he explicitly says overlap with that of the populist Bernie Bros.
And he’ll have a lot of help. Tucker Carlson has won the battle for prominence within Trump’s GOP over other significant economic libertarian holdover figures like Ben Shapiro. Other folks like Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Megyn Kelly are also in full support, but are unburdened by what has been when it comes to economic libertarianism.
What sorts of populist social programs are in the offing? Well, there has already been very significant movement from those who identify with the right, including Vance himself, to take up Elizabeth Breunig’s proposal to “Make Birth Free.” The proposal has been seconded by the pro-life movement, including by the influential group Americans United for Life. Beyond this, a Vance-led GOP populist movement could continue the conversation that Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio started about paid family leave. Other topics on the table include massive child tax credits, help with childcare, and solutions for eldercare.
Now to some, this may seem fanciful, in part because it is just too difficult to shake a cultural imagination that necessarily keeps the GOP connected to economic libertarianism. It is sort of like that one close friend who has been dating someone forever that, even after they break up, you just assume he or she will also be showing up at the party or movie. Maybe you even miss them a little bit as they have become part of the social group.
But it will not do anyone any good to refuse to live in reality. The Coke machine has fallen. The breakup is complete. The old GOP is dead, and it isn’t coming back.
Now, that isn’t to say that there aren’t some holdovers from the old era. There are. And there may be enough in the Senate and House to cause problems for the leaders of the new multi-racial populist GOP. But there aren’t enough of them to stop Vance and company from brokering a deal that would bypass the libertarian and work with populist Democrats to get these programs passed. Indeed, one of Vance’s great strengths is that he has done this kind of reaching across the aisle in the past and is well-positioned to do this now. The number of economic libertarians is extremely low, while the number of economic populists (on both right and left) is very, very high.
Doing this would not only be an aggressive and important signal about what the new Trump/Vance-led populist GOP will look like, but it would go a long way to helping achieve the healing and relationship-building that Trump discussed in his concession speech, particularly in a post-Dobbs environment. It would also go a long way toward revealing where our primary cultural divides and disagreements actually lie and where we have common ground. And for those who still haven’t got the memo, with regard to both, it is time to face facts: we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
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