Republicans Shouldn't Get Sidetracked By 'Libertarian Populism'

There's been a common theme in most analyses of what ails the Republican Party: The analyst discovers that the GOP can win again only if it adopts policies the analyst happens to support.

Professional Republican operatives living on the east coast, many of them young, want the party to abandon unfashionable social policy views that they never shared anyway.

Business elites say the party can make peace with Hispanics by supporting comprehensive immigration reform—which business happens to have favored all along.

Hard-core conservatives insist that the party will do better in elections if it becomes purer in its conservatism. This strategy is a particular head-scratcher — as it involves moving farther away from the median voter — but many Tea Party activists seem to be sincere when they advance it.

And now various writers, led by Tim Carney, are urging a GOP rebrand around "libertarian populism" that puts their anti-crony capitalism ideas at the forefront. They say that Republicans should advance a message that is skeptical of "bigness," including both big government and big businesses seeking favors from politicians.

These strategic ideas are very different, and some of them are smarter than others, but they share a common problem: They leave unchallenged the unpopular economic policy ideas that most members of the GOP coalition agree on, even as they might disagree about gay marriage or immigration.

Namely, these strategies all accept the premise that middle-class entitlements are unsustainable and must be constrained, and that one purpose of this constraint should be to make the federal tax burden lighter and less progressive.

Libertarian populism aims to fix a messaging problem that doesn't actually exist. Middle-class Americans are not broadly distressed about "bigness." They are concerned that incomes are not rising as fast as they used to, that education is extremely expensive, that their children are having trouble getting the education and the jobs they need to move out of the family home.

Some critiques of bigness play well into these concerns—such as that too-big-to-fail banks were able to use their size to extract government subsidies that all the rest of us had to pay for. But others don't; Social Security is a big bulwark against rising economic instability, and the public isn't likely to take kindly to efforts to weaken it on the grounds that it is "too big."

I think it would be good to abolish the Export-Import Bank and I'd love to see Republicans start pushing for weaker patents. But I worry that libertarian populism, like immigration or social issues or any of the other topics that get inaccurately identified as the locus of the GOP's trouble, can become a distraction.

The Republican Party's core fiscal policy goals are both substantively bad and politically unsaleable. But since people who are Republican for a living like those goals, they are looking for anything else they can grasp onto as "the problem." The more issues like the Export-Import bank that Republican reformers get sidetracked on, the longer it will take them to figure out why they keep losing.