Populist Realignment on Full Display at Republican Party Convention

Something for everyone: If you had told me back in 2016 that the GOP of the future would, just eight years from now, feature the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a celebrity-stripper with a face tattoo, in quick succession and to great fanfare, I would have thought you were yanking my chain.

But here we are. Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, got up on stage last night at the Republican National Convention and rebuked big business while calling for labor law reform. With a massive amount of speaking time and no endorsement for former President Donald Trump, O’Brien was an odd choice. (Though he at one point praised Trump, saying “no other [Republican] nominee in the race would have invited the teamsters into this arena,” which is probably true.) But inviting O’Brien also supports the thesis that the populist realignment has already happened, that Trump has remade the party in his own image, and that the party of free markets is no longer.

Looked at more cynically, O’Brien’s speech could simply be a ploy by Republicans to cater to labor and shore up support in the swing states they’re worried about: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

“Companies fire workers who try to join unions and hide behind toothless laws that are meant to protect working people but are manipulated to benefit corporations,” said O’Brien at one point, in precisely the type of speech you’d expect at the Democratic National Convention. “This is economic terrorism at its best. An individual cannot withstand such an assault.”

“An individual worker has zero power,” he continued. “It’s only when Americans band together in democratic unions that we win real improvements on wages, benefits and working conditions.” Soon after, O’Brien started picking on Amazon, a company that has “abandoned any national allegiance,” which has the “sole focus” of “lining its own pockets.”

It’s unclear what exactly O’Brien thinks these businesses ought to be caring about if not profit or how state power ought to rein them in. It’s even less clear what the Republican overseers of the convention are suggesting by having the king of the Teamsters grace the stage.

“Remember: Elites have no party, elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker,” added O’Brien.

It’s Vance’s party now: Pair the O’Brien speech with Trump’s pick of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as running mate, also announced yesterday, and you get a portrait of a Republican Party that simply doesn’t care about free markets the way it used to.

“There is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime,” said Vance last year in a speech at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Vance is, as regular readers of Reason may know, a proponent of tariffs and protectionism. He has plenty of kind things to say about the antitrust policies pursued by the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan. He appears to be in favor of raising the minimum wage, and in favor of the federal government stepping in to prevent American-born workers from being outcompeted by the foreign-born.

More broadly, “the New Right”—of which Vance is part, writes Reason‘s Stephanie Slade—”openly calls on conservatives to wield state power against their domestic political ‘enemies,’ among whom it counts lefty corporations, universities, and nonprofits.” It’s a sign of the times that one of the most prominent members of the New Right, who frequently signals his anti-elitist bona fides despite having worked in venture capital and gone to Yale, has been selected as Trump’s backup.

“Eight years ago, Pence was considered a savvy choice because of his ability to soothe any misgivings his fellow evangelical Christians might have about casting a vote for a thrice-married philanderer,” writes Reason‘s Stephanie Slade. Now, those considerations just aren’t part of Trump’s equation; he’s already secured support from evangelicals, so Vance doesn’t need to even gesture in the direction of religion (though he is Catholic, having converted several years ago).

Which brings me to the stripper.

Amber Rose—model, stripper, face-tattoo doyenne, mom, and (apparently) inflation critic—took the stage just before O’Brien to talk about coming out of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) closet and how hard inflation has made it for parents to make ends meet. She said the media had “lied to us” about Trump, and that “the best chance we have to give our babies a better life is to elect Donald Trump president of the United States.” Though light on substance, the optics were fascinating: Rose, a former girlfriend of Kanye West (himself a wearer of many hats, including those of the MAGA variety) and mainstay in the hip-hop world, was an unconventional choice for the RNC, but was given a warm welcome by both audience and punditry afterward.

Last night felt very much like the type of programming you’d expect from a Republican Party that’s confident it will win—a far cry from “the party of Ronald Reagan” but a whole new beast, one that appears to be gaining in traction what it lacks in cohesion.

Scenes from New York:

A group called the Transit Liberation Front smashed 10 OMNY machines in subway stations across NYC in response to a call from Black revolutionaries in Atlanta calling for a summer of resistance against the US & Israel’s colonial/state violence & surveillance.