In the aftermath of February’s tragic Ohio train derailment, Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent of the Washington Post noted, with surprise, that some of the loudest voices calling for increased regulation to safeguard public health and safety and ensure better working conditions for railroad workers were coming “from Republicans and right-leaning writers.” Similarly, in the New York Times, Dana Goldstein reported on a slew of social policy initiatives—including direct cash payments and expanded child care subsidies for parents and Medicaid expansion—that were, unexpectedly, coming from “an influential group of conservative intellectuals with a direct line to elected politicians.”
Although such voices and initiatives seem unexpected because they run counter to the classic Republican playbook, they shouldn’t be. They reflect an emerging movement in right-wing U.S. politics that is trying to shift the Republican Party away from the embrace of free markets, business interests, and small government and toward an economic profile that recognizes the threats posed by “globalized markets,” “trans-national corporations” and “crony capitalism,” embracing the government’s obligation to protect “workers, their families and communities, and the national interest.”
This movement, moreover, is entirely predictable. The populist right in Western Europe underwent a similar reorientation a couple of decades ago. While the Republican Party’s traditional dependence on the wealthy and big business have delayed the GOP from following in the footsteps of the European right’s economic reorientation, some on the right are catching on. Examining how and why this earlier reorientation occurred in Europe might provide us with a glimpse into the American right’s possible future. As Republicans grow increasingly dependent on low-educated, low-income voters, catering to their economic grievances will be an increasingly winning formula.
2022 was a banner year for right-wing populists in Western Europe. In Italy, the Brothers of Italy became the largest party in parliament, which enabled its leader, Georgia Meloni, to become the country’s first female prime minister. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats became the second largest party in parliament, exerting a dominant influence over the new government. And in France, National Rally’s Marine Le Pen achieved her best result yet in the French presidential contest.
While striking, these results did not emerge out of the blue. Right-wing populists have been increasing their vote share in Western Europe over the last ten years, but these parties have belonged to the political scene for decades—though when they first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, most were much less successful and had very different profiles than they do today.
To start, almost all advocated for conservative economic policies: tax cuts, smaller governments, welfare state reductions, and so on. Take the French National Front (the National Rally’s predecessor), one of Europe’s oldest and most influential right-wing populist parties. The party’s first leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, boasted that he had “adopted the principles of Reaganomics and Thatcherism before they became fashionable.” Another influential early player in the right-wing populist scene was the Danish Progress Party, which also called for radical cuts in taxes, government spending, and the bureaucracy. (In order to make crystal clear how he felt about the Danish “tax and spend” state, the party’s founder, Mogens Glistrup, once proudly stated on television that he paid no income tax—a claim that eventually earned him a prison sentence and large fine.) The Austrian Freedom Party, another long-standing right-wing populist staple, originated as a home for free-market liberals and former Nazis. The U.K. Independence Party and Italy’s Lega (formerly Lega Nord, or Northern League) also started off with conservative economic profiles.
After 2000, however, Western European right-wing populist parties started shifting away from conservative economic policies, embracing centrist or even left-wing ones instead.
The National Front underwent one of the most successful of these transformations, particularly after Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party leader in 2011. She distanced the party from her father’s open racism and anti-Semitism and stressed her support for the welfare state, interventionist government, and protectionism. One study concluded that not long after Marine Le Pen took office, the National Front clearly moved to “a left-wing location on the economic axis,” with more than 75 percent of its socioeconomic policies on the left.
Other right-wing populist parties underwent similar makeovers. The Austrian Freedom Party embraced what some call a welfare chauvinist profile: accepting the welfare state but demanding its benefits be limited to full citizens. In Denmark, the Progress Party splintered and was replaced by the pro-welfare state Danish People’s Party. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany was formed by conservative intellectuals opposed to the Euro and EU bailouts of Southern Europe, but morphed into a right-wing nationalist party that accepted social protection “for Germans.” And in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats proudly proclaim their commitment to protecting the Swedish welfare state and attack the Social Democrats for abandoning their historic role of protecting it and working-class interests.
Which brings us to why right-wing populist parties shifted their economic profiles, a story that can’t be told without also looking at the left’s evolution.
During the period after World War II, Western European center-left or social democratic parties had a distinctive profile based on the view that capitalism could be dangerous, and that it was the government’s job to protect citizens from its negative consequences. In practice, this meant advocating for activist states, expansive social safety nets, and the public provision of key collective goods. It also meant identifying with the interests of the working classes.
By the end of the 20th century, however, this profile had shifted dramatically as social democratic parties moved to adopt a “neoliberalism” profile, shifting from a wariness of capitalism to a wariness of activist states, and from a belief that unemployment was primarily the consequence of market failures to a view blaming individual failure and responsibility instead. These views led social democrats to advocate for globalization, deregulation, and a restructuring of the social safety net to increase the role of market-based, rather than public-sector, services. They also meant downplaying class-based rhetoric and an identification with the working classes, and openly appealing to the business community and what economist Thomas Piketty has referred to as the highly educated “Brahmin elite.”
By the end of the 20th century, European center-left parties had converged so much with center-right parties economically that many voters no longer no longer distinguished clearly between them when asked to place them on a left-right scale. As one study summarized, “by the late 1990s ‘Social Democracy had more in common with its main competitors than with its own positions roughly three decades earlier.’”
This economic shift moved social democratic parties away from voters who were angry about globalization, austerity, and welfare-state restructuring—a group that grew after the financial crisis of 2008 and in which citizens with low incomes and low levels of education were overrepresented. Social democratic parties also shifted to the left on social and cultural issues during this time (most notably immigration and national identity) while many low-income and low-educated voters retained the same moderate to conservative views on these issues that they had throughout the postwar period, further increasing the distance between these parties and their traditional voting base.
Each country of course had its own context. But the votes were to be found in catering to that quadrant of the electorate that was center left on economic and moderate to conservative on social and cultural issues. Once the social democratic and labor parties moved to the center economically and to the left on social and cultural issues, voters in that quadrant who viewed right-wing populist parties as better advocates of their interests grew in number. Cumulatively, these shifts by the center left and populist right contributed to dramatic voting and party system shifts over the course of a generation. During the heyday of the center left’s shift to a “neoliberal lite” profile in the 1990s, a decline in party membership and loyalty rates accelerated and electoral volatility increased. Abstention rates also surged, particularly among low-income and low-education citizens; in some European countries the turnout gap between these voters and higher-income, highly-educated ones reached 40 percent.
These trends created a great opportunity for a party able to attract the growing group of disaffected and detached voters. And this is precisely what right-wing populists did. By shifting their economic profile, these parties enabled voters who may have been tugged in different directions by their economic (left to moderate) and social and cultural preferences (moderate to conservative) to find a home, which is what happened, for example, with the rise of France’s National Front. During this period, right-populist parties also moved away from the more open racism and anti-Semitism that characterized their progenitors, enabling voters who had no interest in pulling the lever for pseudo-fascists to do so more easily.
This transformation proved extremely effective. Right-populist parties have become powerful political forces in many West European countries, and could not have accomplished this without attracting large numbers of low-income, low-educated voters. Indeed, in many West European countries they, and not parties of the left, are now the largest working-class parties in their political systems.
Whereas in the 1980s you could be a right populist party with an economically conservative profile, by the early 21st century this was no longer a winning formula. The shifting electorate and growing frustration with the fallout from neoliberalism and austerity created great incentives for the move to the center left economically.
The budding movement on the American right aiming to reorient the Republican Party has some critical similarities to a movement that already transformed the Western European populist right, enabling it to increasingly capture low-income and low-education voters who during a previous generation would have been the natural constituencies for the left.
The American right, however, is a decade or two behind its Western European counterparts in its grappling with the preferences and needs of its changing electorate. Although the U.S. Democratic Party has been losing working-class voters for decades, the Republican Party’s strong ties to the wealthy and big business, the role of money in American politics, and greater historical resistance to activist government in the U.S. than Europe, hindered the ability of those who might have advocated such a course shift to gain a hearing.
The 2016 presidential election changed that. It is important to remember that what made Trump distinctive in 2016 was not only his willingness to openly exploit voters’ social and cultural grievances; he also differed in that voters viewed him as less economically conservative and more sympathetic to many working-class economic grievances than previous Republican candidates. Seven years later, as higher-income, higher-educated voters became increasingly sympathetic to Democrats, the GOP’s dependence on low-income, low-educated, and rural voters has become ever clearer. Even in his 2020 defeat, Trump managed to hold on to most of his working-class base, increasing his vote share among minority groups from this background. These electoral shifts have convinced growing numbers on the right that the best path to a winning future for the GOP is to embrace its identity as a party of the working class and focus attention on pulling even more working-class voters away from the Democrats and the ranks of the uncommitted.
Doing this over the long term would require a real, rather than rhetorical, economic course correction. And this is precisely what growing numbers of right-wing politicians, think tanks, and magazines are advocating. Whether such forces will succeed in reorienting the GOP, thereby potentially enabling it to attract voters not merely by exploiting cultural and social grievances but rather by offering an economic alternative that truly offers something to Americans who have been suffering from economic insecurity and inequities for decades, remains to be seen. Recent research by political scientists Justin Grimmer, William Marble, and Cole Tanigawa-Lau shows that, although the post-Trump GOP has doubled down on cultural war issues, since 2016 the party “improved the most … by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views.” Solidifying support among such voters will surely be difficult if the party retains its commitment to favoring economic policies that disproportionately help the wealthy and big business. The most notable challenge to an economic course shift remains the GOP’s continued reliance on those constituent groups, which it risks alienating by attacking “woke” business practices and socially responsible investing. But if Republicans successfully attract and hold on to low-income, low-educated voters, they may succeed, as their Western European counterparts did, in further shifting American voting patterns.
This success would deepen the dilemmas facing Democrats. Voters without a college degree remain by far the largest demographic group in the American electorate, and losing more of these voters to the Republican Party—especially if accompanied by the loss of more non-college minority voters—would make winning local and state elections in many parts of the country where such voters are particularly dominant very difficult for Democrats, and complicate winning national elections as well. Biden seems to recognize this and has accordingly taken a harder stance against Chinese trade practices, loudly proclaimed his dedication to promoting American industry and workers, and baited Republicans on their commitment to popular social policies such as Medicare and Social Security, while at the same time managing to keep his progressive wing relatively placated. Whether other Democrat politicians can pull off this balancing act remains to be seen. The future of the Democratic Party and perhaps American democracy hangs in the balance.
