The Working Class, Standing Athwart History

President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” is not what you think it is. To us, it stands as the preeminent symbol of the new Republican party. To know the main beneficiaries of the bill is to know the party’s overriding political mandate to deliver for its base. Its working-class base.

The GOP’s working-class base? Indeed. We’ve written about this reality for several years now, in some cases to vehement denials, even ridicule. But look at the bill’s provisions (particularly the tax provisions, helpfully summarized by the House Ways and Means Committee), and see for yourself where such an assessment stands: $40 billion in “tax breaks for hourly, overtime workers”; $124 billion for “tipped workers”; $100 billion investment “in new opportunity zones”; ends “$500 billion in Biden-era tax breaks and special interest giveaways to wealthy, big corporations”; “eliminates special tax breaks for billionaire sports team owners”; and “holds woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations and other tax-exempt entities accountable.”

This bill comes not from the party of Reagan, or Gingrich, or Bush, or Boehner, or McConnell, or Ryan. It comes from the party of Trump, and it is the Republican party now, and likely for years to come. To understand how we arrived at this point, one must turn back the clock to height of the Eisenhower era. It was then that the party’s populist seeds were sown, only to emerge full flower 70 years later.

On November 19, 1955, in the inaugural issue of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr. said the magazine would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Buckley’s injunction was dismissed as quixotic, but he got the last word. More than any other figure, he helped to radically reshape the politics of modern American conservatism and the Republican Party. And yes, as we’ll see, Buckley was a proto-populist.

Other than both being sons of the Big Apple, Buckley and Trump, of course, couldn’t be more different: Buckley, with his affected aristocratic mien and lofty literary sensibility was born of a traveling oil developer family, and Trump, the blue-collar billionaire, a second-generation New York real estate magnate who has little time for scholarly erudition and polysyllabic words. But both stand as towering giants in how they shaped, and are shaping, the GOP’s voters and leaders, and the nation’s politics.

Seven decades later, in 2025, we are entering perhaps the final stage of the unraveling of Buckley’s longstanding political achievement, of combining the various strands of the conservative movement into a unified base supporting the GOP. This disentanglement stems from many causes, but chief among them is President Trump, whose impact on the party’s ideas and political direction is undeniable and, so it would seem, unstoppable. The Trump effect, to state the obvious, is creating a GOP more steeped in its populist roots.

Buckley helped forge the, at times, uncomfortable partnership between libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists. This intellectual “fusionism,” inspired by Buckley’s colleague and mentor Frank Meyer, led to resounding political success, contributing significantly to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, and an overhaul of the party’s governing philosophy.

Also called the “three-legged stool,” the GOP’s unity emerged alongside a budding political phenomenon that quietly emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, one that has profoundly altered the composition of the nation’s two political parties. This was the rise of “Reagan Democrats,” a group of voters from the Industrial Midwest, who didn’t directly figure into the fusionist formula.

They were once fixtures of the Democratic party’s base but felt betrayed by the party as, in their rendering, it moved left on social issues and capitulated to the growing Soviet menace. Their embrace of Reagan, and “Reaganism,” contributed to massive electoral losses for Democrats and extended the GOP’s electoral reach beyond the corporate boardroom.

Nonetheless, it was the corporate CEO, and the upper-income professional, rather than the rank-and-file labor union member, who most influenced Republican policymaking in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Reagan Democrats became part of the Republican coalition, but they were not central to it. Their concerns were voiced but often not heard. In short, and not exactly what Buckley had in mind, the business of the GOP was (Big) business.

Working-class voters over time grew disgusted with both parties. Certainly, they felt growing unease with, and then outright opposition to, post-9/11 military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan during the George W. Bush administration—not least because the physical and psychological burdens of war were disproportionately borne by their sons and daughters. Intensifying their disaffection was the bipartisan response to the 2008 financial crisis, perceived by them (and not without some justification) as underwriting Wall Street’s excesses.

These voters expressed their anger by moving uneasily to President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but remained dissatisfied with the status quo. Then came 2015. Donald Trump ventured down an escalator, announced his presidential candidacy, and, just as Buckley did, said to the establishments of both parties, “Stop.” That is, in Trump’s telling: stop illegal immigration, stop endless foreign wars, and stop technocratic and cultural elites who monopolized power at the expense of everyday Americans.

This is exactly what working class voters wanted to hear. And with Trump, they felt that, for the first time in many years, they were being heard. So they voted for him in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Here we document the similarities in the relative positions and ideas motivating Trump and Buckley. Both come from the starting point that elites have ill-served the country. They are both populists—in different ways, to be sure. Recall Buckley’s famous line, quite apt in the age of Trump, that, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” See Trump’s recent dealings with Harvard, and you get the picture.

By the same token, Buckley gave no quarter to a segment of the Republican establishment that he deemed inimical to the conservative cause. “Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it,” he wrote, “for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.” Trump’s attacks on the GOP establishment have a similar ring.

Trump, of course, is said to govern by gut instinct, with no fixed ideas about politics or political philosophy. That may be true. But even so, Trump’s populism, along with his governing style, is now favored by working-class, and a growing number of minority voters, whose concerns are quite different from those championed by corporate America, and by extension, the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush-McConnell Republican party. As a result, one can confidently declare, not necessarily the end, but the precarious fraying, of the centerright fusionism that defined the GOP for half a century. National Review’s Phil Klein called the new coalition “the new fusionism of wanting to blow stuff up.” He elaborates:

Adherents to this new fusionism may have previously come from the far right or the far left, but they share an overriding belief that so-called experts and elite institutions have royally messed things up roughly since the end of the Cold War. As a corollary, they believe that those people need to be driven away from all levers of influence and power. And a good number of them believe that Trump is the vehicle by which to make this happen.

Note, too, that this has consequences for bipartisanship. The “blow stuff up” caucus incorporates members from the extremes of both parties. When Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) teams up with Senators Corey Booker (D-NJ) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on pro-union labor legislation, you know something radically different is afoot. In short, center-out bipartisanship is not quite dead, but certainly fading.

Surely Trump, more than any other political figure, contributed to this reality. But it now extends beyond Trump, deep into the party’s DNA. With three election cycles behind us, it’s now safe to say that working class voters fit comfortably within the GOP tent and are essential to its long-term political prospects. Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming the party of the well-heeled.

This is what political scientists call a realignment. The expanding influence of working-class voters in the GOP is inverting long-held social, political, and economic assumptions that have divided the two parties in the modern era. Consequently, Republicans are now influenced by ideas and campaign priorities that are, in many ways, anathema to both Buckley and Reagan. This isn’t your father’s Republican Party.

Electoral contrast helps reinforce the point. Consider that, in 2024, Kamala Harris won 13 of the 20 wealthiest counties in America; Trump won seven. The last time the GOP had a popular vote mandate was in 2004, when Bush won 17 of the 20 wealthiest counties.

So what’s changed? The GOP remains the party of social conservatism but has moved on from its main social preoccupation of the last 50 years: abortion. After the downfall of Roe v. Wade, the fight over abortion is now in the states, where many in the GOP wanted it to be. The drive for a national abortion ban, backed by a constitutional amendment, no longer seems a pressing concern of party leaders (though it remains so for many socially conservative activists). In its place, Trump has pushed the party’s main “culture war” endeavor, which is to expunge “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives from government, corporations, and educational institutions.

Perhaps the most astonishing turn in the modern Republican platform relates to economics. The “supply side revolution”—whose first shot, fired in the form of a graph written on a cocktail napkin in a DC bar in 1974—came to dominate Reagan’s insurgent candidacy and presidency. Economist Art Laffer and Wall Street Journal Associate Editor Jude Wanniski (coiner of the phrase “supply side”) were its leading intellectual proponents. Supply-side thinking became gospel, dominating debates over tax rates, trade
policy, and deregulation.

Trump is chipping away at supply-side dogma, deeming it to be, in some respects, contrary to working-class concerns. Trump’s trade policy, through tariffs and other protectionist measures, is surely one such transgression. The GOP’s free-trade ethos, championed most fervently by corporate America, was once considered sacrosanct. But Trump’s deep suspicion of global elites and institutions, and the post-war economic consensus they developed and managed, reflects the GOP’s working-class base. Trump believes his electoral mandate is to reinvigorate hollowed-out Rust Belt communities, and that won’t happen, in his view, so long as America remains submissive to unfair trade and technocratic globalization.

Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has best captured the party’s new economic focus and emphasis: “Nobody has suffered more because of bad trade and economic policymaking than America’s working and middle classes. Our policies should focus on doing right by them, especially those working in manufacturing, the trades, and other skilled fields that don’t require a four-year degree. Republicans must not take their vote for granted.”

Republicans have always been the party of lowering taxes, especially, in true supply-side fashion, marginal income tax rates on high-income earners. No other party position comes as close to orthodoxy as that. But Trump, at least for a time, entertained something once considered unthinkable from a Republican president. When asked recently about raising taxes on wealthy earners in the reconciliation bill now moving through Congress, Trump said, “I actually love the concept, but I don’t want it to be used against me politically, because I’ve seen people lose elections for less. I’d be raising them on wealthy to take care of middle class. And that’s—I love, that.”

“I love, that.” Earth-shattering. For now, the GOP’s anti-tax orthodoxy has held firm. But one wonders for how long. One need only read the titles of various sections in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” that passed the House of Representatives last week: “Tax relief for American Families and Workers”; “Extension of Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Reforms for Rural America and Main Street”; “Working Families over Elites.” The bill’s major provisions include President Trump’s top priority to eliminate taxes on overtime and tips. The bill also “holds woke, elite universities…accountable, ensuring they can no longer abuse generous benefits provided through the tax code.”

Compare this to the text of the (blandly titled) “Tax Reform Act of 1986,” Reagan’s signature legislative achievement. You would strain to find any specific callout of “workers” or “Main Street,” while references to “Corporate Deductions,” “General Business Credit Deduction,” and “Individual Capital Gains” abound. These differences are not merely semantic or superficial, but indicative of two very different political mindsets.

Finally, in the realm of foreign policy, and in the minds of Trump officials, the neoconservatism of the Bush years has been thoroughly discredited by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neoconservatism informed the call by President George W. Bush in his second inaugural address to make the “expansion of freedom” the singular goal of American foreign policy. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Such bright-eyed idealism no longer holds sway. And Bill Kristol, one of the chief architects of neoconservative foreign policy, now votes for Democrats.

We are not here to pronounce judgement on that era and certainly hold the highest reverence for those who served. We are merely noting Trump’s, and the GOP’s, renunciation of foreign military engagements that are untethered to specific, narrow considerations of American interests. Trump’s foreign policy starts with the basic question: “Have we taken care of Americans first?” Followed by: “Will this particular action help not only those who require our aid, but our fellow citizens who deserve to live in a safe and secure country?” This is a far cry from promoting regime change and democracy abroad.

This is Trump’s party, but it’s also a party forging a new path, with a new coalition of voters. That means new priorities, new ideas, a shedding of the old skin. NR’s Klein said it best: “We can no longer take it for granted that certain foundational ideas are agreed upon. When arguing about an economic proposal, for instance, we cannot assume that all conservatives will agree that the free-market approach is preferable or that the one that requires more government intervention is to be avoided on principle.”