A wealthy party of impoverished ideas

The economic and substantive crater of the RNC.

When I saw the theme for the Republican National Convention’s first day of events on July 15 in Milwaukee, I almost did a spit take: “Make America Wealthy Once Again.” And of all people to make a speech that day, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson? This is a joke, right? They’re laughing at us. They have to be. 

Ron Johnson is wealthy because he married into wealth. Period. He then leveraged that wealth to become a senator, where he has done nothing of note except push easily-debunked misinformation and conspiracy theories, and cut taxes for himself and his wealthy friends. The only person Ron Johnson cares about making wealthy is Ron Johnson. 

That also applies to the rest of the party’s economic platform. I’m actually not against tax cuts because cutting taxes for poor, working-class, and middle-class people would not only provide needed relief but would stimulate the economy. When lower-income people get more money, they spend it mostly on necessities with some extras—events, local shops, or my personal favorite, little treats. 

But that’s not what the Republican Party is talking about. We know this because of their actions. Trump’s tax cuts, which passed in 2017, gave an average $500 back to the lowest-earning 60% of households (in theory—I don’t know about your household’s taxes, but mine has not seen a tax cut); it gave an average $60,000 tax cut to the wealthiest 1%. That’s more than what 40% of American households earned in 2023. What do the wealthiest 1% do with an extra $60K? Maybe attempt to buy themselves some legislators or a judge? Meanwhile, the rest of us have to live with additional fees, poorer government service, and crumbling infrastructure as a result. 

The Republican Party before Donald Trump passed legislation that benefited the wealthy while pandering to the white poor population, and the Republican Party of Donald Trump is doing the same. The strategy became even more blatant when Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate, a classic grifter who will say whatever he thinks will help him get ahead. In 2016, Vance was a “Never Trumper” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” and now he’s Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee, blissfully ignoring that Trump literally almost got his last VP killed. Good luck with that.

Vance stepped onto the national stage with his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, which UW-Madison chose for the 2017 edition of its annual “Go Big Read” community book program. Vance claimed Appalachian identity even though Appalachians don’t claim him. He argued that the secret to understanding the white working poor is that they deserve to be poor. If claiming an identity that isn’t yours and throwing the people who raised you under the bus to get ahead isn’t the bread and butter of the Republican Party, I don’t know what is.

This dynamic played out in real time and at a tragic cost in Milwaukee, a city that bent over backwards to host a convention that turned out to be an economic bust. Milwaukee’s formidable array of venues and restaurants had a shockingly slow week. Some RNC delegates stayed in Madison and even had nice things to say about our city. Yet even our most vigorous business boosters couldn’t muster too much hype, merely anticipating “some” economic benefit for Madison. 

Instead of reaping the touted benefits of the RNC, Milwaukee’s poor and working people experienced austerity’s faithful companion—increased policing. Local officials brought in an army of cops from out of state, 13 of whom saw a fight between two men, one with two knives, and instead of de-escalating a situation with a 13:2 ratio of firearms versus knives, five of them opened fire within seconds, killing the knife-wielding unhoused man. By the way, all of this happened a mile outside the RNC security perimeter.

To cap off this multi-layered insult, “Make America Wealthy Once Again” day featured a speech from Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, arguably the most visible and influential union leader in America today. For all of O’Brien’s bare-knuckle bravado, this made for an abject spectacle, especially in a state where Republicans have carried out a generational assault on organized labor, which has substantially contributed to more of America’s wealth going to the top while laborers’ wages stagnate.

All of which gets to the main problem with “Make America Wealthy Once Again”: America is wealthy. America is insanely wealthy. But we have built a society that creates artificial scarcity among the not-rich and watches as us poor suckers at the bottom fight each other for scraps. Republicans are doubling down on an age-old strategy that pits Black and Latino workers against immigrants, when the real fight should be with the bosses who are overworking and underpaying their workers and hoarding the wealth for themselves. 

Even the reasonably well-off know, on some level, that their position is precarious because we have cut our social safety net into tatters. When I was a reporter in Columbus, Nebraska, in 2016 I interviewed a man who had worked for decades at a car dealership, done reasonably well, and bought a modest house on a lake. Then one day he was bitten by a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus, which affected his health in ways that were debilitating and chronic. But he didn’t qualify for any government assistance because he had retirement savings, general savings, a house, a vehicle, and all the other assets a middle-class person typically accumulates over the years.

We have created a system where someone has to sell off everything valuable they own and give the fruits of their entire working life to hospitals and doctors before the safety net even considers offering any meager assistance. Democrats definitely share some of the blame for this, especially the neoliberals (including our own former Gov. Tommy Thompson) and the Clinton administration. But gutting our social safety net and blocking any reforms to provide a buffer between catastrophe and destitution has been a generations-long project of the Republican Party.

That precarity is feeding our slide into authoritarianism. Despite the impact on my mental health, I’m reading How Democracies Die (2018) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The book is not interested in the dramatic Pinochet-style military coups, but the slow erosion of democratic norms and institutions under an elected head of state. Levitsky and Ziblatt focus on countries that technically have opposition and elections, but everyone knows they’re a farce.

Among the case studies, they document a pattern: a declining middle class faces economic precarity and a dysfunctional government. In steps a populist strongman who promises to fix everything. Which leaves a lot to unpack: why do people turn to these hyper-masculine figures in times of crisis? Why does having one person fix everything seem more plausible than doing the hard work of democracy? And why is it so simple to turn an anxious population against powerless minorities than for them to stand up to the people with the actual power and money to shape the system?

Years, maybe decades from now, when Trump is dead, the Republican Party (if it still exists) and the right may try to distance itself from Trumpism. But the right, at least in the United States, has worked to make government less functional, our society less equal, and our lives more precarious. This set the stage for an authoritarian strongman to step in. Electing Trump president again would give the Republican Party the power they crave—look at Wisconsin’s legislature under the gerrymander and Tennessee’s under its supermajority, to name just a few states the GOP has turned into laboratories of autocracy. The Republican Party as a whole offered little to no resistance to Trump, an authoritarian who promises to fix the problems that Republicans and pliant liberals created. Whether or not Republicans want to admit it, he’s everything the Republican Party stands for.