Republican Disunity

The Republican Party has unified around Donald Trump. But do they agree about anything else? As Julius Krein explains in the NY Times, the policies being floated are all over the place:

We saw plenty of evidence of this throughout the Republican convention and in the party platform. Speakers on the first day alone ranged from anti-union, pro-free-trade, low-taxes Senator Ron Johnson to Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, who excoriated Amazon, Uber and other giant corporations for exploiting workers and selling out national interests.

The party’s official platform offers divergent planks without any attempt to reconcile them. Commentators have already highlighted a number of apparent contradictions: Tighter labor markets resulting from a crackdown on illegal immigration and “the largest deportation operation in American history,” coupled with more tariffs, would, at least in the immediate term, seem to conflict with the goal of lowering inflation. According to some analysts, including at times Senator Vance, the call to “keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency” might inhibit the goal of turning the United States into a “manufacturing superpower.”

Since 2016, pundits and politicians have divided the Republican Party into pro-Trump and anti-Trump, or populist and establishment, factions. These factions are said to have fundamentally different constituencies (the party’s working-class base versus major donors, corporate lobbies and establishment institutions) that pursue fundamentally different ends (MAGA nationalism versus global neoliberalism). 

I keep saying this: I would agree that over the past 25 years (at least) US policy has favored the wealthy and well-educated over factory workers and the like, but I don't see that anybody has a clear policy to turn this around, and I know Trump doesn't have a clue. Biden has been trying, with very limited success. Trump will try to clamp down on immigration, but his economic policy is otherwise likely to be either completely chaotic or boilerplate Republicanism.

Not, mind you, that the Democrats are particularly unified, either.

UPDATE: Here's a great example of what I'm talking about, an editorial in the WSJ from last Friday: 

Do Republicans want to rein in the regulatory state or unleash it? It's hard to tell these days, and the contradiction comes into sharp focus in J.D. Vance's embrace of Lina Kahn, Elizabeth Warren's favorite regulator who runs the Federal Trade Commission. . . .

The WSJ's complaints are that Kahn has been too aggressive in opposing corporate mergers and tried to ban non-compete clauses for workers, two things Vance has supported.