A few months ago, it was an open question whether once Donald Trump vacated the presidency, the idea of a more populist right-wing economic policy would disappear with him.
Trump was a lazy, inconsistent populist, but he still tethered his party to the idea that Republicans should stand for some sort of “working class” politics, some kind of policy that prized American wage earners as well as corporations and the rich. But under his Democratic successor, it was possible to imagine populism going the way of compassionate conservatism in the Tea Party era, as the G.O.P. just cycled back to complaining about deficits.
Some Republicans have made that journey. But a few months into Joe Biden’s presidency, we can also say that the populist impulse remains alive, and the G.O.P.’s Trump -era repositioning with it.
You can see this in two ways. First, Republican Senate moderates keep making counteroffers to the Biden administration’s big-ticket spending proposals: $618 billion for Covid-19 relief in February, $568 billion for infrastructure last week. Compared with the ambition of the Democratic plans, these seem like very modest offers. Compared with the line that Republicans took for most of the Obama presidency, though, they represent a dramatic shift, with a combined price tag far beyond Obama’s $787 billion in stimulus spending, which Republicans back then denounced as profligacy or socialism.