President Donald Trump's tariffs, and his subsequent proclamations that Americans should stop consuming so much and be proud of giving their children fewer dolls, signal a massive shift in what the Republican Party stands for, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote in an analysis published on Monday afternoon.
Specifically, the GOP has renounced its traditional status as the party of jobs, consumption, and ever-growing markets, into a party that specifically embraces the "de-growth" movement, a longtime fringe ideology, historically more associated with the left, that advocates we should consume less and be deliberately be poorer for the sake of making the world we live in sustainable.
"Today’s GOP has stumbled into this position through the back door of nationalism. Republicans are willing to sacrifice GDP growth on the altar of 'America First,' which isn’t America first at all," wrote Hamid. "Consider the evidence. In the first quarter of the year, the U.S. economy contracted by 0.3 percent — the first economic decline since 2022. Responding to the news, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro declared it 'the best negative print I have ever seen in my life.'"
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Not only is the GOP's embrace of "degrowth" remarkable, he continued, but so is "the way Republicans frame economic sacrifice as a kind of masculine virtue."
"After 'Liberation Day' triggered market chaos, right-wing commentators had an intriguing message: Stop worrying about your 401(k) and start pumping iron," he wrote.
For example, Fox News' Jesse Watters told viewers that a Trump economy eliminating office jobs in favor of manufacturing could be a "testosterone boost" for the average man, because “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman ... If you’re out working, like building robots ... you are around other guys.”
It's not just GDP that's on the way down, Hamid wrote, but everything from international student enrollments to tourism — and Republicans, when they even acknowledge these trends are real, seem to consider it a good thing.
Republicans back in the Reagan days "would have seen plummeting tourism and fleeing intellectual capital for the economic disasters that they are. Today’s GOP sees them as acceptable casualties in a war for cultural preservation," he wrote. "The French philosopher Serge Latouche, another leading de-growth theorist, wrote that 'the point is not to end a ‘bad’ economy and put a ‘good’ one in its stead ... The point is to get out of economics.'"
Republicans talking about the cultural benefits of shifting the U.S. economy into a weaker and poorer position, he argued, "align with Latouche’s critique of growth-oriented thinking, even as they reject his ecological concerns."
What all of this means, he concluded, is that the GOP has "inadvertently embraced a central tenet of the de-growth movement they would otherwise dismiss" — and no matter the result of their policies, "one thing is clear: The old economic certainties are gone, replaced by something much stranger and more unpredictable. Welcome to the age of right-wing de-growth."
