Following a speech by Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, at the Republican National Convention last month, a New York Times analysis considered whether the party could really carry out a populist agenda in support of workers. While Donald Trump has never shown much interest in workers’ rights, many of his acolytes have. Republican Senators Josh Hawley, Roger Marshall, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance (the party’s vice-presidential candidate) have all sided with workers in policy debates about labor organizing, the minimum wage, and worker protections.

Hawley, for example, recently declared that “it’s time Republicans embraced the trade unions of the working man … I’ve been on the picket line with the Teamsters. I voted to help them unionize Amazon. I supported the railway strike and the autoworkers’ strike. And I’m proud of it.”

Hawley coupled his encomium to labor with a paean to Christian nationalism that will trouble many worker advocates, who tend to be liberals. He was drawing on a long Republican tradition of attracting workers by appealing to their moral and religious commitments. But his support for labor organization and other worker protections – including the minimum wage and enhanced antitrust enforcement – really does represent a fundamental departure from the Republican Party of the last century.

Read more at Project Syndicate