Can the GOP become the populist party?

Still searching for a way forward after last year's resounding November defeat, some Republicans have trumpeted a new economic platform that they say will return the GOP to electoral dominance: Libertarian populism.

While the phrase may sound like an oxymoron, many intellectual lights in the GOP are arguing that it could solve the party's rebranding problem. In short, the idea involves convincing voters at the middle and lower ends of the income spectrum that Republican policies — lower taxes, fewer regulations — will benefit them more than Democratic ones would. The key is casting President Obama and Democrats as elitists who cater to other elitists, and arguing that the usual populist fare — greater federal assistance in areas of health care, education, consumer protection, poverty alleviation, etc. — benefit the wealthy.

"Conservatives need to turn to the working class as the swing population that can deliver elections," the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney wrote earlier this month in a post endorsing the idea. "Offer populist policies that mesh with free-market principles, and don't be afraid to admit that the game is rigged in favor of the wealthy and the well-connected."

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Former vice presidential nominee and current GOP budget guru Paul Ryan made a similar, shorter case on Twitter this past week.

Ryan's challenge, and that of other GOPers taking this line of argument, is to convince average voters that Obama has helped perpetuate a vast ruling nexus composed of corporate and government elites. As Ross Douthat, a proponent of libertarian populism, explained at The New York Times:

Yet that tactic has, at least so far, not involved any substantive change in policy. Rather, the idea of libertarian populism "consists of advocating the same old policies, while insisting that they're really good for the working class," according to the Times' Paul Krugman.

"You can see why many on the right find this idea appealing," he wrote. "It suggests that Republicans can regain their former glory without changing much of anything — no need to reach out to nonwhite voters, no need to reconsider their economic ideology. You might also think that this sounds too good to be true — and you'd be right."

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait agreed with Krugman in a thorough takedown of the idea, calling it a form of Republican "self-deception" and adding that "this is not a new idea at all, merely a new label for an old conservative tradition of attacking welfare queens or New Deal goldbrickers."

"[T]he main driver of inequality today is the marketplace, and the main bulwark against that inequality is the federal government," Chait wrote, citing government safety nets that Obama has tried to expand. "The egalitarian laissez-faire economy is a fantasy."

And according to Josh Barro at Business Insider, libertarian populism fails even on a pure messaging level:

One of the main problems for GOP reformers like Douthat and Carney is that many in the part see no need to change.

A Pew poll released Wednesday found that nearly seven in ten Republicans felt the party had to "address major problems" to do better in future elections. However, there was absolutely no consensus about what fixes were needed, especially on social issues. And significant pluralities said the party should actually move further to the right on a host of issues, including economic ones.

That's why the Republican rebrand has gone nowhere. Party members can't agree on how the party should approach major issues, let alone how they can build a bigger GOP tent. And with 87 percent of GOP respondents in Pew's survey saying the party was either not conservative enough or just right when it came to federal spending, a pivot to populist-branded economic policies seems unlikely.