A Nation, Not a Market

Against the market-first indifference of the aging Republican class, and for the renewal of an American future

I was an apathetic and politically indifferent middle schooler when Donald Trump walked onto the stage for his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. I had grown up in a Democratic household, in a broadly Democratic community, inside a public-school system shaped by the standard orthodoxies of late-20th century liberalism.

Nothing in that environment should have pointed me toward the political right, let alone the kind of right-wing politics that later ignited my present-day political instincts. But the country was no longer living in times that could be described as normal, and Trump was certainly not a normal presidential candidate.

What happened that night was disorienting because it broke a decades-long pattern in Republican politics. Trump said things Republicans were not supposed to say, and never had. He spoke without mincing words about immigration and its consequences for the country. He identified free trade as hollowing out American life rather than uplifting it. He called attention to the stale choreography of both major parties, two exhausted establishments orbiting one another in a kind of ritualized dance while the country was sold off piece by piece.

For the first time, a Republican candidate seemed indifferent to the scolding of pundits and donors alike. He sounded less like a product of Washington and more like someone who had spent time listening to ordinary Americans trying to survive in a country that no longer cared about them.

For years, Republican rhetoric had been fixated on the health of the market. It treated rising GDP or a soaring stock index as if these were sacred indicators of civilizational flourishing. These were metrics so powerful they could substitute for cultural stability, national cohesion, or the genuine well-being of the American family.

The party manifested as a political movement whose highest aspiration was to make sure the “lines on the chart” pointed in the right direction. Anything beyond that, whether it was questions of national identity, belonging, sovereignty, or cultural continuity, was dismissed.

But who exactly was all this economic “success” supposed to benefit?

My generation came of age amid institutional failure and cultural decline. We learned about an America that no longer existed except in memory, an America built by people who believed that the government existed to protect the citizenry rather than globalize them. We read about this historic nation in picture books, watched movies about it, and listened to stories about it from our parents.

But the America handed to us was something entirely different. We were left with a disjointed society with very few cultural bonds, a middle-class stripped of its dignity, and leaders unable or unwilling to confront any of the forces responsible for this decay.

The conditions that produced this cynicism were assembled in part by a dominant faction of the Republican Party which sincerely believed markets alone could answer questions the political class was no longer capable of answering. In theory this belief might have been workable in a cohesive, high-trust nation.

But the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 followed by decades of mass immigration transformed the country’s social character. The United States moved from a society anchored in shared customs, common institutions, and high expectations to one increasingly defined by fragmented identities and widespread suspicion across cultural lines.

Despite all this, the party’s market devotees behaved as though Americans in 2015 were identical in outlook, trust levels, and social assumptions to Americans in the mid-20th century.

This delusion produced predictable outcomes. The widespread importation of foreign labor created a workforce shaped not by any sense of civic obligation but by the logic of purely individual self-advancement. Many new arrivals came from nations where public trust in institutions was either low or nonexistent, and where the idea of a national civic project where every generation is responsible for uplifting the one that follows was lost.

When the country imported millions of workers shaped by these conditions, it also imported those same norms. Businesses adjusted accordingly, becoming more predatory and less rooted. Long-established Americans under pressure to compete began adopting the same logic, viewing the market not as a system embedded within the nation but as a lawless battlefield where individual survival mattered more than the national interest.

The result is the America we inhabit today, one where economic metrics and lived reality generally fail to intersect. Productivity rises but families struggle to buy homes. Unemployment soars and wages stagnate while managerial profit remains stable. Corporations thrive while the cultural and social foundations of the country erode.

The consequences are not limited to economics. Programs that place foreign visa workers ahead of American-born graduates for high-skill jobs, especially programs like the H-1B, would have been inconceivable to earlier generations. For them, the American nation was a shared inheritance, and its young citizens were the rightful heirs. Today’s market-first conservatives justify these arrangements on the grounds that they benefit the economy in the abstract, as though the purpose of America herself were to serve quarterly earnings reports rather than the American citizenry.

Even proposals to fully abolish property taxes which exist as a bedrock of local school funding and community stability in order to lighten the financial load on older, wealthier homeowners seem to prioritize abstract efficiencies over the practical realities of young Americans, who are broadly feeling left behind their older counterparts financially.

These proposals are often paired with sales tax increases, disproportionately affecting younger consumers already struggling with inflated prices, weakened wages, and barriers to home ownership that their grandparents couldn’t have imagined in their day.

The idea that such a policy is aligned with “market liberty” only underscores how far removed this faction of the GOP has become from the concerns of young Americans who will one day inherit this country and be left with very little.

Some Republicans defend even the most damaging aspects of illegal immigration in the name of economic necessity. Roger Wicker, Senator from Mississippi, recently discussed illegal immigration the way a McKinsey consultant would: as a resource-allocation problem. The cultural consequences, the security implications, the question of what it means to allow millions of people to enter a country outside its own laws were secondary factors, assuming they even registered at all.

Sen. Wicker is not an anomaly. He represents a strain of Republican thinking that treats markets as possessing a moral authority higher than the nation itself. This theology has blinded the party to the grievances that actually drive voters, especially young voters, toward skepticism, populism, or disengagement.

Trump disrupted this longstanding pattern. His unprecedented rejection of the market fundamentalist orthodoxy cracked open a space for younger Americans to imagine a Republican politics grounded in national interest rather than elite consensus. The underlying tonality of his rhetoric reflected what countless Americans already felt, that a nation cannot survive on GDP figures alone and that no chart nor graph should restrain a government from defending its own people.

The mandate that voters delivered in 2024, particularly on immigration, reflected a demand for a government that protects the interests of its own people, not the preferences of special interests and elite consensus. Younger Americans are being driven en masse into political involvement by the reality of visa programs like the H-1B, once defended as necessary for “competitiveness,” which have since become symbols of a political class indifferent to the success and wellbeing of its own citizens. A political movement that cannot defend the economic future of its youth cannot claim to defend the country.

This is the central test for any entity that hopes to govern a nation. A healthy republic must ensure that the next generation can afford homes, build families, raise children, and participate in a stable civic order. If an economic doctrine serves to obstruct these outcomes, it is not a doctrine worth preserving in its current state.

The future of the Republican Party depends on its ability to understand this truth. The day the GOP accepts that markets exist for nations, and not the other way around, will be the day it secures a generational foothold among young Americans. Only then can the party claim to speak for the country’s future rather than its past.

Gabe Guidarini currently serves as the Chairman of the Ohio College Republican Federation, overseeing more than 20 campus chapters across Ohio. He previously served as Acting President of the College Republicans of America, overseeing more than 300 campus chapters across the United States.