For a brief period after the 2012 election, it looked as if there might be some serious introspection among Republicans, some reconsideration of where their scorched-earth opposition to everything Obama had gotten them. But it didn’t last long. Even the notion that the GOP might need to accommodate itself a bit to an increasingly nonwhite nation has been fading fast; the big thing now is that the trouble in 2012 was missing white voters, and that the GOP just needs to redouble its efforts to identify itself as the party of white people.

But if there really is a missing-white-voter issue — and I’d like to see some more analysis by serious political scientists before I completely buy in — what will it take to bring these people back out to play? Sean Trende, who has been making the missing-whites case, describes the missing as “downscale, rural, Northern whites”. What can the GOP offer them?

Well, the trendy answer now is “libertarian populism” — but the question is what that means. And for a lot of Republicans, as Mike Konczal notes, it seems to mean lower tax rates on the wealthy, tight money, and deregulation. And this is supposed to appeal to downscale whites because, um, because.

True believers will say that this kind of agenda is actually great for low-income workers because it would lead to wonderful economic growth. This happens to be a view contradicted by all the evidence, but more to the point, what on earth would make anyone think that it’s a workable political strategy? Yelling even more loudly about the wonders of sound money and supply-side economics isn’t going to persuade anyone who hasn’t been persuaded already.

But wait, it gets worse. As a practical matter, the current GOP agenda isn’t so much about hard money or even lower top marginal rates as it is about slashing safety-net programs. There has been a highly successful attack on unemployment benefits, and the party has worked itself into a lather about food stamps too.

So, news flash: these programs don’t just benefit Those People; they’re also very important to downscale whites, the very people that will supposedly rescue the GOP. This is especially true of unemployment insurance (pdf):

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Data are scrappier on food stamps (pdf), with a lot of states failing to report the race of many recipients; but if we look at, for example, Pennsylvania, which does have almost complete reporting, we find that 59 percent of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites.

In short, the idea behind libertarian populism seems to be to bring back disaffected whites by preaching, even more forcefully, the virtues of the pro-wealthy policies the GOP has been following all along, and meanwhile destroying the safety net programs many of those disaffected whites depend on. Sounds like a winner.