A strange thing is happening on the right. A powerful and influential faction of the Republican Party wants goods to be more expensive, economic growth to be constrained and men and women back in factories — whether the rest of us want this or not.

In fact, you cannot understand President Trump’s attack on global trade (and trade with China in particular) without understanding this faction of the new right. Traditionalist, patriarchal Christians, populist economists and postliberal academics are engineering a Republican break with free trade and free markets that’s deliberately intended to remake the American economy — and American culture — from the ground up.

They don’t want to negotiate better trade deals. They want to reverse the globalization of the American economy. They want the 1950s back.

Movements that are designed to deliberately slow economic growth aren’t new. The left has long contained its own degrowth faction, often rooted in environmental concerns about greed and income inequality.

At the risk of oversimplifying the argument, I’ll put it this way: The single-minded quest for ever-higher living standards — for more stuff — is destroying the planet, creating a nation of self-centered citizens who possess little regard for the poor, and disproportionately benefiting a class of oligarchs who enjoy most of the fruits of economic expansion while the bulk of the citizens struggle to make ends meet.

Bernie Sanders offered a version of this argument when he ran for president against Hillary Clinton. In a May 2015 interview with CNBC, he decried what he sees as the high cost of consumer choice:

You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.

The right-wing version of the degrowth argument is different. Where the left is more concerned with the climate and overdevelopment, the right is more concerned with faith, family and … heavy industry.