Three years ago, “populist” Republican senator Josh Hawley tweeted, “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.” The next year, his colleague Ted Cruz announced that the future had arrived. “The Republican Party,” he said, “is not the party of country clubs” but “the party of hard-working, blue-collar men and women.”

In the real world, neither Haley nor Cruz is even a cosponsor of the PRO Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize unions. Nor are any of their Republican colleagues. Marco Rubio, another senator who likes to preen as an economic populist, actually introduced a bill last year to legalize company unions.

So the “party of the working class” schtick has always rung pretty hollow. But it’s striking that on stage at last night’s Republican debate, no one was even going through the motions.