JD Vance Is Typical of America’s Drift Into Economic Illiberalism

Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a powerful memoir (and later movie) detailing his challenging upbringing in Appalachia. The senator has certainly been on a political journey since then. This latest step marks a victory for his national conservative faction within the Republican Party, which favours a more interventionist economic policy.

Vance’s shift from Trump critic to fervent supporter itself highlights the party’s evolution. Before the 2016 presidential election Vance called Trump “cultural heroin”, “noxious”, “reprehensible”, and suggested he “might be America’s Hitler”. Like most Republicans, Vance bent the knee to Trump upon seeking office, echoing the former president’s doubts about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory when he was running for the senate in 2023. Now, Vance arguably outdoes Trump in his populist rhetoric.

British journalists were stunned when Vance joked at the recent National Conservative conference that the UK under Labour could become the first Islamist nation with a nuclear weapon. Yet such demagoguery is typical of him. He blamed an influx of Ukrainian refugees for high Hungarian inflation and has mocked Republicans who support both aid to Ukraine and entitlement reform, accusing them of wanting to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht”.

On economic policy, Vance, 39, is arguably more Trumpy than Trump himself. Trump’s term as president certainly steered the US toward protectionism on trade and immigration, while showing little concern for the rising national debt. Domestically, though, Trump upheld many Republican free-market principles. He approved business tax cuts and reform, prevented significant new economic regulation, and appointed judges committed to property rights and protecting economic liberties.

Vance’s approach to economics is very different. He wants to run with Trump’s “blue-collar” appeal, but by creating a working-class party through aggressively interventionist policy. While his book emphasised personal responsibility and warned against welfare dependency and overregulation, he now promotes grievance politics. According to Vance, conniving centre-left and centre-right elites and corporations have withheld opportunities from struggling workers by favouring “cheap labour” and neglecting investment in Americans.

In the senate, he’s thus championed protectionism, industrial policy centred on manufacturing, immigration restrictions, and dollar devaluation to try to revive the Rust Belt. While his book, published in 2016, praised Japanese investment in a steel mill as a lifeline for the town, he now opposes similar foreign direct investment. Vance instead argues that Republicans should embrace trade unions, raise the minimum wage, break up tech companies, block mergers, tax corporations that outsource jobs, and use state power to punish woke companies.

Many of these progressive and authoritarian economic views probably won’t trouble Westminster commentators and politicians. After all, the surest way for any conservative to be dubbed “thoughtful” in London today is to repudiate free-market economics. Yet Vance’s opinions on how Republicans should manage the government might raise eyebrows, at least. He’s advocated not reform of the regulatory state, but a “de-Ba’athification programme … fire every single middle-level bureaucrat” and “replace them with our people”.

Of course, the vice-presidency is not a sufficiently powerful position to do all this. In some frontier technologies, like artificial intelligence, Vance is still admirably liberal, saying overregulation would stifle progress and hobble competition. How much power he’d even have to shape the other “pro-worker” policies and whether free-market congressional Republicans, or even Trump, would support them remains unclear.

Directionally, however, his selection shows the US edging towards a world in which both main parties no longer pretend to support free trade, sound public finances, personal responsibility, limited executive power, or entrusting markets to allocate capital. Economic nationalism and centralised industrial policy are ascendant, on both left and right. If Vance has his way, Trump’s second term will see this paradigm firmly entrenched.