In the very short time since Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet in Pennsylvania, two major events have transpired that may have an even more lasting impact on the future of the Republican Party than the failed assassination attempt. The first was Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. The second was a speech last night by the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, at the Republican National Convention.
If there is a nail left to drive into the coffin of the old Republican Party, J.D. Vance is it. Vance is, in his own words, “a very non-conventional Republican;” the libertarians at Reason call him “an enemy of free markets.” If you need proof of this from his voting record, my friend and colleague Lee Fang has collated it. The tl;dr version is this: he supports government intervention into the marketplace to promote outcomes that are good for ordinary people, even if they’re bad for corporate profits. It’s hard to think of a more basic description of what once constituted the political philosophy of “the Left.”
In a 2023 interview with American Compass (which Lee’s post brought to my attention), Vance provided a clear and straightforward description of his economic thinking. In a unregulated marketplace, he explained, a neuroscientist may be paid three times the salary to design a product that is harmful to the public — an addicting social media algorithm, for example — than to create one that is beneficial to people — a cure for Alzheimer’s, for instance. From this, an old school free market ideologue might conclude, tautologically, that a brain-damaging algorithm must be three times more valuable to the public than ending Alzheimer’s Disease, since the market rewards it as such. To Vance — as to most people in possession of common sense — it’s the opposite: it’s self-evidently an anti-social “massive market failure” that requires government intervention to repair. Such intervention, to Vance, would entail taxing the kinds of economic activities we don’t want, whether it’s encouraging internet addiction or offshoring jobs, and subsidizing enterprises that benefit us all, like curing diseases. This is the basis for the industrial policy Vance advocates for. If you’re a liberal over the age of, say, 35, it should sound very familiar.
For the towering heights of the GOP, it’s hard to overstate what a radical rupture this is from the past. For decades, free market dogma found its hardcore base in the Republican Party. The Democrats stood for a slightly sanded down, mildly lubricated version of the same ideology. The bipartisan middle ground became known as “the Washington Consensus,” and it’s what created NAFTA, paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, facilitated the offshoring of American industry, and instigated the financial deregulation that fueled the subprime mortgage crisis. American workers had long resisted this top-down state religion, especially through their unions, but it took the trauma of the Great Recession to drain it of its last drop of popular legitimacy. Its vanquishment opened the door to the populist conquest of the Republican Party that Trump walked through. (That opportunity was also wide open on the Democratic side, but Bernie Sanders lacked the political instincts to effectively leverage it.)
J.D. Vance’s political trajectory is the expression of this astounding transformation. “There is no path to a durable governing majority for the conservative movement that doesn’t run through a rethinking of 1980s and 1990s economic dogma,” Vance declared in his American Compass interview. “Vance is the leader of the post-financial crisis Republican generation,” is how my friend Matt Stoller put it to the New York Times.
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