JD Vance is from the government, and he’s here to help
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language” are, Ronald Reagan said in 1986, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Reagan’s skepticism of government solutions to America’s problems is alien to the power-hungry National Conservative movement, of which Vice President JD Vance is the vanguard.
When Vance concluded from Donald Trump’s early 2020 polling that Kasich Republicanism was a dead end, he kept emphasizing his “pro-family” enthusiasm for an expansive welfare state but killed his soft-spoken technocrat persona, replacing it with Trump’s deliberately inflammatory rhetorical style while adopting Trump’s nativist stances on trade and immigration.
Even more than the $15,000,000 his billionaire mentor Peter Thiel invested in his 2022 Senate primary, the crucial element of Vance’s MAGAmorphosis was his decision to imitate and befriend celebrity Fox News populist Tucker Carlson. By the time Vance announced his campaign, Carlson had been promoting Vance as the GOP’s future for two years:
But Trump is famously susceptible to the charms of whomever complimented him last, so Carlson persuaded him that the 18 months Vance spent in the Senate bashing Ukraine while drafting bills with Liz Warren and Sherrod Brown made Vance the ideal running mate.
Don’t take my word for it that the populist who’s a heartbeat from the presidency sees big government (run by himself and his friends) as the answer to our problems; take JD Vance’s.
Mocking the GOP as an 80s-obsessed party of tax cuts for the rich, Vance could have passed for a Congressional Progressive Caucus flack in a 2018 Financial Times interview:
“I wasn’t as critical of my party in 2016 as I was the person,” he says. “But when I look at tax reform, when I look at healthcare reform, I see Trump as the least worrisome part of the Republican party’s problem, which is that we are basically living in the 1980s. We are constantly trying to resurrect domestic policies from the 1980s.”
Such as? “Let’s cut taxes for the wealthy! Let’s cut the social safety net! . . . The fundamental thesis that underlined basic Republican policies in the early 1980s, which is right, is that you had an economy which was simultaneously stagnating and experiencing high inflation. I don’t think the primary problem facing the American economy right now is that. It is that the opportunities that are out there require an adjustment in skills, an adjustment in training . . . And if that’s the problem, I don’t necessarily see how unleashing tax cuts for the wealthy . . . ” Vance trails off as our food arrives.
At The American Conservative‘s annual gala in 2019, Vance said:
I did this event at the Yale Federalist Society recently where they asked me for my three favorite Democrats purely in terms of policy outcomes, and I said, in order, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard.
At the same event, Vance said:
So the substance piece of Trump – which we can talk about in more detail – but pretty, pretty straightforwardly is he was explicitly attacking the libertarian consensus that I think had animated much of Republican economic thinking – and frankly, you know, much of the neocon consensus that had animated Republican foreign policy thinking – for two, three decades. I remember so vividly when he said during a debate, ‘We’re not gonna let people die in the streets’ when talking about health care, and everybody said, ‘Oh, you can’t say that in a Republican primary,’ and at the same time I’m getting, like, text messages from my friends and family back home, like ‘Finally, somebody’s saying we’re not gonna let people die in the streets!’
“What I worry about is that we have outsourced, in the conservative movement, our economic and our domestic policy thinking to the libertarians,” Vance complained during his keynote speech at the 2019 gala before concluding, “We have to be willing to pursue a politics that actually wants to accomplish something besides just making government smaller.”
In the final keynote of the maiden National Conservatism conference in July 2019, Vance said:
The failure to use political power that the public has given is a choice. And it’s a choice that has increasingly had, and I think increasingly will have, incredibly dire consequences for ourselves and our families.
Vance griped in a March 2020 post for The Claremont Institute’s American Mind blog that “the donors” demand conservatives support low taxes and limited government:
The donors who provide an overwhelming share of the capital to conservative campaigns and institutions have quite literally gotten rich off of the “Washington consensus” of neoliberalism and globalization. Accordingly, there are things you’re not allowed to say—about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government, especially—and things you must say—also about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government. Any departures from orthodoxy must be qualified—“this doesn’t mean we’re for big government”—if the check writers might see or hear.
At the 2021 National Conservatism conference, Vance closed with a quote from “the great prophet and statesman Richard Milhous Nixon” after crediting Pat Buchanan as “the genesis of many of the ideas that we discussed here.”
During a lengthy 2021 in-studio appearance with Carlson on Tucker Carlson Today, Vance attacked his favorite corporate bogeyman while asserting that private companies with “too much power” should be targeted by the federal government:
I don’t care if Google’s a private company because it has too much power, and if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely, you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations
In a 2021 Tucker Carlson Tonight interview, Vance said:
If we take anything away from this moment, it should be that we have a choice in this country between our constitutional liberties – between the rights that our forefathers fought for – or the bottom line of the Silicon Valley tech monopolists. It’s time to break them up, it’s time to destroy them, it’s time to tax them, it’s time to do whatever is necessary so that we can continue to have a good life in this country that all of us love.
In another 2021 Tucker Carlson Tonight interview, Vance said:
Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda. Give it to the people whose lives have been destroyed by the heroin epidemic. Give it to the angel moms who’ve lost a kid thanks to the Ford Foundation’s ideas.
In a May 2021 Claremont speech, Vance said:
Go after the companies that are destroying this country, reward the companies that are building it. It’s that simple. That’s what public policy is about, and if we’re unwilling to use those levers, we should get out of this business altogether.
In a June 2021 interview with Breitbart News, Vance said:
Facebook, Google especially, Twitter, YouTube – these companies all really do control what information gets out there in the public square. One of the things that really bothers me is when, you know, more establishment-style conservatives will say, ‘Well you can’t do anything about this, they’re private companies.’ Well first of all that’s totally BS, they’ve benefited from any number of special government privileges. They’re not really private companies, they’re basically behemoths that have been built on the back of special protections from the government. And the other piece of it is, is that even if they were truly private companies, which again they’re not, I care more about their ability to control the flow of information. They’re just too powerful. Private or public, one of the things I think conservatives should push back against is anything that’s too powerful, and they’re way, way, way too powerful.
When podcaster Dave Rubin interviewed Vance about his Senate campaign for a July 2021 episode of The Rubin Report, Vance said:
People always ask me the difference between left and right, ‘Is it small government/big government, social conservative/progressive,’ what have you, and I always say, look, the big difference between the left and the right is the left loves to use power and the right is terrified of using power. And you know, my friend Richard Hanania, who’s a really interesting thinker on this, he says the left loves to use power because they actually care about politics more. Like, you know, you look at polling, and the right just doesn’t care as much about politics as the left does. I think unfortunately we’re in an environment where we have to get over it, because if we’re not willing to use power to push back against the left I think that power is gonna come for us, it’s gonna come for our livelihoods, it’s gonna come for our families, it’s gonna come eventually – it already started – coming for our very ability to speak and to think for ourselves. And so, I agree, the left has a basic instinctive advantage because they love to use power but we’re just gonna have to get over it or we’re gonna find ourselves without, ya know, really, a real republic anymore.
Reiterating a point from his Breitbart interview the previous month, Vance told Rubin that Big Tech companies including Google, Apple, and Facebook are “not actually private companies.” Vance endorsed three options to “rein in the power of these companies” – adding political views as a protected class under federal antidiscrimination law, using antitrust law to break them up, or making data collection “completely outlawed.”
In a September 2021 campaign video explaining his support for a lawsuit to have Google declared a “common carrier,” Vance said:
If we don’t start pushing back against that biased presentation of information, we’re ultimately gonna give Google control over our entire society. Because if you control what people see, then you control what they think, and if you control what they think, you control how they vote. We saw that in the 2020 election where I think maybe the most fraudulent thing that happened in the entire election is that Big Tech actively censored negative stories about Joe Biden. That is not a real democracy, that is not a real republic, and it’s time to finally push back against this stuff. This lawsuit is just one effort to push back: there’s Section 230 reform, there’s an antitrust approach where you break the companies up, there’s maybe making it illegal for these companies to steal our data in the first place. All of these things have to be on the table if we want to live in a real republic.
Vance loved this lawsuit so much, he filed another amicus brief in support of plaintiff Dave Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, while he was a senator in March 2024. Yost lost the case this August.
A lot of conservatives have said we should deconstruct the administrative state, we should basically eliminate the administrative state, and I’m sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.
In December 2021, Vance suggested there should be a Made in America mandate for cereal.
“Bernie is right, we must protect US workers from having their jobs taken from them,” populist Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent wrote in a post sharing video of Bernie Sanders at a Kellogg’s cereal worker strike. “If Kellogg’s wants to make cereal in Mexico, they shouldn’t get to sell it in America.”
“Allowing companies to use overseas slaves to undercut the wages of American workers is a political decision,” Vance chimed in. “We can make different ones, and protect the livelihoods of our people.”
“Also, Bernie used to understand this, but apparently forgot it: using foreign slaves against American workers is bad whether it comes through offshoring or mass immigration,” Vance added. “Two sides of the same coin.”
In May 2023, Vance spoke at an Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) event celebrating his friend Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen is a leading proponent of “postliberalism,” the belief that the classical liberalism of America’s founding has failed and should be replaced with socially conservative central planning.
During a panel discussion at the event, Vance identified himself as part of “the postliberal right” and said, “there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime.”
Later in the same discussion, Vance said:
The regime is the public and private sector. It’s the corporate CEOs, it’s the HR professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good.
Vance also said at the May 2023 ISI event:
I guess I think that things in American society are so tilted towards the few that I just worry about the many and let the rest of it figure itself out. I sort of see my role and my voice as being explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime, and to the extent that we can sort of elevate voices that have been largely ignored, that’s the role that I play and I think that hopefully I can play a part in that balance. But that – I don’t see myself as trying to concoct the balance myself, I see myself as corrective
Sen. Vance bemoaned conservative opposition to industrial policy at a June 2023 “Rebuilding American Capitalism” event hosted by his friend Oren Cass’s American Compass – which has received $3.2 million from the Hewlett Foundation since 2020:
When the bad guys rule the government, they get to do the things that they want to do. And when the good guys rule the government, they get to do the things that they want to do. And the problem with, frankly, some of our interlocutors on the right is that their worldview appears to be that every time Republicans gain a governing majority they have to sit on their hands on their hands and do nothing with it – acknowledging that whenever the left gets a governing majority, they’re gonna do exactly what they want to do with it. Well that just means that we lose, but a little bit more slowly than we would otherwise lose. And the counterargument I make, even though – look, I really again want to emphasize that what Secretary Raimondo is doing with the CHIPS bill is really bad news for a whole host of reasons – the counterargument to the idea that, well, we can’t give the power to government, we can’t give any power to government because then the left might misuse it is to look at the United States military. Right? If your argument is Gina Raimondo may misuse the CHIPS bill, therefore we cannot do the CHIPS bill, well I guess we should abolish the Department of Defense because Joe Biden’s doing a lot of crazy crap with the Defense Department that I don’t think that he should do. Does that mean we shouldn’t have a U.S. military? No, it means we should advance a political program that’s popular and that can win so that when we win, we can get to do with the military what we want to do with it.
At a December 2023 Claremont Institute event celebrating the release of Up From Conservatism, a collection of National Conservative essays, Vance said:
Our critiques of the administrative state are very often correct, but our answer to this can’t be every single time the American people give us power the only thing that we try to do is to trim down the thing that they gave us control over.
If you think that we’re gonna have to fight back against corporate America – against Big Tech, against the pharmaceutical industry – if you think we’re gonna have to do these things, well, the government’s pretty much the only path in town. That is the representation of the people, that is the entity that has the actual authority and the power to go after something like a Big Tech, or like the railway industry.
During a May 2023 interview with Steve Bannon regarding the Railway Safety Act, Sen. Vance said:
You hear this phrase, Steve, you hear this slogan – ‘Go woke, go broke,’ right? If the railroad industry has gone woke, and it has, if it’s settin’ off chemical bombs in our communities, and it has, isn’t it the job of the servants of the people to make them pay up a little?
At a January 2024 Senate Banking Committee hearing, Sen. Vance asked a witness for suggestions as to how Congress could expand its power to block private transactions like the proposed purchase of US Steel by Nippon Steel:
I guess part of my question is whether we think that the four corners legal mandate here is a little too narrow for what we’re concerned about, what we’re interested in. What do you think, I mean, if we wanted to empower our government to, you know, ensure that we had things like sufficient native domestic production of steel, what do you think we might, maybe should do here? You know, if you were sort of, you know, legislator for a day, and we wanted to further empower the Congress to protect – and I use that word intentionally – the domestic steel industry, what do you think we should be doing differently vis-a-vis transactions like this one?
Sen. Vance joined Manhattan Institute’s Antonin Scalia, ISI president Johnny Burtka, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in a March 2024 Twitter Spaces discussion where he said:
We live in a country where power is handed out, at least theoretically, democratically – hopefully democratically, not always. But you have I think a sort of progressive movement that is enthusiastic about the prospect of using power, and you have a conservative movement that very often sort of saw its purpose as scaling back progressive exercises of power rather than pursuing its own ends. And that, I think, was a really, really significant problem. And if there was a sort of distinction between the new right and the old right, it probably – again, abstractions are always really challenging – but it’s probably that the old right was terrified of using power for conservative ends, and the new right is not.
In an August 2024 interview on Face the Nation on CBS News, Sen. Vance praised Lina Khan, President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, for using the power of the FTC to target Google and other companies:
I don’t agree with Lina Khan on every issue, to be clear, but I think that she’s been very smart about trying to go after some of these Big Tech companies that monopolize what we’re allowed to say in our own country.
In the same Face the Nation interview, Vance said:
Google and Facebook are not giving me a whole lot of money because they don’t like me, because I believe that Americans oughta be able to speak their own mind in their own country, and I think these companies are too big. We oughta take the Teddy Roosevelt approach to some of ’em, break ’em up, don’t let them control what people are allowed to say
JD Vance is from the government, and he’s here to use the power of the state to help his friends and hurt his enemies.
