Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.
Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance speaks at a campaign rally at Radford University on July 22, 2024, in Radford, Virginia. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
“The American left,” as the historian Matthew Karp wrote in Harper’s recently, “has failed to develop a politics capable of winning over the American public.” From economic inequality and workplace democracy to Gaza, the Left has become politically impotent and, in an age of class dealignment, confined to outposts of highly educated urban areas, “from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to Denver,” with “little relationship with the vast country beyond.”
Enter J. D. Vance. The Ohio senator-cum-nominee for vice president’s speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this month raised eyebrows. Vance gave a fiery, quintessentially right-wing populist speech, condemning NAFTA (and the Iraq War) and blaming out-of-touch elites in Washington for pushing policies that destroyed the jobs of autoworkers in Michigan, factory workers in Wisconsin, and energy workers in Pennsylvania. He castigated Wall Street barons for the Great Recession and Democrats with opening the borders to drive down wages. “We will build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.”
In many respects, Vance’s speech was simply recycling rhetoric that Donald Trump has used for years. As many commentators have pointed out, not only were Trump’s economic policies during his first term largely bog-standard Republicanism (the occasional flare-up over tariffs aside), but there is now a bipartisan consensus around national industrial policy driven largely by geopolitical concerns. And yet the Financial Times wrote that Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate “cements the Republican party’s shift from the free-market conservatism of the Reagan and Bush eras to the economic populism of the Make America Great Again movement.” Trump-Vance 2024 is pro-tariff and more autarkic and favors targeted regulations of certain industries, especially banking and Big Tech. The Economist wrote that Vance’s views include “some lefty policies that would thrill Bernie Sanders,” including some state protections for blue-collar workers and a minimum-wage hike. Commentator Matt Stoller called Vance “THE leader of the post-financial crisis Republican generation,” who represents a clear post-2008 break with GOP orthodoxy.
Through this lens, the Trump-Vance ticket poses a profound challenge for the Left — perhaps best exemplified by Teamster president Sean O’Brien’s speech at the RNC. The basic narrative is that due to class dealignment, the Democratic Party is now the party of the educated professional class. Both the Democrats and the Left have profoundly alienated the working class — specifically white workers but also working-class men of various racial backgrounds — by embracing cultural radicalism. And so the danger posed by the Republicans’ embrace of economic populism and pro-worker rhetoric is that working-class cultural affinity for Trump will be matched by actual material and class interests as well. MAGAism, not the politically impotent left and certainly not the Democratic Party, will be the real home for the working class in American politics.
This is a reasonable concern, but it fundamentally misunderstands the MAGAists’ strategy and the history it derives from. Vance did offer a nationalist and populist vision for American workers in his RNC speech. He did not offer bromides about free markets but rather condemned NAFTA and free trade. But Vance savvily did not mention in Milwaukee a phrase that he has used before to more targeted audiences. In a keynote speech to the Claremont Institute in 2021, Vance inveighed against “woke capital,” which he defined as “the biggest businesses, the most powerful institutions” being aligned “against us,” “us” being “those of us on the right.” As for who the “woke capitalists” were, Vance offered some specifics. He blamed the insurance industry for the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming that insurance companies were “one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement,” who “refused to pay their own clients’ claims for their damaged property while at the same time they were making that damage more likely by funding the movement that was causing it.” Vance went on to blame everyone from Jeff Bezos to the Ford Foundation for financing social-justice causes with the explicit intention of squeezing the American middle class and “destroy[ing] the American way of life.”
Vance’s speech was all but indistinguishable from the claims of the John Birch Society in the 1970s. Senior Birch leader Gary Allen (father of Axios executive editor Michael Allen) wrote in his 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, that a group he called the “Insiders,” consisting of “power-seeking billionaires,” sought to squeeze the middle class “to death by a vise.” This would be done by pursuing a strategy of tension: the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations would channel money to Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and a whole sordid host of New Left organizations to stir up trouble in the streets “while the Limousine Liberals at the top in New York and Washington are Socializing us. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A DICTATORSHIP OF THE ELITE DISGUISED AS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.” The hidden hand of the Insiders lay behind the radical tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s, all at the expense of the American middle class. Crucially, although None Dare Call It Conspiracy included anti-capitalist elements, it was still profoundly hostile to socialism and communism, with Allen at one point arguing that both ideologies were simply different terms for monopoly capitalism.
Bircherite producerism did not prevail in the 1970s, either within the contested space of American right-wing politics or national policy. “Woke capital” is used essentially in the same way as “the Insiders,” and not just by J. D. Vance. Andy Olivastro, the director of coalition relations at Heritage, defined it as “a top-down anti-democratic movement . . . on the part of some of the biggest and most important names in American business . . . to change the definition of capitalism itself.” The only major distinction between “woke capitalism” and the Insiders is that Allen insisted that the core goal of the conspiracy was power as such, whereas “woke capital” is more interested in ensuring liberal and left-wing social policy.
Nonetheless, today’s right-wing critics of neoliberalism are fundamentally embedded in the same political tradition. Thankfully, Vance, one of the most unpopular vice-presidential candidates of the past fifty years, is a poor messenger for his Bircherite economic politics.