The Energy Has Shifted
J.D. Vance and Joe Kent have pioneered a new formula for Republican messaging.
Last week, J.D. Vance returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio to confirm what had long been an open secret: he was running for the United States Senate. For those of us who’ve been waiting for the long-heralded political realignment, the most shocking and heartening thing about the speech was that it sounded like a perfectly plausible Republican message.
Bridging the Divide
Vance’s talking points about America’s corrupt ruling class and the dangers of corporate power were seemingly tailored to the hyper-online right, but listening to them in this format, it was easy to imagine that they might also appeal to the median Republican voter, the sort of person who actually decides primary elections.
This disconnect is not to be underestimated. Standard Republican issues remain important to normal Republicans. Much of the online right, meanwhile, praises Huey Long with varying degrees of irony. Normal Republicans look at Tim Scott and Josh Hawley and think they’re both good senators. For the online right, the differences between them are vast.
This is worth considering because it makes it all the more impressive that Vance was able to please the online right on substance, while remaining rhetorically acceptable to the older, more traditionally conservative, more culturally Jacksonian voters who will be picking the nominee.
The Fiscal Middle Ground
"We are not hostile to [corporations]; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
- Theodore Roosevelt
For many years, the Republican Party focused quite narrowly on tax reform, at the expense of other priorities. As a result, much of the online right has become fairly dismissive of taxes as an issue. However, taxes are still deeply important to most Republican voters. Vance found a rather ingenious way to meet these voters in the middle. I’ll cut your taxes, he promised, but Big Tech and the woke, outsourcing corporations will have to pay more.
Even more interestingly, in a recent speech at the Claremont Institute, Vance proposed reforming the tax code to reflect and advance different economic priorities than the current one does implicitly. Specifically, he suggests that we should seek ways to level the playing field between businesses that deal mostly in digital assets and those that operate in the physical world.
Vance sees taxes not just as a means of raising revenue but also as a way to introduce economic nudges. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one the national populist movement has largely overlooked for the reasons stated above.
Vance describes his economic policy this way: “Go after the companies that are destroying this country. Reward the companies that are building it.”
Similarly, in a recent speech, Joe Kent, a congressional candidate in Washington’s 3rd District, said, “I have no problem with any one of you becoming a millionaire or a billionaire, but when you’re benefiting from the country but you’re taking away from the country, that’s when we need nationalist policies to correct that, because we’re not just an economy.”
Dealing with Anti-American Institutions
"The decision to give those foundations and those organizations special privileges is a decision of public policy. It was made by man, and we can undo it.”
- J.D. Vance
Returning to Vance’s speech at Claremont, he’s identified another use for the tax code: biasing the economy against anti-American institutions. He points to supposedly apolitical, non-profit institutions, such as the Harvard endowment, as organizations that benefit from tax exempt status but use their resources to push divisive, anti-American ideas.
Perversely, when taxes go up on the middle class and on businesses that operate in the United States, these predominently left-wing institutions escape the higher tax burden and retain their vast financial power. With respect to Big Tech, even aside from their desire to revitalize the physical economy, Vance and Kent argue that the tax code’s biases in favor of the digital economy further empower the corporations that are most likely put their thumbs on the cultural scale, and which are least likely to identify as American companies.
They’ve also been willing to address cases where powerful, non-government institutions have failed to serve us well even on the apolitical merits. Most notably, both of them have taken aim at the university system and have clearly described some of the ways in which it falls short as a means of training and credentialing workers.
Towards a New Governing Philosophy
Vance and Kent seem to understand a simple truth about the electorate, something that Trump likely intuited when he forged the conservative/populist coalition that now inhabits the center of the Republican Party. It’s that Republican voters would rather pay less in taxes, but they’re not dogmatically opposed to the idea of using state power to achieve their goals.
The first preference has less to do with libertarian influence on the Republican party than populists tend to think. It has more to do with basic intuitions about fairness and the understandable desire to hold onto more of one’s paycheck.
The willingness to exercise state power comes from common sense and the recognition that a competitive system can’t work when one side unilaterally disarms. Even if conservatve voters might struggle to articulate this idea in a principled way, they understand that it’s sometimes appropriate for the government to step in to remedy dysfunction, correct bad path dependencies, and rein in the excesses of other institutions.
There’s a wide middle ground between Randianism and Longism, and that’s where most Americans live.