As we near the halfway point of President Donald Trump’s second term, the neocon establishment is openly scheming to reclaim the Republican Party.
That’s why they’re attacking his proxy and likely successor, Vice President J.D. Vance, attempting to paint him as a socialist of the “woke right.” These attacks are being launched by the same people who opposed Trump in 2016, who derided the America First agenda as protectionist, socialist, isolationist, and denounced the president as a fascist and a xenophobe over his immigration agenda. The NeverTrumpers are back, and they’re recycling the same attacks they leveled against the president a decade ago, aiming them now at Vance in a bid to retake the GOP.
The NeverVance campaign has been going strong, especially on X, ever since Vance said in an interview last week on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show that “You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.” He was responding to the primary success of a handful of DSA-affiliated Democrats who are selling voters on the idea of socialism as the answer to affordability problems.
Vance’s crime, according to critics like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson, was acknowledging the affordability issue is real and proposing that government should do something about it. Shapiro responded with a bizarre post about free markets and process neutralism, while Erickson wrote a lengthy essay arguing that Vance thinks low prices are bad and that America needs a strongman to manage its decline.
Plenty of others jumped on the bandwagon to denounce Vance as a “right-wing socialist” — a favorite epithet of the NeverVancers. Some even took the trouble to compile old interview clips of Vance explaining how we should do things like tax the endowments of Ivy League schools or seize the assets of left-wing NGOs — as if that’s a bad thing.
The only way to make sense of these garbled lines of attack on Vance is to keep in mind that the overarching motivation here is to return the GOP to its pre-Trump state. If Vance proposes something that sounds populist, or if he suggests that the government might be able to improve the lives of ordinary working Americans, then that’s “socialism.” If he talks about the common good — something nearly every American political leader going back to our founding agreed with and espoused — then he’s on the “woke right.” If he suggests that our foreign policy should be refocused on the Western Hemisphere, that’s “isolationist.” (Never mind that all of Trump’s top officials, including Marco Rubio, agree with Vance on all this stuff but never get attacked by the neocons for it.)
Neocons like Shapiro are not making an actual argument, either for the free market or against socialism. They use these as slop terms to express dislike for Vance. Indeed, Vance’s shot last week at those who would “throw slogans at people about the free market” is well-aimed in this regard. What we have in America today, across vast swaths of the economy, is not really a free market but a rigged market full of moral hazard, overregulation, and manufactured scarcity — precisely in the industries that hit families the hardest.
As my friend Inez Stepman wrote in National Review recently, “At least four of the largest stressors on the aspiring middle-class family aren’t tied to weekly or monthly economic indicators. Instead, they are found in the costs of basic middle-class staples: housing, health care, education, and childcare. For many, these costs are unavoidable and have been rising at rates well above inflation and wage growth for decades.”
When Americans express dismay over prices and affordability, or complain that the American dream is out of reach, it won’t do any good to point to rising GDP or gains in the job market. Those gains might be real, but they are not enough to offset the financial strain American households are under. They feel that strain every time they gas up or buy groceries or take a sick kid to the doctor.
It’s not “socialism” to expect the government to do something about this. And yet the reaction of GOP establishment types has been to mock Vance and sneer at anyone concerned about affordability. As Terry Schilling argues, “You are not a socialist for noticing that young people and families are being priced out of the economy in large parts of America, and you are not a socialist for wanting to fix these problems. You are closer to a socialist if you defend the present system that redistributes trillions every year to people and institutions that have not earned it.”
Or, as my colleague Sean Davis argued last week, we’re not going to save the American Dream by pretending we don’t have a problem. “The American Dream was a promise that if you worked hard, you could make it no matter the circumstances you were born into. But that promise has been inaccessible to tens of millions for decades, due in large part to policies Shapiro himself pushed.”
Politically, it won’t work simply to call Vance a socialist for noticing the problems with a “free market” system that’s leaving more and more Americans behind. Politically, it’s a losing proposition. A majority of Americans under the age of 50 now believe the American Dream is no longer possible for them. Right now, half of all Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents — the highest share since the Great Depression. Another 47 percent in that age group get financial help from someone outside their household to pay basic living expenses.
Why is this happening? One reason is mass legal immigration, which has brought millions of foreign nationals into our country on H-1B visas, taking jobs in tech and software development that should have gone to American workers. Recent data from the Labor Department showed that through the third quarter of this fiscal year, employers filled more than 830,000 positions with foreign workers on the H-1B program — nearly a third of which went to software development positions.
So no, under these circumstances it’s not good enough to repeat “free market good, socialism bad,” as an argument against Vance. For many decades now, the Washington establishment has focused on the health of global corporations and foreign nationals, and not on the health of American families. Noticing that, and insisting that the government do something about it, doesn’t make you a socialist. It makes you a patriot.
And remember, all the same people that tried to gaslight you about Trump in 2016 are doing the same thing about Vance right now. And I think we all know why.
