J.D. Vance has been taking fire of late. From the left, of course—but also from the right, whose remaining “zombie Reaganites” have launched an effort to call his conservative bona fides into question.
Much of this criticism purports to find in Vance nothing more than a camouflaged leftist. Writing of Vance’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience last month, commentator Ben Shapiro said he heard the vice president articulate “Bernie Sanders’ economics, Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and Ro Khanna’s conspiracy theories,” adding that Vance seemed to be “mirror[ing] the Democrats.”
But of these critiques, it is the second—foreign policy—that really animates the “conservative” carpers. It is this original sin that renders Vance untouchable to the old-guard “fusionists” of the right, for whom anything less than total devotion to the War Party and its partners in Israel is an excommunicable offense.
Consider the timing. Conservatism, Inc. began to attack Vance anew when the memorandum of understanding with Iran was signed––in other words, when the Trump administration acknowledged reality and made a move to wrap up a stupid and unwinnable war. Former Bush speechwriter and arch-interventionist Marc Thiessen dubbed it the “Vance deal.” Ultrahawk Max Abrahms accused Vance of not wanting to achieve the goals of the Trump administration in Iran, clearly working to frame Vance as opposed to the president and see Trump scuttle the agreement. Others of a similar bent (Ben Domenech, Brian Kilmeade) similarly tried to pin what they framed as a surrender on Vance.
These critics all wanted to use the vice president as a proxy to attack the deal itself while avoiding a frontal attack on Trump. If things went sideways, they wanted to ensure Vance would be left holding the bag. Heads, hawks win; tails, Vance loses.
It was, of course, all about foreign policy—specifically, Vance’s apparent enthusiasm for realism and restraint and his willingness to entertain the notion that perhaps policing the world and launching endless wars have been bad for America.
What gives the game away is that the economic critiques of Vance could usually be applied with equal justice to President Donald Trump–but rarely are. Shapiro, for example, has been willing enough to tolerate Trump’s frequent forays into economic populism without tarring him as a socialist. With the vice president, though, he has not pulled his punches. Now economics matters.
The difference is that the president gave Ben Shapiro and the Israel lobby the war with Iran they wanted. It seems that Shapiro’s criticism is selective.
But hey, if free markets are Ben Shapiro’s thing, maybe we should introduce him to the most laissez-faire Republican of the last twenty years: Dr. Ron Paul. Maybe the good doctor would be more to his liking?
Alas, it’s not to be. Shapiro spent much of the 2012 election cycle accusing Paul of antisemitism, and even disparaged Trump’s supposed embrace of a “Ron Paul foreign policy” during the 2016 campaign.
Michael Brendan Dougherty recently observed on X that, if the real issue were Vance’s “domestic socialism,” then the devotees of free markets would have spent far more time attacking Marco Rubio in the past few years. Rubio has played up his interest in the tradition of Catholic “distributist” economics during the past few years as part of his perpetual efforts to catch up to the political moment. He even contributed a chapter to a book edited by the famed distributist Dale Ahlquist, where they redub this outlook “localism” and promote it as an alternative to laissez-faire economics. What does Ben Shapiro think about Marco Rubio? This: “Waltz for NSA. Rubio for SecState. I’ve got a fevah, and the only prescription is more winning!”
At least Marco Rubio supports deporting college students who want to boycott Israel? I suppose that’s good enough for Ben.
The objections of Shapiro and others who share his outlook come down irreducibly to foreign policy. It is enough to make one wonder whether one of the legs of fusionism’s famed “three-legged stool”—which brought together foreign policy hawkishness, free-market economics, and social conservatism—was in fact bigger and more important than the others.
Because industrial policy, state involvement in the economy, and debt-funded spending are all fine when it comes to defense.
Ultimately, Vance’s critics are coming after him because he represents a major threat to the interventionism and mindless pursuit of global primacy that has done so much damage to our republic over the past three decades. They are, when it comes down to it, single-issue voters—and that issue is war.
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