Chicago – July 24, 2024
Last week, former President Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance to be his running mate. And a host of traditional free-market conservatives and libertarians were less than thrilled. In fact, up until the eleventh hour before Vance’s selection, big Republican donors lobbied their butts off to try to convince Trump to pick someone else.
In some ways, Vance has the résumé of someone you’d think old-school conservatives would be happy with. He’s a former Marine, a Yale-educated lawyer, a bestselling author and a successful venture capitalist. He’s staunchly conservative on social issues. He’s the embodiment of the American dream, rising from humble working-class roots in Ohio to become a self-made millionaire. He’s well connected to titans of business in Silicon Valley, and he has proven his ability to help raise millions of dollars in political donations for Trump.
But Vance is far from a traditional conservative, at least these days (he has had a self-acknowledged political transformation over the last decade). In his less than two years in the Senate, Vance has emerged as one of the brightest minds in what has been called “the New Right” or “national conservatism.” It’s an intellectual and political movement that departs from the free-market fundamentalism and foreign policy hawkishness of the Republicans of yesteryear.
Vance opposes free trade and advocates for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Prominent economists argue that Trump’s proposals for higher tariffs and more restrictive immigration (including Trump’s policy goal to deport millions of undocumented workers) would make goods and services more expensive for American consumers, reignite inflation, hurt businesses and harm the overall economy.
