The headlines following JD Vance’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast were the sort of red meat you’d expect to come out of a Rogan sit-down: Vance admitted the Trump administration botched the Epstein files, he humored Rogan’s extraterrestrial fixation, tried a few hacky culture war jabs, and suggested (before directly denying) that Israel is influencing America’s behavior in the Iran war. It was all destined to be largely unsurprising stuff—that is, until Rogan made a boilerplate attack on socialism. Vance picked that moment to offer a complaint that decades of Republican economic policy has left Americans suffering and that (most horrifyingly for Vance) the policies of his own party have “created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism.”
Unlike his boss, President Donald Trump, who these days lives almost entirely within the safe confines of his own self-delusions (among them his belief that “the word affordability is a con job”), Vance senses that most of us aren’t doing great and that—while the Republican donor class is enjoying the spoils of America’s ever-more-pronounced economic inequality—your average American is taking it on the chin. In a striking moment of honesty, Vance made a direct attack on his own party’s longstanding supply-side economic doctrine, telling Rogan that “we ran the experiment of ... allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable line-goes-up asset.” It’s this experiment, based on a longtime Republican measurement of economic success, Vance says, that’s turning our youths onto socialism.
It’s not just Vance. In increasing numbers, Republican politicians are waking up to the reality that their economic policies have screwed just about all of us out of their fabled “American dream.” Consider Trump’s executive order from January, aimed at keeping investors out of single-family home markets. Senator Bernie Moreno helped make it law in the recent housing bill. It’s a sensible policy, but telling American consumers what they can and can’t buy, well, that’s anathema to the free market economics of the GOP. Or, in a similar moment of realization, Senator Josh Hawley lodged complaints last year that accomplishing the Republican dream of slashing the social safety net in the Big Beautiful Bill was “politically suicidal” and demonstrative of the GOP’s longstanding fealty to what Hawley called his party’s “old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital, and deep cuts to social insurance.” Even Marco Rubio during his Senate confirmation hearing last year admitted that “free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy has shrunk the middle class and left the working class in crisis” —a remark that sounded eerily similar to the Marxian theory that free trade accelerates inequality.
The particularly inconvenient thing about Republicans realizing they’ve caught the car at this moment is that they’re presently in lockstep behind Donald Trump who, as a dedicated transactionalist, has stacked up a jenga tower of economic policies that are largely short-sighted. Not the sort of ideas you would use to rebuild a party platform that has failed, let alone revive a crumbling economy.
The president’s zany economic policies (as much as they can be coherently understood) are best characterized as nationalist, sharp reversals of decades of Republican doctrine. When, in 1987, Ronald Reagan implemented tariffs against Japan over a semiconductor tiff, he complained that “imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take.”
When Trump unveiled his widespread tariffs in April 2025, he did so gleefully, cradling an infographic in a Rose Garden ceremony. Trump, already sinking into his self-delusions, saw the tariffs as a quick fix, declaring that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” But reversing half a century of Republican economic blunders isn’t as simple as slapping tariffs on the rest of the word.
We are still fighting the semiconductor fight that Reagan was fighting half a century ago, though we’ve pretty much lost the war. In 1990, we were making around 37 percent of the world’s semiconductors; we’re now making about 10 percent, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Biden tried to reverse this trend with the CHIPS Act, but Trump took a step further to the left, recently doling out $870 million to domestic semiconductor manufacturers in exchange for a government stake in the companies. The acquisition led one policy analyst at the Cato Institute to complain that “Republicans warning that Communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.”
Cato scholars are exactly the kind of people that are likely to be left bereft in this new era of Republican economics heralded by Vance and others. They’re the critics the vice president was referring to on Rogan when he said some accuse him of “being too pro-labor for Republicans.” That remark came after another stunning admission from Vance: When asked about AI and how it might reshape the economy, he responded that “what really worries me about AI is the fact that private sector unions have largely disappeared from the United States of America.”
Which leads us to the second problem for Republicans, who have managed to catch the proverbial economic car at this moment; it’s a familiar one: their billionaire donors. Strong labor unions in the private sector aren’t the sort of thing that go over well with the oligarchs who have managed to amass almost all of America’s capital and expect to continue their role as the guiding hand of conservative policies.
Contrast Vance’s desire for more worker autonomy with the future Elon Musk recently outlined in an Economist interview. Musk said he believes that, after the AI revolution, “work is going to be optional” and that “the treasury should just issue people checks.” In Musk’s future, there will be an explosion of goods and services to theoretically keep inflation in check. But it stands to reason that if all the goods and services are the products of these AI companies, oligarchs like Musk will also reap the capital produced by those goods and services, private sector unions be damned. Musk imagines a world in which, to quote JD Vance, an industry comes in and turns every aspect of our lives into a “line-goes-up asset.”
There’s a good argument to be made that Musk is (at least occasionally) delusional in his predictions, but there are two hard truths with which to contend. AI really is coming for the exact sort of private sector jobs that Vance worries are in jeopardy. Additionally, Elon Musk was, in 2024, the largest single-cycle political donor in American history. He was so influential that they gave him an agency within the White House. Now he’s poised to throw his money around in a similar fashion this cycle.
Musk’s idealized future presents the final problem for Republicans realizing at this moment that their longstanding policies are hurting Americans: The AI future is on the march. Absent some sector-wide uproar or sweeping regulations, it’s going to change the economy and drastically reconfigure the role of labor, probably subjugating it even more, and thus driving wealth inequality further into the intolerable zone. This is where the oligarchs and the politicians agree. Musk says that human labor will be irrelevant. Vance told Rogan “the real analogy is the industrial revolution,” noting that, the last time this happened, “the inequality in the country got completely out of wack.” Taken as a whole, it’s a grim sight indeed—we’re staring down a new industrial revolution with the industrialists already driving the car, and Republicans are slowly realizing their policies have made this dire future possible.
