Assessing JD Vance: Votes Not Vibes
I am reliably informed that the Republican Party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, Ohio senator JD Vance, is not a libertarian. Given the standard set by Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, and er, Dick Cheney, I was braced for this news and have so far managed to contain my disappointment.
But the ongoing hue and cry within the Libertarian Temple suggests it may be much worse than I think. Some of my colleagues have even compared Vance to villains from that film they love, with the space hairdresser and the cowboy and “the Death Star thing.” (You know the one.)
JD Vader? I’m not convinced it’s as Dark-Sided as all that, though I definitely understand the concerns. Libertarians place great weight on economic policy, and the junior senator from Ohio has a lot of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad opinions there. As Reason’s Robby Soave recounts, Vance “embraces tariffs and protectionism. He has called for the federal government to break up Google. He has even praised Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, a Joe Biden appointee waging a one-woman crusade against major tech companies”—and that’s only scratching the surface.
But as economists know, talk is cheap, compared to revealed preferences under constraints. If you just listened to the 2012 GOP veep candidate, Paul Ryan, you’d come away convinced he was an ardent fiscal hawk, instead of a reliable vote for every free-spending debacle of the George W. Bush years, from the multitrillion dollar prescription drug entitlement to the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Contra Maya Angelou, when people tell you who they are, it’s worth looking at what they actually do before you believe them.
Toward that end, with an assist from Cato’s Alana Entinger, I decided to review Vance’s legislative record on liberty issues. It’s admittedly brief, Vance having been elected in 2022, but it’s not nearly the horror show I’d been expecting: There are even a few bright spots.
If you go by votes instead of vibes, Vance looks better than advertised even on economic issues. He’s so far racked up a zero rating on the AFL-CIO scorecard, a score of 83 percent on the Club for Growth’s tally, and by another measure, “Vance has the fifth furthest-right voting record on economic issues, beaten only by Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Tommy Tuberville, and Eric Schmitt.”
But Vance’s nomination also represents a repudiation of the neoconservative consensus in GOP foreign policy. And since ambitious schemes to remake the world through military force have proven to be a very bad idea indeed for life, liberty, and property at home and abroad, libertarians ought to welcome that shift.
Vance has harshly criticized neocon adventurism and here, the record actually matches the rhetoric. Last year, he cosponsored a joint resolution ordering an end to the illegal deployment of US troops in Syria and backed repeal of the 2002 and 1991 authorizations for the use of military force in Iraq (AUMFs). More significantly, Vance cosponsored a bill to repeal the authorization that really matters: the 2001 AUMF. That resolution, passed three days after 9/11, has for nearly 25 years has served as an all-purpose enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.
Until recently, a vote to repeal the 2001 AUMF would have been considered not just quixotic but completely disqualifying for a member of the GOP ticket. As Cato’s Justin Logan notes, for Republicans, it used be that you could “either be a party leader on foreign policy or you could be right about foreign policy, but you can’t be both. But Vance seems to be both.”
Lest you give in to irrational exuberance, Reason’s Matthew Petti has an informative piece on Vance’s foreign-policy flaws. The Ohio senator has praised Trump’s reckless and illegal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, supports using the US military to fight Mexican drug cartels, and “share[s] the establishment view that the United States needs to get ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan.” Yet there’s a case for cautious optimism even here:
“To his credit, Vance has been a little more thoughtful about the risks of escalation than some other China hawks. ‘As a father of three young children, I really don’t want to go to war with a country that makes all of our antibiotics,’ he said in his Quincy Institute speech. “So for the neoconservatives, maybe pump the brakes for at least 10 years.’”
When it comes to Vance’s record on tech policy, there’s less for libertarians to cheer. Like many conservatives, the Ohio senator views content moderation by social media companies as a free speech issue and has made the predictable noises about weakening or removing the Section 230 liability shield. My colleagues have ably catalogued the serious problems with that approach.
But Vance is clearly right that “the government telling social media to engage in censorship” is a free speech issue—and it’s one libertarians ought to care about at least as much as they do about protecting private platforms’ right to squelch the Babylon Bee.
From early 2021 onward, the Biden-Harris administration engaged in a massive, covert effort to suppress core political speech, strong-arming social media companies to blacklist and shadowban alleged “disinformation” (much of it accurate) about the lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, and COVID-19 risk. That effort “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”
Vance has cosponsored several bills aimed at reining in the federal “censorship-industrial complex.” Those include the Free Speech Protection Act, which bars federal officials “directing online platforms to censor any speech that is protected by the First Amendment,” and the PRESERVE Online Speech Act, which would require social media companies to publicly report government requests to censor or deplatform users, an approach favored by Cato technology-policy analysts.
Libertarians should also care about the capture of critical institutions by a militant, illiberal orthodoxy that divides Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). And since DEI is effectively a state-sponsored industry, they should welcome an effort to remove some of its key supports. Vance’s Dismantle DEI Act would do just that, eliminating “all federal DEI programs and funding for federal agencies, contractors which receive federal funding, organizations which receive federal grants, and educational accreditation agencies.” (I’m less keen on the provisions in the working draft that attempt to bar private-sector DEI via amendments to Title VII. On constitutional grounds and general principle, private companies should be free to be as woke as they like, provided government’s thumb isn’t on the scale.)
On other flashpoint culture-war issues, there’s plenty in the Vance record to give libertarians pause. Last summer, he introduced a bill that would make providing so-called gender-affirming care to minors a federal felony. I have a problem with that approach, given that it rests on an overbroad theory of the Constitution’s Commerce Power. I don’t have a problem with the provisions that “block taxpayer funding for such procedures, including banning coverage of the treatments from Affordable Care Act insurance plans,” and I can’t imagine any genuine libertarian would.
What worries me more about Vance is that, as Reason’s Stephanie Slade puts it, he’s “been more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways.” He’s called for “punitive taxation to ‘seize the assets’ of nonprofits that push a ‘woke’ agenda.… ‘Harvard University’s $120 billion endowment is ammunition for our enemies,’ he said on one occasion, ‘and we can’t let the enemy have that much ammunition or we’re going to lose.’” (The legislation he later introduced wouldn’t actually expropriate Harvard, but it would have hiked the tax on endowment investment income from 1.4 to 35 percent.)
Vance has also mused that perhaps, instead of “deconstruct[ing] the administrative state,” conservatives “should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.” I’m very much against that, for reasons I laid out at length in a recent feature article for Reason. I mean, imagine if ideologues started using the administrative state as a weapon against their culture-war enemies—that would be really bad!
In truth, that particular norm was already busted. What’s new and dangerous is the emerging view on the right that payback takes precedence over structural reform. If that’s Vance’s view, it’s a strike against him.
All told, Vance’s record is a mixed bag from a libertarian perspective. How you rank him relative to past Republican vice presidential candidates depends on what you give the most weight. On war and foreign policy, Vance is a vast improvement over what came before (he’s certainly got Cheney beat). On economic policy, he’s clearly more hostile to markets than, say, Pence and Palin—and arguably the worst of the bunch. When it comes to “electoral integrity” issues, there’s no “arguably” about it: If you want to make the case that Vance is beyond the pale, you should put your emphasis here. Even if “Our Democracy” merits only one cheer, the peaceful transfer of power is important, and it’s best not to court constitutional crisis with bogus legal theories about the vice-president’s vote-counting powers. Yet Vance has said that if he’d been veep on January 6, he’d have “told the states … we needed to have multiple slates of electors.” On that front, Mike Pence definitely has him beat.
Finally, as a culture-war provocateur, Vance outdoes even Sarah Palin in gratuitous abrasiveness. He seems to revel in his ability to offend the sort of forward-thinking cosmopolites who put up “In This House” yard signs.
If I can be permitted some vibes of my own, I suspect that the last factor accounts for a lot of the libertarian hostility toward Vance. For going on a decade now, American politics has largely been a reaction to Donald Trump. And when he came down that escalator, he took up rent-free residence in the libertarian mind as well. One significant faction went full, barking #MAGA; another shifted hard in the opposite direction, toward blue-team “mood affiliation.” The latter camp, understandably disturbed by rising illiberalism on the right, has become fixated on making clear that “we’re not like those people.” I sense a drift toward a sort of “Yard-Sign Libertarianism,” in which left-wing cultural sensibilities have become an essential part of the libertarian package. Count me out.
“Politics isn’t about policy” for most people, but it should be for libertarians. When it’s not, style starts to trump substance, and you may find yourself edging away from “low-status opinions” and playing up fashionable ones, or decoding hidden authoritarian messages in plain-vanilla conservative rhetoric. For instance, if you can detect “overtones of blood-and-soil nationalism” in Vance’s acceptance speech—-where he praised his immigrant in-laws, stated the innocuous truth that “America is not just an idea,” and said he wants to be laid to rest in a Kentucky cemetery alongside seven generations of his family—I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe adjust the sensitivity dials on your fascism detector?
“Vance is weird”-style arguments may or may not work for the Dems, but—and I say this with great affection—that line of criticism is unavailable to libertarians. Not everybody wants to freeze their head in the hopes of getting resurrected in an immortal cyborg body. Some Americans would prefer to be buried with their ancestors in a family plot. As a libertarian, I say to each his own.