The answer to the rise of socialism is not to embrace socialism dressed in the language of conservatism.
An interview between Vice President JD Vance and Joe Rogan was released Wednesday night, where the pair discussed a range of political topics. When the conversation turned to socialism, the terms on which Vance chose to critique the left-wing economic idea didn't sound like a free-market rebuttal at all. As a matter of fact, they mirrored the language of many of the very socialist leaders reshaping American politics.
Wall Street is "buying up every asset of modern life." An economy rigged against ordinary workers. A generation of young people radicalized not by ideology but by material conditions they didn't choose and can't escape. These aren't typically conservative talking points; they're the socialist diagnosis of American capitalism, almost verbatim.
That should trouble anyone who actually believes in markets, not because the underlying facts Vance cites are all wrong, but because when conservatism starts borrowing its opponent's diagnosis, it isn't long before it starts borrowing the cure too.
.@JDVance on the rise of socialism in America:
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) July 15, 2026
"We ran the experiment of offshoring our industrial jobs, becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to buy every asset of modern life."
"It created a generation of kids who are attracted to socialism." pic.twitter.com/57INIslEXk
"Does the socialism thing scare me? Yes. Is it the wrong solution? Yes. But one thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is socialism is the alternative if we don't have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable," the vice president said. "That's like our job. That's what we have to do."
We ran the experiment. We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, you know, line goes up asset. And what has that done? It's created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism.
First, Vance's perception of the American economy is simply wrong. The United States is not primarily a services-and-finance economy. It is an economy driven by technological innovation, Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence, and the industries the rest of the world is still trying to catch up to. We are not an investor economy in the way much of Europe has become, content to manage existing wealth. We are still the country producing the products that define the next era of human progress.
Second, the problem was never that Wall Street is "buying up every asset of modern life" to turn a profit. Profit-seeking is not the crime Vance's framing implies it is. The real problem is that ordinary Americans have been shut out of doing the same thing, priced out of homeownership, boxed out of the kind of investment opportunities that build generational wealth, not because Wall Street outcompeted them in a fair market, but because of poor government policy.
However, another, somewhat deeper issue existed in Vance's thought as well, and it has to do with his point on offshoring manufacturing, which is worth considering precisely because it sounds intuitively correct.
Start with the obvious: manufacturing, while important, is not the engine of the American economy, and it hasn't been for decades. There is no hidden generation of Americans lined up outside factory gates, begging for jobs on an assembly line, that offshoring stole from them.
The real failure in American manufacturing isn't offshoring at all, it's automation, or rather, the political class's decades-long refusal to accept it. Companies didn't move manufacturing overseas because they hated American workers. They did it because it was, for a long time, the most efficient way to produce at scale and remain competitive globally. But the deeper shift, the one both parties have spent years dodging, is that even the manufacturing that stays or returns increasingly doesn't need many workers at all. China doesn't out-produce the United States because it has cheaper labor. Increasingly, it out-produces the United States because it has embraced automation more aggressively than we have. That is the actual competitive threat, and neither party wants to say so, because "robots build it better and cheaper than people can" doesn't fit neatly into a stump speech about bringing back jobs.
Politicians on the left and right have both, in effect, opposed automation. In theoretical terms, that is nothing less than opposition to the free market itself, a preference for propping up a less efficient, more expensive way of producing things simply because it employs more people to do it.
Vance is not wrong that a generation of young Americans feels like the system is rigged, and he's not wrong that some of them are drawn to socialism as a result. But being right about the symptom means nothing if you're wrong about the disease, and everything Vance identified is a socialist's explanation wearing a Republican's voice. That point, that state-guided capitalism is the answer to America's problems, isn't a one-off. It's hammered repeatedly in his new book, "Communion."
VP Vance on AI and the importance of giving workers a voice in their own wealth creation:
— Vice President JD Vance (@VP) July 15, 2026
"There has to be a middle way...and part of that solution is to give workers a say in what's going on, give normal people some power in this system." pic.twitter.com/x8QwXCexHX
The real culprit, however, is government picking winners, interfering in the market, and a manufacturing nostalgia that hasn't matched reality in thirty years. None of that indicts capitalism. If conservatives want to stop the socialist drift Vance, and the rest of us, are rightly worried about, borrowing the socialist diagnosis, and now the socialist solution, is the last thing that will do it.
The cure was never to agree with the left about what's broken and simply promise a gentler hand in fixing it. It's to say that the system isn't rigged by markets. It's rigged by the government that keeps getting in its way. The only path back to the American dream Vance says he wants to save does not lie in right-leaning socialism, it lies where it always has: the free market.
