Wall Street is freaking out that Donald Trump’s choice for vice-president is a young senator from Ohio, best-selling author and populist J.D. Vance. In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Vance attacked Wall Street barons, saying, “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street … We’ll commit to the working man.”
It’s hard to overstate the earthquake this running-mate pick has caused in the citadels of power. “Wall Street will be begging for the return of Lina Khan after two months of the Trump-Vance administration,” said one New York dealmaker to the Financial Times, referring to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Joe Biden’s chief anti-truster.
Economic populists on the right, and they exist, are elated, because they think the Republican Party is shifting its underlying philosophical orientation.
At first, Vance bought into standard libertarian ideas, consistent with Peter Thiel’s thinking. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, and the alums from PayPal, the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” are hugely influential in Silicon Valley today, though they are not entirely aligned with Big Tech. Thiel, for instance, hates Google, and this group is one of Vance’s core influences.
In the mid-2010s, while a venture capitalist, Vance began to rethink his priorities, ultimately transitioning into a populist with aggressive stances on economics, immigration and foreign policy. While there’s a temptation to see this change as purely opportunistic, Vance has taken political risks inconsistent with mere careerism. Indeed, four months ago, he told a crowd that “Lina Khan is one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” In the GOP, those are fighting words.
What’s most strikingly different about Vance is something simple. Age. He’s young. Both he and Khan are in their 30s, and both grew up seeing the disastrous set of policies of the 2000s and 2010s, not the prosperity of the 1990s. Neither has a sanguine view of Big Tech, a view which is largely held by those who came of age in the 1990s and still at some level understand Google as a disruptive upstart and Mark Zuckerberg as a kid. To Vance and Khan, Google and Facebook are just the establishment.
Indeed, when Vance praised Khan, it was at an event called “Remedy Fest” put on in February by a tech incubator called YCombinator, and oriented around the question of how to break up Google if the corporation was found to be acting unlawfully. To have a prominent 39-year-old Republican senator show up at a conference whose sole focus is thinking through what a post-Google-dominant internet would look like is a big political statement about what the younger faction of the right might look like.
Vance had been a believer that America had a competitive economy until 2015. At the time, as a venture capitalist, he saw a bunch of advertising technology companies growing very quickly, some with up to US$60 million of revenue. But they were “un-investable,” and were going to die quickly, not because there was anything wrong with their business but because they were in a space dominated by Google. The market wasn’t competitive, even if you had a good product (though he did note that he didn’t think technology to improve advertising was particularly useful.)
And then Vance realized this dynamic wasn’t just about Big Tech, but extended throughout the economy, leading him to agree with Khan’s analysis of antitrust.
At Remedy Fest, I asked Vance a question about what Trump thinks about antitrust and what that policy area would look like in a second Trump administration. He had a few guesses on that.
“Trump’s instincts on this stuff are quite good,” he said, “and he fundamentally just rejects some of the old orthodoxies.” He went on to explain that Trump got that Google and Facebook were bad for his politics, so he realizes there’s a problem.
So what happens if the Trump/Vance ticket becomes President Trump and Vice-President Vance? There are huge swaths of policy where there is no conflict within this coalition, such as war and peace, and crypto. There’s even working-class alignment with crypto venture capitalists and the PayPal Mafia crew on some areas, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) rule to let consumers port their own data, and monopolization cases against Google, Amazon, Facebook, Ticketmaster and Apple.
As Vance said at the introduction of the Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act on March 30 of last year, “It is high time for Congress to free our digital economy from the stranglehold of Big Tech. A system that allows large companies to control all sides of the digital advertising market has no place in the American economy. I’m proud to join this effort to restore competition and rein in the Big Tech companies.”
If Trump loses this election, Vance is set up to run in 2028. Regardless, Big Tech and Wall Street need to understand that Vance, to put it plainly, is the leader of the post-financial-crisis Republican generation, someone who has thought carefully about how to blow up our existing institutional governing arrangements.
The notion that companies should be left to grow as big as they like is an insane way to try to understand capitalism and to govern. There is a “realignment” on the right in the United States, where some very prominent conservatives, including J.D. Vance and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, are forcing their fellow Republicans to re-evaluate their orientation toward corporate power and challenge Big Tech and Wall Street. Canadian conservatives would be wise to study Vance closely and borrow a page from him by standing up for the little guy by rolling out pro-worker, anti-monopoly policy ideas.
National Post
Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.