Nathan Howard, Associated Press pool Vice President Vance is seen before boarding Air Force Two at Emmen Air Base in Emmen, Switzerland, on June 22, 2026, after the U.S. and Iran held high-level talks at the Lake Lucerne Summit. In his bestselling 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance argued that free enterprise and personal responsibility could help restore dignity, opportunity and prosperity to impoverished Rust Belt communities. He even praised Japanese investment in a steel mill as a critical lifeline for his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
A decade later, as vice president, Vance is singing a very different tune.
As a recent guest on “The Michael Knowles Show,” he celebrated the ascendancy of Hamiltonian economics over laissez-faire economics on the American right. “The economy is a tool to service the dignity of the human person,” he said.
Yet the interventionist policies Vance endorses — intended to support family formation, a living wage, leisure, faith and community involvement — neither enhance the dignity of ordinary Americans nor strengthen their lives and families.
Interestingly, Vance argued that Milton Friedman-style laissez-faire economics made more sense when the U.S. had a vibrant Christian culture that provided moral and institutional guardrails, but such policies, he claimed, aren’t as applicable or defensible in an era of “globalized liberalism.”
This populist sentiment echoes the New Right conviction, often expressed by Patrick Deneen, author of “Why Liberalism Failed,” that the erosion of American civil society by progressive social norms, the administrative state and globalization requires correction through federal government intervention on behalf of families and communities.
For Deneen, Beltway-directed relief must come in the form of tariffs, industrial subsidies and pro-natal or pro-family initiatives. Vance has identified himself as part of Deneen’s “postliberal right” and championed New Right economics in the White House.
But the breakdown of the American family started long before NAFTA or China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. And economic populism certainly won’t undo decades of social fragmentation wrought by America’s sexual revolution and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The post-1960s spike in divorce and non-marital births was precipitated by legal and cultural changes, such as ubiquitous no-fault divorce laws passed in all 50 states (starting with California in 1969 under Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan) and the demise of the “shotgun marriage” custom, which encouraged couples who had conceived to marry before giving birth.
In recent years, positive economic shocks in struggling working-class towns — fracking booms, for instance, which boosted the wages of blue-collar men — have not reversed these corrosive trends in American family life. Unsurprisingly, financial rejuvenation does not magically spur a revival of traditional norms that encourage marriage and a stable, two-parent upbringing for children.
That isn’t to say that Vance’s economic agenda would deliver prosperity. The Trump administration’s Liberation Day tariffs, which Vance defends, have fallen short of a manufacturing renaissance, with around 100,000 fewer manufacturing jobs one year after the tariffs took effect. Despite the Supreme Court rolling back some of the president’s tariff powers, the average American family is slated to pay more than $2,500 in tariff-related costs in 2026 — a 43 percent increase from last year, according to the Joint Economic Committee.
Under any protectionist regime, politically connected industries with arsenals of lawyers and lobbyists benefit while ordinary people bear the costs. Large industries that don’t have anything to gain from tariffs can also pressure lawmakers for special exemptions, which auto, pharmaceutical, energy and semiconductor lobbying firms successfully achieved following Liberation Day.
Contrary to Vancenomics, entrusting the federal government, specifically the executive branch, with the power to reward concentrated interests through tariffs, tariff exemptions and subsidies at the expense of small entrepreneurs and everyday consumers doesn’t promote the dignity of the human person. It makes Americans of all stripes less able to support their families, serve their communities and enjoy leisure time.
Conservatives rightfully mourn the decline of family values and the loss of faith and community, but a remedy won’t be found in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule or at the Federal Trade Commission. The path to human dignity and cultural renewal will be charted when Americans are empowered to innovate, compete and flourish in a free economy and civil society — without federal bureaucrats standing in their way.
If JD Vance is the future standard-bearer of American conservatism, perhaps he and his supporters would do well by revisiting “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Aidan Grogan is an associate editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, a senior contributor with Young Voices, and a history Ph.D. candidate at Liberty University.
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