Vance Proposes a Tech-bro/Populist Fusion

by Kenneth Schmidt

Kenneth Schmidt views JD Vance’s March 18th speech as an important call for uniting tech innovation with populist nationalism, reaffirming Vance’s loyalty to the working class and MAGA’s future.

On February 14th, US Vice President JD Vance gave a momentous speech at the Munich Security Conference. It was an immediate, world-wide sensation that was widely discussed and debated and rightly so. However, on March 18th Vance gave a speech at the American Dynamism Summit, a meeting of high-tech leaders in DC, that was in many ways just as important as the Munich address, but was only given perfunctory coverage in the media. This speech, in my opinion, was an important one, not only in terms of government policy, but on the future ideological posture of the MAGA movement.

Vance began his speech by acknowledging that Trumpism had two factions, what he called the “techno-optimists” and the “populist-right.” This was a frank admission on his part. I don’t recall Ronald Reagan, for example, opening up about his movement being composed of competing neocons, Buckley-ites and big business. Major political leaders don’t like to admit in public that their supporters are split into factions. Vance’s candor is laudable.

The Vice President went on to say that he was “a proud member of both tribes” of the Trumpist movement. For the remainder of his speech, Vance outlined a sophisticated rationale for a fusionism between the populist and tech-right elements. He deplored the deindustrialization of America and stated plainly that the decades of industrial decline in the US was a national security issue as well as a burden on the workforce.

Vance correctly sees our current economic organization as one of dispossession of working people. Jobs were sent overseas and people lost well-paying working class jobs. If you read his biography, Vance did most of his growing up in an Ohio steel town that lost its mill to foreign competition. Vance believes that the lack of good jobs equals a “profound loss of personal and communal identity.” These losses constitute a deep alienation in workers from their sense of purpose in life. Vance recalls a conversation he had with a tech billionaire who told him that laid off blue-collar workers could find meaning in life via “digital fully immersive gaming.”

JD Vance derided a system where products are invented in the US, but manufactured by cheap overseas labor in places like China. He is convinced that high-tech items can not only be invented in the US, but built here. Vance said that countries with a great hunger for “cheap labor” either import cheap workers in the form of immigration or have things manufactured in places like China. The Vice President is convinced that the reason countries like Canada and the UK have poor productivity numbers is precisely because of this disjointed separation of innovation and manufacturing.

I have to admit I was a little worried that Vance’s contacts and friendships with the tech-bro faction, not bad in and of themselves, would cause him to drift too far away from the populist-nationalism of the first Trump administration and make him forget the working class and in particular the white working class in America. This speech reassures me that Vance has the right stuff to be a major national leader of the MAGA movement, perhaps extending to a future role of the MAGA standard bearer.