Vance warns there will be a 'socialist president in this country' if GOP doesn't fix economy for young people
Vice President JD Vance warned during an interview Wednesday that if Republicans don’t fix the economic missteps of recent decades, young people will elect a socialist president.
Podcaster Joe Rogan revealed during his interview with Vance on "The Joe Rogan Experience" that the rise of democratic socialists in politics has left him shaken.
"Those f---ing people scare me," Rogan declared.
Vance replied by noting that, in his book, "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," he laid out the historic norms of a Christian idea of a political economy that has been lost in recent American politics, one which was the norm throughout most of Western history and avoids the pitfalls of free markets and socialism.
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Vance suggested that even if he detests socialism, conservatives should try to understand why young people are drawn to it.
He proceeded to call out how the U.S. in recent decades has "run the experiment where we just try to do everything with low-wage foreigners, whether they're in the United States via illegal immigration or whether they're outside the United States via offshoring and outsourcing. And what it has led to is, I think, a society where socialism is a bit on the rise.
"We were left in quite a hole by 40 years of bad policy," Vance said of his work to undo those underlying issues, arguing that the economic crisis of today cannot just be blamed on the previous Democratic administration.
"This is 40 years of failed bipartisan leadership which has created, really, a kind of shell corporation out of the United States of America. We don't make enough of our own stuff. We don't have enough self-reliance. Our workers don't have enough bargaining power. That has led, in a lot of ways, to this kind of socialism fervor. And we have to keep fixing these problems.
"Again, I think that we're going in the right direction. Maybe people disagree, but it's going to take years to fix this problem. And if we don't, we are going to end up with a socialist president in this country."
He argued that, under President Donald Trump, such issues have at least started to reverse.
"This idea that nobody should own anything, we should all become renters, whereas what we're trying to do is lower interest rates. You actually have seen housing costs stabilize in the country over the last year and a half, frankly because of immigration," he added further. "We had way too many people going after way too many homes. You close the border. This is one of the reasons why rent and housing costs have stabilized a little bit.
"So, I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome," he said, noting that while many Republicans can recognize that socialism is bad, they fail to understand what circumstances drove young people toward it.
Vance recalled a Thanksgiving conversation with friends that underscored the problem, where an engineer revealed he couldn't afford a home in a safe area. Another friend said his childhood San Diego neighborhood that was once filled with military families is now out of reach even for Marine officers.
"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, 'line goes up' asset," he warned. "And what has that done? It's created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism. We have to fix that problem."
Vance argued that, ironically, the democratic socialists play into the hands of big business when they push for open borders.
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"One of the reasons why I'm such an immigration hawk is because it is really important not to flood the country with low-wage immigrants," he said.
"This is why I think the DSA types are a little full of s--- when they talk about helping normal people," Vance added, arguing workers have more negotiating power when immigration is restricted.
"Corporations care way more about open borders than they do about any other policy the DSA cares about. So, while these people say that they're trying to fight for workers, and they're trying to fight for the working man, the actual end result of DSA policy is to flood the country with low-wage immigrants, which will destroy the middle class in this country.
"In fact, we have run this experiment for decades now, and we have a much weaker middle class than we did before it started."