Vance on How Republicans Can Fight Socialism

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Fox News host Will Cain asked the vice president about socialism’s appeal to young people. Vance replied, in part:

 

My warning to my fellow Republicans, Will, would be if we don’t get this right, don’t blame young people for being sympathetic to socialism. We’ve got to blame ourselves. And I think what is so unique and refreshing about Donald Trump’s economic policies is that it’s not the same old economic ideas that you would have heard 30, 40 years ago.

 

He’s talking about rebuilding our industrial base, rebuilding the heartland, making our streets safer, making it possible for young people to afford to buy a home. This is how you stop socialism. You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better. And that’s what we’re trying to do every single day.

 

I think Vance gets a number of important things right in this response. Young people have legitimate reasons to be dissatisfied with the economy; Republicans have to meet them where they are rather than criticizing them for being lazy and entitled (a point on which Vance is in accord with National Review’s editorial the other day); delivering good results — especially when you’re the party in power — will do more to win over voters than free-market sloganeering. And while I imagine some people who love the free market even more than Vance loves it see the line about “throwing slogans at people” as a strawman, I think Republicans have sometimes been guilty of what he charges.

 

Earlier in his remarks, Vance said that “while these things sometimes take a little bit of time, we are already seeing the positive results come from the president’s economic policies.”

 

Trump has, however, been “talking about rebuilding the industrial base” for more than a decade now as the dominant figure in U.S. politics. And particularly during the last two years, he has been implementing many of what Vance calls his “unique and refreshing” policies too. So far, neither young people nor voters at large are happy with the results. Young people have been turning to socialism more rapidly during this period than in prior eras of Republican free-market sloganeering.

 

All of this could change. It would have been a mistake to judge Reaganomics in August 1982, when the country was in a deep recession (at the time, the deepest since World War II) and Republicans were about to lose a lot of House seats. But the results of Trumponomics so far hold a warning for Republicans, too.