Gene Healy’s Balanced Perspective on JD Vance

In my recent post on JD VanceI was very negative about his casual dismissal of the value of cheap toasters to consumers compared to the value of one manufacturing job.

I certainly didn’t set out to do a blanket evaluation of Vance. Now I don’t have to, because Gene Healy, senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute, has done extensive work, assisted by Alana Etinger, administrative assistant for government affairs at Cato. His post is titled “JD Vance Review: Votes, Not Vibes, Cato at LibertyAugust 8, 2024.

I can’t do the entire piece justice in one short Substack, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll highlight a few key points, starting with his clever first paragraph:

I am reliably informed that the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president in 2024, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, not a libertine. Given the standard that Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin and, uh, Dick CheneyI was prepared for this news and have so far managed to contain my disappointment. (italics in original)

About his voting behavior:

With that goal in mind, with the help of Cato’s Alana EntingerI decided to watch Vance’s legislative report on freedom issues. It’s short, Vance is up for election in 2022, but it’s not the horror show I expected: there are even a few bright spots.

If you go by votes rather than vibes, Vance even looks better than advertised on the economic front. He has a zero rating on the AFL-CIO Scorecarda score of 83 percent on the The Club for Growth countand through another measure“Vance has the fifth most right voting behavior on economic issuesbeaten only by Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Tommy Tuberville and Eric Schmitt.”

On foreign policy:

Vance has been sharply critical neocon adventurism and here the record matches the rhetoric. Last year he co-sponsored a joint resolution order an end to the illegal deployment of US troops in Syria and supported withdrawal of the 2002 and 1991 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force in Iraq (AUMFs). More importantly, Vance co-initiator of a bill to revoke the authorization that really matters: the 2001 AUMFThat resolution, adopted three days after 9/11, served as a comprehensive instrument for nearly 25 years. enabling act for a global presidential war.

Healy also points out some problematic aspects of Vance’s foreign policy views:

Lest you give in to irrational exuberance, Rode‘s Matthew Petti has an informative piece on Vance’s foreign policy flaws. The Ohio senator has criticized Trump’s reckless and illegal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, supports using the U.S. military to fight Mexican drug cartels, and “shares the establishment view that the United States should prepare for a conflict with China over Taiwan.” Yet even here there is reason for cautious optimism:

“To his credit, Vance is a little more thoughtful about the risks of escalation than some other China hawks. ‘As a father of three young children, I really don’t want to go to war with a country that makes all our antibiotics,’ he said in his speech at the Quincy Institute. ‘So for the neoconservatives, maybe they should put on the brakes for at least 10 years.’” (This is a quote from Reason’s Matthew Petti.)

And here’s Vance’s record on free speech, with one big negative and a few big positives:

When it comes to Vance’s record on tech policy, there’s less to cheer about for libertarians. Like many conservatives, the Ohio senator sees content moderation by social media companies as a free speech issue and has made predictable noises about weaken or remove the Section 230 liability shield. My colleagues have the serious problems of that approach.

But Vance is clearly right that “the government orders social media to apply censorship” is a matter of free speech, and it’s one that liberals should be at least as concerned about as they are about protecting the right of private platforms to the suppression of the Babylonian Bee.

Since early 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has engaged in a large-scale, covert effort to suppress mainstream political expression, putting pressure on social mediacompanies to blacklist and shadowban alleged “disinformation” (much of it is accurate) on the lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, and COVID-19 risk. That effort “had the desired result of suppressing millions of protected free speech messages from American citizens.”

Vance co-sponsored several bills aimed at curtailing federal “censorship industrial complex.” These include the Freedom of Expression Protection Actwhich prohibits federal officials from “directing online platforms to censor any speech protected by the First Amendment,” and the PRESERVE Online Speech Actwhich would require social media companies to publicly report government requests to censor or deplatform users, approach favored by Cato technology policy analysts.

Healy’s piece is quite nuanced and I could only reproduce that nuance by reprinting the entire piece. I highly recommend reading his entire post.

I’ll close with my favorite last paragraph of his:

“Politics is not about policy“for most people, but it should be for libertarians. If not, style begins to take precedence over substance, and you may find yourself straying from “low status opinions“and play on fashionableor decoding hidden authoritarian messages in simple conservative rhetoric. For example, if you “undertones of blood-and-soil nationalism“in Vance’s acceptance speech—where he praised his immigrant in-laws, spoke the innocent truth that “America is not just an idea,” and said he wanted to be buried in a Kentucky cemetery next to seven generations of his family—I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you should adjust the sensitivity knobs on your fascism detector?