Some Republicans Are Finally Realizing They Wrecked the Middle Class

If recent comments from JD Vance and others are any guide, the future of GOP economic policy is going to be strange.

The headlines following JD Vance’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast were the sort of red meat you’d expect to come out of a Rogan sit-down: Vance admitted the Trump administration botched the Epstein files, he humored Rogan’s extraterrestrial fixation, tried a few hacky culture war jabs, and suggested (before directly denying) that Israel is influencing America’s behavior in the Iran war. It was all destined to be largely unsurprising stuff—that is, until Rogan made a boilerplate attack on socialism. Vance picked that moment to offer a complaint that decades of Republican economic policy has left Americans suffering and that (most horrifyingly for Vance) the policies of his own party have “created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism.”

Unlike his boss, President Donald Trump, who these days lives almost entirely within the safe confines of his own self-delusions (among them his belief that “the word affordability is a con job”), Vance senses that most of us aren’t doing great and that—while the Republican donor class is enjoying the spoils of America’s ever-more-pronounced economic inequality—your average American is taking it on the chin. In a striking moment of honesty, Vance made a direct attack on his own party’s longstanding supply-side economic doctrine, telling Rogan that “we ran the experiment of ... allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable line-goes-up asset.” It’s this experiment, based on a longtime Republican measurement of economic success, Vance says, that’s turning our youths onto socialism.

It’s not just Vance. In increasing numbers, Republican politicians are waking up to the reality that their economic policies have screwed just about all of us out of their fabled “American dream.” Consider Trump’s executive order from January, aimed at keeping investors out of single-family........

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