Make America Great Again has never been a doctrine so much as a person. When Donald Trump leaves office, the right will have to choose a successor idea, and Vice President JD Vance is the figure best placed to supply one. The name he and his circle use is post liberalism. It began in Anglican argument. American Catholic writers took it over and turned it into a case for an executive strong enough to impose what they call the common good.
Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule defines that good as justice, peace, and abundance, and he ranks liberty below it. The aim of the constitutional order, in his telling, is good rule, not the protection of liberty as an end. In public, the religious program has been softened. The economic program has not. Where an older conservatism defended markets, this one blames trade and open capital for emptying industrial towns.
A Hamiltonian turn against the dollar
Vance has been explicit. In a 2022 campaign speech, he attacked the neoliberal and neoconservative habit of backing trade deals he called bad for workers. Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame theorist, showed photographs of a hollowed Ohio town and asked the audience to taste the liberty. In a 2020 essay, Vance said he would drive more daggers into neoliberalism and follow the neo-Hamiltonian course urged by Oren Cass. Cass founded American Compass in 2020 as a home for that view, and he consulted Vance while building it. The tools are penalties for firms that send unskilled work abroad, subsidies to pull factories home, and a weaker dollar. Vance has long called the reserve currency status of the dollar a King Dollar problem, because a strong currency makes imports cheap and homemade goods dear. On Fox in April 2023, he said the cost was worth it for exporters.
The bill would not stop with exporters. Most large firms buy inputs on global chains. Closing those chains raises the price of everyday goods, and past a point the goods disappear. Consumers lose purchasing power. So do manufacturers that sell at home and need foreign parts. The winners are the owners who collect the relocation subsidies.
The autarky warning
James Patterson, writing in National Review, argues that the precedent is Spain under Francisco Franco, a figure some Catholic post liberals admire for his war against communism. After 1939, Franco shut the country to trade. The 1940s became the hunger years. Historians Gloria Román Ruiz and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco trace the famine to that protectionism: prices rose, basics vanished, corruption spread, and the policy failed. Admirers of Franco in Vance’s orbit, including media figures and a Homeland Security cultural official, do not have to want a dictatorship for the economic lesson to apply. A state that picks industries and seals the border in the name of the common good can produce shortages faster than it produces factories. MAGA’s flaws were personal. The program waiting behind it is a theory of rule, and it has a record.
Original analysis inspired by James M. Patterson from National Review. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
