The Democratic Party’s rising socialist faction hurts ordinary Americans because it helps employers import wage-cutting migrants, Vice President JD Vance told streaming host Joe Rogan.
“The [Democratic Socialists of America] types are a little full of shit when they talk about helping normal people,” Vance told Rogan on July 15, adding:
If you want to help a normal person, don’t provide a corporation nine low-wage migrants to compete against them when they’re bargaining for wages, you actually give workers more power when you have a more restricted immigration policy.
Vance’s comments came amid a discussion about alienated younger voters, many of whom see their chances for prosperity and marriage evaporating amid wage-cutting migration, inflation, and concentration of power among business leaders, technologies, and government agencies. That alienation is empowering the Democrats’ Red/Green coalition led by the immigrant socialist Zohran Mamdani, who is now the Mayor of New York City.
“Unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome,” Vance said, adding:
One thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is, socialism is the alternative if we don’t have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable. That’s our job. That’s what we have to do. I’m not saying Rome was built in a day. It’s not going to be easy to undo some of these economic trends.
But man, we ran the experiment — 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, and what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who are attracted to socialism.
“You’re correct,” Rogan responded, adding:
I agree with you, the system is rigged. Kids feel like there are no options other than to burn it down, yes, and that’s the problem. And because they feel very frustrated … They’re also terrified about the future because of AI, because they feel like jobs are going to be taken away, and there will be no place for people that have education in very specific avenues, like very specific jobs, are going to just be irrelevant.
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Vance is trying to build a coalition within the GOP that would blend the ambitions and interests of hyper-ambitious business leaders with comfortable people, complacent older voters, and the growing bloc of election-deciding, alienated populist-minded voters.
Amid the extremes of libertarianism or socialism, “there is a third way… that balances these things,” Vance said.
That third way requires concessions by business leaders who got almost everything they wanted under President Joe Biden — and who are now facing a wave of anger from left-wing coalitions amid the chaos of artificial intelligence, mass migration, and civic diversity.
Vance’s comments about a third way are drawn from his new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.“
Vance’s Catholic-themed vision offers business leaders and Wall Street a good business environment — including low taxes and little regulation — plus security from the Democrats’ Red/Green coalition of pro-tax socialists, Muslims, immigrants, low-level violence, and alienated Americans.
But business leaders must make compromises amid the chaos of fast-paced capitalism, Vance argues.
The GOP should deal with the alienation problem by breaking up major economic powers via antitrust measures, curbing migration, and building a political counterweight outside the free market, Vance said:
If you go back again to what worked and what was broken about the Industrial Revolution, hyper-monopolistic-style companies had way too much power … If a single corporation has monopolized an entire space, then you don’t have a real democracy unless you rein in the power of that company.
Americans should have a greater role in company policies, he said,
Why did the United States and Britain weather the Industrial Revolution better than literally every other Western country? I think you could make a good argument: strong religious institutions. Right now, we have very weak religious institutions. Number two, I think you could say strong worker participation institutions, and not just private sector labor unions. That was a big piece of it.
“I think that you have to give workers some seat at the bargaining table,” he said.
Curbs on mass migration would give young Americans more power in the labor market, Vance said. “Man, 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.
Vance argues that Christianity can take the rough edges off of capitalism:
Now there’s this fascinating encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII … It’s one of the best things that I think has ever been written by a Christian leader. It was written in the late 19th century, and the basic argument of it is that in the age of industrial churn, there has to be a middle way between six-year-olds working on the factory floor and socialism. Part of that solution to give workers a say in what’s going on — to give normal people some power in this system.
So far, establishment business leaders have vehemently rejected any compromise on political regulation of business, on anti-trust, and on the mass migration since 1990 that annually imports millions of new consumers, renters, and workers for Wall Street’s investors.
The need for political compromise is even greater amid rising Artificial Intelligence, Vance said:
I was talking to a CEO, not of an AI company, but of a tech company, and he’s one of the few CEOs that’s sort of right-of-center, and I was like, well, “What do you think? Do you think AI is going to come and take all the jobs?”
And his basic take was, the real historical analogy is the industrial revolution, and did the industrial revolution displace or change a lot of jobs? Yes, it also created a lot of jobs that didn’t exist before. So he was like, my concern here is not that 50 percent of Americans are going to be unable to find a job. There will be some displacement, some sort of churn in the labor market, but that’s not the main issue. He said the main issue, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, is that there was a lot of demand for workers, but the inequality in the country got completely out of whack. [For him], this is the era of the Robber Barons, and the Robber Barons in both Europe and the United States led to fascism. It led to communism.
“If you don’t give them a good option, then it leads to fascism and communism,” he said.
Communism burst into the world when a small group of anti-nationalist Bolsheviks imposed anti-nationalist communism on Russia. In the next 75 years, globalist-minded communists killed roughly 100 million people worldwide. Similarly, militarized national-minded socialists, dubbed “fascists,” emerged in the 1920s amid the Great Depression and a collapse in world trade. In the next two decades, the fascists killed roughly 50 million people.
Vance is making progress as he tries to avoid the two evils: socialism and fascism.
Some business leaders openly promote the productivity-beats-migration themes pushed by Vance.
President Donald Trump has also given the policy some support. In August 2025, for example, he promoted automation as an alternative to immigration:
We don’t have enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … We’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
AI “is going to unleash a lot of wealth creation, but if that wealth creation all goes to some segment of people, you’re going to have communism,” Vance said. “We have run this experiment before, and it leads to communism.”
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