[ek_hornbeck]

An additional irony here is that people are attacking Vance for not being a Friedmanite libertarian, despite the fact that Trump is quite clearly not a Friedmanite libertarian either - Trump supports tariffs, restrictive immigration policy, etc.

This implies that deviation from libertarian economics isn't their real beef with Vance. As I remarked on another thread, the anti-Vance hatefest isn't really motivated by economic policy or any other domestic issue, it's due to the fact that he's perceived by certain obsessives as being insufficiently pro-Israel (and by a smaller but very noisy contingent of even more obnoxious obsessives who see the VP as insufficiently pro-Ukraine).

[Wallace T.]

Donald Trump is in the economic sense a reincarnation of the protectionist policies that characterized the Republican Party from Lincoln to Hoover. Lincoln himself began his political career as a Whig, a party that championed high tariffs. Lincoln was an admirer of Henry Clay, who like Lincoln was a Kentuckian. Clay in turn followed in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton, who advocated for a strong central government, Federal encouragement of manufacturing, and high tariffs.

J.D. Vance seems to be following the beliefs of distributism, advocated by the British Catholic authors Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Distributism is not necessarily contradictory to protectionism, but the former line of thought favors decentralized economic power while the latter tends to favor economic concentration by reducing foreign competition.

Distributism is not confined to Catholic circles. The Social Credit Party of Canada, which was led by low church Protestants and was strongest in western Canada, advocated distributism, as did Huey Long of Louisiana, a Baptist.