Vance’s speech was all but indistinguishable from the claims of the John Birch Society in the 1970s. Senior Birch leader Gary Allen (father of Axios executive editor Michael Allen) wrote in his 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, that a group he called the “Insiders,” consisting of “power-seeking billionaires,” sought to squeeze the middle class “to death by a vise.” This would be done by pursuing a strategy of tension: the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations would channel money to Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and a whole sordid host of New Left organizations to stir up trouble in the streets “while the Limousine Liberals at the top in New York and Washington are Socializing us. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A DICTATORSHIP OF THE ELITE DISGUISED AS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.” The hidden hand of the Insiders lay behind the radical tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s, all at the expense of the American middle class. Crucially, although None Dare Call It Conspiracy included anti-capitalist elements, it was still profoundly hostile to socialism and communism, with Allen at one point arguing that both ideologies were simply different terms for monopoly capitalism.
Bircherite producerism did not prevail in the 1970s, either within the contested space of American right-wing politics or national policy. “Woke capital” is used essentially in the same way as “the Insiders,” and not just by J. D. Vance. Andy Olivastro, the director of coalition relations at Heritage, defined it as “a top-down anti-democratic movement . . . on the part of some of the biggest and most important names in American business . . . to change the definition of capitalism itself.” The only major distinction between “woke capitalism” and the Insiders is that Allen insisted that the core goal of the conspiracy was power as such, whereas “woke capital” is more interested in ensuring liberal and left-wing social policy.
Nonetheless, today’s right-wing critics of neoliberalism are fundamentally embedded in the same political tradition. Thankfully, Vance, one of the most unpopular vice-presidential candidates of the past fifty years, is a poor messenger for his Bircherite economic politics.