President-elect Donald Trump showed in one decision that his vice president's lip service to working-class welfare and oversight of powerful corporations means nothing, wrote Paul Waldman in a scathing opinion piece for MSNBC.
Vance, along with a "younger generation of Republicans," has been at least publicly working to "convince their party to (partially) rethink its traditional kowtowing to corporate interests," wrote Waldman.
"If they really want to be the party of the working class, it might not be enough to pour contempt on college professors and government employees. What if they combined that with a genuine skepticism of corporate power, and a willingness to use government to police monopolies and make sure markets work for everyone?"
This has even extended to Vance, along with some right-wing lawmakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), praising some Biden administration figures, like Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who make it their mission to enact tough antitrust enforcement and uphold workers' rights.
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But Trump has already signaled he's not going to take that seriously, Waldman wrote; he instead followed the dictates of GOP megadonors like tech billionaire Elon Musk who wanted Khan fired, and will be replacing her with Andrew Ferguson, an FTC Commissioner who has vowed to crack down on "wokeness" and "censorship" in tech platforms, but has also called for reversing Khan's policies limiting mergers and other measures intended to safeguard competition and consumer rights.
Ultimately, he wrote, this shows that Republicans have no real desire to police corporate power — they just situationally adopt those stances when they believe big corporations are advancing liberal values.
In other words, he wrote, "conservative support for Khan and opposition to Big Tech was never about the dangers of monopoly power or the well-being of consumers. Republicans only get mad at companies when they perceive a threat to their partisan interests. Likewise, they’ll condemn corporate 'wokeness' when companies celebrate Pride Month, but they don’t care if those same companies jack up prices, mistreat workers or pollute communities. ... They’re happy to have the FTC, and the government in general, revert to a reflexive view that corporations should be able to do pretty much whatever they want — so long as it’s conservative officials who are determining where the lines are."
