The Post-Liberal Authoritarians Want You To Forget That Private Companies Have Rights

On Wednesday night, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) took the stage at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and declared—to the astonishment of many who subsequently read the quote online—that “there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime.”

The remark came during a panel discussion about Regime Change, a new book by the “post-liberal” Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, in which Deneen argues that classical liberals and left-progressives are all pushing the same agenda and need to be “replaced” by a new conservative elite. (Keep an eye out for a review in the August/September issue of Reason.) 

A longer version of the Vance quote gives the context:

One of the really bad hangovers from that uniparty that Patrick talked about is this idea that there is this extremely strong division between the public sector and the private sector. You know, the public sector is the necessary evil of government. We want to limit it as much as possible, because to the extent that we don’t limit it, it’s going to do a lot of terrible things. And then you have the private sector, that which comes from spontaneous order. It’s organic. It’s very Burkean. And we want to let people do as much free exchange within that realm as possible. And the reality of politics as I’ve seen it practiced, the way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats interact with corporations, there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together, it is all melded together, and it is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio.

I will give you a couple of examples here. One, when I talk to sort of more traditionalist economic conservatives, what Patrick would call economic liberals, when I talk to these guys about, for example, why has corporate America gone so woke, I see in their eyes this desperate desire to think that it’s all just coming from the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. That there are a couple of bad regulations at the SEC, and that in fact [BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink would love to not be a super woke driver of American enterprise, and that Budweiser has no desire to put out a series of advertisements that alienate half their customer base. They’re just being forced to do it by evil bureaucrats. And there is an element of truth to that. The element of truth is that the regime is the public and private sector. It’s the corporate CEOs, it’s the H.R. professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good. That is the fact that we are dealing with.

There are, of course, countless ways that the public sector—government—has its tentacles in private sector affairs. Through taxation and regulation; through the subsidies and targeted benefits that are a mainstay of the industrial policy that so many on the New Right want to