Vice President JD Vance has said American right-of-center economic policy is now “much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman,” and he has called that shift “obviously a good thing.” Friedman’s tradition treated markets as the default and government intervention as the exception requiring justification. Hamilton’s tradition treated a strong central government as the engine of economic development, from national banks to tariffs to direct subsidies. Vance is naming his preference and endorsing it.

The break is not without precedent throughout Republican history. Skepticism of unregulated markets ran through the party well before President Donald Trump, from the trust-busting Republicanism of President Theodore Roosevelt through pockets of Rockefeller-era Northeastern centrists who dismissed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s free-market ideology. What makes Vance’s version different is not that a Republican is skeptical of markets. It is how he oddly grounds that skepticism in religious terms rather than economic ones and how far he is willing to take it inside a sitting administration.