Vice President JD Vance went on Joe Rogan's podcast last week to promote his new book, "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith."
He spent a good stretch of the visit selling conservatives on a rebuilt, modernized labor movement — tying the cost of living to union membership and arguing that Republicans should treat organized labor as the engine of a working-class comeback.
It is a neat story, but in reality, it’s about politics more than it’s about opportunity or affordability.
Start with the arithmetic Vance skips. Union membership has been sliding for four decades, from 20.1 percent of workers in 1983 to 10 percent in 2025, and just 5.9 percent in the private sector — the lowest share on record. That slide did not happen because unions were doing right by workers; it happened because fewer of them saw the point. Legislating the trend into reverse does nothing about the reasons it began.
Then there is the bill. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, has co-sponsored the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which the U.S. House passed 230 to 193 in June after every Democrat and 20 Republicans forced it through on a discharge petition. It would hand a federal arbitrator the power to impose a first contract when bargaining stalls, a mechanism lifted straight from the labor left's old PRO Act. It now sits in the Senate, its odds uncertain.
Here is the part that should give a Buckeye Republican pause. The unions Vance and Moreno are courting spent lavishly to keep Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in the Senate, and this fall they are spending again to send him back to the very seat Vance vacated and Jon Husted, R-Ohio, now holds. A party that rebuilds the institution bankrolling its opponents isn't outsmarting anyone; it is volunteering to be played.
It is the oldest gag in the funny pages: Charlie Brown lines up to kick, certain that this time Lucy will hold the ball, and every time she yanks it away and leaves him flat on his back, staring up at the sky and wondering how it happened again. In this arrangement, Vance and Moreno are Charlie Brown, and organized labor is Lucy.
Which raises the question no one on the right seems willing to ask: since when is it Vance's job, or any Republican's, to reinvent the American union?
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