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There are some pretty basic problems with Vance's argument. For one, it's built on the flawed, evidence-free belief that Americans don't produce anything anymore. Let me show you a little chart and you tell me if that's accurate:
https://americanmind.org/essays/end-the-globalization-gravy-train/
https://americanmind.org/essays/end-the-globalization-gravy-train/
And that growth in manufacturing output occurred even as manufacturing employment fell, meaning that actual productivity has been growing at an incredible rate. We produce more using fewer people than ever before, an astonishing achievement!
Vance's argument pulls from an older discourse. You can find similar complaints in the 19th c as a decreasing % of Americans worked in agriculture even as agricultural output grew rapidly.
19th c pastoral romanticism has been replaced by 20th c industrial nostalgia.
19th c pastoral romanticism has been replaced by 20th c industrial nostalgia.
[And I do mean 20th c. Vance's argument is ripped from the 80s/90s hardhat "Made in America" movement.]
In this regard, Vance's view of domestic manufacturing as a jobs program fits well with Josh Hawley's yearning for a Jeffersonian yeomanry. Both are fundamentally primitivist, an attempt to roll back history to an (imagined) utopian era of production. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/americas-epicurean-liberalism
I say 'imagined' because Hawley's history is bunkum. Early 19th c America was bustling, industrializing, globally-interconnected. Read Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought" and you'll see just how antiquated Jefferson's views were in his own time. https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/free-thoughts/whats-wrong-national-conservatism
What should we call this trend in conservative intellectual thought represented by the likes of Hawley and Vance? "Conservative Pastoralism" doesn't quite work, since Vance focuses on a return to distributed manufacturing rather than a return to the land per se.
Perhaps "parochial conservatism"? The word captures both the retreat from globalization to a narrower, nationalist focus as well as the reactionary religious turn of Ahmari/Vermeule.
