Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed ways forward for the country under the Trump administration and beyond at the American Compass New World Gala on June 3.

Although the two Republicans, who appear to be contenders in the 2028 presidential election, hit different beats, they were largely singing the same tune about prioritizing Americans, strengthening the country, and abandoning the failed globalist thinking that has undermined security, prosperity, and dignity in the United Sates.

Their outlooks on the future provided some indication of the staying power of President Donald Trump's vision as well as how it might evolve in the years to come.

Returning to reality

Rubio kicked off his speech by countering the progressive notion that human nature changes over time, stressing that "technologies change, the clothes we wear change, even languages change, governments change — a lot of things change, but the one thing that is unchanged is human nature."

Rubio suggested that this static nature accounts for why history often repeats itself and helps explain humans' unshakable "desire to belong," which naturally scales up to nationalism, despite nationhood being a relatively "new concept" in the grand scheme of things.

"If you put humans anywhere — a handful of people anywhere — one of the first things they start doing is trying to create things that they can join or be a part of," said Rubio. "The advent of the nation-state is a normal evolution of human behavior because people think it's important to belong to something, and being part of a nation is important. And I think that's really true, obviously, increasingly in how geopolitical decisions are made."

'We've undermined our position in the world.'

Despite man's immutable desire to belong and the naturalness of this desire's expression in nationalism, Rubio suggested that many in the West nevertheless entertained the fantasy that the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant the inevitable and imminent universalization of liberal democracy — that "the entire world is going to become just like us"; that "nationhood no longer mattered when it came to economics"; "that right now the world would no longer have borders"; and that it didn't matter where things were made.

Rubio noted that this idealistic outlook "became part of Republican orthodoxy for a long time," which accounts for why the GOP long proved indifferent to the outsourcing of labor and the offshoring of productive capacity.

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 Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The decades-long flirtation with liberal globalism "robbed a nation of its industrial capacity, of its ability to make things," thereby hurting the economy, hurting the country, robbing people of jobs, and eating away at the social fabric of the nation, suggested Rubio.

"What you find is because of all of those years of neglect, because of the loss of industrial capacity, we didn't just undermine our society, we didn't just undermine our domestic economy — we've undermined our position in the world," said the secretary of state, whose department recently signaled an interest in taking up the mantle of Western civilization.

'You can never be secure as a nation unless you're able to feed your people.'

Now that America and the rest of the world are facing a "crunch," the days of illusion are over, and geopolitics are adjusting accordingly.

Rubio indicated that the Trump administration is undertaking a reorientation of domestic and foreign approaches "to take into account for the fact that you can never be secure as a nation unless you're able to feed your people and unless you're able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function and ultimately to defend yourself."

Accordingly, Rubio suggested that the country moving forward needs to:

• make decisions with the nation-state in mind and engage the world "in a way that prioritizes our national interest above all else";
• guarantee America's access to the requisite "raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core both of the decisions that we're making and the areas that we're prioritizing"; and
• rectify trade imbalances with fully developed countries.

While this direction is possibly good news for the American people, it bodes poorly for stubborn champions of the globalist dream.

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 Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, for instance, recently complained about the MAGA vision for the future.

The MAGA movement is waging war on the nation's economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.

After presenting the possibility of a powerful, indomitable, and reindustrialized America as a terrifying prospect, Bouie stumbled upon the truth of the project under way, stating, "The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it."

Kicking bad habits

Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, pressed Vance about the project of "reshoring and reindustrialization" that the Trump administration is pursuing.

Vance noted that at its core, the project is about addressing "stagnating living standards" affecting normal Americans "who just want to start a family, work in a decent job, earn a livable salary, and have dignified work."

'The complete disconnect between their views on foreign policy and economic policy made me realize, again, that we're governed by people who aren't up to the job.'

The vice president suggested that the offshoring of industry, an under-investment in technology, heavy industrial regulation, and high energy costs are among the factors that have made it difficult for "normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life."

He also identified a "misalignment between the ... normal Americans and the talking heads in Washington" and an unworkable separation of the making of things from the innovating of things — a issue he raised in his March speech at the American Dynamism Summit — as problems warranting remedy.

RELATED: Vance: Trump’s growth plan ditches cheap labor for real jobs that will fuel American greatness

 Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Blaze News previously noted that in his American Dynamism speech, Vance suggested that the Trump administration plans to help innovators wean off cheap foreign labor and begin on-shoring industry, partly by incentivizing manufacturing and investment inside the United States with tax cuts and other policy instruments; by erecting tariff walls around critical industries; by reducing regulations and the cost of energy; and also by enforcing immigration law and securing the border to drain the pool of cheap illegal alien labor.

In his conversation with Cass on Tuesday, Vance reiterated that America needs to effectively get innovators and labor back on the same page and in the same country and to ensure that educational institutions are equipped to supply them with talent.

Vance also criticized "pro-globalization" elements of the leadership class who are indifferent to "whether a given part of the supply chain existed here, or China, or Russia or somewhere else" yet frequently champion foreign entanglements fought with outsourced munitions and technologies.

"The complete disconnect between their views on foreign policy and economic policy made me realize, again, that we're governed by people who aren't up to the job," Vance told Cass, "until four months ago when the American people actually gave the country a government it deserved. And obviously we're in the very early days, but I think that we've done more in four months to solve these problems. But this is not a five- or a 10-year project. This is a 20-year project to actually get America back to common-sense economic policy."

When asked by NBC News' Kristen Welker last month whether he figured the MAGA movement could survive without him as its leader, President Donald Trump said, "Yes, I do. ... I think it's so strong. And I think we have tremendous people. I think we have a tremendous group of people. We talked about a number of them. You look at Marco, you look at JD Vance, who's fantastic."

Trump added that Vance is "a fantastic, brilliant guy" and "Marco is great."

A straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February reportedly found that 61% of the over 1,000 attendees said they would support Vance as the future GOP standard-bearer.

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