Long’s motto, “every man a king,” was not a call for individual sovereignty. It was a populist pitch for wealth taxes and a more powerful federal government.
As a governor and senator, Huey Long is best remembered for his radical proposals to confiscate wealth by force and for condemning President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” as insufficiently expansive or progressive.
So when Vice President J.D. Vance openly says he finds Long “great” and “interesting,” it’s a detail worth keeping in mind.
During a stop in Ohio last week, Vance invoked Long’s famed “Every Man A King” slogan and praised Long as a “great Southern populist” who was “an interesting guy; kind of a crazy guy.”
“But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” Vance went on, “No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.”
The moment is telling not only because Vance chose to name Long—this was a deliberate, prewritten line rather than a spontaneous remark—but also because the vice president appears to have misunderstood the speech he was citing.
In fact, Long’s “every man a king” platform had nothing to do with imprisoning criminals or tightening immigration controls, as Vance suggested. It was, instead, a direct call for a strengthened federal government to seize wealth and redistribute it.
“You must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own,” Long argued. To realize that aim, Long urged capping individual ownership at no more than $50 million—though he conceded that “it may be necessary that we limit it to less.”
That figure translates to roughly $1.2 billion in contemporary terms. In essence, Long was advocating a populist revolt against the era’s billionaires, and he meant every bit of it. “Our taxation is going to be to take the billion-dollar fortunes and strip them down to frying size,” he vowed.
And there was more. The remainder of the “every man a king” program called for loan forgiveness and a cap on the number of hours people could work. Taken as a whole, the speech and the political platform, aside from some archaic phrasing here and there, resemble what you’d hear from modern Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or the Democratic Socialists of America.
One might ask what exactly it is about Long that catches Vance’s eye.
To be fair, Vance did add that Long was “kind of a crazy guy.” And he wasn’t saying that Republicans should embrace Long’s economic ideas or imitate his policies. His point seems to be that abstract notions such as freedom and rights can be hollowed out by material insecurity—and even though the circumstances differ greatly, that premise lies at the heart of Long’s call for wealth redistribution.
But this also serves as a revealing nod.
Long may have wanted the federal government to decide how much wealth Americans could hold, but his stance on the concentration of political power was less austere. He grasped—just as Vance appears to—that populism serves a目的—a means to an end, usually a stronger, more forceful government. Lawrence Dennis, an outright fascist advocate, characterized Long as “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader” the United States had ever produced.
Vance shows little hesitation in cozying up to authoritarians or endorsing illiberal views about governance.
In recent times, he has been articulating a blend of progressive and authoritarian economic ideas with increasing clarity. In a recent interview with Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, Vance defended President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize profits from AI firms, then outlined a future scenario in which the Republican Party abandons Milton Friedman’s economic doctrines.
“Vance understands better than Trump that such a proposal runs counter to long-held GOP economic dogma, and that is precisely what he admires about it. He likes that it has a socialist edge,” observed Reason writer Robby Soave at the time.
It seems almost inevitable that Vance’s combination of illiberal politics and populist economics would bring him into the orbit of the “Kingfish.” By invoking Long, Vance offers a clarifying moment: Long embodies nearly everything the American right once warned against in the name of limited government and constitutional liberty.
The fact that Vance cannot stomach Friedman but finds Long to be an “interesting” figure speaks volumes—and should serve as a major warning sign for his future political ambitions.
