Doug DeVos re-introduces his dad’s book Believe, trashes socialism and thinks the country was founded on the principles of free enterprise

I recently listed to a December 2025 interview with Doug DeVos who is now re-branding his father’s book Believe! as a way to perpetuate the awful ideological principle that gave birth to Amway and made the DeVos family the most powerful family in West Michigan.

The interview is conducted by Aaron Renn who has his own show. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Public Research, which is a far right think tank, very much like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy here in Michigan.

The interview with Doug DeVos is just seconds shy of 35 minutes, which you can watch here on YouTube.

There are for me important parts of this interview that I was to highlight and comment on. This first section I want to talk about is where the interviewer quotes Rich DeVos talking about patriotism (8:40 into the interview). “At a time when flag waving is discouraged I don’t apologize for an old fashioned, hand over heart brand of patriotism. I believe that America is the greatest country in the world with the richest past, the brightest future and the most exciting present of any nation anywhere.”

Nothing of what Rich DeVos says in this quote should be surprising. DeVos, a white, wealthy, Christian man, who made his wealth on the pyramid scheme company Amway, originally wanted to call the company the American Way.

A second theme I wanted to look at begins at 19:30 in the video where the interviewer wants Doug DeVos to talk about why he thinks that socialism is appealing to people, particularly young people. Doug’s responses are interesting, first with the idea that people who don’t have a sense of themselves are more susceptible to the appeal of socialism.

The second generation Amway executive also tries to point out that socialism has been tried before. Of course DeVos provides no examples and doesn’t provide any analysis of socialism, because he has no real knowledge of what it means and how it has been applied around the world in various ways. Instead DeVos invokes this notion that people want to come here, so we must be doing something right. Really? Lets look at the millions of undocumented immigrants that have come to the US in recent years. They are coming because the US is so great, they are coming because they are desperate to flee political violence and poverty, which are realities that the US has helped to create in the countries just south of the border.

DeVos also attempts to claim that the US was founded on the principles of free enterprise, focus on the importance of family and people being able to celebrate their religious beliefs. I’m sorry, the US was founded on Settler Colonialist values of taking indigenous land, engaging in genocidal policies and profiting off the labor of Blacks who were enslaved by white owners.

In the section on free enterprise (beginning at 22:20) Doug says that we have been fighting poverty for 60 years, which is likely a reference to the Johnson Administration’s war on poverty program. DeVos believes that hasn’t worked, but provides no analysis of why it didn’t work, so there is no discussion of how capitalism morphed into neoliberal capitalism, with increased state intervention and policies change to imposed austerity measures, push privatization, deregulation and create tax policies that would benefit families like the DeVos family. Doug’s solution is to create wealth, which sounds nice, but it means go into business for yourself, be an entrepreneur. The problem with the idea of wealth creation is that only a small percentage of people within a capitalist system will be able to create wealth, because it is always at the expense of the masses.

There are a few other sections where DeVos talks about the “regulatory state” and America vs China, but just like the rest of this interview Doug just repeats his father’s ideas and offers no substantive critique of what he doesn’t like and what he thinks works. For a decades-long critique of the DeVos family check out my 800 plus page document entitled the DeVos Family Reader.