When Donald Trump won his second term in the White House last fall, a whole host of other politicos and organizations won with him. This includes his campaign staff now working in the administration, Republican backers now serving in the Cabinet, and a loose collection of intellectuals that dubs itself the New Right. Among the most prominent of these New Right figures is Oren Cass, the founder of a think tank called American Compass, who takes a victory lap and looks to the future in his new book, The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry, which was released by Diversion Books on June 5.
For Cass, who founded American Compass in 2020, Trump’s victory also represented a triumph, not so much over then-Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats as over the “Old Right” and its “free trade, open borders, and anti-worker agenda.” “As of about 5:00pm eastern time on Election Day 2024, one could still find pundits opining that the Republican Party would have done better nominating Ambassador Nikki Haley,” Cass writes. “By midnight, all that was over.”
Just as Trump vanquished rivals including Haley, Jeb Bush, Mike Pompeo, and Chris Christie, Cass calls out his rivals in the Washington think tank world, saying his 5-year-old outfit with just 10 employees and $2 million in funding outcompeted the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, R Street Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all of whom backed an outdated “market fundamentalism.” American Compass instead advocates domestic industry, the working class, and a balance between government and the market. A related aim is to shift the government’s focus away from consumption growth and toward production, even if it means price hikes in the short term.
Cass edits and mostly writes the essays that constitute The New Conservatives, though it also includes contributions from former Trump trade representative Robert Lighthizer, current Secretary of State and “Mr. Everything” Marco Rubio, and writers such as Wells King and Elbridge Colby, who hold smaller roles in the Trump administration.
Despite his prominence in the New Right, Cass has more than a little bit of the Old Right in him. He worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 before a transformation that began when he crafted a plan to fight poverty. On the heels of Romney’s infamous “47%” comments, Cass sought to fight the perception that Republicans didn’t care about the poor, catching the attention and support of Rubio in the process. Then, as Trump refashioned the GOP as a blue-collar, working-class party, Cass sought to define the movement with a 2018 book titled The Once and Future Worker, which was praised by Vice President JD Vance as “A brilliant book” and “among the most important I’ve ever read.”
Today, Cass has friends in very high places, including the second- and third-most powerful people in the federal government. So what’s The New Conservatives about? Namely, it sees the Trump phenomenon as a fundamental reworking of the Republican Party, and even of politics writ large, and seeks to explain exactly what that means.
“Have you noticed conservative political leaders sounding strange new notes about Wall Street, labor unions, trade deals, antitrust enforcement, industrial policy, and so many issues where the GOP position had always been so uncomplicated and predictable?” Cass writes. “Have you wondered, ‘What are they talking about?’ This is what they are talking about.”
Indeed, for those who view Trump’s policy positions as something he thinks up two seconds before typing them into Truth Social, the book may surprise you. For example, in an essay first published in 2021, Lighthizer advocates a 10% universal tariff on all foreign imports, which has now come to pass. (And heads up: Lighthizer calls for upping the ante to 20% and then 30% if trade deficits persist.) In an essay first published in 2023, contributor Chris Griswold writes that “a supply-side economics for the 21st century would worry far less about the difference between a 39% and 37% top marginal tax rate” and more about stimulating real investment in the U.S. economy. Sure enough, Trump is now flirting with a modest hike in the top marginal tax rate.
The big-picture message in The New Conservatives is that the old GOP mantras — free trade, tax cuts, limited government — were crafted in the 1980s in response to the issues of that decade and must be updated for a new generation. This leads to one of Cass’s most controversial positions, which is that taxes in some instances should be raised. When President Ronald Reagan cut the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50% and then to 33%, it generated fantastic economic growth. But, Cass argues, repeating the trick over and over again triggers the law of diminishing returns, and runs up the national debt besides.
Such a position has led opponents to brand American Compass as a group of progressives in disguise. Nonetheless, Cass and those he has aligned with certainly appear ascendant on the Right, as embodied by the rapid rise of Rubio and Vance. Haley, by contrast, was left out of the Trump administration and comes in for scorn throughout the book. She’s mentioned 10 different times in the volume, called out for arguing that tax cuts are “always a good idea” and that any government intervention in the free market represents a “slow path to socialism.”
Looking further back, the book venerates figures from the early days of the United States by explaining how they backed government planning and tariffs. Henry Clay, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all favored investing in domestic manufacturing and protecting infant industries. Abraham Lincoln was a tariff man who donated government land to create public colleges. Even the seminal free trade economist Adam Smith comes in for a redefinition. Cass highlights two passages from The Wealth of Nations, one in which Smith writes that profit is “naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.” The other is the one time Smith used his famous term “invisible hand,” in a passage that reads, emphasis added, “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry … he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
From this origin, many conclusions flow. The U.S. must end its reliance on Chinese supply chains, reshore industry, encourage real business investment rather than “financialization” of the economy, raise wages by locking out illegal labor, and even embrace labor unions under certain conditions. And while the doings of a wonky think tank may never capture the wider public imagination, no less a figure than Rubio argues its vision can, in fact, must, become mainstream not only in the Republican Party but across the electorate.
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“Forging a path towards a pro-American capitalism that protects our nation’s interests and serves the common good will not be easy,” Rubio writes in his essay. “… It will not be the work of one person or one party. To succeed, it must be the work of an entire generation and cross the entire political spectrum. It must become our new consensus.”
If that sounds fanciful, check the news.
Haisten Willis is a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner.