RECOMMENDED READING
Big business can no longer take the support of conservative parties for granted.
The 1990s saw a great uncoupling between left-wing parties and big labor, with President Bill Clinton embracing free trade and Wall Street and Prime Minister Tony Blair ditching Clause 4 (which committed the Labour Party to nationalization) and tea and sandwiches in Number Ten with trade union bosses. Are we now witnessing an equally momentous change on the other side of the divide: an uncoupling between conservative parties and big business?
This new business-critical conservatism naturally starts with opposition to corporate “wokery”: Rubio is even introducing a bill into the Senate to force companies to “mind your own business” and stop indulging in woke posturing. But this new conservatism goes deeper than that — and overturns most of the tenets of the business-friendly conservatism of the 1980s. The new conservatism focuses on the producer rather than the consumer. Is it really worth getting that Amazon parcel to you within 24 hours if it means that workers have to operate like robots? It puts a premium on pro-family policies such as family leave and near-universal tax credits for children, unencumbered by work requirements, all ideas that the Republican establishment has long anathematized. American Compass goes so far as to call for enhanced collective bargaining rights for workers, lamenting the “labor movement’s slow descent into obsolescence.”
Recommended Reading
Finding True North Ideas in the Trump Era—And Beyond
The challenge for Cass is to help restore conservative ideas to their proper primacy — the conservatism of Main Street, that is, not the libertarian pseudo-conservatism that so often trickles down from plutocratic donors.
Confronting the Federal Deficit with Reps. Khanna and Arrington
Both taxes and spending are on the table as one progressive and one conservative join Oren Cass for discussions of how exactly to fix the budget.
What Republicans Can Learn from the UK’s Conservative Party
As the big loser in 2020, the GOP should consider what it can learn from Britain’s Conservative Party, which offers a compelling policy matrix.