New Think Tank Looks to Counter Establishment’s Influence in Policy-Making Circles

Steve Hilton: Now back to The Next Revolution. Welcome back. For years conservative policymaking in Washington D.C. was dominated by establishment thinking that turned out the same old policies that hurt workers, undermine families, destroyed local communities, and sold out America. All that is about change. There’s a new kid on the block, a new think tank working along the same lines as we advocate on this show with positive populism. It’s called American Compass and I’m delighted that its executive director Oren Cass, who you’ve seen before on the show talking about his fantastic book, The Once and Future Worker.

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Oren Cass: We’re kicking off a new package for labor day that’s called A Seat at the Table. It’s about the idea that conservatives should really care about organized labor and it’s not the unions that we have today and big labor which mostly seems to function to raise money for democrats, but the idea of organized labor, the idea that workers should be able to come together to form associations, to have some power and bargain collectively. I think those are great ideas that conservatives should care about and a lot of other conservatives do too. So we’re releasing a statement signed by everyone from Marco Rubio, to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to leaders of think tanks, to some of the leading conservative labor lawyers, all making this exact point that labor should work differently than it does right now in this country, but conservatives shouldn’t be hoping that labor goes away and that workers don’t have any power. Conservatives should be finding a way to build strong organizations that give workers a real seat at the table.