Economics in the Age of Trump

The American Right is going through an intellectual renaissance. Although President Trump is a visceral, even anti-intellectual leader, his rise to power shook the foundations of conservative orthodoxy and created the space for new debate.

There are now burgeoning intellectual communities of nationalists, populists, integralists, and other more obscure factions. While the ancien régime of free-market intellectuals has taken refuge in publications such as The Bulwark and The Dispatch, the new vanguard has declared the end of the “dead consensus” of 1980s Reaganism and is quickly working to replace it.

Oren Cass—who has superb establishment credentials as a Harvard-educated lawyer, management consultant, and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign—has stepped into the fray with a forceful challenge to what he calls “free-market fundamentalism.”