Finding True North Ideas in the Trump Era—And Beyond

If knowledge is power, then it follows that groups of the knowledgeable are even more powerful. …

It’s to help upgrade conservatism that Oren Cass has founded a new group, American Compass. Cass has an interesting background: He once worked for Mitt Romney, the epitome of the old orthodoxy, and yet he himself first made a splash in 2014 when he published a cover story for National Review on China, entitled, bluntly, “Fight the Dragon.”

Cass argued that our trade policy toward the People’s Republic was dangerously naive from a strategic point of view, as well as hideously obtuse from a political point of view; that is, all those blue-collar workers knew they were getting the shaft, even as officialdom, in both parties, was happy-talking the stale orthodoxy.