Founder’s Letter: Consensus, Building

It has been five years since we founded American Compass with a mission to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.

A blind faith in markets had come to dominate right-of-center economic thinking, at great cost to conservatism’s political prospects and the common good. This market fundamentalism left policymakers and pundits unable or unwilling even to admit the serious challenges that Americans were facing, let alone craft a responsive agenda. Tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade were the only items on the menu, cheap labor and rising corporate profits were the goals. Government’s only task was to get out of the way, and anyone who suggested otherwise was, as former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley put it, taking “the slow path to socialism.” 

The legacy institutions of establishment conservatism—think tanks, editorial pages, congressional offices, and so on—had become complacent, preferring to suppress or gloss over disagreement in the interest of preserving their existing arrangements. A wide variety of lazy platitudes, indefensible assumptions, and unacknowledged tradeoffs demanded exploration and debate.

New questions had emerged that demanded new answers.

We believed that, like the boy calling attention to the emperor’s state of undress, a simple willingness to speak clearly about the obvious weaknesses in the unchallenged orthodoxy could have immediate and dramatic effect. An enormous opportunity to construct a compelling new agenda lay untapped. But we needed to apply conservative principles to contemporary problems, rather than page repeatedly through a dog-eared 1980s playbook.

None of us would have dared predict we would come this far this quickly.

In just a few years, our organization has become “a policy nerve center for the party’s younger, more populist generation” (Ezra Klein, New York Times), a “slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows” (The Economist), “ground zero in a fierce conservative clash over Trump-era economics” (Politico), and “the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill” (Wall Street Journal). Asked to explain the downfall of Tea Party conservatism, Adam Brandon, longtime president of the now-defunct FreedomWorks, responded, “I credit Oren Cass and his philosophy.” 

The ideas that we introduced, initially mocked and condemned as “progressive” and “socialist,” have become not only acceptable but also, in many cases, the accepted position. Bloomberg published Manhattan Institute economist Allison Schrager warning that “private equity has grown too big too fast” this year, while the Wall Street Journal published Glenn Hubbard, chair of George W. Bush’s council of economic advisers, acknowledging that “a contemporary economic agenda should recognize a limited measure of successful industrial policy.” When we released our conservative statement on labor in 2020, asserting that “strong worker representation can make America stronger,” most people were confused. But one of the signatories is now Vice President, another is Secretary of State, and the president of the Teamsters Union just addressed the Republican National Convention in prime time. 

Nor, as this annual report details on so many fronts, is the progress merely rhetorical. From an aggressive reset of the U.S.-China economic relationship to industrial policies for critical technologies to stronger non-college educational pathways to better protection for worker organizing to creative new forms of financial support for working families, our ideas are moving quickly into prominent legislation, earning widespread acclaim, and in some cases becoming law. In nearly every case, the relevant cabinet appointments that President Trump has made at the start of his second administration are far more closely aligned with our views than the comparable appointments last time around.

With good reason, the New York Times’s David Brooks said that we now represent the Republican Party’s “center of gravity,” while the Free Press’s Bari Weiss declared that we “won the day” and that the GOP is “[our] party now.”

Still, much work remains to be done, bringing the ideas that are winning in debates amongst policymakers to the much broader audience of politically engaged Americans whose views must ultimately dictate and reflect whatever consensus serves as the basis for the nation’s political economy. Thus, our organization is in the middle of its most substantive strategic shift since our launch, investing heavily in building a platform from which to reach that audience. We now have a weekly podcast. I have launched my own Substack, Understanding America, that reaches tens of thousands of readers each week. To celebrate our fifth anniversary, a commercial publisher is releasing a book that features our best work. And most importantly, at the start of the new year, we launched Commonplace. As its name suggests, our magazine’s purpose is twofold: First, to be a common place where not only the American right-of-center’s diverse factions, but also thoughtful interlocutors from across the political spectrum can gather to debate the future of both conservatism and the nation. Second, to focus those conversations on the commonplace—the economic, political, and cultural concerns that shape the experiences of ordinary Americans and, as a result, the trajectory of the American experiment. 

For a long time, we resisted launching a magazine. Does the world really need another one? But the same could have been asked about think tanks. No one doubts the distinctive and indispensable role we have come to play.

When the establishment’s legacy institutions show themselves incapable of adapting to modern circumstances, and new entrants find easy rewards in farming angry engagement, the creation of a new institution committed to serious, relevant ideas is vital work.

So Commonplace will do for conservative writers and readers what American Compass has done for the movement’s policymaking community, and I predict we will do it even faster.

Our assembled contributors already represent an unparalleled roster of talent, and we are eager to expand it as we establish the magazine as the home of the must-read ideas and debates on the Right. We have the luxury of not needing to churn out ten new things a day to fill a page and generate clicks. We will publish what we think is important—what matters in America, per our tagline—for an audience that wants to be challenged and inspired. 

Moments of realignment in American politics often give birth to new magazines, because the process of realignment itself is so chaotic and those institutions which had previously maintained order have blown apart, collapsed in on themselves, or drifted off into the void. After a big bang, the dispersed matter must reassemble, condense, and cool before the oceans can form and life can emerge. Likewise, the contours, commitments, and culture of a coalition must slowly set. 

Thus, one task we hope that Commonplace will perform is to form.

The New Right’s political culture has emerged largely in reaction against progressive cultural insanity and the “American carnage” of Donald Trump’s first inaugural address. It has tended to privilege the negative: naming and shaming enemies, airing grievances, counterattacking in the culture war. 

The enemies are real and should be ashamed, the grievances are legitimate and require airing, the culture war must be fought and won, but the sum-total of these efforts lacks the aspirational vision, inclusive culture, and happy-warrior ethos necessary to political success in a democracy. Commonplace will conduct and discuss an effective and positive conservative politics, making the case for constructive world views and encouraging the pursuit of useful endeavors and approaches. At the margin, in a world where such efforts are rare, even a modest new one can have dramatic effect. 

A second task is to inform.

Realignment has brought entirely new constituencies and concerns into the conservative coalition and is making many others accessible, but it has done nothing to equip conservative leaders to address them effectively. Commonplace will provide a bridge to connect various factions and a common language in which to establish facts and conduct debates. Our choice of focus will bring the most important issues to the fore and push distractions to the side, our content will educate readers about the realities of American life and the aspirations of American citizens, and in the fights we pick we will expose lazy thinking that has been blindly accepted only because it has gone unchallenged. 

The third task is to reform.

Through its work, Commonplace will become the central forum for shaping the new conservative coalition; developing its rationale, contours, and principles; convening its influential participants and helping to adjudicate vital disagreements; and ultimately charting the course for a durable and effective governing majority. 

At Commonplace, you can read diagnoses of what ails America that provide not only the specifics of concrete problems amenable to solution, but also the broader frameworks for understanding what has gone wrong and why. You can find an aspirational account of the common good that draws upon a shared moral vision, set of values, and definition of virtue anchored in the national character, culture, and tradition. And you will be thrown headfirst into the debate over what conservatives should do. 

The Commonplace mission, ultimately, is the same as American Compass’s: to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.

The most important word there—perhaps by an order of magnitude—is consensus. Any functional political coalition, and more so any durable governing majority, must settle upon an understanding of the nation, its problems and priorities, and the roles for private action and public policy in response.

American Compass gets called a think tank but more accurately it is an ideas factory, churning out new frameworks, arguments, and proposals for the conservative coalition’s consideration. Commonplace will provide a forum where those ideas and many others can be discussed and debated, refocused and refined, and disseminated to a nationwide audience. The new consensus is visible now on the horizon, and with each day’s progress its contours sharpen further. At our current pace, and with your continued support, we will arrive at it soon and the building can commence.