Donald Trump: Can’t live with him, can’t live without him. Republican Party leaders aren’t expelling Trump from the party because, even though they lost the White House and both houses of Congress during his tenure, they’re afraid they would do even worse without him as their link to the working class.
But center-right thinker Oren Cass says there’s a brand of non-Trumpian conservatism that can win national elections by hanging onto working class GOP voters while appealing to culturally conservative Democrats. Cass, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, says the key is jettisoning the party’s commitment to what he calls “market fundamentalism.”
As of Feb. 15, Cass’s essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, “A New Conservatism: Freeing the Right From Free-Market Orthodoxy,” was the most read article on the magazine’s website.
Market fundamentalism—which is all about getting government out of people’s lives—is more libertarian than truly conservative, Cass writes.
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