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One year ago at the Economic Club of New York, Donald Trump confronted a roomful of businessmen and billionaires with a choice: Line up behind him and “freedom” in the coming election or brace for the coming “communism” that “Comrade Kamala” would surely deliver as president.
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“Trump has broken open a lot of political, rhetorical and intellectual space. The idea that you can’t have a muscular economic policy as a Republican is well and truly dead,” said Chris Griswold, policy director of American Compass, the premier think tank of the New Right. The old guard of free market absolutists remains in the party, but they’ve been reduced to a small cadre, and the conversation has shifted.
“The debate isn’t so much ‘big government’ versus ‘small government’ anymore,” Griswold continued. “It’s about who will solve the urgent problems we face and how.” Rather than the ad-hoc approach Trump currently favors, he called for the development of “standing capacity” so the federal government can invest in certain industries, such as battery production and chip fabrication, that have been overlooked by private capital and lost to foreign competition.
“An openness to more muscular economic policy does not signal that we’re all socialist now,” Griswold continued. “Doing this well is in the Hamiltonian tradition of protecting and investing in American industry as a prerequisite to national thriving, strength and economic resilience. That’s not new at all. It’s the American system.”
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