WSJ: Celebrating 5 Years, American Compass Is "Clearly Ascendant"

Pre-order our new book, chock full of the ideas defining the New Right

Today marks the 5th anniversary of American Compass’s launch. In 2020, no one else envisioned a future for American conservatism that embraced organized labor, pursued industrial policy, scrutinized corporate power, rejected globalization, mocked Wall Street, and prioritized benefits for working families over tax cuts. Now we are “clearly ascendant,” reported the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Our “white papers and congressional briefings have helped to spread the gospel among members of Congress and their staffs, and numerous allies have made their way into the administration.”

Welcome to…

To celebrate, we’re asking our friends and readers (that’s you) to pre-order the fantastic anthology of our work, The New Conservatives, which will be published on June 3.

Contributors to the volume include:

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

Robert Lighthizer, former U.S. Trade Representative

Elbridge Colby, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy

Wells King, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy

Yuval Levin, Michael Lind, Julius Krein, John Sailer, and more…

I know, I know, why pre-order? Well, for better or worse, this is how the publishing industry works. Pre-order sales demonstrate interest in the book, which helps get it more promotional support, media attention, and so on.

For those already committed to the New Right, it will be a treasured compendium. For those fascinated by the debates, it will be the definitive brief from one side. And for everyone else who wants to understand what on Earth is happening on the American Right—a Teamsters president speaking at the RNC!?—it will be the invaluable orientation that only Compass could provide.

A number of the essays in the book are mine, and as editor I also got to write short introductions to each chapter. Here is an adapted excerpt from the Editor’s Note that kicks things off:

We founded American Compass in 2020 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. 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 trade-offs 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, according to the Wall Street Journal’s recent reporting, “clearly ascendant” and “the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill.” The ideas that we introduced, initially mocked and condemned as “progressive” and “socialist,” have become not only acceptable but, in many cases, the accepted position. Prominent elected leaders and key institutions have become skeptical of corporate power and financial engineering and optimistic about a renewed labor movement; actively hostile to globalization and enthusiastic about industrial policy; averse to entitlement cuts and eager to expand support for working families. The one organization in all of American politics responsible for advancing that set of ideas is American Compass.

How did we accomplish this? Our team has only just become ten people strong. We have spent less in our first five years than some legacy conservative institutions spend every couple of months. We are prevailing only because the quality of our ideas and our work is undeniable. We have built a robust foundation for a compelling agenda supported by reams of research, the best writing, and a growing coalition of elected leaders and young policy professionals eager to carry it forward. We are charting an intellectually coherent and politically persuasive course for where American politics, economics, and public policy ought to go.

This volume serves as an anthology documenting how we have revitalized conservative thinking and as a primer on what that new thinking is. The seminal ideas in the essays are the ones that are winning debates on the national political stage, defining the contours of the conservative coalition, and spawning an enormous range of legislative proposals. Have you noticed conservative political leaders sounding strange new notes about Wall Street, labor unions, trade deals, antitrust enforcement, industrial policy, and so many issues where the GOP position had always been so uncomplicated and predictable? Have you wondered, “what are they talking about?” This is what they are talking about.

The volume’s first part, “Principles,” examines the core commitments of conservatism and their implications for the key conceptual debates of modern politics, with chapters on The Market, The State, Labor, and Capital. Part Two, “Production,” focuses on the errors that have led to deindustrialization of the American economy, the consequences of the imbalances that have ensued, and the types of policy responses needed, with chapters on Globalization, China, and Industrial Policy. Finally, under the heading “People,” the volume’s final part addresses the role that conservative policy must play in sustaining supportive communities and creating the conditions for human flourishing, with chapters on Worker Power, Education, Family, and The Public Purse.

Taken as a whole, this collection of more than 30 essays from more than a dozen scholars and policymakers represents where the cutting-edge of conservative thinking is right now, where the center of gravity in the conservative movement will be in the coming decades, and the only plausible foundation in modern American politics on which to build a durable governing majority.

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We are very proud of everything that American Compass has accomplished over the past five years. This book encapsulates the intellectual foundations we have laid and atop which we hope to build in the years to come. I hope you’ll pick up a copy, and tell a friend to do so too.

- Oren