Politics
Are Conservatives Finally Back?
It is morning in a more dignified, pro-worker America.
It has been a long time since I dared to feel as exuberant for a conservative revival in America as I do right now.
The Republican nominee for vice president is the most intellectually developed conservative on a major party ticket in the last three decades. Corporate America, for the first time in years, seems to understand that half the country doesn’t want their beverage company to be a full-fledged culture warrior. Families are turning their backs on universities that offer debt and dysfunction rather than knowledge and skills.
Still, that optimism is tempered by the depth of our nation’s challenges and the feeling that time is running out.
Uncontrolled mass migration challenges whether our nation wants to control, in the most basic and essential sense, our national identity. At a tangible level, millions of illegal immigrants flooding across our border pose immediate threats—drugs, crime, untenable strains on our public services, and a suffocating downward pressure on the wages of American workers.
America is losing its ability to make things. Members of our leadership class conceive of themselves as “citizens of the world” rather than loyal citizens and stewards of a unique nation; many view the concept of national belonging itself as an antiquated parochialism of a bygone era—an obstacle to global progress. China’s rise cannot be stopped, but its desire to do so by supplanting—and eventually, dominating—our country must be.
Achieving middle-class security has become much harder and young Americans are less likely to even try. Family formation is declining, with affordability cited as the largest obstacle. Eighteen-to-34-year-olds are more likely to be living at home with their own parents than independently with a significant other.
To meet these challenges, America needs more than just good elected officials. It needs a strong conservative movement reminding the nation as a whole, and those elected officials especially, about the importance of family, community, and industry to our liberty and prosperity. For most of my 20-year career in Washington, the movement has been weak, its ideals misguided—one thinks of the old Catskills joke, “the food here is terrible, and such small portions!” But that, too, seems to be changing.
Coming to Washington as a young conservative in 2004 felt like being a young oarsman, charged with helping to propel the ship of state into port alongside the Shining City on a Hill—a challenging task, sure, but one within our capacity to achieve. Reagan had laid the groundwork, Clinton had conceded the era of big government was over, and Republicans had control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Failure was beyond the reach of the mainstream Right’s imagination.
It didn’t take long, however, to learn that the ship was, in fact, headed in the wrong direction completely. Over the next few years, millions of grassroots conservatives came to the same conclusion. Amidst record pork-barrel spending, the failures in the response to Hurricane Katrina, the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, and creation of the first new entitlement program in 40 years, grassroots donations to the Republican Party evaporated. They went instead to the institutions of the conservative movement.
When I started at The Heritage Foundation in 2004, its annual budget was around $32 million. Soon that skyrocketed to more than $60 million. What was that money spent on? The creation of a vast managerial bureaucracy known as the “Leadership for America” (LFA) structure. An army of bureaucrats was hired. Elite college campuses had their DEI administrators. The conservative establishment had its LFA directors.
In 2010, the conservative grassroots gave DC Republicans another chance with the tidal wave Tea Party election. At the time, I had just founded Heritage Action for America—what the conservative writer Tim Carney once described as the Tea Party’s “very sharp tip of the spear.” But to the conservative establishment, our new organization’s desire to pick fights, including (often especially) with the Republican Party itself, was foolhardy. Our job, we were told, was to help Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor pass their agenda. “We don’t get to choose our leadership” was the constant refrain.
The Republican establishment wasn’t in Washington for the same reason we were. Conservatism, Inc. wasn’t here to save our country. Like most managerial bureaucracies, it existed to move slowly and perpetuate itself.
The resulting internecine conflicts only underscored the disconnect. “In management meetings, it was usually Needham, representing Heritage Action, against much of the room,” reported the New Republic. “And he often won out because he came to the table with a national army at his back.”
What nobody asked was why we were capable of mustering the “national army” we had at our backs. The conservative establishment was not yet ready to learn its lesson. The “national army” aligned against it should have created the imperative to reform. Instead, it was viewed as an inconvenience to be maneuvered around.
Fortunately, the conservative movement has come a long way. Kevin Roberts, who became Heritage’s president in 2022, has achieved reforms that I never would have imagined possible. It is a totally different institution today than it was a decade ago.
Even more encouraging is the emergence of a constellation of energetic new institutions on what has come to be known as the “New Right.” The Center for Renewing America, America First Legal, American Moment, and many others are building a new conservative establishment that might actually be worthy of the nation for which it intends to fight.
An especially bright star in the constellation is American Compass. Founded by Oren Cass and now led by Abigail Ball, the organization has become the most important source of innovative economic thinking on the right. It is reintroducing an authentically conservative economics—a welcome and long overdue correction to the libertarianism that has dominated the Republican Party for decades.
This week, I’m proud to be taking on the role of Chairman at American Compass, and I look forward to working with our allies in the new conservative movement to not only unseat the failed leaders of the past generation, but also develop the constructive, coherent, conservative vision needed to build a durable governing majority and solve our nation’s problems.
In its few short years of existence, American Compass has become a vital source of the intellectual ammunition necessary for conservatives to win the fight against unfettered mass migration. Oren Cass’s seminal essay “Jobs Americans Would Do” outlines, in exhaustive detail, how mass migration acts as a substitute for the types of productivity-enhancing innovations business must seek to invest in if we want to boost the wages of American workers.
Americans across the political spectrum are demanding we get the border under control. When that becomes a defining issue in 2025, American Compass will be in the middle of the fray ensuring we win the intellectual argument to control our borders.
America became the greatest nation on earth because of the unique qualities of a unique people. The Protestant Work Ethic, the American System of Manufactures, the distinctive shape and character of American civil society—including the role of irreplaceable institutions such as the traditional nuclear family—created a particular, and exceptional, way of life, which shaped our nation in fundamental ways. Nobody has done better work than American Compass in providing the economic arguments for that way of life.
American Compass has not been afraid to fight with sharp elbows against stale orthodoxy when the conservative movement needs a push from within to update its thinking.
We are proud to partner with Sen. Josh Hawley who has become a leader in the fight for worker power in the economy.
We agree with Sen. Marco Rubio (for whom I spent five years working as chief of staff) that America’s economy must work for its people; its people don’t exist to work for the economy. We are not afraid to consider the role government must play to better align market outcomes with the common good.
We agree with our friend, and vice-presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance that something has gone wrong with how investment works in today’s economy—or doesn’t. America’s financial system is one of our nation’s great competitive advantages, connecting funding with great ideas. But all too often this is now going wrong, with strategies focused on extracting value from American companies rather than helping them grow and become even more productive.
Some traditional institutions think American Compass should be embarrassed about these breaks from orthodoxy. We aren’t. A strong conservative movement is big enough for fact-based disagreements among allies, and it will become stronger only with organizations like ours pressure-testing orthodoxy that has gone unquestioned for decades. We are excited to debate which policies are best to address the problems we all see ahead—what we won’t do is get dragged into useless ad hominem attacks or defer blindly to vague shibboleths. The challenges we face are far too important.
For the first time since 1980, America desperately needs what only conservatism can provide and the conservative movement is primed to deliver. We have been let down before—and I fear for what comes next if we do not rise to the challenge and start delivering results.
The post Are Conservatives Finally Back? appeared first on The American Conservative.
