The New Conservatives

For the fifth anniversary of American Compass, the conservative think tank hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "the forefront of rethinking traditional conservative economic ideas," comes a collection of its best, most influential writing American Compass is the nerve center of the New American Right, the political strategists and policy experts navigating a new Republican path through the economic issues shaping today’s political landscape—trade and immigration, technology and finance, industrial policy, education, welfare, labor, family, and more. The New Conservatives is the organization’s ur-text, a collection of its most influential writing on why and how true conservative government fosters markets that serve society—not the other way around. As The Economist put it, American Compass is “a slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows.” With essays and manifestos by American Compass founder Oren Cass, New America co-founder Michael Lind, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Affairs founding editor Yuval Levin, American Affairs founding editor Julius Krein, author and former American Conservative senior editor Helen Andrews, and Comment senior editor Brian Dijkema, The New Conservatives breaks down America’s economic and political failures before drawing upon a re-assessed American conservative tradition to prove how an innovative conservative movement, breaking from the GOPs free-market dogmatism, is defined by three pillars—productive markets, supportive communities, and responsive politics. The book explores American Compass’ groundbreaking projects, like the Cost-of-Thriving Index, which explains how the typical American worker could once provide a family with middle-class security on 40 weeks of work but now requires more than 60—a problem, there being 52 weeks in a year. It refines the American conservative tradition, which most people today wrongly assume emphasized free markets and limited government, reminding readers that the early American republic pursued a robust national economic policy with high protective tariffs and intensive public investment. It offers new conservative critiques of modern markets that have failed to deliver on capitalism’s promise that globalization, cheap labor, and financial markets will deliver widespread prosperity. And it sets capitalism’s sights on community: re-calibrating a right-of-center attitude toward families, worker power and solidarity, and higher education. The New Conservatives, published in celebration of American Compass’ fifth anniversary, is a conservative manifest, a ship’s log, and an updated nautical chart to an economy in which free markets are not an end unto themselves, but are rather a means to an end—national liberty and prosperity—steered by public policy.