On May 4th, American Compass was launched with “A Note of Introduction” declaring, “Our mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.” What followed was a remarkably anodyne discussion of the desire to be a flagship, “creating and nurturing connections between people, facilitating communication among them, and shaping a common identity understandable to the outside world.”
There is very little in the introductory note that would signal that American Compass has an agenda. But, a couple of months back, American Compass announced itself over at National Review in an essay by Oren Cass with the curious title “The Return of Conservative Economics.” I’ll admit my first thought in seeing the title was to wonder if supply and demand curves are different in the world of conservative economics. But, of course that is not what the title meant. Instead, the project is “helping American conservatism recover from its chronic case of market fundamentalism.”
The enemy, it seems, is not “liberal economics” or “socialist economics,” but rather libertarians. Now I am not a libertarian, but I must admit that I have heretofore thought of the libertarians I know as broadly reasonable people with policy preferences slightly different from mine. Reading American Compass’s views of the libertarians was thus, to put it mildly, a bit jarring. Fusionism, the melding of social conservatives, libertarians, and Cold Warriors that, as George Nash has so well documented, created the modern American Conservative movement, is now passé, especially among younger conservatives.
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