The Dispatch Podcast - The Once and Future Right

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

The Dispatch’s associate editor and Morning Dispatch guru Declan Garvey joins Sarah to ask Oren Cass what his mission is with American Compass, a center-right organization of which he is the executive director. Cass thinks it’s time the conservative movement reforms itself and he is trying to do so from within. Cass says, “What has been missing from American politics and policy making is a conservatism that takes seriously the ways that public policy could really take on and address failures in our markets and things that are not going well in the economy.” Chief among the issues debated in this episode is Sen. Mitt Romney’s new child allowance proposal. The trio also discusses what Donald Trump’s lasting legacy will be in the Republican Party, and what it would mean for the party if he won again. Show Notes: -American Compass website -“The Once and Future Worker” by Oren Cass -Sen. Mitt Romney’s child allowance plan -Oren Cass’ op-ed in the New York Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Joining me this week is Declan Garvey, your one and only morning dispatch editor. And we are going to talk to Orrin Cass. Oran is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new, well, new-ish now think tank on the right, center right. So much that they have done on family policy. see, I'm really interested in all of the, there's been like this policy explosion in the last just few weeks, I think, that we have a lot to talk about.

Let's dive right in. So I just want to start with a, you know, what is an Oren Cass? So, You worked at Bain for a number of years. You worked on the Romney campaign. What are your political beliefs now? Where do you put yourself on the political spectrum? And was there an epiphany moment where you feel like your brand of conservatism shifted? Was it a slow evolution? And how did Trump's campaign or his election fit into that shift?

I'm going to use the whole podcast answering that question. Great. My job is done. Your job is actually going to be three hours. I'll try to boil it down. I guess I would describe myself as a conservative, how that fits on the existing party politics of America at the moment is a little harder to discern. But I think I'm quite conservative in the spalsy sense. I certainly have a bias toward limited. government and a real interest in and focus on the institutions and sort of traditions and norms

of the society. But I don't have a whole lot of patience for what I guess you would call conservative ink or sort of the conservative establishment, which I perceive as really having been sort of taken over, at least on the economic side by libertarian thinking and business interests, which I think there's a place for, and maybe we'll get into more of that. But it frustrates me that if you say kind of conservative economics in America, the assumption is that that means tax cuts and tax cuts and deregulation and more tax cuts and free trade and then more tax cuts. And, you know, there are times when each of those things might be exactly the right

policy, but that's certainly not the sum total of what conservatives should be thinking about. And there are an awful lot of times when conservatives shouldn't be focused on that at all. So I guess I don't know exactly where that leaves me on the various spectra spectrums. But to not answer it to great length, the one other thing I'll say is in terms of kind of how did I get here, you know, I think I had a fairly non-traditional entry into the policy world where I'd always been very interest in public policy, but had been working as a management consultant, had gone to law school whenever else was going to business school, because I did want to do policy work. And then ended up working for then Governor Romney on his presidential campaign and had the opportunity to be his

domestic policy director and just cover a lot of ground on a lot of policy issues. But really, in keeping with the way he thinks about things, not starting from, okay, well, what is the standard Republican position on this, but actually starting from, well, what are the problems in this area and what are the options for addressing them? And so, you know, there are places where I think I probably sound very much like a typical Republican, but there are other places where I think if you actually start from conservative principles and try to address the problems we have today, you realize that the 1980 playbook probably isn't the right one anymore. And so going through that exercise of asking, okay, what's the playbook for the 2020s is sort of what interests me and what I find

myself working on. And how did Trump's campaign or election affect that? Made a huge mess of it. You know, it's interesting. I think there are ways in which Trump proved very helpful to exposing real problems on the right of center. The metaphor I constantly use, unless it's a simile, is that he's sort of like an earthquake. You know, an earthquake, generally speaking, kind of causes damage. If there's something good to be said about it, it's that it knocks down the weak stuff. And it exposes where something was poorly built. It exposes where something is out of date.

And it creates an opportunity in the aftermath to learn from that and rebuild something that's going to be better. Now, you're always going to have people who like the way things were, charging right back in and saying, let's go, let's just put these things back up. But, but, you know, I think that's a huge mistake. And that's ultimately the impetus for founding American Compass is well into the Trump era. We were looking around and saying there's so much great thinking going on at the level of individuals. There are so many interesting people doing interesting work. But if you zoom out and look at the level of institutions, think tanks and publications, you see an awfully sort of homogenous

orientation toward what I would call pre-Trumpism or just let's keep our heads down until this is over and we can go back to how things were before. And if we wanted to develop what I would call a post-Trumpism, if we wanted to learn from this and build something better and responsive to the current era, there was going to need to be some institutional support behind that effort. And so that's what American Compass tries to be. Great. And so you launched American Compass just over a year ago, I guess a few weeks before the pandemic hit. So have you met in a person yet? Great time to be launching an organization, let me tell you.

Exactly. But basically with the goal of, as you said, kind of challenging the quote-unquote free market fundamentalism that you believe has kind of defined the right for kind of decades on end at this point. And we at the dispatch have kind of talked about the importance of institutions, maintaining existing ones and building new ones. that we hope that that's what we are too. Why did you feel like it was necessary to kind of create something new here rather than build on what people who like Yuval Levin or Scott Winchip or Ramesh Pannuer

are doing at AI or Rihon Salam at the Manhattan Institute where he used to work? Why do you think that American Compass adds to that debate in kind of a new and unique way? Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the sort of ecosystem of organizations, working on on policymaking on the right of center, you know, frankly, I don't think you see the kind of innovation we need. And this was my experience. I was at the Manhattan Institute previously and was thrilled to see Rihon there. You know, Rihon was my original editor.

Literally, the Romney campaign ended. I went back to Bain. And about a month later, Cass Sunstein wrote something in Bloomberg opinion and that outraged me so much. I sent Ryan an email. We never even talked, but he had, you know, he blogged about some of my work. He was blogging at National Review time.

I said, hey, could I write a guest post for you? And he said, sure. And he said, then he said, hey, you should do another one? And then he said, hey, do you want to write something for print? And let's just say I was not a good writer at the time. And he was awfully patient with me. And so, you know, having to like Ryhan be leading the Manhattan Institute is fantastic. I also think if you step back and look at the Manhattan Institute in the work that it's doing,

and this was my experience there as well, there were ways in which I had enormous freedom to do whatever I wanted. But I think there are also real constraints that any institution is under that has sort of been established for a long period of time and has a set of leaders and scholars and donors and media folks that they work with. And just showing up in the middle of that and saying, well, actually, maybe we should say a bunch of that was wrong. Even if individual people agree with that, it's very difficult to sort of turn the ship. And there's sort of, you know, an analog in the private sector where there's a lot of work in management theory that looks at, you know, Ford Motor Company can see some huge new breakthrough

coming or see the future electric cars and realize that that's going to be the future. But once you've built a $10 billion organization with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers doing one set of things, the idea of just doing something else instead might sound great, but isn't necessarily going to happen. And so I think you see that in a lot of right-of-state organizations, again, where so many of the people there really are, certainly in my experience, they're almost all well-meaning trying to get the right answer doing good work. but the orientation of their institutions is biased very much toward preserving the status quo. And so I think it's incredibly important to have people like Reihun-Lean Manhattan Institute, having Yvall doing the work that he's doing at AEI. But I also think it's really important to create institutions that actually stand for the new ideas, that the media and other people working on them can identify as sort of representing

and being a flagship for that way of thinking. and that we then in turn can push the thinking of the existing institutions. I mean, one thing I always emphasize is the goal of American Compos is not to build yet another marble building in Washington. You know, there's four or five of us right now, and I don't think we're going to get a whole lot bigger. Our hope is that we can force discussions and debates and ways of thinking that everyone would be more comfortable kind of not dealing with. And that the end result is that everybody's thinking gets sharper and the right of center kind of prepares itself to provide the kind of leadership this country needs. Most academic debate, though, friendly though it may be, collegial though it is, there's still a politics to the whole thing. There's still donors.

And so you have to sort of have opponents to have these conversations with. Who do you see as your chief opponents? Well, the nice thing about our position is everyone is our chief opponent, right? I mean, there is no shortage of opponents to talk with. And I think it actually, you know, it varies a lot by issue, which is one thing that's interesting, is that the approach that we try to take generally, and this goes kind of back to the rationale for the founding this thing, is to say, what are the issues that, our front and center in 2020, that were not on the radar and did not exist in 1980.

And because we have different issues today, and those are the ones that just trying to use, well, might have been very smart ideas in 1980, but have since sort of hardened into dogma, do not fit the current situation. And so, you know, I think the quintessential example here is China. And, you know, I've been accused of, quote, playing the China card. to which I say like, like China is not a debating tactic. Like China is the single most important, you know, economic and geopolitical phenomenon of the last 30 or 40 years. It's a 1.4 billion person, authoritarian, you know, state capitalist, mercantilist country with an economy the size of ours, engaged increasingly in great power competition with us. And if my bringing up

makes you think like, ooh, well, like, that's not fair. My theory doesn't account for that. Then the problem is with your theory, right? And so I think China has kind of been the leading the sort tip of the spear on forcing a rethinking because it so clearly is just a different situation than the Cold Warriors of 1980 we're thinking about and how you approach, you know, international trade, how you approach investment and innovation, how you, all of these things are different in the context where China is behaving the way that it is. And so, you know, this is, this is, This is one of the first issues I worked on with Ben, Governor Romney in 2012. People forget this in Trump context.

But Romney was saying in 2012, virtually everything about China, that Trump said about 2016, in 2016. And it was an issue he was really focused on. And it was the sort of quintessential issue when I, you know, when I was like, all right, let's go figure out what all the great thinking on China is. It was like, oh, wow, oops, there actually isn't any. So, you know, when we're having that kind of fight about China and investment and trade, I think there's sort of a very kind of standard set of right-of-center economists and, you know,

the folks who were doing economics at AEI and heritage and so forth who have sort of represented the old guard. On China, they've actually started to change their minds a little bit. If you won't find them talking about it the same way they did five. or six years ago. But then there are other issues where I think the dynamics are a little bit different. And if, you know, if you look at an issue like financial markets and what the heck is going on with hedge funds and private equity and why is most of what we call investment these days, not investment at all, it's just speculation, then you have sort of a different set of folks who I think are more, you know, in the financial markets, who are the people who are eager to

defend that. I'm sort of in a long-running back and forth with Michael Strain at AEI about this because he sort of poo-poot our work on private equity, but won't say what he actually objects to about it. Like, we've yet to determine what it is that the AI folks think we're wrong about private equity in hedge funds, because it's not really something they want to talk about at all, as far as we can tell. On the, did you coin the term free market fundamentalist, by the way? Is that an American Compass term? I don't think so. I certainly annoy people with its use more than just about anybody else. So maybe that's, I can't imagine I actually point it. I'm sure if, I'm sure if you Google it, it will be the Google Ngram or whatever will, will show it in use for hundreds of years.

When I see people challenge that term, I see them point to, or I rather ask you to point to elected Republicans. Do you think President Reagan was a free market fundamentalist? Do you think President Bush was a free market fundamentalist? And I guess I would put that question to you. I mean, President Bush seems to me far from that. So is your term free market fundamentalists limited, really, to the think tank world? Or are you actually saying that we've had, you know, elected Republicans in the past who are true fundamentalists in the pejorative sense, I suppose? Well, I certainly wouldn't say that Reagan or Bush was. I mean, Reagan, as I never tire of reminding people, Reagan was, among other things, a quite aggressive protectionist. And, you know, George W. Bush,

I think with the sort of more compassionate conservatism model obviously had different thoughts as well. I think it's probably actually important to sort of highlight that successful national Republican leaders, like, have not toad the market fundamentalist line. Whereas, you know, I think you see some examples of it among elected officials. You know, I think someone like Senator Pat Toomey, who I actually have a great deal of respect for. I think he's a tremendous public servant, but I don't think his approach to economics is right at all. And so while fundamentalist is sort of inherently pejorative, I mean it in a somewhat neutrally descriptive sense that that I think he sort of analyzes economic issues from, from a quite fundamentalist frame of

reference. And so there are politicians like that, you know, Nikki Haley, who's not currently in office, is, I think, somebody else who sort of fits this mold. She very famously right around the start of the pandemic when, you know, markets were going all to hell and, you know, everyone who got, she had this tweet that said sort of, you know, in times of economic change, tax cuts are always a good idea. And it's just like, like, and this is why I say the fundamentalist, it's not even pejorative. It's just like, like the mindset tax cuts are always a good idea. Like that just, that is fundamentalist. And I don't think at all a conservative way of approaching issues. And so, you know, I, but I think what you see in an example like that is less that

there are a lot of senior elected officials who hold tightly and personally to fundamentalist views, then that there's an assumption that's created in the donor and think tank and publication ecosystem that this is what you're supposed to think and how you're supposed to act. And, you know, some of that is on the activist side where you think of like Grover Norquist's tax pledge, right? Like, I shall, like, thou shalt never raise taxes. Like, sorry, like having, you know, having a political culture where all elected officials are going to sign something like that is, again, just descriptively a fundamentalist approach to policy. And obviously, everyone for a very long time did go along with that, even though it is not always the case that that's the right

way to think about policy. I think if you look at the Wall Street Journal Ed page, I think they're a very good example in the kinds of stuff. Both they write as editorials and then the folks they choose to feature, whether that's Grover Norquist or Stephen Moore. You know, like literally the continued denial that like economic stimulus could be a thing or or that or that more government spending in a time of recession could possibly help like that's I mean honestly it's a little bit hard to take seriously as far as I'm concerned but but certainly a lot of people do and and then I think you see it in in the think tank world where you know the explicitly libertarian think tanks like a Cato or a Mercatus but but then if you look at at an AI or a

Heritage. You know, I had a really interesting conversation once with Jack Spencer, who leads up a lot of the economic work at Heritage. We were doing a podcast, and I was sort of, you know, talking about some of this stuff. And he just asked me point blank, like, why don't we just look at policy and ask, does it increase economic freedom? Or does it increase economic liberty? Like, why isn't that just the question to govern all decision making? And we then had a wonderful discussion about it, But that that would be the question is, again, just as a descriptive matter, I think quite fundamentalist. And so, you know, and then certainly among the donor class, there's a lot of this. So, you know, I think certainly if you look at how Republicans elected officials have governed,

there's obviously a tremendous amount of variation. I'm fond of pointing out that Reagan's famous remark, you know, the nine scariest words, or I'm from the government and I'm here to help, was actually the, the start of a press conference when he was announcing unprecedented farm aid. So, you know, politics is messy. Let's be clear. But I think that what has been missing from American politics and policymaking is a conservatism that takes seriously the ways that public policy could really take on

and address failures in our markets and things that are not going well in the economy. And I think it is the fundamentalist impulse that is the obstacle to, to making the kind of progress we should. In President Trump's term, we obviously kind of saw the start of this break from the, at least rhetorically, this market fundamentalism. It's kind of funny that, you know,

his first major legislative accomplishment was a, you know, $2 trillion tax cut. It's not funny. It is an extraordinary illustration of the problem. And then, you know, obviously we had last. year a two trillion-dollar cares act, which is obviously a break from some of this line of thinking. American Compass has kind of board members and staffers who have formerly worked with

Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. You obviously spent two campaign cycles with Mitt Romney. Josh Hawley has really broken away from some longstanding kind of conservative orthodoxy on a whole host of issues lately. Who in today's GOP, do you think kind of best exemplifies the direction you want the party to go. So I think that was a good list. You know, I think Mike Lee is, I would put more in the pat-to-me camp of someone who I have tremendous respect for, but I honestly don't see sort of leading in a heterodox way on a lot of issues.

I think, as you said, you know, Holly has certainly broken on a lot of things. I think Senator Romney has, Senator Rubio is a real leader on this. I would put Senator Cotton in that. camp as well. He was very involved in CARES Act. It's doing the minimum wage bill with Senator Romney. And then also has done some really interesting work on sort of sector-specific economic policy focusing on on semiconductors in particular. And I think the interesting thing to look at as you kind of look across that group is to see the kind of many different angles that they come at it from. So, you know, I think Senator Rubio is very focused.

on sort of, you know, the issues of the dignity of work and the structure of the economy and how to make changes there. You know, I think Senator Cotton is much more focused on the national security implications of failing to address some of these things. I think Senator Hawley is very focused on a lot of the kind of cultural implications of seeing things drift in the direction they have been drifting. And so it therefore makes for kind of a very interesting coalition. And frankly, it gestures to how broad-based a coalition it could be. I mean, I think there are many more voters out there who have not historically supported

or thought of themselves as conservative who will find this way. of thinking appealing, then there are kind of folks who were just in it for the tax cut and are upset that that's no longer what everybody's talking about. Yeah, and we've kind of seen in recent weeks some of the divisions even within that kind of wing of the GOP come to the fore with, you know, Rubio, Hawley, Lee, others have for years now been kind of championing this common good conservatism and policies kind of designed to stimulate family formation, things like that. And then we had Romney kind of come off the top rope and unveil his family security act. I mean, I don't think anybody 10 years ago

would think that would be coming from him. But it's arguably one of kind of the most ambitious welfare policy reforms in decades and definitely a decided break from typical conservative thinking on the issue. And then you saw Rubio and Lee were kind of out within a couple hours opposing the plan and in a New York Times piece that we linked to in our morning dispatch newsletter this week, you sided with some of their critiques arguing it doesn't do enough to incentivize work. So can you talk a little bit more about kind of what you appreciate about the Romney plan and what you disagree with and how you think that debate should play out going forward? Yeah, let me just start by saying I love all of it. I mean, the fact that this is going

on and, you know, this is what people on the right of center are focused on and talking about and debating is fantastic. This is, I'm certainly not going to suggest that American Compass is responsible for it or take credit for it, but this is what American Compass wants to be part of and what we need more of on the right of center that we haven't, I would say, had in a meaningful way since, you know, Reagan and Ford were duking it out to a significant degree. And so when I look at this particular set of policies, I think it's really interesting to step back and recognize the underlying philosophical debate, which is twofold. It's one, what actual problem are we acknowledging and saying we need to solve? And then two, what are we accepting

as forms of government action to solve it? And this first one, what are we actually trying to solve is really important in looking at the Romney proposal in particular. And this is the the point I made in my op-ed is, you know, saying, well, we just want to give everybody a cash benefit sounds like a very kind of typical, you know, that's just a simple universal policy, but it's actually two very different things because the needs of the working class family that's sort of earning money, having trouble making ends meet, and typically we haven't focused on as with policy support at all, it's very different than the, kind of anti-poverty concerns of the family at the very bottom of the income spectrum

or earning nothing at all, for which we have, you know, this trillion-dollar safety net and have been fighting about policy to help those folks for decades. And it seems to me that the sort of initial starting point, to notice what's different here is there's an acknowledgement that we probably need to be doing something for the middle also. And so whether you're talking about the Romney proposal or the Rubio Lee proposal, which is a much larger child tax credit, there's actually a really important agreement here that the family that's earning, you know, $40, $50, $60,000 a year, like they've actually really fallen behind and there's something wrong there. And I think that's something that the right of center historically hasn't been willing to acknowledge. And by the way, in these debates, they're playing folks who still aren't.

I mean, if you look at some of the AEI opposition, for instance, there's still a heavy emphasis on like, well, you know, we don't think we should be giving, you know, we don't think this is where the problem is at all necessarily. So that's one interesting kind of point of agreement, whereas I think the point of disagreement is to say, okay, well, for folks, well, I'm sorry, I should say there are two points of disagreement then. One of them is, okay, how much support can we give people? So among those who are in, let's say, the working and middle class, you have the Romney proposal, which says, well, we should just calculate a benefit and everybody gets the benefit versus the Rubio and Lee proposal,

which says, we want to give people a benefit, but we can't give them a bigger benefit than what they are paying in taxes. And that's a really interesting distinction that has to. to be hashed out. And then at the bottom, we have a disagreement where the Romney approach says, well, if we just have a universal program, we can just help by giving everybody money, whereas certainly Rubio Lee and myself included would say that's not really the way to fight poverty. You can certainly raise people above the poverty line by giving them enough money, but the problem for the non-working poor in particular is a lot more complicated than that. And we actually should want our system to be one that distinguishes between

households that are working to support themselves and households that aren't. So there are all these different issues to be hashed out. They're both issues of principle and practice. And depending on where you come down on each of them, then you end up with a different policy proposal. So forgive me, I read the op-ed in the New York Times, and I felt reading it that it was very think tanky. It was very sort of theoretical in its approach. And so I'm thinking then of a single mom, you know, she's, she has a new child. It's going to be five years until that child enters school during the day. And so what you're talking about is her going to work, which means the child now has to go into daycare. So she has to pay for daycare then. And so then

she's, forgive, let's see, Caleb, I don't want to bleep this. She's S-O-L, as they say, for those five years. Because under your plan, if she's not working, if she's staying home with her child, she doesn't get any benefit from this program. But if she does work, then she's got to pay for daycare, which will cost more than this benefit in the first place. Daycare is extraordinarily expensive, as we all know, until public schools kick in five years down the road where she would re-enter the workforce. And so when I'm thinking of of conservative policies, and I know Declan has done some reporting on this, that Mitt Romney very much did not want to prescribe whether there was a stay-at-home parent, whether parents

should stay at home with their, whether one parent should stay home with their child. Isn't there something deeply unconservative about wanting mothers to put their kids in daycare versus stay home with them and prescribing that as a government policy? Well, I haven't prescribed anything as a government. I mean, I haven't prescribed what anybody has to do through a government policy. It seems to me that when you're talking about single parent households in particular, you have a really difficult tradeoff, which is that you're right, you'd like to have parents be able to raise their own kids. But you'd also really like to make sure a household has somebody that's working. Among other things, it's the only sort of, path to upward mobility they're going to have. But she will be able to go back to work. When the child is five years old and is going to school, that mom would love nothing more than to go to work. The issue is those daycare years where the government has no program for that child, and you're saying then she can't have any benefit unless she can show that she is earned enough

money through working to match that benefit. Well, I think being out of the workforce for five years is empirically a huge problem. The experience of the long-term unemployed in returning to work is not good, not to mention that, of course, she has the foregone not only earnings but experience during those five years. Yeah, but lots of women make that choice. And that's a fine choice if women want to make it. But I think the idea that there's no trade-off here, and it would obviously be preferable for a household that only has a single parent in it to just not have any connection to work for years on end, I don't think there's a lot of support for the idea that that's actually the best for that particular unit. And I think there are two sort of other problems

with how you've framed the question here, both of which go over. very much to how I'd say conservatives should think about this. One is that it's simply not the case that her only choices are to sort of stay home with the kid or pay for expensive daycare. I mean, among other things, there's a reason we have family connections beyond our nuclear family and actually a very large share of households, particularly in the lower and working class, do rely more on extended family to provide child care. And so to say, look, you know, one challenge you're going to face if you're a single parent is you may need to be living closer to other family, and you may need other help from your extended family in taking care of kids. I don't think we should have any problem saying that.

That's a perfectly healthy arrangement. And again, I think a better one than saying we're just going to have this isolated nuclear household just by itself unconnected to work for years on end. And then the second thing I'd say is I think it's really important to not just analyze these problems in terms of, you know, look, I found someone who is facing challenges. What is the policy that will resolve that person's specific challenge today? Because all of our policy operates within the broader framework of how our society operates. And I think conservatives rightly contribute a very important dimension to these conversations by saying, we actually need to step back and think about how we're understanding relationships to each other, people's obligations to each other, what we as a society expect of our members.

And so, for instance, the expectation that families are going to work toward supporting themselves, and yes, we want to find ways to help them. But we expect them to be working to support themselves as well, I think is an incredibly important one. Because among other things, if you take that away, well, then what message are you sending to the people who are trying to do that? I mean, if you say actually working to support your family is sort of the optional extracurricular choice, then you've immediately stripped away a huge amount of the respect and value that comes with doing the work to support your family. So what I see so encouraging about these discussions is that conservatives are getting away from the mindset of sort of, you know, government spending bad, government can't do anything right. Surely the market will solve things best, which isn't true and is recognizing that there is a

role for public policy here. But with respect to your question, Sarah, I think they equally say, well, just asking, wouldn't it be better if single parents just could stay home for five years is, I don't think the right way to look at it at all. And I think conservatives can really provide a valuable role in saying, how do we use public policy to support families in ways that are also consistent with our nation's expectations and, you know, our intuitions about what we expect of each other, what obligations people have to each other, and sort of how we're defining the social compact. I think what we're talking about, though, is work incentives, a child incentivizing policy and whether work incentives then just alone should be added. I agree that there could be a whole series of policies that could help new single moms for those five years. We could have universal daycare. We could have a federal maternity policy. We could have a child care policy. But I think the point of the Romney plan is not to be prescriptive when we're not going to build out all that infrastructure. And instead, we want people to have children and we want them to care for those

children. And just adding in a work incentive feels like changing that policy without building out the infrastructure it needs. Well, it certainly does change the policy. And I think you're right that we should be asking what other infrastructure we can build out. I think one thing that's been very frustrating about this conversation, and particularly the criticisms that have come from the left, are there's this idea that, like, well, if you don't support the Romney plan, then you think people should starve. Right. And it's like, well, actually, we do spend a trillion dollars a year on anti-poverty policy. Like, among other things, let's not forget, like today there is no Romney policy, right? It's not like I'm trying to repeal the Romney policy, particularly since

welfare reform in 1996, we've said actually there's going to be limited support and an expectation that people are at least doing their part and trying to support themselves. And there's an incredible depth of literature on the extent to which that worked, what didn't work, what the effects were, where there's consensus is that the sky didn't fall. And in fact, if you look at, you know, child poverty rates and the share of families with children in poverty, they did fall after 1996, and we're at an all-time low in 2019. So we have a number of programs in place. We have a program called CCDF that is specifically designed to provide child care to low-income households so that a parent can get back to work and start earning money of their own. We also have,

and this is something that I use as a case study in my book, we have all of civil society. So, you know, Catholic Charities of Fort Worth is a great example of an organization that focuses on helping families in poverty, not by just mailing them a check, but by actually looking at, you know, what is the problem that a particular family has

and what are the goals they are going to be working toward, and how do you help them do that? And so the example I have in my book is exactly this. the parent wanted to go to work, but had a chicken and egg problem that they couldn't afford the daycare to get started working. The answer to that is not to say, let's mail everybody in the country a check every month forever, or even to say, let's have free child care for everybody forever. It's to say, okay, we have resources in place so that there's an organization that can help

this family with this family's problem, which in this case was, how do you afford the first month's daycare. And so you can say, here, we are going to help you afford the first month's daycare. And I believe I'm getting the story right. They said, we're going to pay for daycare for months one and three. And if after six months, you're still employed, we're going to reimburse you for months two and four as well. And it worked. And she was able to get a job and keep the job. And her family moved towards its goals and had three months of savings after a while and so on and so forth. And this sort of dichotomy of like either federal program provides everything in cash or disaster is, that is definitely not the way, the conservative way of understanding how the

world works or what interventions are going to be most effective. I think I agree with you that if these are the debates that conservatives are having, That's a huge difference from five years ago, 10 years ago, let alone, you know, 20 or 30. And so these are good debates to be having. But kind of shifting gears a little bit to, you mentioned earlier this earthquake analogy that you've been using to kind of describe Trump's election and how conservatism rebuilds itself in kind of its aftermath. We've already talked a lot about what you'd like to see kind of changed in that rebuilt

post-Trump future. What, if any, aspects of the pre-Trump GOP do you think should be rebuilt and should be preserved and kind of harken back to? I think there are a lot of things that the right of center and the GOP had right in the past and are important to preserve. I think, you know, the general bias toward limited government and recognizing that, as we've just been discussing to an extent. The default isn't that the government should take care of everything, but that there's a lot of value in having the civil society and families and people on their own take care of things is good. And by the way, the government's not going to do everything especially well. I think is a really important principle. I think, you know, looking at issues of deregulation in a lot of

cases where there's over-regulation is certainly important. I like free trade. If it's working properly, I think we should want to have free trade. And so, you know, we could go through, I mean, I think on judicial policy and all sorts of other things, there are plenty of things I think the Republican Party was right about. But I think there's a way that we sort of have to take the Marie Condo approach to all of this. And, you know, not just assume that it was. all good or all bad, but actually go through the exercise of touching each piece and asking, does it spark joy? And there are, you know, there are places there will. There are places it won't. Certainly there are things that are fraught about doing this. It's hard to hold a coalition

together when you're suddenly rethinking everything. But it is also in the nature of politics that coalitions that are very strong and effective initially kind of ossify and stagnate over time. and both parties have gone through cycles, you know, while the right of center was so strong in the 80s and in the 90s, the Democrats were going through the Democratic Leadership Council and the idea of the new Democrats that then led to Clinton, you have to go through these periods of renewal. And I think the right of center is in one now. Do you think that kind of mirroring that historical analogy that electorally, Republicans might find themselves in the wilderness a little bit for these coming years,

as they figure out what it is that they stand for and what it is that they want to believe in and what not? Do you think that it's difficult to keep that coalition together, as you said, in the coming years, as there is really no one definition of what the GOP is? There could be. And is it worth it.

Yeah, I think the phrase in the wilderness is exactly right. It's one that I use a lot actually to contrast that DLC Democrat experience that we're accustomed to thinking about. with what actually happened to the Republican Party over the last few years, because, of course, what's so strange is that Trump won. I mean, the natural course of things, if you think back to, you know, Goldwater getting crushed in 64 and the 16 years of kind of rebuilding institutions after that that then leads to the Reagan Revolution or the Democrats getting crushed against Reagan

and then all that worth it leads to Clinton, but what's so strange is not that you had sort of this breakdown in the GOP in 2015-16, and then this kind of very strange candidate, it's not that candidate somehow won. And against, you know, someone more competent than Hillary Clinton, he probably wouldn't have. And as it is, you know, he obviously won incredibly narrowly. But what's been going on in recent years, I think, would have sort of made more sense in our way of understanding things if it were happening during a Clinton presidency. Whereas the fact that it was happening with Trump in the White House and like, but what does Trump actually represent? And is Trumpism even a thing? Made it look and feel very different. And I think

that's going to ripple forward. So I don't think we can kind of apply the template of what necessarily happened for Republicans in the 60s and 70s or Democrats in the 80s and into the 90s to what's going to happen to Republicans now. I do think we're headed for a period of disruption. and I think, you know, of course, with the shadow of Donald Trump still hanging over, hanging over all of it. I mean, I think we're seeing that we're not quite sure how that's going to play out, but it's going to be something. And so I think it's a really interesting question, you know, as we talk about post-Trumpism, is 2024 even a post-Trumpism election, or is 2024 still sort of a Trump fallout election? And 2028 is the first post-Trump election. These things take time.

And so I think it's, you know, it's really important to both keep our eye on the long game, to recognize that there are people who need to keep their eye on the short game and have a lot more respect than I see out there for, you know, the elected officials who are trying to make their way through this incredibly fraught environment. But then also to have folks who are playing the long game and thinking about where do we actually want to get to and how do we get from here, there, and are we going to break some things along the way, probably? But it's work that has to be done. And at the end of the day, I think we'll be glad that we did it. What does it mean for conservatism for American Compass if Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2024? It's an interesting question. I mean, for conservative, for conservatism generally, I don't know that it means very much at all. I mean, conservatism is. I mean, conservatism is,

conservatism, right? What it means for whether the Republican Party will be remotely connected to conservatism or not, I think is certainly a very serious question. But, you know, what it means for American Compass or conservative conservatism generally, I think, is more of a timeline question. You know, my perspective is that liberal democracy relies heavily on having healthy, liberal and conservative parties or, you know, representation. And that it's, I will be the first to say it's not that conservatives are always right. It's not that liberals are always wrong or vice versa. It's that both sets of impulses are critically important. And as we sort of navigate between them and bounce back and forth between the guardrails, we try to make our way forward. And I think a real

problem in America in recent years has been the absence of conservatism from the scene. You've sort of had everything being duked out in this very narrow little neoliberal window between the libertarians and the progressives. And I think to make progress, we are going to need a robust and healthy conservatism. And so my hope is that that happens as soon as possible. But if necessary, we'll work on it for as long as it takes. All right. So David Azurad is one of your board members. He recently wrote a piece for the American conservative. American conservatism is fiddling while Rome burns. It's getting trampled all over by history, but while yelling, stop.

And I just want to read a brief section of it. The new right understands not just ideas, but power. The less ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions, in particular those with the power to shape public opinion. to reconquer lost ones, or at the very least, defund them, the universities in particular. Adrian Vermeul, I thought, said something kind of similar in his common good constitutionalism

essay about power being more important than ideas in conservatism at this point. He said common good constitutionalism is also not legal liberalism or libertarianism. Its main aim is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power an incoherent goal in any event, but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well. Is that the future of conservatism that this is actually not about ideas anymore,

that this is about power, and where does American compass sit on this ideas to power spectrum? Well, I have to be honest, we don't listen to David Azarad much. He's on the board because he has such great hair. He does. Listeners, he has the most incredible hair and a French-Canadian accent, which is delight, frankly.

That's right. I should say we listen to him in the sense that we enjoy his accent. Yes. But there's obviously a serious point here about the kind of ideas to power relationship. I find it strange to think of them as a dichotomy. They seem very closely related. That is, I think it's difficult to establish. obtain power if you don't have the right ideas. And I think I'm not sure what the point of attaining

the power is if you don't have ideas that you're trying to advance. And so, you know, it strikes me less as a... But it sounds here like the ideas can't be limited government. If you're saying that your idea is to conquer institutions, defund them, you know, power is sort of anathema to limited government, isn't it? Well, no, I don't think so. In two respects, I think first of all, it's important, and I don't want to speak for them, but I think what they're talking about is not just the role conservatism should play through elected government, but the role that conservatism should play in the culture more broadly, and that I think there are a lot of folks who are frustrated by the extent to which

you see very assertive, progressive efforts in institutions throughout the society to assert a particular perspective and wanting to see conservative counterweights to that. Within the context of government, I think you're right, there's a tension here between power and limited government. And in that space, I think American Compass has a lot to say and is very focused because I think there's a way in which equating conservatism with limited government full stop, you know, less is just always better, does in fact, what has two problems. One, it makes it very hard to win power in the first place. I mean, it's very hard to sort of campaign on

and have a pitch of elect us because we don't want to do anything. But it's also just wrong on the merits, that a public, a conservative public policy is not one that simply says less is always better. That, again, is a kind of totally fundamentalist mindset. It's one that tries to apply conservative principles to the problems we actually have. And so this family policy debate, we were just having the perfect example, right? If, you know, you've got all these different proposals out there, one thing that we found very interesting, we put our proposal out of American Compass and then also solicited responses from a whole bunch of people. And it's interesting to see the range, all responses from folks on the right of center that range from, no, we really should do

the universal Romney style benefit to, no, I disagree with this because it's not government's role to be involved at all. Now, just as a snapshot of where the right is right now, that's fascinating. But it's that second impulse of saying, you know, we could have a debate about whether or not there's a problem here. We could have a debate about whether or not, you know, this particular plan would solve it. But even conceding that there is a problem, this would be a good way to address it. And it would reinforce pro-work, pro-family, pro-social compact values that conservative share. We are still opposed to it because somehow conservatism says we can, we should never be in favor of anything. Like, that's, that's the problem. And it's sort of, it is,

different than market fundamentalism, though certainly related to it. And it's something that I think conservatives have to get beyond. Conservative principles are going to point to different things government should do and counsel different ways government should do them. But just don't do anything ever is not a conservative principle. And so I think we do, just as on the economic side, more broadly need to reclaim the idea that conservative public policy is still affirmative public policy. I think that's a great place to leave this discussion. I do have one last question for you, though. You and I both worked for Mitt Romney back in the day. I, and Mitt Romney went to Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. He got a JDMBA. And I once asked him during the

campaign, whether he thought that was a good idea. I was in law school at the time and was wondering whether I was wasting my effort. And he said, no, that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't get the JD MBA. The JD was pretty pointless. So now you're almost 10 years out of law school. What would you say, should you have gotten an MBA? Are you happy with the JD? what are what are you making of your life decisions 10 years later well that would again be a whole whole different podcast um with respect to with respect to my my credentialization in particular though uh you know the jd is saying i'm very happy that i got i had been already at bain and company doing business consulting for a number of years and knew that after law school i would i would go back

and do it a couple more. And so I felt like I'd basically gotten the MBA excluding the like parties and other ridiculous, unproductive things. MBAs tend to spend most of their time on, whereas, you know, for me, the JD was a real opportunity to actually learn the guts of policy. And one of the things I always say about my experience in law school anyway is that like law school is a heck of a lot of fun when you're not there to be a lawyer. You know, I knew I was there because I wanted to understand public policy. And so while my friends were taking, you know, evidence and advanced federal court procedure, whatever, you know, I was taking labor law and environmental law and trade law and on and on. And in my experience, understanding those things, understanding how our environmental

statutes are actually written and what the tradeoffs are in them and why it's hard to write it well, you can't just say, here's my goal, poof, make a law out of it, has been incredibly helpful to me in understanding the policy challenges we have and formulating the proposals that I want to put forward. So I'm very positive on my own law school experience, though would still caution everyone to think carefully before taking the plunge themselves. I think you're going to be on Team David French, and I'll stick with Team Mitt Romney. Fair enough. Thank you listeners for joining us. Thank you so much, Oren, for coming on and having such a detailed discussion with us about what you guys are doing. It's Americancampus.org, and you can check out Oren's latest op-ed in the New York

Times. The Biden and Romney family plans go too far from this week. Thank you guys very much. This was fun. You know,