Shortly before launching the think tank American Compass in 2020, Oren Cass gave an interview to the Washington Post. He compared Donald Trump to an earthquake shaking apart the old Republican coalition of social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and free-market enthusiasts. Cass wanted to build something new in the space left behind, to “think about what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be.”
He was talking especially about economics. In Republican circles today, the grand old mantra of free trade, limited government, and fiscal responsibility sounds antique. Party leadership advocates muscular industrial policies, punitive tariffs, and enough deficit myopia to rival the Democrats. Cass wants to make this activist stance permanent by undergirding it with academic rigor. But while such economic populism has dominated the campaign trail since the 2016 election cycle, any deeper intellectual realignment of the right is not likely to gel until after Trump leaves office.
In the meantime, traditional proponents of free markets are fighting Cass-style “productive pluralists” for the future of conservative economic thought. The winner could influence U.S. economic policy for decades to come.
Economist Norbert Michel of the Cato Institute, author of the 2025 book Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies Are Threatening the American Dream, is one of the free-market voices opposing Cass. He notes that populist sentiment has long circulated on the right, but no one before Trump was able to sell it successfully. “A lot of the Trump populism is not new,” he told me, pointing to the 1990s when Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were shaking up the conservative electorate. Perot garnered 19 percent of the popular vote as an independent candidate in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. He did it while railing against a “giant sucking sound” he claimed would result as freer trade with Mexico pulled jobs south of the border.
Despite such populist rumblings, the 1990s and early 2000s were a political high-water mark for economic thought that went by names such as the Chicago school and freshwater neoclassicalism. Closely related, the former was associated with thinkers such as Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. The latter was a more widespread, highly mathematical approach to modeling the macroeconomy on the microeconomic decisions of a rational and utility-maximizing consumer, sometimes called homo economicus, or economic man. Both approaches were staunchly free-market. And such thinking dominated both academic debates and Republican economic policy. That ended in 2016.
“[The earlier populism] never got over the finish line,” Michel said. “Trump somehow got across that finish line.”
Soon after he did, Cass, a Harvard-trained lawyer and former policy adviser to Mitt Romney, arguably landed the first big punch of the current intellectual brawl with his 2018 book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. He argued that economic policy should focus less on gross domestic product (GDP) and more on building up communities harmed by economic change. Two years later, Cass founded American Compass and began debating all comers in a crusade against what he terms “market fundamentalism” in conservative thought. At Harvard Business School, he and attorney Katherine Tai debated the value of tariffs with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Harvard Kennedy School professor Robert Lawrence. At Princeton, Cass debated the future of capitalism with economist Samuel Gregg, president of the American Institute for Economic Research. On The Weekly Show, he discussed the deficiencies of “shareholder capitalism” with Jon Stewart.
The core message comes across as a calm, professorial doppelganger of MAGA campaign trail rhetoric. Cass believes there is more to national flourishing than GDP growth, therefore conservative economic theory and policy should embrace that broader understanding.
More traditional conservatives might agree with the premise but reject the conclusion. Certainly there is more to life than material wealth. But what does that have to do with the economy? Issues such as welfare dependency, substance abuse, and obesity are real, but arguably more cultural than economic. And at least since Reagan, conservatives have offered an alternative to the progressive idea that economics is a tool for centralized social planning.
In Michel’s view, Cass’ argument is also factually problematic.
“The wage stagnation story is wrong,” Michel said, referring to the narrative that freer international markets have left average Americans behind. He explained that U.S. median household income has grown 70 percent since 1970, and 132 percent for families with children. And the relative decline of the manufacturing sector of the economy, another complaint of productive pluralists, began decades earlier than is commonly understood. Michel asserted it was in either the 1920s or 1940s, depending on the data you use. If true, that places it well before the “neoliberal” era of expanding international trade agreements and China’s admittance into the World Trade Organization. And the primary driver of the decline has been productivity growth, Michel added, a pretty good problem to have.
Alex Tabarrok is a professor at George Mason University and economics chair at the Mercatus Center, a market-oriented think tank. He co-authors the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. Tabarrok struck a similar tone to Michel, telling me in an email that the average American today lives better, economically speaking, than folks in nations such as France, Germany, and Japan.
“Americans have bigger homes, more cars, better medical technology, and access to a cornucopia of goods that would have been unimaginable a generation ago,” he said. Yet Tabarrok acknowledged that some have been hurt by freer global trade, pointing out that change inevitably results in winners and losers. But he claimed that even many of globalism’s beneficiaries are now buying into the narrative of market-led economic decline. Tabarrok also acknowledged there was one way in which the United States needs to be made great again.
“America has become a grievance nation,” he said. He explained that while the left claims victimhood from racism, colonialism, and a malevolent “patriarchy,” the new right claims victimhood from globalization, immigration, and feminism.
“But look around,” Tabarrok said. “We are one of the most racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world—and one of the most tolerant. We do immigration and assimilation better than any other nation. We create economic opportunity for immigrants and natives, men and women, black and white. The things both sides say are destroying America are in fact the things that make America awesome.”
If this is true, there may be a kind of emotional transference at work in conservative populism. The U.S. economy is arguably doing what an economy is meant to do, better than ever before. In the 1950s, for instance, a 21-inch color television might have run you $495 (equivalent to about $5,500 today). Last year, I bought a 50-inch set at Walmart for under $200.
Yet other dynamics of 21st-century life, from the decline of local institutions and religious observance to political disunity, feel less hopeful. Whatever glue once melded the U.S. into a coherent culture has clearly weakened. People may be blaming the resulting unhappiness on the economy. And in an era when angst is cheap, Tabarrok told me he worries about whether enough of the country will continue to support the limited government, free-market model.
“Right now,” he said, “that constituency is small and shrinking.”
That is even true within academia. Once, neoclassical economists such as Friedman and Robert Lucas Jr. bucked the trend of the left-leaning university system to make economics one of the few departments where free-market conservatism was not only represented but often ascendant. Today, that ivory tower energy has moved to supposedly apolitical, microeconomic testing of policy questions, in what has been termed a “credibility revolution.”
This all raises the question of how traditional free-market conservatism will fare going forward. Politically speaking, it’s not enough to tell voters the economy is strong and back it up with data. Voters want a story. They want to be inspired. And neoclassical economics, the kind I learned in graduate school in the 1990s, just doesn’t translate well to today’s political arena.
But there is a heterodox body of free-market thought outside of neoclassicalism: the Austrian school. It emerged from the same late 19th-century “marginal revolution” that later led to neoclassical economics. Both schools embrace the original, revolutionary idea that the value of a good or service comes not from the quantity of labor that produced it, but the value consumers place on the next unit they want to acquire. Someone could spend all week making a hair comb out of razor-sharp needles, but why would anyone buy it?
In the Austrians’ telling, the neoclassicals’ original sin was in being tempted from the true path of the revolution by a serpent conversant in math. Eventually, the two schools spoke different languages. But both still support free markets.
My master’s program included one student who was a partisan of the Austrian approach. Vastly outnumbered, he made up for it with intellectual passion. And his reasoning, more verbal than that of our professors, often sounded more realistic. Though I’ve never considered myself an Austrian, strictly speaking, it occurred to me that the approach might offer advantages in today’s political climate.
“Absolutely!” said economist Robert P. Murphy, senior fellow at the Austrian-leaning Mises Institute. He is familiar with the new right, having interviewed Cass on several occasions. For a story that could resonate with families worried about their financial future, Murphy pointed out how a “Federal Reserve and banking cartel” serially destabilizes the economy. This is a standard Austrian critique that discretionary interest rate policy does more harm than good. By artificially lowering rates, for example, the Federal Reserve may spur excessive borrowing, leading to too many dollars chasing too few goods, as well as misallocated investments. The result is inflation and a boom-bust cycle. As a remedy, Austrians propose alternatives such as rule-based monetary policy, a gold standard, or a free banking system with no central bank at all.
More generally, rather than a mechanistic universe of abstruse math and rigidly rational “homines economici,” Austrians see the economy as a land of opportunities, an adventure in which sovereign consumers and heroic entrepreneurs build better lives for themselves and others, despite the efforts of centralized power to sabotage them. The end of Trump’s second term might allow such stories to gain space in conservative thought.
Regardless, both Michel and Tabarrok agreed it will be challenging for the populist right to replicate Trump’s influence after 2028.
“You need somebody to pull it off,” Michel said. “I don’t think that there are many other people coming through the ranks that have that appeal.”
“Trump is unique,” Tabarrok said. “He’s tremendously charismatic, and he cannot be shamed. A lot of politicians want to be the next Trump, but most of them are just doing an impression. … In that narrow sense, yes — Trumpism fades when Trump fades.”
For his part, Murphy said that Trump had “permanently shattered” the conservative coalition that last won a national election with George W. Bush. But that didn’t seem to bother him, as he believed Bush strayed far from a free-market stance. Whatever comes next for conservatism, Murphy felt it would be something other than a reconstitution of a past era.
“I think the genie is out of the bottle,” he said.
