The Siren Call of Right-Wing Progressivism | Connor O'Keeffe
Summary
Core Argument: The guest critiques the “new right” economic vision (American Compass/Orin Cass) as essentially progressive economics repackaged for conservatives.
Historical Narrative: He disputes the standard progressive account from the Progressive Era through FDR, arguing regulation served incumbent corporate interests rather than checking them.
Labor Unions: Extensive discussion contends unions raise wages for members by excluding other workers and were empowered by 1930s legislation, creating distortions and conflict in labor markets.
Monetary Regime: Ending the dollar’s gold link in the 1970s is framed as a major power grab that enabled broad economic distortions and inequality trends often blamed on “markets.”
Financialization: The Greenspan Put, bailouts (e.g., Continental Illinois), and easy money are cited as driving Wall Street’s centrality via government backstops rather than market forces.
Trade Policy: “Free trade agreements” are portrayed as complex, government-directed systems (WTO/IMF/World Bank) that centralize power rather than enable true free trade.
Market Diagnosis: The guest asserts the U.S. operates under cronyism/interventionism, not laissez-faire, and warns that mislabeling it as capitalism leads to wrong policy prescriptions.
Investment Relevance: No specific companies, sectors, or investable themes are pitched; the talk is a macro-institutional critique without actionable security recommendations.
Transcript
I don't think it would be particularly controversial of me to say that politically speaking, the last 10 years have been pretty interesting. Um, the popularity of Donald Trump as a candidate and his two victories have been framed as this big shift on the right, but that's been accompanied by the same shift on the left with the popularity of figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC and Zohan Mandani, who's probably going to become the mayor of New York City in a few days. Uh, so what's causing this? What factor or central dynamic lies at the core of all this change? I would argue that the popularity of these figures who to different degrees the political establishment has tried to obstruct that it all comes back to one thing which is that many Americans now recognize that the status quo the the political economic system as it's existed for at least the last few decades is unacceptable which is kind of what we're here talking about. that the trajectory we are on is bad for them, for their families, the communities, their communities, and most everyday Americans, and that therefore we need to make substantial moves away from it. What those changes are varies a lot depending on who you're listening to, what party they're in, or where they fall in the political spectrum. But in this talk, I want to focus on one faction within the right that is presenting an answer. And it's an answer that evidently a lot of it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people, especially young right-wingers, but that I would argue is dangerously wrong. The group doesn't have a single consistent name that it calls itself, but its intellectual core is small and easy to identify. Their lead thinker is a former policy director for Mitt Romney's campaign [clears throat] in 2012 named Orin Cass. and he has a think tank called American Compass that's become sort of a central node for this group. But there are other thinkers like Patrick Dan um Adrien Vermui I don't know how to say his last name. Uh so Amari and uh Steve Bannon in many ways is a part of this group within the government. JD Vance is often associated with them as are Josh Holly and Marco Rubio. So some people pretty you know at the top of the administration. Um, those are the big names, but there are plenty of staffers, young scholars, and activists who operate in this kind of American compass adjacent space. Like I said, there's no clear or agreed upon term to identify this group. Uh, they mostly call themselves populists or the new right. That's not very precise. So, what does this group believe? Again, Orin Cass is their intellectual leader, or at least the one that's done the most work to flesh out their economic vision. So, I'll turn to him. Stated plainly, Cass believes that the right ought to move away from the market fundamentalism or free market dogma that he argues has defined the American right for the last three decades or so. from the American Compass website. The uh the conservative economic philosophy they espouse quote rejects the market fundamentalism of libertarians who see capitalism as nothing more than economic freedom and thus expect a policy agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, and union busting to unleash the economy's productive forces." End quote. So big business making big profits is they say not to be seen as a good in itself. The strength of the economy should not be judged by the sharehel the shareholder value of a few big corporations or the endless growth of GDP but by the productivity of American industry both the well-being and economic security of the American worker and the broader national interest. Corporate power is to be seen by conservatives as just as big a threat as big government. A threat that may require the use of state power if it grows out of hand or stands in the way of conservative goals. As Cass puts it, quote, "Modern multinational corporations have become unmed from their social purpose and incapable of delivering on it. Their leaders have lost contact with the communities and institutions that might hold them accountable, escaped from the oversight and regulation that would channel their activities, and proven themselves shameless in the face of whatever weak standards of decency the culture still attempts to muster." End quote. So in other words, he argues that the lack of care these corporations are showing to American workers and their communities, the the difference in to evil foreign regimes like the CCP and the embrace of extreme not all that popular far-left social causes l they all that all that stems from a lack of social and government restrictions that they act badly simply because they're allowed to and conservatives ought to stop allowing it. He also argues that the right should lean into becoming the party of the American working class and specifically that it should do so by embracing labor unions. Labor unions the right has long viewed as an enemy. He thinks that improving the well-being and economic strength of the American worker is the proper aim of a conservative economic policy and that a return to the golden age of labor unionization would be a major step in that direction. Essentially again from American Compass quote in a well functioning capitalist system participants meet as equals able to advance their interests through mutually beneficial relationships. Organized labor has traditionally been the mechanism that gives workers an institution of solidarity, power in the market, and representation in the workplace. Strong worker representation can make America stronger. End quote. Finally, Cass and his allies believe that the right's commitment to unmitigated free trade has had tragic consequences for American workers and most small American communities. that it has unnecessarily hollowed out middle America and made America weaker on the world stage and that a protectionist trade policy is required to begin to repair some of this damage and to get us back on track or on the track that we would have remained on if not for the rights dogmatic commitment to free trade as a good in itself. In short, Cass Vance and most members of this self-proclaimed new right populist conservative tribe, whatever you want to call it, believe that the believe that the right has erroneously delegated their domestic economic policy to libertarians and that the results have been disastrous. That that is what's caused this terrible status quo that we're here talking about at this event. Now, a lot of these populist conservatives, they really try to play up this stance as being super heterodox. They like to uh they like to act like they're bold truth tellers standing up to these old pro- free market dinosaurs in the establishment right. They'll talk about this Reagan era mythology, this like near religious level of commitment that the right has to the belief that the government should not intervene in the economy at all and argue that as populist as this belief is, it's been proven wrong by reality and the right's continued commitment to it is preventing conservatives from accomplishing what they want, what they seek to accomplish. It shouldn't be a surprise that as more and more people are waking up to the fact that the status quo is not working for them and their families and most Americans that a faction that's presenting itself as a sharp departure from the central guiding philosophy of the right is gaining traction in this our current moment. So what's wrong with this? We're here talking about why the status quo is so bad, especially for young Gen Z Americans. So why shouldn't young American right-wingers specifically support a sharp departure from the economic beliefs that helped bring this about? Well, I think they should. But the problem with the economic vision as laid out by Orin Cass, American Compass, and all their acolytes is that they completely buy into, they completely accept the left-wing progressive narrative of economic history. What I like to call the New York Times version of economic history. And that version of economic history is not just wrong. It's a deliberate deception of mythology meant to help further progressive causes. So, if you like me attended a public school in a blue state, you already know this story very well. But I suspect even those of you who were raised in a more conservative raised and educated in a more conservative setting, you're still exposed to this narrative because it's been so baked into our media and our culture. Progressives usually like to start unsurprisingly with the progressive era. So they'll point to the mid to late 1800s as the period of lazare capitalism, which is genuinely generally accurate. But then according to this narrative the people organically grew tired of the consequences of lazair such as the dangerous and disgusting product quality of important goods like food as detailed in the opening chapters of Upton Sinclair's novel the jungle or the dangerous working conditions forced on workers by greedy capitalists as highlighted by incidents like the triangle shirt waist factory fire that completely organic grassroots movement rose up and demanded reform and so the government reluctantly took more power over the economy economy in what's known as the progressive era and everything was almost wonderful except not enough reform was done to reign in greedy speculators on Wall Street which led to the Great Depression. Everything collapsed in 1929 and then got worse because President Herbert Hoover in this narrative refused to use the government to help which meant FDR had to come in and through the New Deal go to great lengths to help the economy heal. Thanks to Hoover's complete hands-off approach, you know, in this narrative, he was barely able to keep the economy afloat until, thankfully, the worst world war in human history came around and rescued the the American economy from the depression. The government's wartime economy worked wonders and helped usher in the progressives favorite economic period in the post-war years when, as they love to note, taxes on the rich were very high, labor unions were in their golden age, and the economy was booming. But then, for reasons they'll sometimes blame on the oil shocks in the 1970s, ne never ne never anything that progressives or the American government did, the economy slumped into a period of stagnation and inflation or stagflation, which ushered in the Reagan years. Oo, scary. And crucially, as the progressive narrative has it, during the Reagan years, the entire political establishment completely walked back all the progress progressives had made earlier in the 20th century and forced the country back to a level of unfettered lazair capitalism that has not just described but defined our current system ever since. Because it didn't end with Reagan. George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush went even further and made Reagan's system of totally unfettered capitalism even less fettered somehow by cutting taxes, eviscerating the welfare state, and ushering in a globalist neoliberal trade regime that left American workers defenseless on a global market hostile uh full of hostile foreign regimes and people and developing countries willing to work for far lower wages. Then of course the return of lasair capitalism blew up in everybody's faces when the housing bubble collapsed and the country was plunged into the great recession. The government was so committed to lazare capitalism that they forced the American people to bail out the banks and the people got angry and protested and eventually the occupy wall street protesters on the left rallied around Bernie Sanders and later AOC and the Tea Party protesters on the right continued their rejection of the conservative establishment by rallying around Trump blah blah blah. Now we're here. That's the narrative that progressives like to push. And they like to push it not just because it paints them as the heroes of history. Pushing the country forward against a government that is almost cartoonishly reluctant to take any power or do anything whatsoever. They push it because the obvious takeaway from it. The obvious next correct step for the country is to embrace what progressives are saying. reject Lazair once again and return to the high tax industry-heavy economy with a vigorous welfare state and extensive union participation that had this country on a great economic trajectory until Reagan and Bush and Clinton came in and ruined it. Now, for most people, the political group they identify with is primarily a social calculation. But when it comes to the ideas that people subscribe to and defend, when it comes to their worldviews, most people arrive at those ideas through narratives, not logical arguments. As much as we as much as we may wish that that's the case, it's not if A is true and B is true, then C is true. It's more like if A happened which led to B, which now needs to lead to C. So, progressives are, as I defined it, therefore people who subscribe to the narrative I just laid out, at least in a general sense, and the policy vision implied by that narrative. Meaning, Orin Cass and the group he's built up and organized around American compass are progressives, at least on the economic front. They subscribe to the same historical narrative and largely advocate for the same kinds of economic policy. It's actually funny. I was uh researching this and I read an interview that Vox, the left-wing progressive website, did with Orin Cass and the interviewer, he keeps interjecting at the end saying, you know, I'm confused. This just sounds like democratic socialism. And Cass was like, well, no, we're socially conservative. We don't like abortion. And the interviewer, he didn't seem very convinced that that meant that they weren't democratic socialists. But also, many progressives are thrilled with these guys. There's an article in the New York Times called Republicans Against Inequality where the writer is telling Times readers like, "Hey, I know you might be skeptical of this new breed of Republicans, but they really are serious and it's a sign that everyone's finally starting to admit that we're right, that it's time to move away from the lazair approach." It's also probably worth mentioning something that made headlines a few years ago, which is that American Compass is funded in part by two left-wing philanthropies. the Omidar Nexus. It's kind of hard to say, and uh the Hila Foundation. But I don't believe in pure guilt by association. I'm not arguing that these guys are wrong just because some people on the left say that they're right. The reason that right-wing progressives are wrong when it comes to most of the economic policies they advocate for is because the left-wing progressives are wrong, too. Almost the entire progressive narrative that I laid out earlier is wrong. The story that leads people to think that lazy fair capitalism that totally unfettered markets, free markets, is the current economic setup that the country must move away from, you know, if we want to truly reject the status quo. That's far more myth than fact. And that starts with the progressive era right at the beginning. The whole idea that it began because the public rose up and demanded reform is a myth. Gabriel Kolko, I think I'm saying that right, is a historian that did a lot of great work exposing this and that work was built on really well by Murray Rothbart in his book, The Progressive Era. What actually happened was that after trying and failing to form industry cartels and monopolies during the truly lazy fair days at the end of the 1800s or during the 1800s, some heads of industry recognized that the only way they'd be able to actually form these cartels and monopolies was with state power. that began with railroads, but it didn't take long for that insight to spread to other sectors like energy, agriculture, and you know, drug manufacturers and healthcare providers as well. I highly recommend you read Rothbart's book because he shows these industrialists and industry interest groups in their own words recognizing that if they push for new government interventions in the economy and help implement them themselves that they could help warp their industries to their benefit. He shows them realizing it, implementing it, and reaping the financial rewards. That is the true dynamic at the heart of the progressive era. The extensive roll out of new agencies and regulations was not designed to hold big business in check. It was meant from the beginning to leverage the the power of government to help the businesses that were already on top. And that's how it's worked since. Moving on and moving quickly, the Great Depression was caused by the government's credit expansion in the 1920s and then grace greatly exacerbated by FDR and yes, Hoover, too. Both presidents interveneed heavily in the economy and did so in a way that prevented the economy from correcting itself. Recessions and depressions are market corrections and both Hoover and Roosevelt prevented that correction from happening which froze the economy in this kind of permanent recession state. Then World War II did not help the economy heal. In fact, if you strip out all the government spending, the private economy did not farewell as everything was mobilized for war, which is kind of common sense. In fact, the government's attempts to keep prices high, which was what was preventing the market from correcting during the depression, that had mostly gone away by the late 1930s. So, the economy was already improving. It then got set back with the adoption of the wartime economy during World War World War II. But when that went away, the economy returned to its pre-war rate of growth. And that is what we think of as the post-war boom. It wasn't high taxes. And besides, there were a lot of loopholes. Like, very few people were paying 90% rates on their income taxes. and it wasn't labor unions. So, this could be a whole talk in itself, but I'll direct you to two essays that I think spell this out really well and both are available on our website. The first is called the restrictionist pricing of labor by Murray Rothbart. And it goes fairly deep into the economics of what specifically labor unions are doing to labor markets. And what he shows is that in a labor market, the only way a union can secure a higher wage for its members is than they would have gotten on, you know, by selling their uh labor services in an individ in in an individual uh basis is if it's able to lower the wages of other workers or exclude them from the market. which is why labor unions have worked so hard to demonize workers and in a lot of cases especi especially during the uh golden age or the so-called golden age to literally attack outside workers who attempted to undercut the higher priced union wages. Those outside workers must accept lower wages than they'd get on the market or some form of underemployment or mismployment or just straight up unemployment for the labor me for the labor members the union members to enjoy above market wages. Economic theory is very clear about this. Labor unions do not bring about worker solidarity. They literally pit workers against each other. The second essay uh leaves the realm of theory and looks at the actual history of labor unions in the US. It was written by Morgan Reynolds, a chief economist at the Department of Labor. It's called a history of labor unions from colonial times to 2009, which is when it was published. It's long, but it's very detailed and it's really good. What Rand's show shows is that labor unions, as we understand them, are actually pretty new. They didn't really exist until the end of the 1800s, which is around the time big business was starting to warp the economy to to their own benefit. Um, and when you look at these early labor unions, you find exactly what economic theory would have us expect because surprise surprise, economic law is not optional. These early unions were very violent and specifically they were very violent against other workers. They would mostly use beatings and vandalism but sometimes arson and bombings against workers threatening their hold over labor markets their restrictions on the supply. The earliest form of government support they got was as Reynolds shows police in action. The police would stand back and let the workers fight each other which tended to help the unions more. They were better organized after all. But then, especially during the 1930s, the federal government came in and began to take over the violent coercion propping up labor unions. Some of the most important bills to that end were the Davis Bacon Act of 1931 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which criminalized lower paying jobs, driving non-UN workers out of many markets. The Norris LaGuardia Act of 1932 gave unions a level of legal immunity enjoyed by enjoyed by few non-government entities and declared all non-UN employment agreements, [clears throat] sorry, all non-UN employment agreements uninforceable in federal court. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave unions extensive leverage over employers in exchange for some government control over the election of union leadership. So the government came in and helped unions bring about a restrictionist price of labor far beyond the level that they could achieve with threats, violence or social pressure. And that's what helped usher in the post-war golden age of labor unions. Because of course the federal government helping to prop up union wages was good for workers and unions, but it wasn't good for all workers. In fact, it was bad for for many. Okay, now let's get to the 70s and 80s, the period that's probably the most important to understand if we really want to see meaningful e economic improvements in this country. First, it's important to mention an event that's always left out of the progressive narrative, uh, but the consequences of which are nearly impossible to overstate, and that's when President Nixon suspended the dollar's tie to gold. That was a complete government takeover of the value of money. And because money is half of every transaction that happens anywhere in the economy, it's hard to emphasize enough just how big of a power grab this was. Taking full control of the money allowed the political establishment to supercharge the rackets they had been building up and carrying out since the progressive era, designed to move as much of our money as possible into the pockets of well-connected companies. It's no coincidence, It's no coincidence, excuse me, that most of the economic trends that progressives and really everybody doesn't like when it comes to economic mobility, income inequality, the impossibility of maintaining a family on one income, the hollowing out of middle American communities, even your uh statistic about marriage age, it's not a coincidence that they almost always go back to the 1970s. Then in the 1980s, you have the birth of bailout culture with the government's bailout of Continental Illinois, a bank the government determined was too big to fail. At the same time, and mind you, this is all during the Reagan years when the the progressives were saying it was just an era of small government. At the same time, the Federal Reserve, the central bank, came under the control of Allen Greenspan. And what Greenspan did or really helped to do is very important to understand. It's something I highly recommend uh you read more into. There is one there's a few books um I'd recommend. There's one I think it's fairly new called what went wrong with capitalism by rushier chararma and that it gives a good overview of uh the history here. David Stockman has a book called the great deformation that gets into this as well. And then we publish a collection of essays by Murray Rothbart called making economic sense and a lot deal with this era. So what Greenspan Greenspan did in response to the stock market crash of 19887 specifically is he made it clear to the financial industry that he would use the awesome power of the central bank to serve as a source of liquidity and support for the financial system. And that support really didn't go away as the bad times following the 87 crash uh ended. This has come to be known in sort of the popular lexicon as the green span put and it helped usher in our current era of what some people call financialization. Wall Street's evolution from simply being a way to invest in some companies as one of many alternative investments to becoming in many ways the center of the economy was not some natural market move based solely on people's preferences. It came from Greenspan's Fed and Reagan and then Bush Senior's Treasury departments combining their new bailout philosophy with an era of easy money to bring about what was in effect a wartime economy, but not to defeat some foreign enemy, but to prop up and support the financial sector. We are still living under that system. Then more in the 90s came the so-called free trade agreements. As Peter Klein, who's one of our senior fellows, uh, as he's written, economists and politicians have two very different definitions of free trade. For economists and most people outside of DC, free trade simply means an absence of government interference with foreign trade. But to politicians and government officials, free trade it refers to complex agreements that only come about after governments negotiate thousands of pages of tariffs, taxes, and subsidies designed to warp trade to their liking. Add to that the ideology of globalism, which holds that international markets and peaceful cooperation can only come about through top-down global governance enforced and secured by a global superpower. And you start to understand how our government has tried to warp these trade agreements. Our trade policy in recent decades has not been based on the idea that Americans should be allowed to buy what they want and sell to whomever they like. It's been defined by government brokered and government subsidized trade enforced by multinational organizations like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, all backed by the globe spanning power of the United States military. A few libertarians and free market advocates like Rothbart and Lou Rockwell, our founder and chairman, uh saw the postcold war trade deals for what they were back then, an effort to take legislative and judicial authority away from states and localities and to instead centralize that all that power into multinational organizations ultimately controlled by Washington DC and acting in the interest not of the American people but of the Washington establishment and their allies in various industries. So, some free market advocates understood that this was just another example of the government warping the economy to benefit itself and the well-connected. But many, arguably most, went along with it simply because the government called it free trade. And it's not just trade. Remember how progressives presented all of this? Everything we talked about, the crony departments and regulations that have been building up for over a century now. And despite what progressives say, Ronald Reagan and Clinton and Bush, they did not wipe it out. They only expanded it. Legislation that institutionally pits workers against each other, which also hasn't gone away. The complete control the government now exerts over money. The artificial propping up of the financial sector, the trillions of dollars in entitlements that the government sends to keep some of the people they're ripping off afloat while also making them dependent on the current level of government power. and overall all the ways that Washington works with well-connected businesses to warp important industries like healthcare, agriculture, education, the financial sector, and really the entire economy to move as much money as possible from the pockets of everyday Americans to the well-connected rich. All of that is to progressives on the left and right and the polit and the political establishment itself simply capitalism, the free market, lazy fair and free trade. But it isn't. It's cronyism. It's corporatism. It's interventionism. It's progressivism. You can call it whatever you want. But what it is not is a system where the government has nothing to do with the economy. calling what we've had for the last 40 years lazare capitalism is simply a branding choice meant to mislead you and it's meant to prime you so whenever there's an economic crisis of any kind your immediate ref your immediate reflex is to conclude that the crisis only happened because you have too much economic freedom Americans and young right-wingers are absolutely correct to reject the awful status quo this awful system that's been ripping them off But to and to you know instead seek a better system. But to really truly reject it, you first have to understand it. And it would be a major mistake for the right to delegate their understanding of what's gone wrong under the current system to their ide ideological opponents. Thank you. [applause]
The Siren Call of Right-Wing Progressivism | Connor O'Keeffe
Summary
Transcript
I don't think it would be particularly controversial of me to say that politically speaking, the last 10 years have been pretty interesting. Um, the popularity of Donald Trump as a candidate and his two victories have been framed as this big shift on the right, but that's been accompanied by the same shift on the left with the popularity of figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC and Zohan Mandani, who's probably going to become the mayor of New York City in a few days. Uh, so what's causing this? What factor or central dynamic lies at the core of all this change? I would argue that the popularity of these figures who to different degrees the political establishment has tried to obstruct that it all comes back to one thing which is that many Americans now recognize that the status quo the the political economic system as it's existed for at least the last few decades is unacceptable which is kind of what we're here talking about. that the trajectory we are on is bad for them, for their families, the communities, their communities, and most everyday Americans, and that therefore we need to make substantial moves away from it. What those changes are varies a lot depending on who you're listening to, what party they're in, or where they fall in the political spectrum. But in this talk, I want to focus on one faction within the right that is presenting an answer. And it's an answer that evidently a lot of it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people, especially young right-wingers, but that I would argue is dangerously wrong. The group doesn't have a single consistent name that it calls itself, but its intellectual core is small and easy to identify. Their lead thinker is a former policy director for Mitt Romney's campaign [clears throat] in 2012 named Orin Cass. and he has a think tank called American Compass that's become sort of a central node for this group. But there are other thinkers like Patrick Dan um Adrien Vermui I don't know how to say his last name. Uh so Amari and uh Steve Bannon in many ways is a part of this group within the government. JD Vance is often associated with them as are Josh Holly and Marco Rubio. So some people pretty you know at the top of the administration. Um, those are the big names, but there are plenty of staffers, young scholars, and activists who operate in this kind of American compass adjacent space. Like I said, there's no clear or agreed upon term to identify this group. Uh, they mostly call themselves populists or the new right. That's not very precise. So, what does this group believe? Again, Orin Cass is their intellectual leader, or at least the one that's done the most work to flesh out their economic vision. So, I'll turn to him. Stated plainly, Cass believes that the right ought to move away from the market fundamentalism or free market dogma that he argues has defined the American right for the last three decades or so. from the American Compass website. The uh the conservative economic philosophy they espouse quote rejects the market fundamentalism of libertarians who see capitalism as nothing more than economic freedom and thus expect a policy agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, and union busting to unleash the economy's productive forces." End quote. So big business making big profits is they say not to be seen as a good in itself. The strength of the economy should not be judged by the sharehel the shareholder value of a few big corporations or the endless growth of GDP but by the productivity of American industry both the well-being and economic security of the American worker and the broader national interest. Corporate power is to be seen by conservatives as just as big a threat as big government. A threat that may require the use of state power if it grows out of hand or stands in the way of conservative goals. As Cass puts it, quote, "Modern multinational corporations have become unmed from their social purpose and incapable of delivering on it. Their leaders have lost contact with the communities and institutions that might hold them accountable, escaped from the oversight and regulation that would channel their activities, and proven themselves shameless in the face of whatever weak standards of decency the culture still attempts to muster." End quote. So in other words, he argues that the lack of care these corporations are showing to American workers and their communities, the the difference in to evil foreign regimes like the CCP and the embrace of extreme not all that popular far-left social causes l they all that all that stems from a lack of social and government restrictions that they act badly simply because they're allowed to and conservatives ought to stop allowing it. He also argues that the right should lean into becoming the party of the American working class and specifically that it should do so by embracing labor unions. Labor unions the right has long viewed as an enemy. He thinks that improving the well-being and economic strength of the American worker is the proper aim of a conservative economic policy and that a return to the golden age of labor unionization would be a major step in that direction. Essentially again from American Compass quote in a well functioning capitalist system participants meet as equals able to advance their interests through mutually beneficial relationships. Organized labor has traditionally been the mechanism that gives workers an institution of solidarity, power in the market, and representation in the workplace. Strong worker representation can make America stronger. End quote. Finally, Cass and his allies believe that the right's commitment to unmitigated free trade has had tragic consequences for American workers and most small American communities. that it has unnecessarily hollowed out middle America and made America weaker on the world stage and that a protectionist trade policy is required to begin to repair some of this damage and to get us back on track or on the track that we would have remained on if not for the rights dogmatic commitment to free trade as a good in itself. In short, Cass Vance and most members of this self-proclaimed new right populist conservative tribe, whatever you want to call it, believe that the believe that the right has erroneously delegated their domestic economic policy to libertarians and that the results have been disastrous. That that is what's caused this terrible status quo that we're here talking about at this event. Now, a lot of these populist conservatives, they really try to play up this stance as being super heterodox. They like to uh they like to act like they're bold truth tellers standing up to these old pro- free market dinosaurs in the establishment right. They'll talk about this Reagan era mythology, this like near religious level of commitment that the right has to the belief that the government should not intervene in the economy at all and argue that as populist as this belief is, it's been proven wrong by reality and the right's continued commitment to it is preventing conservatives from accomplishing what they want, what they seek to accomplish. It shouldn't be a surprise that as more and more people are waking up to the fact that the status quo is not working for them and their families and most Americans that a faction that's presenting itself as a sharp departure from the central guiding philosophy of the right is gaining traction in this our current moment. So what's wrong with this? We're here talking about why the status quo is so bad, especially for young Gen Z Americans. So why shouldn't young American right-wingers specifically support a sharp departure from the economic beliefs that helped bring this about? Well, I think they should. But the problem with the economic vision as laid out by Orin Cass, American Compass, and all their acolytes is that they completely buy into, they completely accept the left-wing progressive narrative of economic history. What I like to call the New York Times version of economic history. And that version of economic history is not just wrong. It's a deliberate deception of mythology meant to help further progressive causes. So, if you like me attended a public school in a blue state, you already know this story very well. But I suspect even those of you who were raised in a more conservative raised and educated in a more conservative setting, you're still exposed to this narrative because it's been so baked into our media and our culture. Progressives usually like to start unsurprisingly with the progressive era. So they'll point to the mid to late 1800s as the period of lazare capitalism, which is genuinely generally accurate. But then according to this narrative the people organically grew tired of the consequences of lazair such as the dangerous and disgusting product quality of important goods like food as detailed in the opening chapters of Upton Sinclair's novel the jungle or the dangerous working conditions forced on workers by greedy capitalists as highlighted by incidents like the triangle shirt waist factory fire that completely organic grassroots movement rose up and demanded reform and so the government reluctantly took more power over the economy economy in what's known as the progressive era and everything was almost wonderful except not enough reform was done to reign in greedy speculators on Wall Street which led to the Great Depression. Everything collapsed in 1929 and then got worse because President Herbert Hoover in this narrative refused to use the government to help which meant FDR had to come in and through the New Deal go to great lengths to help the economy heal. Thanks to Hoover's complete hands-off approach, you know, in this narrative, he was barely able to keep the economy afloat until, thankfully, the worst world war in human history came around and rescued the the American economy from the depression. The government's wartime economy worked wonders and helped usher in the progressives favorite economic period in the post-war years when, as they love to note, taxes on the rich were very high, labor unions were in their golden age, and the economy was booming. But then, for reasons they'll sometimes blame on the oil shocks in the 1970s, ne never ne never anything that progressives or the American government did, the economy slumped into a period of stagnation and inflation or stagflation, which ushered in the Reagan years. Oo, scary. And crucially, as the progressive narrative has it, during the Reagan years, the entire political establishment completely walked back all the progress progressives had made earlier in the 20th century and forced the country back to a level of unfettered lazair capitalism that has not just described but defined our current system ever since. Because it didn't end with Reagan. George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush went even further and made Reagan's system of totally unfettered capitalism even less fettered somehow by cutting taxes, eviscerating the welfare state, and ushering in a globalist neoliberal trade regime that left American workers defenseless on a global market hostile uh full of hostile foreign regimes and people and developing countries willing to work for far lower wages. Then of course the return of lasair capitalism blew up in everybody's faces when the housing bubble collapsed and the country was plunged into the great recession. The government was so committed to lazare capitalism that they forced the American people to bail out the banks and the people got angry and protested and eventually the occupy wall street protesters on the left rallied around Bernie Sanders and later AOC and the Tea Party protesters on the right continued their rejection of the conservative establishment by rallying around Trump blah blah blah. Now we're here. That's the narrative that progressives like to push. And they like to push it not just because it paints them as the heroes of history. Pushing the country forward against a government that is almost cartoonishly reluctant to take any power or do anything whatsoever. They push it because the obvious takeaway from it. The obvious next correct step for the country is to embrace what progressives are saying. reject Lazair once again and return to the high tax industry-heavy economy with a vigorous welfare state and extensive union participation that had this country on a great economic trajectory until Reagan and Bush and Clinton came in and ruined it. Now, for most people, the political group they identify with is primarily a social calculation. But when it comes to the ideas that people subscribe to and defend, when it comes to their worldviews, most people arrive at those ideas through narratives, not logical arguments. As much as we as much as we may wish that that's the case, it's not if A is true and B is true, then C is true. It's more like if A happened which led to B, which now needs to lead to C. So, progressives are, as I defined it, therefore people who subscribe to the narrative I just laid out, at least in a general sense, and the policy vision implied by that narrative. Meaning, Orin Cass and the group he's built up and organized around American compass are progressives, at least on the economic front. They subscribe to the same historical narrative and largely advocate for the same kinds of economic policy. It's actually funny. I was uh researching this and I read an interview that Vox, the left-wing progressive website, did with Orin Cass and the interviewer, he keeps interjecting at the end saying, you know, I'm confused. This just sounds like democratic socialism. And Cass was like, well, no, we're socially conservative. We don't like abortion. And the interviewer, he didn't seem very convinced that that meant that they weren't democratic socialists. But also, many progressives are thrilled with these guys. There's an article in the New York Times called Republicans Against Inequality where the writer is telling Times readers like, "Hey, I know you might be skeptical of this new breed of Republicans, but they really are serious and it's a sign that everyone's finally starting to admit that we're right, that it's time to move away from the lazair approach." It's also probably worth mentioning something that made headlines a few years ago, which is that American Compass is funded in part by two left-wing philanthropies. the Omidar Nexus. It's kind of hard to say, and uh the Hila Foundation. But I don't believe in pure guilt by association. I'm not arguing that these guys are wrong just because some people on the left say that they're right. The reason that right-wing progressives are wrong when it comes to most of the economic policies they advocate for is because the left-wing progressives are wrong, too. Almost the entire progressive narrative that I laid out earlier is wrong. The story that leads people to think that lazy fair capitalism that totally unfettered markets, free markets, is the current economic setup that the country must move away from, you know, if we want to truly reject the status quo. That's far more myth than fact. And that starts with the progressive era right at the beginning. The whole idea that it began because the public rose up and demanded reform is a myth. Gabriel Kolko, I think I'm saying that right, is a historian that did a lot of great work exposing this and that work was built on really well by Murray Rothbart in his book, The Progressive Era. What actually happened was that after trying and failing to form industry cartels and monopolies during the truly lazy fair days at the end of the 1800s or during the 1800s, some heads of industry recognized that the only way they'd be able to actually form these cartels and monopolies was with state power. that began with railroads, but it didn't take long for that insight to spread to other sectors like energy, agriculture, and you know, drug manufacturers and healthcare providers as well. I highly recommend you read Rothbart's book because he shows these industrialists and industry interest groups in their own words recognizing that if they push for new government interventions in the economy and help implement them themselves that they could help warp their industries to their benefit. He shows them realizing it, implementing it, and reaping the financial rewards. That is the true dynamic at the heart of the progressive era. The extensive roll out of new agencies and regulations was not designed to hold big business in check. It was meant from the beginning to leverage the the power of government to help the businesses that were already on top. And that's how it's worked since. Moving on and moving quickly, the Great Depression was caused by the government's credit expansion in the 1920s and then grace greatly exacerbated by FDR and yes, Hoover, too. Both presidents interveneed heavily in the economy and did so in a way that prevented the economy from correcting itself. Recessions and depressions are market corrections and both Hoover and Roosevelt prevented that correction from happening which froze the economy in this kind of permanent recession state. Then World War II did not help the economy heal. In fact, if you strip out all the government spending, the private economy did not farewell as everything was mobilized for war, which is kind of common sense. In fact, the government's attempts to keep prices high, which was what was preventing the market from correcting during the depression, that had mostly gone away by the late 1930s. So, the economy was already improving. It then got set back with the adoption of the wartime economy during World War World War II. But when that went away, the economy returned to its pre-war rate of growth. And that is what we think of as the post-war boom. It wasn't high taxes. And besides, there were a lot of loopholes. Like, very few people were paying 90% rates on their income taxes. and it wasn't labor unions. So, this could be a whole talk in itself, but I'll direct you to two essays that I think spell this out really well and both are available on our website. The first is called the restrictionist pricing of labor by Murray Rothbart. And it goes fairly deep into the economics of what specifically labor unions are doing to labor markets. And what he shows is that in a labor market, the only way a union can secure a higher wage for its members is than they would have gotten on, you know, by selling their uh labor services in an individ in in an individual uh basis is if it's able to lower the wages of other workers or exclude them from the market. which is why labor unions have worked so hard to demonize workers and in a lot of cases especi especially during the uh golden age or the so-called golden age to literally attack outside workers who attempted to undercut the higher priced union wages. Those outside workers must accept lower wages than they'd get on the market or some form of underemployment or mismployment or just straight up unemployment for the labor me for the labor members the union members to enjoy above market wages. Economic theory is very clear about this. Labor unions do not bring about worker solidarity. They literally pit workers against each other. The second essay uh leaves the realm of theory and looks at the actual history of labor unions in the US. It was written by Morgan Reynolds, a chief economist at the Department of Labor. It's called a history of labor unions from colonial times to 2009, which is when it was published. It's long, but it's very detailed and it's really good. What Rand's show shows is that labor unions, as we understand them, are actually pretty new. They didn't really exist until the end of the 1800s, which is around the time big business was starting to warp the economy to to their own benefit. Um, and when you look at these early labor unions, you find exactly what economic theory would have us expect because surprise surprise, economic law is not optional. These early unions were very violent and specifically they were very violent against other workers. They would mostly use beatings and vandalism but sometimes arson and bombings against workers threatening their hold over labor markets their restrictions on the supply. The earliest form of government support they got was as Reynolds shows police in action. The police would stand back and let the workers fight each other which tended to help the unions more. They were better organized after all. But then, especially during the 1930s, the federal government came in and began to take over the violent coercion propping up labor unions. Some of the most important bills to that end were the Davis Bacon Act of 1931 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which criminalized lower paying jobs, driving non-UN workers out of many markets. The Norris LaGuardia Act of 1932 gave unions a level of legal immunity enjoyed by enjoyed by few non-government entities and declared all non-UN employment agreements, [clears throat] sorry, all non-UN employment agreements uninforceable in federal court. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave unions extensive leverage over employers in exchange for some government control over the election of union leadership. So the government came in and helped unions bring about a restrictionist price of labor far beyond the level that they could achieve with threats, violence or social pressure. And that's what helped usher in the post-war golden age of labor unions. Because of course the federal government helping to prop up union wages was good for workers and unions, but it wasn't good for all workers. In fact, it was bad for for many. Okay, now let's get to the 70s and 80s, the period that's probably the most important to understand if we really want to see meaningful e economic improvements in this country. First, it's important to mention an event that's always left out of the progressive narrative, uh, but the consequences of which are nearly impossible to overstate, and that's when President Nixon suspended the dollar's tie to gold. That was a complete government takeover of the value of money. And because money is half of every transaction that happens anywhere in the economy, it's hard to emphasize enough just how big of a power grab this was. Taking full control of the money allowed the political establishment to supercharge the rackets they had been building up and carrying out since the progressive era, designed to move as much of our money as possible into the pockets of well-connected companies. It's no coincidence, It's no coincidence, excuse me, that most of the economic trends that progressives and really everybody doesn't like when it comes to economic mobility, income inequality, the impossibility of maintaining a family on one income, the hollowing out of middle American communities, even your uh statistic about marriage age, it's not a coincidence that they almost always go back to the 1970s. Then in the 1980s, you have the birth of bailout culture with the government's bailout of Continental Illinois, a bank the government determined was too big to fail. At the same time, and mind you, this is all during the Reagan years when the the progressives were saying it was just an era of small government. At the same time, the Federal Reserve, the central bank, came under the control of Allen Greenspan. And what Greenspan did or really helped to do is very important to understand. It's something I highly recommend uh you read more into. There is one there's a few books um I'd recommend. There's one I think it's fairly new called what went wrong with capitalism by rushier chararma and that it gives a good overview of uh the history here. David Stockman has a book called the great deformation that gets into this as well. And then we publish a collection of essays by Murray Rothbart called making economic sense and a lot deal with this era. So what Greenspan Greenspan did in response to the stock market crash of 19887 specifically is he made it clear to the financial industry that he would use the awesome power of the central bank to serve as a source of liquidity and support for the financial system. And that support really didn't go away as the bad times following the 87 crash uh ended. This has come to be known in sort of the popular lexicon as the green span put and it helped usher in our current era of what some people call financialization. Wall Street's evolution from simply being a way to invest in some companies as one of many alternative investments to becoming in many ways the center of the economy was not some natural market move based solely on people's preferences. It came from Greenspan's Fed and Reagan and then Bush Senior's Treasury departments combining their new bailout philosophy with an era of easy money to bring about what was in effect a wartime economy, but not to defeat some foreign enemy, but to prop up and support the financial sector. We are still living under that system. Then more in the 90s came the so-called free trade agreements. As Peter Klein, who's one of our senior fellows, uh, as he's written, economists and politicians have two very different definitions of free trade. For economists and most people outside of DC, free trade simply means an absence of government interference with foreign trade. But to politicians and government officials, free trade it refers to complex agreements that only come about after governments negotiate thousands of pages of tariffs, taxes, and subsidies designed to warp trade to their liking. Add to that the ideology of globalism, which holds that international markets and peaceful cooperation can only come about through top-down global governance enforced and secured by a global superpower. And you start to understand how our government has tried to warp these trade agreements. Our trade policy in recent decades has not been based on the idea that Americans should be allowed to buy what they want and sell to whomever they like. It's been defined by government brokered and government subsidized trade enforced by multinational organizations like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, all backed by the globe spanning power of the United States military. A few libertarians and free market advocates like Rothbart and Lou Rockwell, our founder and chairman, uh saw the postcold war trade deals for what they were back then, an effort to take legislative and judicial authority away from states and localities and to instead centralize that all that power into multinational organizations ultimately controlled by Washington DC and acting in the interest not of the American people but of the Washington establishment and their allies in various industries. So, some free market advocates understood that this was just another example of the government warping the economy to benefit itself and the well-connected. But many, arguably most, went along with it simply because the government called it free trade. And it's not just trade. Remember how progressives presented all of this? Everything we talked about, the crony departments and regulations that have been building up for over a century now. And despite what progressives say, Ronald Reagan and Clinton and Bush, they did not wipe it out. They only expanded it. Legislation that institutionally pits workers against each other, which also hasn't gone away. The complete control the government now exerts over money. The artificial propping up of the financial sector, the trillions of dollars in entitlements that the government sends to keep some of the people they're ripping off afloat while also making them dependent on the current level of government power. and overall all the ways that Washington works with well-connected businesses to warp important industries like healthcare, agriculture, education, the financial sector, and really the entire economy to move as much money as possible from the pockets of everyday Americans to the well-connected rich. All of that is to progressives on the left and right and the polit and the political establishment itself simply capitalism, the free market, lazy fair and free trade. But it isn't. It's cronyism. It's corporatism. It's interventionism. It's progressivism. You can call it whatever you want. But what it is not is a system where the government has nothing to do with the economy. calling what we've had for the last 40 years lazare capitalism is simply a branding choice meant to mislead you and it's meant to prime you so whenever there's an economic crisis of any kind your immediate ref your immediate reflex is to conclude that the crisis only happened because you have too much economic freedom Americans and young right-wingers are absolutely correct to reject the awful status quo this awful system that's been ripping them off But to and to you know instead seek a better system. But to really truly reject it, you first have to understand it. And it would be a major mistake for the right to delegate their understanding of what's gone wrong under the current system to their ide ideological opponents. Thank you. [applause]