Nice Conservative Blueprint, Who’s Gonna Build It?

How to fund a movement of, by, and for ordinary Americans

As of about 5:00pm on Election Day, one could still find pundits opining that the Republican Party would have done better nominating Ambassador Nikki Haley, who would surely have held together the GOP coalition more effectively than Donald Trump, appealed more to women, and so on. The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg tweeted proudly that he had written in Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House best known for a tax cut that added nearly $2 trillion to federal deficits and his subsequent work launching SPACs and promoting cryptocurrency. The future direction of American conservatism seemed likely to face sharp contestation in the coming years.

By midnight, all that was over. Trump was going to win the popular vote, the first time a Republican had done so in twenty years. He was going to win more electoral college votes than any Republican since 1988. And while narrow victories in every single one of the swing states would hand him the presidency, the massive shifts among young and non-white voters and accompanying double-digit gains in urban areas were the story with the longer-term implications. Democratic strongholds appear headed toward swing-state status: Virginia, Minnesota, and New Jersey all had margins below six points. After years of Democrats talking about “turning Texas blue,” Republicans are now closer to turning Illinois and New York red.

The path for conservatives to a durable governing majority runs forward from here, toward solidifying and expanding this multi-ethnic, working-class coalition. Will a serious Old Right candidate even bother running for president on a free-trade, open-borders, anti-worker agenda in 2028? Perhaps. Certainly there will be no shortage of wealthy donors eager to set their money on fire supporting the effort, no shortage of commentators who have dedicated their careers to market fundamentalism who will cheer along. But as a political matter, such campaigning is dead on arrival. The relevant question for the next several years is how to deliver for the ordinary Americans who swung this year’s election and create a political movement, message, and agenda capable of building on that success.

Understanding America is a publication of American Compass, the organization that has served since its founding in 2020 as the flagship for this exact project. Frankly, it’s a bit eerie to watch the issues we have championed—decoupling from China, tariffs to reverse globalization’s harms, restricting low-wage immigration, industrial policy to rebuild American manufacturing, a conservative embrace of labor, a generous benefit for working families—become the central debates in our politics, with our small but mighty team recognized as the leaders on each and every one.

It's dawning on you about now that this is a fundraising email—but, see, even our fundraising emails are better than the usual Washington fare, featuring useful political analysis and a swashbuckling spirit. I’ll even say: we have accomplished more over the past few years in our 1,200-square-foot converted yoga studio next door to a liquor store and above a chiropractor than the entire collection of Old Right organizations with combined budgets and staffs literally 100 times our size.

The American Compass team has only just reached ten people, our budget is still just $2 million, but we have “become the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill” (Wall Street Journal), the “intellectual leader of the ‘pro-worker’ faction in the Republican Party” (New York Times), and “ground zero in a fierce conservative clash over Trump-era economics” (Politico). David Brooks calls us the Republican Party’s new “center of gravity” while Bari Weiss says that the GOP itself is “Oren Cass’s party now.”

We need to roughly double our budget this year to hire additional staff, move into real office space, launch a magazine, and generally play the role that no other organization in Washington is capable of; charting the course for this new conservatism. Think about it—who besides American Compass is going to do the in-depth research, provide the serious analysis, and foster the important debates necessary to the emergence of a coherent, energetic, responsive, and responsible politics on the American right? A lot rides on this.

And yet, somewhat bizarrely for an institution as successful and influential as ours, fundraising is an enormous challenge. The conservative donor world remains dominated by foundations dedicated to, quite literally, Zombie Reaganism—their massive endowments were bequeathed to advance forever a 1980s playbook, and dadgummit that’s how the money will be spent. I somewhat admire their commitment; the instructions are to use the money this way, no matter how pointless. Meanwhile, the wealthy donors still alive expect, in return for their gifts, enthusiastic endorsements of their hedge funds and private equity firms as engines of prosperity for all Americans, and also invitations to extremely swanky retreats that cost more than American Compass spends in a year. Suffice to say, we have had little success tapping this market.

Part of our project, then, is building a new base of financial support for a conservatism that is of, by, and for ordinary Americans. That requires engaging a broad group who have never thought of themselves as political donors, but who care deeply about their country and who see the type of politics, economics, and public policy promoted by American Compass as something worth supporting. In other words, I’m talking about all of you.

If all of Understanding America’s regular readers just clicked on the button below this paragraph to “Subscribe” or “Upgrade to Paid” and made a $250 gift to American Compass, you’d cover the entire growth in our budget for the coming year. If you are someone who makes substantially larger donations to your charities of choice each year, please take a minute to read about our Navigators Guild, for donors at the $1k, $5k, and $25k levels.

If you’re not able to make a gift at this time, I’d ask you to do us one other favor instead: send Understanding America to three friends who you think would like it, and encourage them to subscribe. This movement will grow only by word of mouth and ever more people becoming engaged with it. Share my introductory essay, one of the most popular pieces, or whatever you liked best.

And finally, regardless of what you’re able to do, thank you for your own interest in our work. Writing is only worthwhile if people are reading, and I am grateful that all of you give some of your time and attention to our work.

- Oren