Welcome to Understanding America

Your guide to the future of economics, American politics, and public policy

We may as well get the most important question out of the way: Does the world really need more Substacks? Certainly not. But it does need this one. Do you have too much to read? No problem, cut some of it out. Read this instead.

Because, let’s be honest, most of what’s written today about economics, politics, and public policy is not just wrong but actively makes things worse. While everyone is outraged about everything all the time, the underlying emotion felt by most followers of current affairs, and quite a few participants, too, is confusion. A “paradigm shift” is underway but the commentators who would normally help us to make sense of it are precisely the promoters of the outdated thinking that we so clearly need to move beyond.

Thomas Kuhn famously introduced the concept of a “paradigm shift” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Whereas scientists and philosophers had believed that scientific knowledge advanced steadily through incremental progress, Kuhn showed that the process was one of long static periods of “normal science,” during which a community of researchers worked mostly to validate their existing paradigm, punctuated by short periods of disruption, when an old paradigm failed and a new one emerged. Far from pushing this process forward, scientists will tend to defend their existing paradigm from challenge and accept new frameworks grudgingly, if at all. As the physicist Max Planck observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Colloquially, the insight is often paraphrased as, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Politics and economics lack the clearly stated hypotheses and experimental proof of science, but they experience change in a similar way. Innovative ideas harden into dogma around which politicians and economists build their careers, warding off the heresy of new thinking until they render themselves so irrelevant and inadequate to contemporary challenges that a crisis occurs, then chaos, and then a better framework emerges. In neither science nor politics does positive change occur spontaneously. New information provides a catalyst by rendering an old paradigm indefensible, but experts whose status depends on defending the indefensible have never hesitated to do just that.

Understanding America is your guide through the chaos, written by one of the leading architects of the new consensus that is beginning to emerge.

Why So Confused?

For the past generation, the thoughtful and respectable posture of upstanding professionals has been, “I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” Those darn Republicans were always starting “culture wars” over outdated, religiously motivated social values and a jingoistic, probably somehow racist nationalism. Those darn Democrats were always mucking around in the free market, obstructing economic dynamism, and launching expensive new programs. Seeing as all right-thinking people agreed with these views, inexplicable and perhaps nefarious forces must be responsible for the failure of the political system to resolve its conflicts and move the country forward. Michael Bloomberg for President. Maybe Aaron Sorkin could write his speeches.

Reality has proved stranger. The socially liberal and fiscally conservative quadrant of the matrix is by far the least popular in American politics and yields an agenda and vision for the nation that is fundamentally incompatible with what most people say they want and what can in fact deliver widespread prosperity. Precisely the opposite is now ascendant, particularly within the Republican Party, where the younger generation of leaders like Senators Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Josh Hawley can be found walking picket lines with striking workers, criticizing stock buybacks, promoting industrial policy, and prioritizing more generous family benefits over corporate tax cuts, while also calling to restrict immigration, assaulting campus culture and the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” fad, and opposing transgender ideology.

Donald Trump, of course, is most confusing of all. Look at how his last term ended, look at the things he says and does, look at his policy agenda—and he is leading in the polls, against an incumbent presiding over relatively strong economic growth and record-low unemployment, having made his most notable gains among non-white voters. If you read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion pages to keep informed, you could be forgiven for not understanding what’s going on here. But perhaps it’s time to read something else.

Did you know, for instance, that fewer than one-in-five young Americans goes smoothly from high school to college to career? For young men, the outcome is even less likely. Indeed, for 25- to 29-year-old men, real earnings are lower now than in the 1970s. Did you know that fewer Americans aged 18 to 34 now live with a significant other than at home with their parents? Did you know that productivity in American factories has actually been declining for more than a decade—it now takes more workers more hours to make the same amount of stuff?

You are probably familiar with “deaths of despair” and know vaguely that somewhere out there an “opioid epidemic” rages. You probably didn’t realize, though, that on top of 82,000 deaths from opioid overdose in the most recent annual data, other forms of drug overdose are climbing faster: Psychostimulant deaths rose 13-fold in the past decade, to 34,000. Americans are now dying from drug overdoses at a higher rate than Russians died from alcohol use disorders in post-Soviet Russia’s worst years..

So perhaps the question is not why things feel like they are falling apart, but rather how they have managed to hang together at all. If you have been waiting for things to go back to normal, you are setting yourself up for not only continued confusion, but also deep disappointment. If you want to understand better what is happening, why, and how America can rebuild, read on.

How Can I Help?

I got my start in the political world as domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. I learned a tremendous amount from the experience and was proud to serve a brilliant, accomplished, and decent man of the sort all too lacking in positions of national leadership. But I also found the reining economic orthodoxy to be downright silly, in both its diagnosis of the American condition and its prescriptions for policymakers. So I spent the next decade trying to make sense of why, reaching conclusions that were at the time generally deemed outlandish but have since become conventional wisdom.

Where did the shifts in conservative thinking start—on free trade and worker power, family and industrial policy, and so on? I’m just one of many people who have been working on these issues, but you could have done a lot worse than just reading what I’ve been writing. In 2014, I published a full-throated rejection of free trade with China in National Review, “Fight the Dragon: The Case for Retaliating Against China on Trade.” In 2015, I wrote another essay for the magazine, “Social Inequality Matters as Much as, or More Than, Economic Inequality.” I sent the draft to my editor the day before Donald Trump took the stage in his first Republican primary debate.

In 2018, I published a book called The Once and Future Worker that was celebrated across the political spectrum. David Brooks called it “absolutely brilliant” while J.D. Vance considered it “one of the most important books I have ever read.” Emmanuel Todd, the eminent French left-winger, described it as “a remarkable intellectual articulation of ‘populism,’ a kind of manifesto of a polite Trumpist, if you will, one relieved of excessive language and so rendered amazingly convincing,” while the Christian World Magazine named it “book of the year for understanding America.” In 2019, I defended the resolution that “America should adopt an industrial policy” in the keynote debate at the first National Conservatism conference. To the shock of the New York Times, I won handily. In 2020, I published an essay in the Wall Street Journal, “America Needs a Conservative Labor Movement.”

Also in 2020, I founded American Compass, the think tank charting the course for conservative economics. We are “more sophisticated,” according to The Economist, and “influential among lawmakers.” Senator Marco Rubio says, “Compass is doing as much or more to shape the national conversation and our economic policy than Washington’s largest think tanks. I look to American Compass for advice and ideas, and the number of my colleagues who do also is staggering.”

When CNBC published a feature in May on how “Trump-allied Republicans are changing the GOP’s approach to labor, free markets and regulation,” senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers explained, “The neopopulist ideas emerging on the political right are being refined and promoted in Washington by an embryonic network of institutions. Chief among these is the nonprofit think tank American Compass, founded in 2020 by Oren Cass.”

My work, and our work at American Compass, is unique for its belief in responsive politics. We conduct in-depth surveys that pose questions too rarely asked of the American people—about their aspirations, their preferences in organizing their lives, and the tradeoffs they wish to make; our research on topics like “secure jobs” and the “cost of thriving” seeks to measure the economy as working families experience it. From many angles, our findings converge on the same conclusion: Americans are struggling to achieve prosperity as they define it, encompassing not only economic measures, but also indicators of family, community, and national health. Much of our success in reshaping conservative economic policy debates is the result simply of our willingness to believe what the American people are saying, make their problems our starting point, and take their priorities as our own.

It helps, also, that I couldn’t care less what our established political institutions think. I live 300 miles from Washington with my wife and three young children in a town of 5,000 people who definitely do not read Politico Playbook. I have no political aspirations of my own, or even any interest in working inside the Beltway in the foreseeable future. Even on the Romney campaign, I removed myself from any consideration for a position in the administration were we to win. My first daughter was due two months before election day, and the demands of a White House job were plainly incompatible with those of my young family.

You’d be amazed how easy it is to spot transparently silly orthodoxy when you have no stake in upholding it.

Why Subscribe?

Which I suppose brings us to the question of why you should subscribe to Understanding America. If you’re someone who cares deeply about this country, if you want to stay up-to-date about the key economic and political developments that will most influence events, if you have noticed the remarkable emergence of a more responsive and worker-focused conservatism and want to know where that’s going, then Understanding America is for you.

I’ll be writing every week, both sharing my own extended thoughts on some particular item and then commenting on the most important developments and debates of the moment. Why are politicians and pundits adopting their stances and how does that align with the preferences of the American people? What are the actual data, assumptions, and models behind some set of claims and are they worthwhile? Who is making a fool of himself reciting outdated dogma this time?

Also each week, you’ll get a rundown of the things I am reading that I think are most important, stimulating, or just fun. And this will be a great way to keep up with everything happening at American Compass—from new podcast episodes and commentary to essays, reports, and policy proposals.

America does not have the luxury of waiting for a failed generation of leaders to pass naturally from the scene and for new ones who understand our challenges and what to do about them to gradually take their place. Let’s see if we can speed things up a bit, shall we?

Recommended Reading:

“The Working Hypothesis,” an adaptation from my book, The Once and Future Worker.

“Neoliberalism Falls Apart,” my Founder’s Letter in American Compass’s first annual report.

“Searching for Capitalism in the Wreckage of Globalization,” the story of how I came to question most of what I had learned about economic policy.

“What Happened to Capitalism,” my foreword to American Compass’s Rebuilding American Capitalism handbook for conservative policymakers.

“The Nerd Trying to Turn the GOP Populist,” a profile of my work in New York Magazine.