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The New Conservatives

Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry

Published by Radius Book Group
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

For the fifth anniversary of American Compass, the conservative think tank hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "the forefront of rethinking traditional conservative economic ideas," comes a collection of its best, most influential writing

American Compass is the nerve center of the New American Right, the political strategists and policy experts navigating a new Republican path through the economic issues shaping today’s political landscape—trade and immigration, technology and finance, industrial policy, education, welfare, labor, family, and more. The New Conservatives is the organization’s ur-text, a collection of its most influential writing on why and how true conservative government fosters markets that serve society—not the other way around. As The Economist put it, American Compass is “a slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows.”

With essays and manifestos by American Compass founder Oren Cass, New America co-founder Michael Lind, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Affairs founding editor Yuval Levin, American Affairs founding editor Julius Krein, author and former American Conservative senior editor Helen Andrews, and Comment senior editor Brian Dijkema, The New Conservatives breaks down America’s economic and political failures before drawing upon a re-assessed American conservative tradition to prove how an innovative conservative movement, breaking from the GOPs free-market dogmatism, is defined by three pillars—productive markets, supportive communities, and responsive politics.

The book explores American Compass’ groundbreaking projects, like the Cost-of-Thriving Index, which explains how the typical American worker could once provide a family with middle-class security on 40 weeks of work but now requires more than 60—a problem, there being 52 weeks in a year. It refines the American conservative tradition, which most people today wrongly assume emphasized free markets and limited government, reminding readers that the early American republic pursued a robust national economic policy with high protective tariffs and intensive public investment.

It offers new conservative critiques of modern markets that have failed to deliver on capitalism’s promise that globalization, cheap labor, and financial markets will deliver widespread prosperity. And it sets capitalism’s sights on community: re-calibrating a right-of-center attitude toward families, worker power and solidarity, and higher education.

The New Conservatives, published in celebration of American Compass’ fifth anniversary, is a conservative manifest, a ship’s log, and an updated nautical chart to an economy in which free markets are not an end unto themselves, but are rather a means to an end—national liberty and prosperity—steered by public policy.

About The Authors

OREN CASS is the founder and chief economist at American Compass and author of The Once and Future Worker (2018), a groundbreaking reassessment of economic policy. Cass writes monthly columns for both The New York Times and the Financial Times, and his essays have appeared recently in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs to First Things, Law & Liberty, and Compact.

AMERICAN COMPASS is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. Founded in 2020 by Oren Cass, the organization challenges conventional wisdom and champions innovative solutions that prioritize American workers, their families and communities, and the national interest. Its work addresses critical issues such as economic growth and job creation, trade and industrial policy, worker power and family stability, and the role of government in promoting the common good.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Radius Book Group (June 3, 2025)
  • Length: 336 pages
  • ISBN13: 9798895150511

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Raves and Reviews

“A policy nerve center for the party’s younger, more populist generation.”
Ezra Klein, New York Times

“[The] coterie of younger Republicans, in Congress and think tanks, who advocate policies that would mark a sharp break from the conservative, free-market gospel that has been the backbone of the GOP for more than half a century. . . . [American Compass] is in the forefront of rethinking traditional conservative economic ideas.”
Gerald Seib, Wall Street Journal

“A slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows.”
The Economist

“Ground zero in a fierce conservative clash over Trump-era economics.”
Politico

“The most intellectually honest tendency within the anti-Establishment right.”
New York Magazine

“Oren Cass won the day, it’s Oren Cass’s party now.”
Bari Weiss, The Free Press

“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.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio

“[American Compass’] thoughtful and innovative vision of conservative economics will shape discussions on the right for years to come.”
Senator Tom Cotton

“American Compass . . . provides a blueprint for the future of conservatism. By rousing our movement to rise to this moment and giving it the intellectual material to do so, you’re setting the stage for a second American century.”
Senator Todd Young

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