# American Compass **American Compass** is a Washington, D.C. think tank founded in 2020 by Oren Cass, focused on developing a **post-liberal, economically nationalist policy framework** for the contemporary American right. It is the **principal institutional shop of the contemporary "common-good capitalism" / National Conservative economic policy tradition** — the position that the post-Reagan conservative consensus on free trade, deregulation, and limited industrial policy has substantially failed working-class American families and needs to be replaced with a more interventionist, industrially-focused, labor-and-family-supporting economic framework. American Compass is one of the principal intellectual contributors to the **JD Vance / [[Josh Hawley]] / Marco Rubio policy program** — [[the New Right]] economic-nationalist wing of the contemporary Republican Party that has substantially displaced the Reagan-era free-market consensus on trade, manufacturing, China policy, antitrust, and labor regulation. ## Founding and Trajectory American Compass was founded in 2020 by **Oren Cass**, a former economic-policy aide to [[Mitt Romney]]'s 2012 presidential campaign and former Senior Fellow at the [[Manhattan Institute]]. Cass had published *The Once and Future Worker* (2018), a policy book arguing that conservative economic policy needed to recenter on the value of work and the conditions of the American working class — explicitly criticizing the conservative consensus around GDP-maximization, free trade, and deregulation as having neglected what Cass called "the labor market." The book and its policy program found a receptive audience inside the emerging New Right coalition. American Compass was founded as the institutional vehicle for advancing the *Once and Future Worker* program — combining academic-style research output, congressional engagement, op-ed strategy, and direct policy entrepreneurship with sympathetic Republican legislators. The org has grown rapidly through the 2020–2026 period, particularly in 2022–2024 as the New Right economic-nationalist position became the dominant Republican policy framework. The 2024 elevation of JD Vance to the vice presidency, and Vance's substantive engagement with the American Compass intellectual program, has further increased Compass's institutional prominence. ## Programmatic Focus American Compass operates substantially as a **policy-development shop for the New Right legislative agenda**, including: - **Trade and manufacturing policy** — opposition to most-favored-nation status for China, support for tariffs as industrial policy, opposition to free-trade-agreement expansion, support for reshoring incentives - **Industrial policy** — direct government support for strategic industries (semiconductors, batteries, defense industrial base, critical minerals) - **Antitrust policy** — willingness to use antitrust law against big-tech and other concentrations of corporate power (a position closer to [[Lina Khan]]'s FTC than to traditional conservative antitrust skepticism) - **Labor policy** — selective support for labor power, including pro-union positions on private-sector workers, family-supportive tax policy, child tax credits - **Trade unions** — engagement with private-sector unions as conservative coalition partners (notably the Teamsters' 2024 RNC speech) - **Family policy** — child-allowance and family-tax-policy proposals, marriage-supportive policy The labor-and-family-policy dimension is particularly distinctive: American Compass has been willing to advocate for direct government support for families and workers in ways that the traditional conservative-libertarian consensus rejected — making Compass ideologically distinct from [[Cato Institute]] / [[Reason Foundation]] / [[Mercatus Center]] libertarianism on multiple dimensions. ## Distinctive Position: Common-Good Capitalism American Compass's central intellectual contribution is the framework of **"common-good capitalism"** — the position that capitalist economic organization is valuable when it serves shared community-and-family flourishing, and is appropriately subject to political-and-policy intervention when market outcomes fail to produce such flourishing. This framework breaks with the post-Reagan conservative consensus in several important ways: - Free trade is a tool, not a principle; trade policy should be evaluated by whether it produces shared prosperity - Industrial policy is legitimate when it advances national-security or shared-prosperity goals - Antitrust law should be used to constrain corporate power that distorts political and economic life - Labor policy should support the conditions for family formation and community stability - Tax policy should be structured around what it does for working families, not around marginal economic efficiency The framework has substantial ideological overlap with: - The Catholic-social-teaching tradition (subsidiarity, common good, dignity of work) - The Post-Liberal intellectual movement ([[Edmund Burke Foundation]], NatCon orbit) - The communitarian-conservative tradition (Yuval Levin at [[American Enterprise Institute]]) - The labor-Republicanism of some 20th-century traditions And substantial ideological opposition to: - Libertarian-conservative economic policy ([[Cato Institute]], [[Mercatus Center]], [[Reason Foundation]]) - The Chamber-of-Commerce-and-Wall-Street wing of the traditional Republican coalition - Free-trade-as-principle positions ## Funding American Compass funding patterns are somewhat distinct from peer institutions: - New Right–aligned individual donors (including some donors who shifted from Koch-network to NatCon orientation) - [[Bradley Foundation]] (historically partial supporter) - Smaller foundations supporting industrial-policy and labor-policy research - Some labor-union engagement (a structurally unusual funding posture for a conservative think tank) The funding profile is consistent with the org's intellectual positioning — Compass deliberately does not seek funding from sources that would create pressure toward more libertarian or free-trade-orthodox positions. ## KB Significance American Compass matters to the KB for three reasons: 1. **The institutional anchor of New Right economic policy.** American Compass is the most operationally important think tank developing the post-Reagan economic-policy framework that has substantially become Republican-coalition orthodoxy under the Trump-Vance leadership. Understanding contemporary Republican trade, industrial, antitrust, and labor policy requires understanding American Compass as a load-bearing institution. 2. **The intra-conservative fault line.** American Compass and [[Cato Institute]] / [[Mercatus Center]] are operating from substantially incompatible ideological frameworks. The intra-conservative fight between economic-nationalist and libertarian camps is one of the central ongoing fights inside the contemporary right, and American Compass is the principal institutional vehicle of the economic-nationalist side. 3. **The Catholic-social-teaching connection.** American Compass's common-good framework draws substantially on Catholic social-teaching intellectual traditions, connecting Compass to the broader Catholic-conservative intellectual ecosystem (EPPC, the Robert P. George–[[Patrick Deneen]]–[[Sohrab Ahmari]] intellectual orbit, the [[Edmund Burke Foundation]] NatCon network). This is a useful illustration of how religious-intellectual traditions enter contemporary policy debate through specific institutional channels. ## See Also - [[Edmund Burke Foundation]] — peer NatCon institution (more ideological/political; American Compass is more policy-technical) - [[Heritage Foundation]] — broader movement-right peer (substantial overlap on New Right economic policy under [[Kevin Roberts]]) - [[Manhattan Institute]] — Oren Cass's prior institutional home - [[American Enterprise Institute]] — peer with mixed positioning (Yuval Levin/Doar communitarian-conservative wing overlaps with Compass) - [[Center for Renewing America]] — peer Trump-2 administration policy shop (executive-power focus rather than economic-nationalism focus) - [[Cato Institute]] — ideological opposite (libertarian) - [[Mercatus Center]] — ideological opposite (libertarian) - [[Marco Rubio]] — Senator whose policy agenda substantially aligns with the Compass program - [[JD Vance]] — Vice President whose policy framework substantially aligns with the Compass program - [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] — broader ecosystem hub