Oren Cass Talks to Rockefeller Center: A Review

On Wednesday, April 14, Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosted a Zoom event with Oren Cass, the influential public-policy expert and frequent columnist for the Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Cass served as Mitt Romney’s Domestic Policy Director during the 2012 campaign and is the founder and Executive Director of American Compass, an organization seeking to (re)shape the trajectory of the modern conservative movement. 

We were pleased to find that the Rockefeller Center made the wise choice to host the Cass event as a Webinar rather than as a massive Zoom meeting. The impersonal nature intrinsic to Webinars aided in limiting Zoom fatigue and (thankfully) enabled audience questions and reactions to be filtered through a moderator.

Charles Wheelan, a senior lecturer and policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center, served as the event’s moderator, in which capacity he asked questions of Cass after the central lecture had come to an end. Wheelan conducted the event’s question-and-answer section admirably, drawing key ideas from audience-submitted questions to formulate his own insightful queries, rather than simply repeating verbatim those that the viewers had written and submitted. Wheelan often framed his questions by making excellent, deliberate references to Cass’s recent book, The Once and Future Worker, in addition to the material that had been covered in the lecture.

This central lecture, which occupied the first twenty-five minutes or so of the hour-long event, progressed well—often ingeniously—from philosophical to historical and ultimately to some measure of contemporary discussion. Promoted beforehand under the title of “Conservatism: What It Is, How We Lost It, and How We Find It Again,” the lecture was eminently engaging but is apparently rather standard for Cass as he “virtually” tours the college lecture circuit. It is interesting to note that, as he had devised it, the lecture was also initially titleless. 

We find it unfortunate that schedulers at the Rockefeller Center elected to impose the aforementioned title on Mr. Cass. Although he expressed his appreciation for their efforts, we were less than thrilled for two main reasons: First, Cass duly tried to adhere to the three-part structure outlined by the title and, certainly for the lecture portion of the event, doing so seemed to constrain him from supplementing parts of his central ideas with additional insights. Second, the title was actually misleading in multiple ways. On the one hand, it seemed to inaccurately suggest to potential audience members a forthcoming discussion of the Republican Party’s current reckoning with Donald Trump. (We wonder if this did not discourage some from attending?) On the other hand, considered in light of Cass’s lecture, the imposed title could be said to reflect an absurd normative judgement that there has been something wrong or impure about the conservative politics of Reagan and all subsequent Republican presidents, which was certainly not one of Cass’s arguments.

To this latter point, in his lecture, Cass presented himself as a defender of the Burkean conservative tradition, explaining that conservatives value existing institutions but remain open to government-sponsored change for the betterment and protection of society. Indeed, Cass argued that the conservative philosophy desires to achieve economic success and efficiency, but also to preserve the institution of the family and address the nation’s key needs.

In the era of the Cold War, Cass maintained, the American right-of-center movement began embracing a set of values apart from these. As exemplified in the Republican Party, the right-of-center coalition soon encompassed social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and economic libertarians, who were united solely by their disdain for communism. Ultimately, said Cass, the libertarians seized complete control of Republican economic policy starting in 1980. Consequently, there has been a political hybrid of a conservative movement in which free-market policies have been championed, but the preservation of America’s social fabric has been neglected, disappointing many traditionalists and social conservatives.

Excepting his own references to the imposed title of his lecture, Cass had good reason to not directly characterize this concept as a “loss” of conservatism. In truth, it was not, and the title is thus misleading. The conservative movement simply underwent a change in constitution during the Cold War, as it had many times previously in American history. Moreover, reflecting what we believe to be the title’s poor reference to “lost” conservatism, one would be hard pressed to argue that the 1980 Republican platform was somehow less conservative than it had been in 1960. In fact, quite the opposite was true.

Still, in order to shift once again towards the Burkean conservative tradition and reshape both the right and the Republican Party, Cass explained that he envisions a working-class conservative governing majority. The time has come, Cass said, for conservatives to push back against libertarian economic ideals within the Republican Party, and to insist on pure conservative policy.

After his lecture had ended, it became clear that Cass’s relative lack of outright partisanship would serve to insulate him from potential fallback in answering several of the more prying questions. These questions, it is worth noting, had been toned down in directness (and, quite frankly, greatly refined and improved upon) by Wheelan from the viewers’ submissions. Yet these questions still challenged the assumptions and applications of Cass’s vision of conservatism. Nevertheless, like an avatar of his former boss in the first 2012 presidential debate, Cass answered the questions splendidly, balancing smoothness of presentation with wonkish detail.

The audience’s only real “gotcha” question arose when Wheelan asked Cass about the solutions that conservatism proffers in addressing climate change. However, Cass dispatched the question masterfully, stressing that while climate change has been proven to not be an immediate life-or-death emergency, it must be accepted as fact by those on the right, and it necessitates definite policy solutions. Further, he spoke about the ways in which environmental changes will, over the coming centuries, combine with technological revolutions to transform the world. By monitoring the projected timelines of these processes, Cass explained, conservative policy would seek to adapt to the new circumstances. He presented this policy “adaptation” as a direct and more workable alternative to a leftist policy “revolution,” which would seek to rapidly replace the entire fossil fuel economy.

Cass was also asked about conservatives’ concern for the preservation of the American family as a two-parent institution, particularly in an era in which two-parent households are becoming increasingly less common. In response, Cass echoed research to which he made reference in his book, observing that overwhelming data exist—even from left-of-center organizations such as the Brookings Institution—that document the importance of two-parent households in terms of children’s future economic well-being as well as familial stability. Notably, both Wheelan and Cass acknowledged that the existence of this issue is often denied by those on the left. It serves, said Cass, as “the converse of the climate change problem” that has been denied by those on the right. Cass added that to successfully address the problem of decreasing numbers of two-parent households, there must be an agreed-upon explanation as to what caused this decrease in the first place, which is itself politically contested. 

In another question, Cass was asked about the conservative position on matters of race in the United States, which constitute a particularly pressing topic today. Cass replied that conservatives can do a better job than can progressives in acknowledging and addressing challenges and obstacles people endure. He asserted that progressives are incorrect in their approach to racial injustices—seeing inequities, a progressive would seek dramatic social change. A conservative, on the other hand, would dislike the idea that so many institutions and societal norms would have to be changed, and would instead advocate for people to be treated as individuals. Therefore, Cass explained, conservatives should reject identity politics and race-based policy. While he added that conservatives need to do better in talking about race, he contended that their efforts to find ways in which to make the economy work better for all who have been left behind will surely benefit those people of color who have been disproportionately impacted.

Given the strength of his performance throughout the hour, we wish that Cass would have had the opportunity to address one of the largest threats to the American working class: mass immigration. 

“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” George Borjas of the Harvard Kennedy School explains in Politico. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.” 

As mass immigration to the country persists, working Americans will continue to bear the brunt of downward economic pressures. Since Cass professed hope for a “working-class conservatism,” we would have enjoyed hearing his thoughts on this matter.

Mr. Cass was an impressive presenter, and we greatly enjoyed the event. Still, there was a noticeable lack of concrete policy proposals undergirding the new conception of conservatism that he advanced, and this seems to be a running theme amongst the “working-class conservative” intelligentsia. We therefore question whether this sort of populist conservatism will be able to grow into a viable competitor to established conservative orthodoxy or even populist leftism. Until men like Cass can articulate precise ways of instituting their many political and cultural objectives, they will be fighting for an ideology without a definition. So long as this persists, working-class conservatives will struggle to achieve the “governing majority” that Cass predicts, and no such conservative will be able to answer the question of how to get his country back.