What does it look like when the Right attempts to articulate its own version of a “pro-worker” program? That is the question driving the American Compass think tank. Founded during the last year of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, American Compass has spent the last five years puzzling through what it would take to “exit right from neoliberalism” (a question that animated Trump’s return to Washington, DC, four years later). Led by Oren Cass, a former management consultant and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, American Compass has focused on convincing the Republican Party to abandon its decades-long commitment to “free market” orthodoxy. In its place, Cass and his colleagues argue that the party’s future depends on laying the political and social foundation for a building “conservative labor movement.”

That project requires embracing some kind of labor organizing on the job, greater public investment in the nuclear family, and using the assault on undocumented workers to “tighten” labor markets and raise wages. There lies the foundation for what American Compass describes as a broader political realignment away from a crumbling neoliberal order and onward toward the restoration of “an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.”

These are policies that harken back to the blue-collar, neoconservative welfarism of the Nixon years mixed with the fierce anti-immigrant xenophobia unleashed by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s that Steve Bannon resuscitated for Trump’s 2016 campaign. American Compass, though, translated this rabid, reactionary populism into a blandly wonkish, nominally color-blind program to plan for the social reproduction of a nativist “working-class nationalism.” This programmatic vision won early and enthusiastic support from figures who styled themselves as part of a “new right” that would go on to occupy leading positions in the second Trump administration such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Tom Cotton (R-AR). In the face of a complacent neoliberal Democratic Party, these right-wing figures seek to position themselves as the only ones able to speak to the frustrations of working people facing miserable and uncertain times. This also has an appeal to certain union leaders — such as Sean O’Brien of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 — who are trying to seize an opening to both deliver for their members and perhaps win over the support of Trump-voting members by allying with a nationalist, anti-neoliberal new right.