Why Oren Cass Is the New York Times’s Favorite ‘Conservative’ Intellectual

The New York Times’s favorite “conservative” intellectual, Oren Cass, is back in that newspaper with a new article advising Republicans to dump not only President Reagan’s economic policies but his national security strategy, too.

Cass’s latest effort doesn’t quite top his New York Times piece in February, in which he declared, “The finance industry is a grift,” and advocated for the social shunning of people who take jobs at Blackstone.

The Times labels Cass’s latest piece with the line, “Mr. Cass, a contributing Opinion writer, is the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank.” It’s an open question whether American Compass is indeed “conservative.” For a “conservative” organization, it sure collects a lot of money from far-left foundations like the Omidyar Network Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

But ideological mislabeling is only the beginning of the problems with Cass’s article. It’s useful as a text for studying logical fallacies, from the false dichotomy to the straw man. And it’s a good example of how the Times misleads readers by serving up to them “conservative” columnists who don’t represent the current mainstream of conservative views. Last year a Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, asserted that her opinion section lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a hard time finding people who are “pro-Trump, honest, and not racist.” A columnist for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney, recently disclosed that the New York Times paid him “to record a test podcast in Autumn 2026, that never aired.”

The latest Cass piece frames itself as analysis of where the Republican Party will go after President Trump. On deck are “two very distinct groups, representing two very different possible futures for the party Mr. Trump will leave behind,” Cass writes. “The first group remains loyal to the Reagan revolution and its strain of conservatism,” while the second group he calls “the New Right.” He acknowledges parenthetically that “(My organization, American Compass, was founded to help develop the New Right’s ideas.)” Yet the real clue that this isn’t really analysis but advocacy isn’t the disclosure but the tendentiousness of the exposition.

Cass gets the Reagan history wrong. Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as hostile to organized labor. “Where Reaganites have viewed unions with hostility and in many cases sought to make organizing impossible, the New Right seeks to revitalize the labor movement, making it more responsive to ordinary workers and compelling employers to bargain with their employees on a level playing field,” he writes. While President Reagan did take on the federal air traffic controllers union, it’s also true that he was a longtime former president of the Screen Actors Guild—a union—who campaigned in 1980 wearing a union jacket and cap and whose signal foreign policy accomplishment, the defeat of the Soviet Union, was accomplished largely by backing a Polish union leader, Lech Walesa, and his Solidarity movement.

Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as hostile to values in education. “Where Reaganites advocate education reform that treats schools as marketable consumer services measured by test scores and college admissions, the New Right regards public education as a communal project to equip young people with the skills and values they need to build decent lives,” Cass writes. Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, literally wrote The Book of Virtues.

Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as unilateralists. “Reagan delivered victory in the Cold War with an ambitious and outward-facing posture. His followers extended that into a world where the United States was the sole superpower … They preferred that allies minimize their own military spending and rely on American might. They pursued efforts at regime change and nation-building in the Middle East. Now they envision a leading U.S. role in repelling Russia from Ukraine, protecting Taiwan from China and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Reagan was constantly hosting Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and various Japanese prime ministers at the White House.

The “new right” foreign policy alternative sketched by Cass—”let Europe deter Russia, East Asian democracies deter China, and the Gulf states and Israel deter Iran, with the United States offering support from afar”—has the downside risk that if delegating the job to others doesn’t work out, the U.S. will be stuck with a nuclear-armed terrorist regime in Iran, the semiconductor plants in Taiwan in the hands of Communist China, and a revanchist Russia poised to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact.

Cass’s flabby thinking is on display in the economics, too. He writes about, “a surging stock market and extraordinary wealth for asset holders. For people who rely on a paycheck, it’s a different story. Their share of national income has been steadily falling while their share of the tax burden keeps rising.” Later on, he writes of, “an industrial base hollowed out by years of lopsided free trade, financial markets run amok and labor’s share of national income at a record low.” Cass can’t seem to decide if the markets are surging or running amok. Which is it? The business about “labor’s share of national income” sounds concerning until one realizes that a declining labor share of national income is just the mathematical consequence of technological progress in various sectors of the economy. I’m old enough to remember when Thanksgiving travel meant sitting and waiting in traffic at toll plazas for paid workers in booths to collect cash tolls for bridges and highways. Now E-ZPass transponders automatically charge your credit card. Labor’s share of your Thanksgiving travel budget has declined, but America is way better off. No one is calling for restoring the human toll collectors, no more than anyone is proposing to resume farming with hand tools instead of tractors, even though mechanization meant labor’s share of the costs of agriculture declined.

Cass is no more reliable when it comes to more recent history. He writes, “The Reaganites must also struggle with their own baggage, filled with the failures that led voters to abandon them for Mr. Trump in the first place. If Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney are your answers, what was the question?” Yet Trump in many significant ways represents not an abandonment of Reagan but a continuation, from the “make America great again” campaign slogan to the tax-cutting. Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney both served honorably. Anyone who doubts it can read my piece on Cheney from November 2025. Cass using their names as shorthand smears says more about him than about them.

Money manager and philanthropist Clifford Asness called Cass a “right-wing socialist theocrat (who only gets in the NYT and the FT as they share his socialism).” Asness may be on to something. Cass touts the policies as good politics. The New Right, Cass claims, “has the potential to deliver the kind of durable majority and national revitalization that Reagan achieved in his own era and conservatives have been trying to replicate ever since.” Yet America already has a high-tax Nanny State surrender party—the Democrats. Why would Republicans benefit politically from offering an echo rather than a choice?

And if the idea is supposed to be doing what’s best for the country, or its people, rather than for a political party—notwithstanding Cass’s partisan framing of, as his headline puts it, “Republicans Have Two Paths Out of This. They’d Better Choose Wisely.”—why would America want to replicate Big Government at home, weakness abroad policies? Calling those policies “New Right” doesn’t make them right. They’ve failed when they’ve been tried in Europe or in America. If you think working class American voters, or America itself, are in rough shape now, wait for the country to adopt Oren Cass-style heavyhanded regulation, “tax increases,” and “industrial policy” “channeling energy and resources toward constructive enterprises that create real value, and away from destructive ones that merely extract it,” along with a let-anyone-but-us-lead foreign policy. Things will get worse.