{"id":2704072,"date":"2026-11-12T09:45:02","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T14:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/why-oren-cass-is-the-new-york-timess-favorite-conservative-intellectual\/"},"modified":"2026-11-12T09:54:58","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T14:54:58","slug":"why-oren-cass-is-the-new-york-timess-favorite-conservative-intellectual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/why-oren-cass-is-the-new-york-timess-favorite-conservative-intellectual\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Oren Cass Is the New York Times\u2019s Favorite \u2018Conservative\u2019 Intellectual"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwhy-oren-cass-is-the-new-york-timess-favorite-conservative-intellectual%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2704072&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Oren Cass\u2019s New york Times piece urging Republicans to abandon Reagan-era economics and security is criticized as advocacy, misleading, and ideologically inconsistent. The author argues Cass misrepresents Reagan-ignoring his union ties, moral-education emphasis, and alliance-building-and praises a \u201cNew Right\u201d that favors labor revitalization, industrial policy, and letting allies deter rivals. Cass\u2019s economic claims are called contradictory and simplistic; his proposals resemble big-goverment, high-tax approaches more like Democrats\u2019. The piece warns such policies would weaken U.S. security, harm workers, and offer voters an echo rather than a distinct Republican choice.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The <em>New York Times<\/em>\u2019s favorite &#8220;conservative&#8221; intellectual, Oren Cass, is back in that newspaper with a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/11\/11\/opinion\/post-trump-republicans.html\">article<\/a> advising Republicans to dump not only President Reagan\u2019s economic policies but his national security strategy, too.<\/p>\n<p>Cass\u2019s latest effort doesn\u2019t quite top his <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/media\/the-finance-industry-is-a-grift-oren-cass-claims-in-the-new-york-times-look-whos-talking\/\">piece<\/a> in February, in which he declared, &#8220;The finance industry is a grift,&#8221; and advocated for the social shunning of people who take jobs at Blackstone.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Times<\/em> labels Cass\u2019s latest piece with the line, &#8220;Mr. Cass, a contributing Opinion writer, is the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank.&#8221; It\u2019s an open question whether American Compass is indeed &#8220;conservative.&#8221; For a &#8220;conservative&#8221; organization, it sure collects a lot of money from far-left foundations like the <a href=\"https:\/\/projects.propublica.org\/nonprofits\/organizations\/201173866\/202543219349106224\/full\">Omidyar Network Fund<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rockefellerfoundation.org\/grants\/search\/?post_type=grant&#038;keyword=American%20Compass\">Rockefeller Foundation<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/hewlett.org\/grants\/?_grant_search=American%20Compass\">William and Flora Hewlett Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But ideological mislabeling is only the beginning of the problems with Cass\u2019s article. It\u2019s useful as a text for studying logical fallacies, from the false dichotomy to the straw man. And it\u2019s a good example of how the <em>Times<\/em> misleads readers by serving up to them &#8220;conservative&#8221; columnists who don\u2019t represent the current mainstream of conservative views. Last year a <em>Times<\/em> columnist, Michelle Goldberg, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theeditors.com\/p\/new-york-times-opinion-writer-explains-lack-of-pro-trump-columnists-michelle-goldberg-derek-penslar\">asserted<\/a> that her opinion section lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/woke-kelloggs-stock-tanks-as-labor-talks-go-soggy\/\" title=\"Woke Kellogg&#039;s Stock Tanks as Labor Talks Go Soggy\">hard time finding people<\/a> who are &#8220;pro-Trump, honest, and not racist.&#8221; A columnist for the <em>Washington Examiner<\/em>, Tim Carney, recently <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/TPCarney\/status\/2118657559124902268\">disclosed<\/a> that the <em>New York Times<\/em> paid him &#8220;to record a test podcast in Autumn 2026, that never aired.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The latest Cass piece frames itself as analysis of where the Republican Party will go after President Trump. On deck are &#8220;two very distinct groups, representing two very different possible futures for the party Mr. Trump will leave behind,&#8221; Cass writes. &#8220;The first group remains loyal to the Reagan revolution and its strain of conservatism,&#8221; while the second group he calls &#8220;the New Right.&#8221; He acknowledges parenthetically that &#8220;(My organization, American Compass, was founded to help develop the New Right\u2019s ideas.)&#8221; Yet the real clue that this isn\u2019t really analysis but advocacy isn\u2019t the disclosure but the tendentiousness of the exposition.<\/p>\n<p>Cass gets the Reagan history wrong. Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as hostile to organized labor. &#8220;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,&#8221; he writes. While President Reagan did take on the federal air traffic controllers union, it\u2019s also true that he was a longtime former president of the Screen Actors Guild\u2014a union\u2014who campaigned in 1980 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alamy.com\/ronald-reagan-tries-on-a-national-maritime-union-jacket-and-cap-in-st-louis-on-oct-9-1980-after-being-named-an-honorary-member-of-the-35000-member-union-and-winning-its-endorsement-his-second-union-endorsement-within-two-days-at-right-is-the-union-president-shannon-j-wall-ap-photocharles-w-harrity-image524229902.html\">wearing<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as hostile to values in education. &#8220;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,&#8221; Cass writes. Reagan\u2019s education secretary, William Bennett, literally wrote <em>The Book of Virtues<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Cass falsely depicts the Reaganites as unilateralists. &#8220;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 \u2026 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.&#8221; Reagan was constantly hosting Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and various Japanese prime ministers at the White House.        <\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;new right&#8221; foreign policy alternative sketched by Cass\u2014&#8221;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&#8221;\u2014has the downside risk that if delegating the job to others doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>Cass\u2019s flabby thinking is on display in the economics, too. He writes about, &#8220;a surging stock market and extraordinary wealth for asset holders. For people who rely on a paycheck, it\u2019s a different story. Their<a href=\"https:\/\/fred.stlouisfed.org\/series\/PRS85006173\"> share of national income<\/a> has been steadily falling while their<a href=\"https:\/\/taxpolicycenter.org\/briefing-book\/what-are-sources-revenue-federal-government\"> share of the tax burden<\/a> keeps rising.&#8221; Later on, he writes of, &#8220;an industrial base hollowed out by years of lopsided free trade, financial markets run amok and labor\u2019s share of national income at a record low.&#8221; Cass can\u2019t seem to decide if the markets are surging or running amok. Which is it? The business about &#8220;labor\u2019s share of national income&#8221; 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\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s share of the costs of agriculture declined.<\/p>\n<p>Cass is no more reliable when it comes to more recent history. He writes, &#8220;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?&#8221; Yet Trump in many significant ways represents not an abandonment of Reagan but a continuation, from the &#8220;make America great again&#8221; campaign slogan to the tax-cutting. Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney both served honorably. Anyone who doubts it can read my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theeditors.com\/p\/richard-cheneys-war\">piece<\/a> on Cheney from November 2025. Cass using their names as shorthand smears says more about him than about them.<\/p>\n<p>Money manager and philanthropist Clifford Asness <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CliffordAsness\/status\/2120546320293277928\">called<\/a> Cass a &#8220;right-wing socialist theocrat (who only gets in the NYT and the FT as they share his socialism).&#8221; Asness may be on to something. Cass touts the policies as good politics. The New Right, Cass claims, &#8220;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.&#8221; Yet America already has a high-tax Nanny State surrender party\u2014the Democrats. Why would Republicans benefit politically from offering an echo rather than a choice?<\/p>\n<p>And if the idea is supposed to be doing what\u2019s best for the country, or its people, rather than for a political party\u2014notwithstanding Cass\u2019s partisan framing of, as his headline puts it, &#8220;Republicans Have Two Paths Out of This. They\u2019d Better Choose Wisely.&#8221;\u2014why would America want to replicate Big Government at home, weakness abroad policies? Calling those policies &#8220;New Right&#8221; doesn\u2019t make them right. They\u2019ve failed when they\u2019ve 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, &#8220;tax increases,&#8221; and &#8220;industrial policy&#8221; &#8220;channeling energy and resources toward constructive enterprises that create real value, and away from destructive ones that merely extract it,&#8221; along with a let-anyone-but-us-lead foreign policy. Things will get worse.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here\u2019s a paraphrase of the piece:<\/p>\n<p>The New York Times has revived Oren Cass, the newspaper\u2019s go-to figure labeled a \u201cconservative\u201d intellectual, with a new op-ed urging Republicans to abandon not only Ronald Reagan\u2019s economic policies but also his approach to national security. While this isn\u2019t Cass\u2019s first NYT appearance-he previously argued that the finance industry is a scam and called for social shaming of people who take jobs at Blackstone-the Times again treats him as a leading conservative voice. The piece is accompanied by a Times note that Cass is the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, though questions linger about whether American Compass is truly conservative given its funding from several left-leaning foundations. Even if one questions the label, the article serves as a useful example of how arguments can hinge on logical fallacies and how the Times can present a \u201cconservative\u201d writer whose views aren\u2019t aligned with the mainstream of conservatism.<\/p>\n<p>The piece sits amid other Times controversies: a columnist criticized the presence of pro-Trump voices in the Opinion section, and a Washington Examiner columnist disclosed that the Times paid him for a test podcast that never aired. Cass frames his analysis as a forecast for where the Republican Party will head after Trump, proposing two divergent futures. One camp adheres to the Reagan tradition; the other, which he calls the New Right, would represent a different path. He even notes (in a parenthetical aside) that American Compass was founded to help advance the New Right\u2019s ideas. Yet the piece reads more like advocacy than neutral analysis, and Cass repeatedly distorts historical facts to fit his narrative. He portrays Reaganites as anti-union, claiming they opposed organized labor, while ignoring Reagan\u2019s long association with unions and the role Solidarity played in defeating the Soviet Union. He misstates Reagan\u2019s stance on education, suggesting Reaganites favored marketized schooling while the New Right would see schools as a communal project-despite figures like William Bennett promoting virtuous education. He also depicts Reagan\u2019s foreign policy as unilateralist, ignoring the era\u2019s alliances and the president\u2019s openness to foreign partners.<\/p>\n<p>The foreign-policy fork Cass sketches-for Europe to deter Russia, East Asia to deter China, and Gulf states and Israel to deter Iran, with the U.S. backing from a distance-carries obvious downside risks if others fail to carry their weight: the possibility of a nuclear Iran, a China-tinged Taiwan crisis, and a revived Russia. The author accuses Cass of slippery economics too: he oscillates between calling the stock market booming and saying workers\u2019 share of income is falling, and between saying the economy is booming and lamenting \u201cmarkets run amok.\u201d The latter, argued as a share of national income, is presented as a symptom of technological progress rather than a problem to be solved. A Thanksgiving toll-booth analogy is used to illustrate how automation lowers labor\u2019s cost share, suggesting that declines in labor\u2019s share don\u2019t imply a need to roll back modernization.<\/p>\n<p>Cass\u2019s historical judgments are suspect in other places as well. He argues that Reagan\u2019s supporters would abandon him in favor of Trump, but the author contends that Trump has in many ways continued Reaganite policy, including tax cuts, and criticizes Cass for using Ryan and Cheney as shorthand insults. Even Cass\u2019s admirers weigh in: investor Clifford Asness called him a \u201cright-wing socialist theocrat,\u201d a label that some see as closer to the mark. Cass, for his part, praises the New Right as capable of delivering a lasting majority and national renewal comparable to Reagan\u2019s era. But the author argues that the Democrats already govern as a high-tax, expansive-state party, and that Republicans would simply be offering a factual echo rather than an actual choice if they adopted Cass\u2019s program. The piece closes by warning that adopting Cass\u2019s heavy-handed regulation, tax raises, industrial policy, and a let-others-lead foreign policy would recreate a Big Government status quo, which has failed before. In short, his argument is framed as a path to revitalization, but the critique says it would amount to reproducing the same costly, interventionist agenda that has already shown itself unsuccessful.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019d like, I can also provide a concise 55-character caption summarizing the piece<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4157,"featured_media":2704073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-10-092746-1024x700.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[548,544],"tags":[21130,56439,51059,87770],"class_list":["post-2704072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conservative-news-daily","category-the-free-beacon","tag-conservatism","tag-media-bias-2","tag-nytimes","tag-oren-cass-2"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-10-092746-1024x700.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2704072"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2704077,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704072\/revisions\/2704077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2704073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2704072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2704072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2704072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}