вЂњA lot of people have tried to assign meaning to the Trump phenomenon, and a lot of that meaning is self-serving,вЂќ says Michael Strain, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Why else would the 2012 Romney campaign adviser turn his back on the free-market principles he once championed? Why else would the populist agitators of the previous decade, including the Tea Party darling Marco Rubio and his chief of staff, the former Heritage Action enfant terrible Michael Needham, shift their focus from restraining government and controlling spending to finding new ways for the feds to meddle in the economy, or the onetime Trump critic Vance transform himself into an avatar of populist economics? вЂњItвЂ™s a very different set of things to put together and support, certainly from Republicans,вЂќ Cass told me recently, describing his position as вЂњin all respects antithetical to the Chamber of Commerce view.вЂќД¬assвЂ™ critics say he is merely a more intellectual version of the crass political opportunists looking to capitalize on the Trump legacy. He also favors a stricter immigration policy with an eye toward migrantsвЂ™ impact on the wages of American workers, arguments echoed by Vance and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In order to become the party of the working class, Cass has argued, the GOP must abandon its doctrinaire attachment to free-market principles in favor of traditionally Democratic causes like organized labor, the minimum wage and an industrial policy in which the government boosts particular industries over others. | Stephen McCarthy/Collision/Sportsfile via Flickr Oren Cass at a conference in New Orleans in 2017. Cass left the free-market Manhattan Institute in 2019 to launch American Compass, the first right-of-center think tank dedicated to pushing the government to get more, rather than less, involved in national economic policy in order to help advance a certain set of social and cultural goals - a view Cass and his ilk have termed вЂњcommon good capitalism.вЂќ The groupвЂ™s mission: вЂњTo restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nationвЂ™s liberty and prosperity.вЂќ The emergence of the new economic counterculture is loosely connected to the two-year-old think tank, American Compass, whose founder, the Harvard-trained lawyer and former Bain consultant Oren Cass, routinely derides his adversaries as вЂњmarket fundamentalistsвЂќ peddling вЂњstale pietiesвЂќ from the 1980s.

The battle is likely to play out in the 2024 presidential primary, and shape the future of Republican politics long after Trump exits stage left.

The pro-Trump former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, for example, has emerged as a leading champion of traditional free-market policies in opposition to other pro-Trumpers like Vance and Hawley. The divide doesnвЂ™t quite fall along pro- and anti-Trump lines. The debate centers on what lessons to draw from Donald Trump, who talked like a populist but governed - with the exception of trade policy - more like a Reaganite.

Elyana gop