Time to Haul Anchor...

Commonwealth Dispatches is setting sail to American Compass

Today, I’m going to interrupt the regular programming here to bring you some pretty big personal and professional news that will probably be of interest to most regular readers of Commonwealth Dispatches. At the end of next week, I will be saying a bittersweet goodbye to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which has been a wonderful full-time professional home to me these past nine months and a true honor to have been a Fellow of for the past three years. I will be saying an exuberant “Hello!” to American Compass, where I will join the team as the first Director of Programs and Education starting February 24^th.

Now, a swirl of questions are probably going through your head: “What’s American Compass?” “Why are you going to American Compass?” “What are you going to be doing there?” And of course “What does this mean for our beloved Commonwealth Dispatches?” I will try to tackle each in turn—and if you already know the answers to one or two, feel free to skip on to the next.

What is American Compass?

American Compass is a conservative thinktank, based in Washington, DC, founded and helmed by Oren Cass, the eminent economist. It is one of the flagships of the so-called “New Right” or “Realignment” or “Populism,” and specializes in economics, or perhaps better political economy, construed in the broadest terms. As their excellent website puts it:

“Conservatives rightly value free markets, but we also recognize that markets require rules and institutions to work well, that they are a means to the end of human flourishing and exist to serve us (not the other way around), and that larger televisions and fancier cars are not what people value most. Rather than evaluate the economy by how much stuff it allows everyone to consume, conservative economics asks whether the economy empowers workers to support their families and communities, whether it strengthens the social fabric, and whether it fosters domestic industry and innovation. Public policy plays a vital role in advancing those goals.”

In other words, this is a conservatism that is actually committed to conserving the essential components of a flourishing society, rather than simply getting government out of the way and trusting that everything will take care of itself. It is a conservatism that recognizes that “the market” is an imaginary construct and that such markets as exist are not self-creating, self-sustaining, or self-regulating in isolation from the laws, customs, and communities that steer them, orient them, and anchor them. (It’s a requirement of working at Compass that you use nautical metaphors wherever possible—get used to it!) It’s also a conservatism that understands that material goods, while important, are far from the highest goods, and that public policy must promote family, faith, and community, rather than merely a higher GDP. And it’s a conservatism that follows the best of the Burkean tradition in its commitment to empiricism over ideology: if theories don’t match the real world, the theories need to change, not the world.

In practical terms this means things like questioning free trade orthodoxy, advancing policies that actively foster family formation, and governing tech in the public interest—all areas where Compass and its members have helped dramatically move the political consensus in the less than five years since it was founded.

“Its members?” you ask, “who are they?” So glad you asked. My favorite thing about American Compass is its unique structure as an army of friends built around a small, hardworking general staff. The Compass team is just now cracking the double digits, but the Compass membership, which I’ve been part of for more than four years, now numbers around 250—scattered among Congressional offices, agencies, thinktanks, law firms, journals, nonprofits, and more. Members share their practical experience in government and civil society with the policy team, helping it refine and sharpen its ideas, and serve as ambassadors for its vision of a pro-family conservatism in other institutions and contexts. And Compass, in turn, provides an extended family and intellectual home for its members, as they try to navigate a crazy political and cultural landscape.

Why Me?

“Okay, I get it, sounds great…but why exactly are you going to American Compass?” This is certainly a fair question from anyone who’s followed my work as a historical theologian and Christian ethicist over the years. However, I’ve always focused on issues at the intersection of theology and politics. Indeed, I’ve had a particular interest in economics (I used to be a part-time financial advisor), and the ethics of technology, and have lamented the lack of rigorous thinking and good resources in the church on these topics. In my roles at the Edmund Burke Foundation and EPPC from 2019 till now, I’ve had increasing opportunity to study and occasionally write on such issues. Initially, I kept my remarks general and theoretical, however, when I wrote “We Peasants of the Metaverse” for American Compass in 2022, seeking to apply feudalism’s understanding of property rights to make sense of social media’s attention economy, Oren Cass asked me to close with a concrete policy proposal. I dared to spitball one, and he actually liked it and published it!

The next year, I began teaming up Clare Morell at EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing Project, with the idea of fusing my more historical and philosophical ruminations on tech with her detailed knowledge of the public policy landscape and the harms to kids. It proved a perfect partnership, resulting in “The Soft Tyranny of Smartphones” (National Affairs), “Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone” (First Things), “Stop Hacking Humans” (The New Atlantis), an amicus brief, and the “Future for the Family” project. Through it I became increasingly conversant with front-line public policy work, and excited to translate everything I’ve been writing for the last decade about freedom, law, and community into actual laws that are making a difference in our children’s lives.

Still, the journey from theological ethicist to public policy advocate seems a strange one even to me, until I pause to consider that most of my theological work over the past decade and a half has been dedicated precisely to defending such a role for Christians in our decaying republic. By retrieving and tirelessly hammering away at the ideas of natural law and the two kingdoms, I’ve insisted that Christians can and should embrace vocations of service in the public square, and that there is no contradiction between them bringing their distinctive Christian convictions to bear and seeking to translate those convictions into language and categories that can appeal to a wide range of their fellow citizens.

That said, my main work at Compass will not be front-line policy, which I’m happy to leave to the experts; rather, I’ll be shepherding the army (or perhaps I should now say navy) of friends that is the Compass membership—work that closely resembles what I had the pleasure of doing at the Davenant Institute for a decade. And although Compass is a self-conscious conservative organization, it is committed above all to serious ideas, not partisan point-scoring or loyalty tests.

What I’ll Be Doing

So let me say a bit more about the work. As I’ve already mentioned, what makes Compass unique is its members, and I’ll be responsible for curating, nourishing, and leveraging this extraordinary group of talented people. There are existing programs for members, where we bring in speakers, exchange ideas, and build friendships and collaborations, and I’ll have pretty wide scope to develop new programs and events. But now that the membership network is five years old and many members are experts in their fields, we’re hoping to really leverage that expertise to build up other conservative leaders and train future leaders in many different domains. We’re hoping to translate the huge knowledge base that Compass’s policy team has developed over the last five years into easily-disseminated educational content that can help forge a new consensus on the Right.

Because of Compass’s small team/big membership structure, the spirit of the work will be one of coalition-building: forging relationships with lots of different people doing great work in lots of different organizations (including lots of folks at EPPC), challenging them to sharpen and refine their ideas through debate, and helping them find ways to multiple the impact of each other’s work. Again, this is a lot of what I did at Davenant, and I’ve discovered over the past year that I seem to be good at it in the public policy world as well.

That said, you’ll be happy to hear that the new role will still allow ample scope for me to develop my own research, writing, and speaking, continuing many of the same lines of inquiry that I have been able to focus on in my time at EPPC.

What About Commonwealth Dispatches?

Commonwealth Dispatches will continue in more or less its present form, though it may become slightly less frequent given the demands of the work—at least during busy event seasons at American Compass. I’ll continue to use it as a repository of everything I’m publishing elsewhere, and as a sounding-board to develop new ideas I’m exploring.

I am even hoping—and indeed planning—to create an audio/podcast version of the Dispatches which I’ll make available to paid subscribers. I know lots of people prefer listening on their commute to reading long articles, and I have a habit of publishing looong articles. So stay tuned for an option to listen to me reading some of my posts and publications!

Final Thoughts

I should just close by tendering again my sincere gratitude to Ryan Anderson, Mitch Muncy, and the whole community at EPPC for the amazing landing pad they provided me this past year, an opportunity to take a break between leadership roles and just focus on research and writing. I’ve never had such a productive year—when I launched this Substack in July, I set the goal of 100 publications and appearances in the next twelve months; thanks to the support of this fantastic institution, I’ve already met that goal. Thanks also to all the donors who have supported EPPC and my own work in particular—I’ve tried to give you your money’s worth!

Newly Published

Oh, I almost forgot—this just dropped at FusionAIER, “Human Nature Isn’t Enough”:

But why, Bellafiore asks, is persuasion needed? This, he says, is “the scandal of tech criticism”—the fact that we even ask for arguments to “convince us of what we have incredibly managed to forget—the fundamental facticity of our physical selves.” What is it, he asks, that “has made it possible for us to live in ways that deny the most basic truths about ourselves”?

The answer, in fact, is not hard to seek. Indeed, Bellafiore mentions it in passing, observing that “Saint Paul lamented that ‘the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’.” The scandal of tech criticism, I would submit, is simply the scandal of sin.

… So then, perhaps there is not much mystery as to why we find ourselves trapped in unreality, why we need common-sense reminders like Rosen’s book.

The proper task of such works, like the arguments of Socrates more than two millenia ago, is not to convince us, but to remind us, enabling us to fully awaken to and embrace something that we already knew in some measure, but had suppressed out of a sense of guilt or impotence.

Read the whole thing here.