YOU KNOW WHAT THE rIGHT REALLY HATES?:

"The goal, long term, is to think about what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be," said Cass. "One of the reasons we think this is such an important project is that, even four-plus years after Trump emerged on the scene, there really has been very little new and interesting ferment in the right of center. It's pretty much the same set of institutions and publications and so forth. ... By and large, the establishment is what it was. And it seems to be keeping its head down and sort of hoping that everything can just go back post-Trump to the way that it was pre-Trump. To the extent that the future should sound different, and certainly I think it should, now is the time to start building the institutions and efforts that are going to make that a reality."

Cass acknowledges the problems animating populism are very real, but he argues that they won't be solved by the governing ideologies he blames for creating the crisis, nor by the populism itself, "which has demonstrated no ability to formulate or implement a coherent response."

"An earthquake clears a lot of space for rebuilding, but an earthquake does not rebuild," Cass explained. "And there are a lot of people who want to rush right back in and build what you already had after the earthquake. But something an earthquake shows you is which of the things that you'd already built were really not built very thoughtfully. It's important to learn lessons from this disruption that has occurred. It's important to go back to first principles and ask: What do we actually believe and why? What do we care about and why?"

Inside the GOP coalition, Cass argues, traditional economic conservatives ceded economic policy to libertarians as part of a "bargain" to win the Cold War. Ronald Reagan called it a three-legged stool: economic libertarians, social conservatives and national security hawks. Cass believes this "fusionism" worked well - in the past.

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