By Oren Cass
A chasm has opened within American conservatism between an old guard whose blind faith in markets has degraded the common citizen's quality of life and a New Right determined to restore a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest. At its heart, the dispute is an economic one. What is the proper goal for an economy? What has gone wrong and why? What is the role for government in charting a better course? Vivek Ramaswamy clearly sees himself as a peacemaker in this struggle, and has proposed a new ideology halfway between the two sides that he calls "National Libertarianism." The problem with positioning oneself halfway across a chasm, though, is that there is nowhere to stand; only a long way to fall. If National Libertarianism contains a theory of the economic problems afflicting the United States, or a vision for how to address them, Ramaswamy hides it well.
What is National Libertarianism? The best description would be warmed-over market fundamentalism with a dash of nationalism sprinkled on to mask that past-the-expiration-date funk. Ramaswamy focuses on three issues — trade, immigration, and the regulatory state — and in each case winds up embracing the old-guard economic view, almost inadvertently, for lack of anything else to say. His critique of the New Right alternative, to which he assigns the tellingly redundant term "National Protectionism," is mostly that it takes seriously the need to depart from the old orthodoxy, which he makes no effort to defend.
Take the issue of trade. Donald Trump believed "that the top objective of trade policy shouldn't just be to blindly increase the size of the economic pie but instead to advantage American manufacturers," says Ramaswamy. But he disagrees. Rather, his own departure from the old orthodoxy would focus "exclusively on eliminating U.S. dependence on China in those critical sectors for U.S. security." That's an important issue, no doubt, but hardly the only one. What about the health of the domestic industrial base, the allocation of capital to productive activity, and the quality and dispersion of good blue-collar jobs nationwide? | 
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