“Together,” the author Edward Everett Hale once observed, is “one of the most inspiring words in the English language.”
“Coming together is a beginning,” he continued. “Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
The Freedom Conservatism project began when a small group of writers, activists, and policy professionals came together in early 2023 to share our concerns about the rise of the nationalist-populist Right and its turn away from the principles of individual liberty, civic virtue, and civil society that form the fusionist core of American conservatism.
Over the ensuing months, these initial FreeCons kept at it together, drafting a statement of principles, developing a plan of action, and recruiting others to our cause. By the time we publicly announced the project on July 13, 2023, there were 83 signatories.
Within days, the FreeCon count surpassed a hundred. Today it exceeds 300 — all resolved to stand fast, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder for a new age of American freedom.
All are leaders, though in a variety of institutions, disciplines, and leadership roles. We represent different generations, faiths, and areas of interest. We disagree on some of the particulars. But we share enough in common to work together on behalf of the nation we love — and to further the exceptional experiment in freedom and self-government that has always made America great.
We know we can’t accomplish this great task alone. Over the past 18 months, FreeCons have recruited hundreds of other allies across the conservative movement who might be precluded from signing our statement for institutional or professional reasons but are equally committed to our common cause.
We’ve also attracted thousands of followers to our pages, drawn hundreds of thousands of readers to our Substack and social-media feeds, and reached millions of Americans with the FreeCon message via newspapers, broadcast networks, podcasts, and other media outlets.
Will you join us? The more we all work together, the more success we’ll have. Subscribe. Follow us. Tell others about us. Forward this newsletter. And if you can, attend our first Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held on Monday, Feb. 24 at the National Press Club in Washington.
Building bridges
Kay Coles James has an extensive background in crafting public policy and leading nearly every sector of America’s economy. A former president of the Heritage Foundation, James will be one of the featured speakers at the first Freedom Conservatism Conference on Feb. 24 in Washington.
James most recently served as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a Cabinet-level office in the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin. She previously served in former Gov. George Allen’s Cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
At the federal level, James was Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under President George W. Bush and Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President George H.W. Bush.
A former member of the Virginia Board of Education and Fairfax County school board, James was dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and senior vice president of the Family Research Council.
Her board service includes stints with PNC Financial Services Group, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Magellan Health Services, Amerigroup Corporation, and Focus on the Family.
In a speech last year at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, James discussed how her background and experiences have informed her leadership roles.
“True leadership, I think, comes out of a spirit of love,” she told Pepperdine students, faculty, and guests. “You do it because of the love that you have for your fellow humans, and for wanting to create a better world. Leadership for the sake of being a leader is empty and meaningless; leadership to improve the quality of life of those who you love is worth it.”
James also defended the art of persuasion as essential to political action.
“I make it a point to reach out to people on the other side of the aisle and remind them that I am trying to build bridges. I’m trying to win them over, not blow up bridges.”
Tip of the iceberg
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.
He will be one of the featured speakers at our first Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held on Feb. 24 in Washington.
Cochrane previously taught at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and its economic department. During the Reagan administration, he served as a junior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers.
The author of the book Asset Pricing, Cochrane writes frequently for academic journals and the press on financial markets, monetary economics, and public policy. He also maintains the Grumpy Economist blog and appears on the weekly podcast GoodFellows with his Hoover colleagues Niall Ferguson and H.R. McMaster.
In a recent post, Cochrane argued that most scholars underestimate the potential economic benefits of deregulation.
“Many studies of regulation count up the number of regulations, or the paperwork time devoted to filling out forms,“ he wrote. “That’s a good start, but it’s obviously a scratch on the surface, a tip of the iceberg of economic damage.”
Cochrane pointed to the onerous set of government restrictions faced by would-be builders of housing in California.
Such a regulatory morass “leads to sky-high prices, people who can’t take good jobs, and businesses who can’t find nearby workers. The cost of filling out the forms is considerable, but tiny compared to the economic damage.”
Deep stake
A former visiting professor at West Virginia University, Judge Glock now serves as director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he focuses on the intersection of economics, finance, and housing.
Glock is a Freedom Conservatism signatory and one of the featured speakers at the Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held on Feb. 24 in Washington.
He formerly served as senior director of policy and research at the Cicero Institute. His work has been featured in National Affairs, Tax Notes, the Journal of American History, NPR, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other places.
Glock is the author of the book The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939.
In a recent piece for The Free Press, he described the inevitable relationship between protectionist trade policies and the Deep State. “Tariffs are managed by opaque bureaucracies,” he wrote, “and manipulated by high-priced lobbyists in order to extract funds from American consumers.”
Glock observed that political favoritism often determines whether companies are harmed or helped by tariffs. “One study found that donations to the president’s party made a company significantly more likely to get an exclusion,” he wrote. “Those donations paid off because companies that won exclusions together gained billions of dollars in market value.”
Economists’ confidence that tariffs cause economic losses “might border on cockiness if the evidence were not so strongly in their favor,” Glock concluded. Protectionist policies during the first Trump administration “tended to enrich a small group of connected companies — and imposed higher prices on everyone else.”
In the mix
• In Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Scott Winship contrasted how critics of free enterprise describe the American economy with how Americans rate their own household finances and prospects.
“Whenever you read that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the US, you should remember that 80% are satisfied with the way things are going in their own life,” wrote Winship, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute.
While there was an unmistakable drop in public confidence after 2020, its primary cause was the “high inflation that occurred in the wake of the COVID pandemic” and the mistaken Biden-Harris policies that exacerbated it, not “fundamental problems with the American economy or pre-COVID economic policies that neglected workers.”
• At EconLog, FreeCon signatory and economic-policy consultant Vance Ginn wrote that “the federal government’s $36 trillion debt isn’t just a fiscal issue — it’s a direct threat to economic freedom and prosperity. Every dollar borrowed is taken from us and future generations, limiting opportunities for growth and innovation.”
Associate director of economic policy at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration, Ginn argued that fiscal restraint at the federal, state, and local levels — as well as FreeCon policies such as school choice and regulatory reform — represent the best path forward for 2025.
“Let’s commit to policies that limit government, reduce spending, and ensure every individual has the opportunity to prosper.”