What’s next
FreeCons and other Center-Right leaders to gather in Washington
Now that the biggest political questions of 2024 are settled — Donald Trump is returning to the White House, with Republicans in charge in Congress and most state governments — we turn our attention to the biggest policy questions of 2025 and beyond.
Will a resurgent GOP champion such principles as individual liberty, civic virtue, federalism, free markets, fiscal restraint, the rule of law, peace through strength, and limited, constitutional government?
Or will its leaders try to move the party, and the country it seeks to govern, in a more leftward direction — toward centralism, protectionism, fiscal irresponsibility, and other wrongheaded notions imported from other countries or resurrected from past, discredited administrations?
We Freedom Conservatives will do our part to preserve the timeless principles of the American Founding and apply them creatively to the challenges of the 21st century.
Our hundreds of signatories and allies bring a depth of knowledge and experience to the task, having served as presidential aides, congressional leaders, governors and mayors, state and local lawmakers, judges and litigators, policy experts, scholars, journalists, educators, donors, and grassroots activists.
Today we spotlight more FreeCon analysis of the 2024 elections. But first, some announcements.
Upcoming events
The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) is holding its annual Freedom & Progress conference in a few days. FREOPP’s president, Avik Roy, is one of the leaders of the FreeCon movement. Many conference speakers are FreeCon signatories and allies.
The event will be held at Washington’s Park Hyatt hotel on Monday, November 18 and Tuesday, November 19. Among the topics to be discussed are:
The Future of Freedom in the Two Major Parties
Applying the Principles of Federalism Across Policy Issues
How the Debt Crisis Is Affecting Ordinary Americans
Will AI Advance or Hinder Equal Opportunity?
Why Bureaucracies Fail — And How to Fix Them
Speakers at the conference include former HHS Secretary Alex Azar, pollster Patrick Ruffini, author Philip Howard, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, EdChoice president Robert Enlow, and such FreeCon signatories as Lanhee Chen, George Will, Grover Norquist, Kent Lassman, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Tony Woodlief.
You’ll find the 2024 Freedom & Progress conference schedule here. If you’d like to register for the event, click here.
And here’s one more date to put on your calendar: Monday, February 24, 2025. That’s when we are currently planning to hold our first Freedom Conservatism Conference at the National Press Club in Washington. We’ll share more details ASAP.
Supply-side boom
Kevin Hassett is the Brent R. Nicklas Distinguished Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and a FreeCon signatory.
During the first Trump administration, Hassett chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A former advisor to several other GOP campaigns, he is likely to play a role in the next Trump administration, as well.
Hassett previously served as senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. His academic background includes being an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and visiting professor at New York University’s Law School.
His many books and monographs include Toward Fundamental Tax Reform, Inequality and Tax Policy, and Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers.
In a preelection interview with CNBC, Hassett forecast a “supply-side boom” if a second Trump administration maintains and builds upon the 2017 tax cuts while pursuing other fiscal and regulatory reforms.
“When you increase growth that puts downward pressure on inflation,” he pointed out.
Praise for pluralism
Williamson M. Evers is a senior fellow and director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Educational Excellence as well as assistant editor for its publication The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.
Evers formerly served as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education and as a member of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.
Earlier in his career, he served on the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, on California’s State Academic Standards Commission, and as an elected member of the school board of California’s Santa Clara County. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, among other outlets.
Evers is the author of the education chapter in the new Routledge Handbook on Classical Liberalism. It argues for reforms of K-12 education based on “pluralism, demonopolization, and parental choice.”
As “pluralism of delivery grows,” he wrote, “competitive pressure from parental choice will increase school effectiveness and may check the desires of some educators to engage in ideological indoctrination.”
For higher education, Evers proposes “removal of direct subsidies in favor of relying mainly on student tuition payments.”
In the mix
• FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman, a senior writer at National Review, cited instances of left-wing pundits condemning or insulting American voters instead of reexamining the Democrats’ failed economic policies.
“America’s merit and virtue are not contingent on election results,” Rothman wrote. “Voters hired Trump to do a job to their satisfaction — a job they thought Biden failed at. And if Trump doesn’t deliver, they’ll give Democrats another shot in 2028.
“That exceedingly banal explanation for voters’ behavior in 2024 leaves a lot of theatrics on the table, but it has more explanatory power than the notion that Trump’s victory is attributable to the irredeemable bigots who secretly surround us.”
• Washington Examiner writer David Harsanyi, a FreeCon signatory, described the largely left-wing media as among the biggest losers of the election cycle.
“The establishment press are less trusted than virtually any major institution in American life,” he wrote. “It is a well-earned ignominy.
“It’s also a tragedy for a free nation that we have a barely functioning press. Reporters probably tell themselves they’re disliked because they’re fearless truth-tellers. But, far more likely, it’s a referendum on their deceit.
• FreeCon signatory André Béliveau, senior manager of energy policy at the Commonwealth Foundation, argued at National Review Online that Democrats’ opposition to fracking cost their party dearly.
“After receiving flak for her 2019 promise to ban fracking, Vice President Kamala Harris flip-flopped and retracted her more environmentally hawkish stance,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump’s embrace of the ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra might have helped secure his victory, with exit polls showing that 55% of Pennsylvania voters oppose a fracking ban.”