A New Age of Industrial Democracy
Reclaiming Roosevelt’s Vision to Guide the Movement That Began in 2015
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was the first presidential race I was old enough to understand and actively track. I was in high school at the time, and while I had hazy memories of the 2008 and 2012 elections, those were mostly from talk at the dinner table and cable news advertisements. The chaos of the 2015 primaries in the Republican Party had completely enraptured me, and I found myself rooting more and more for the man that seemed to be fighting against the entire world.
When I went to school the morning after election day, tired, but smug, I took no small amount of pleasure in the fact that my teachers, and some of my peers, had all been wrong. Over the course of the election cycle I had been subject to the occasional light-hearted jab at supporting a candidate that was “bound to lose”, but they had lost in the end. It was then that I knew that something big was happening in American politics, as if a switch had been flipped overnight. Suddenly the same liberals who had acted as if Republicans were being hysterical over the potential impact of a Clinton presidency had become the hysterics themselves.
It was also apparent that something had happened that was not supposed to. The realization that we might be living in a world beyond the old stale consensus and common knowledge made me very pleased. That was almost a decade ago.
Over that time, a lot has changed, much of it positive: I’ve since graduated college, entered the workforce, founded a think-tank, and been married. But there have been negative societal changes as well: I watched with morbid curiosity as my peers, the media, and other adults meant to be role-models transform first into rabid anti-Trump activists and then simply extreme anti-Republicans.
My time as a student at American University, was particularly radicalizing on three counts: the already-present, left-wing radicalization of the student body, the weak response of the few conservatives on campus to this unbridled hate, and the lack of focus of both parties on issues that I believed played a role in Trump’s victory in 2016.
So, I found the people who were talking about it. And ten years on from 2016, it’s clear to me that there’s still plenty of work to do.
Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. This is transparently obvious to anyone not living under a rock. But the movement he leads beyond that is fuzzy, at best. There is no real alternative to distinguish “Trumpism” from Trump, nor should there be, because the most important objective for those who hold our philosophy is to present our vision as one that already is. That’s where the terminology falls short. Ultimately even using the term “realignment” or “New Right” is a vague description at best, and can easily fall to internal feuds and redefinitions that plague any large scale organization.
For example, there already was a “New Right” in the 1960s, which served as the precursor to modern neoconservatism but was “new” in the sense that it differentiated from the “previous” right before it. And the more recent Tea Party named itself after a Revolutionary War-era action; the name was full of symbolism but light on actual defined meaning beyond being functionally more libertarian than what came before.
That’s not to say that being adaptable is bad. It is a key trait for survival in a dynamic political environment, and arguably that’s also what has made both of President Trump’s administrations relatively successful. President Trump has largely fractured the previously rigid dogma and mores of American politics, opening the door to a more assertive and less decorous method of attaining political victories. It’s paid off – the news cycle is dominated by the President, and he sets the agenda.
This adaptability, and flexibility with the moment, is also unintelligible to the broader coalition of voters, donors, and volunteers, all of whom grew up thinking about politics in a completely different way. Too heavy a break from the past, and it becomes a death sentence. Too light, and there’s nothing functionally different about the party that needed Donald Trump to achieve historic gains from the white working class to Hispanic voters.
Nonetheless, our movement – such as it is – is now in power, meaning we must put some sort of contouring on it. Like many other conservatives, we draw inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt, as much for his backbone as the policies he pursued during his presidential administration. He was the first President to truly dominate and invigorate American politics and the American media in a comparable way to the modern era. He also possessed a wide range of opinions, many of which changed drastically towards the end of his life, and was not afraid in the slightest to voice them. Our animating factor at the New Outlook comes from a special message to Congress in the last year of his Presidency, President Roosevelt referred to “industrial democracy,” saying:
“The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their right to life on this continent. If we allow great industrial organizations to exercise unregulated control of the means of production and the necessaries of life, we deprive the Americans of today and of the future of industrial liberty, a right no less precious and vital than political freedom. Industrial liberty was a fruit of political liberty, and in turn has become one of its chief supports, and exactly as we stand for political democracy so we must stand for industrial democracy.”
The phrase “industrial democracy” is loosely defined but appears several times in post-presidency writing from Roosevelt. It is, in a very Rooseveltian way, presented as a middle-ground to protect America from the excesses of socialism and those of extreme individualism. An industrial democracy, simply put, is the a state that defends the livelihood, dignity, and political power of its citizens, where it must balance its corporate patrons’ desire for monopoly and control, as well as the individual’s desire to forge their own path, with even still the broader common good of the nation and community as a whole. The extent to which the state should or should not be involved in those, or what makes the ideal balance, is the cornerstone of our political debates still today.
After Roosevelt left the scene, his concept of industrial democracy left with him.
At the New Outlook, we’re dedicated to reinvigorating the American spirit, which means redefining the concept of industrial democracy for the times in which we live. Our contributors will certainly not reflect all the views of the staff or organization, but we hope to platform new perspectives, debates, and ultimately inject fresh ideas into the bloodstream of the conservative movement. Our precursor, The Outlook, was the magazine where Theodore Roosevelt himself – as an associate editor – shared his commentary on all questions, whether political or cultural, and developed a narrative that would help connect him with the average American.
We want to retain that spirit. The “New Right” has urgent political and coalitional questions which must be settled, but most importantly, it requires a narrative, a way of connection, with the broader American public that goes beyond niche policy prescriptions and instead engages the moral character and foundational beliefs of our citizenry. Convincing Beltway policy experts is one thing; reaching everyday Americans and convincing them to embrace our ideas is something else entirely.
Our duty is not to reconstruct the old definitions of virtue and nation, nor to consult a thesaurus and drum up soliloquies. It is to communicate those time-honored, immortal principles in an effort to encourage leadership to move on from penning think pieces and toward the frontlines. The years ahead will call for true leadership – decisive action, moral character, and honest communication – and the only way to ensure this movement lasts beyond the short-term is to build a clear vision of what America should be, and why
Aiden Buzzetti is President of the Bull Moose Project and 1776 Project Foundation. You can find him on X at @AidenBuzzetti.