Does Compact Pass the Rubio Test?

Geoff Shullenberger and I talk about Compact Magazine and whether it's for real

This is a lightly edited excerpt from the transcript of my recent podcast episode with Compact editor Geoff Shullenberger in which he responds to my skepticism of reformist conservative projects, like Compact, that present themselves as trying to inject more concern for the working man’s economic interests into the agenda of the Republican Party.

Here’s the full audio, if you’re interested.

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Geoff Shullenberger: We are trying to be pretty doggedly materialist in our politics, and this is something that I’d say unites the masthead. We have left wing and right-wing writers. We have somebody like the political scientist Darel Paul, who is a standard conservative in a lot of ways, but does have a materialist, class-based analysis of American society and politics.

You can read his columns and see that he shares that with another writer like Justin Vassallo, who's a lefty. So these are people who at least are aligned in wanting to have that framework where they're not looking at culture war issues in abstraction from deeper material trends.

That is something that's shared pretty broadly across the masthead. It has a kind of Marxian inspiration, but it doesn't require any kind of orthodox Marxist outlook, and it brings together people who are potentially quite different in terms of their views on electoral politics or culture but who are interested in looking at things in this way. I'd say this is similar to American Affairs, which is a more policy oriented and scholarly but also shares this crossover type of masthead and will publish people who don't see eye to eye on a lot of things.

Daniel Oppenheimer: With these magazines or projects that frame themselves as right wing reformist projects, my test has always been: At the end of the day, are you going to be willing to support a Democratic president when the Republican Party proves ultimately invulnerable to your various reformist critiques?

It's the Marco Rubio question. Marco Rubio is always signing up for the latest reformist Republican endeavor. He published something for you guys the other day. I'm not knocking you for publishing him, but at the end of the day, Marco Rubio always falls in line, right? He always falls in line with the right-wing corporate oligarchy.

So that’s my question for American Affairs and Compact. At the end of the day, when year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, the Republican Party ultimately remains captive to corporate, oligarchical interests, will you sever ties?

To be fair to you guys, you seem less interested in power seeking than I think I once thought you were. So I’m not going to make that requirement of you if you're just an intellectual endeavor. In that case, be whatever the fuck you want. Then the expectation is just call out the bullshit wherever you see it.

But I have had this gripe for a long time. You guys are all materialist, okay, but which party is more pro-labor? That doesn't seem like that's a real question for me. It’s the Democrats. I would love if the Republican party actually assimilated some of these influences in a meaningful way and was attacking the Democrats from the left on labor, even as they remained pro-life and culturally conservative and whatever. It just never seems to happen. At the end of the day, they just defer to the National Association of Manufacturers or the Chamber of Commerce or whomever else on whatever the labor policy and tax policy is going to be. Is that a fair thing to throw at you?

Geoff Shullenberger: I think it's completely fair. And I've written things to that effect. But I think the weirdest way that this moment seems open actually has less to do with anything the GOP is doing then with the Democrats increasingly attracting more and more of the oligarchs into their camp as well as the security state apparatchiks and so on.

This isn't necessarily a good thing for the Republican Party. They're already weaker in terms of being able to attract competent elites into their orbit who can do the stuff they want to do, whether that stuff is good or bad. It may just mean that you have a circus like atmosphere of haphazardness and incompetence and a vacuum. Then various things, for different reasons, are making bids to fill that vacuum. One of them is obviously Elon Musk, who can make a very strong bid just by handing out million dollars to voters and things like that. If it goes in that direction, it's potentially worse than the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers.

Oppenheimer: It can get much worse. No question. It can get much worse than Chamber of Commerce.

Shullenberger: But then you also have the Teamsters president Sean O'Brien’s speech at the RNC, which I think should be understood as him making a bid and seeing what comes of it. It’s also reflection of where the membership is, with a slow trickle of union households increasingly supporting Republicans. I think we're still seeing more de-alignment than re-alignment, but it’s unsettled.

Oppenheimer: I mean, JD Vance talks the talk a little bit. But I'll believe it when I see it. Again, if it happened, fantastic. I think that would be better for the American worker or the American working class if that realignment happened, frankly, if it somehow happened where labor became a constituency of the Republican party.

Shullenberger: The way I would frame is that if labor were able to essentially play the two sides against each other, that would be a stronger position for it to be in as a movement. For it to be independent and able to demand things from both parties and play them against each other. That would be a stronger position.

Now it is essentially a kind of client of the Democratic party, which means that it gets certain things, and it is true that the Republican party, by and large, will not support the PRO Act, which is a big problem and puts the lie to the notion of any real pro-labor sentiment. But at the same time, it's also true that Obama essentially marginalized labor. He did not pass card check legislation. It had to beg for scraps within the party. That was true to a lesser degree with the Biden administration too.

All of that may just reflect the weakening status of the labor movement overall. But yeah, I think these are the right questions to ask.