Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond. One way to start doing that is to read Oren Cass’s absolutely brilliant new book, “The Once and Future Worker.” The first part of the book is about how we in the educated class have screwed up labor markets in ways that devalued work and made it harder for people in the working class to find a satisfying job. . . . “What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks. The bulk of his book is a series of ideas for how we can reform labor markets.

Mr. Cass, 35, has spent most of his life among that technocratic elite. He started as a junior consultant at Bain & Company out of Williams College. A few years later he took a six-month leave to work on Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Afterward, Mr. Cass enrolled in Harvard Law School to deepen his understanding of public policy. “Law school is a lot of fun if you’re not there to be a lawyer,” he quips. He worked for the next Romney operation in 2011 between his second and third years at Harvard, and ended up with so much in his portfolio that at the end of the summer “they sort of said, well, you have to stay.” He became domestic-policy director while still in law school.

Returning to Bain after the election, Mr. Cass started writing on environmental and labor policy for National Review. His work caught the attention of the Manhattan Institute, which hired him as a senior fellow in 2015. His new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” grew out of responses to Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory.

Many public-policy experts, Mr. Cass said, saw the defeat of both party establishments as a marketing issue: “Maybe we haven’t done a good enough job explaining how great everything is.” Mr. Cass disagrees. Can working-class Americans “buy more cheap stuff? Absolutely. And do we now transfer more money to them, so they can buy even more cheap stuff? Yes,” he says. “But their ability to participate meaningfully in the labor market, and to become self-sufficient supporters of families has eroded badly.”

This dilemma is apparent in the vigorous intra-conservative debate over a new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” written by the former Mitt Romney domestic policy director Oren Cass. In certain ways the book is an extension of the reform-conservative project, an argument for policies that support “a foundation of productive work” as the basis for healthy communities and flourishing families and robust civic life. But Cass is more dramatic in his criticism of Western policymaking since the 1970s, more skeptical of globalization’s benefits to Western workers, and more dire in his diagnosis of the real socioeconomic condition of the working class. . . .

In a sense the debate reproduces the larger argument about whether a post-Trump conservative politics should seek to learn something from his ascent or simply aim to repudiate him — with Cass offering a reform conservatism that effectively bids against Trump for populist support, and his critics warning that he’s conceding way too much to Trumpist demagogy.

But the argument over Cass’s book also raises a larger question that both right and left are wrestling with in our age of populist discontent: Namely, is the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?

Free trade, too, has come at a cost. “What if China sends $50 billion worth of electronics to the United States and we send $50 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds back to China?” asks a new book, The Once and Future Worker. Its author, Oren Cass, has one of the sharpest policy minds in this new vanguard. His pedigree is surprising. In 2012, the year he graduated from Harvard Law School, he was a top policy adviser for Mitt Romney at age 29. He now writes for the Manhattan Institute. “The issue that came up after the 2012 campaign was, What does conservative antipoverty policy look like?” Cass says. . . .

Cass’s book, timed for publication the week after the midterms, could either be the battle orders for a second Trump term or a to-do list for a successor stamped in the same mold. There is no mistaking the Trump-inflected themes of nationalism, populism and criticism of free trade. Cass, an alum of Bain & Co.–the progenitor of Romney’s Bain Capital–now wants “to combat the unfair trade practices of nations like China,” which threaten “to reduce opportunities for workers, lower the trajectory of their productivity and diminish the nation’s real prosperity.” He also goes after globalization. Currently “we free employers from the constraints of using the existing domestic workforce,” he writes, “offering them instead an option of using much cheaper foreign workers overseas or bringing the cheaper workers here.” Sanders and Bannon would agree.

Cass’s pro-worker policy includes wage subsidies, a standard conservative alternative to raising the minimum wage. Under one proposal the subsidy would act differently, by diverting tax giveaways enjoyed now by the wealthy–for instance, slashing further the mortgage-interest deduction–and sending that money down the economic stream, supplementing the paychecks of families while also reinforcing their work ethic. This could potentially address the problem tucked away in the unemployment numbers–that too many of the able-bodied have drifted out of the job market. The problem of “labor-force participation” is a subject for conservatives like Charles Murray and J.D. Vance. What’s striking in Cass’s argument is its unapologetic Robin Hoodism. He dispenses with homilies about morally educating the poor and instead vows to target the rich, “taking tax revenue drawn from higher earners and inserting it directly into the paychecks of lower earners.”

Cass is less inhibited than most because he’s a free agent.

This commentary by Emmanuel Todd appeared initially in the French publication Books. It was translated and reprinted with permission by City Journal.

The Once and Future Worker . . . is a remarkable intellectual articulation of “populism,” a kind of manifesto of a polite Trumpist, if you will, one relieved of excessive language and so rendered amazingly convincing. The proof is the very favorable review by the columnist David Brooks in the very anti-Trump New York Times. His column suggests that this book is one of those rare works capable of affecting a change in attitude among its less dogmatic readers: it convinces through its moderation, its open-mindedness, and its willingness to negotiate ideas.

Cass begins by stating a thesis to which a specialist on societal dynamics like me cannot remain insensitive: he argues that no political program whose objective is the nation’s durable prosperity can be focused on purely economic questions. His critique of GDP and the rate of growth (which are not ends in themselves) is interesting because it avoids the usual pitfalls of anti-growth discourse. . . .

The question of immigration is posed with an acuity that can be unsettling. I confess feeling overwhelmed on this point. . . . He does this in his usual peaceful, measured, conciliatory tone. . . . We find the same civilized originality when Cass takes up the problem of environmental regulations. . . . For those, like me, who remember the time when it was the Communist Party that showed interest in the proletariat, it is troubling to find oneself in a world where it is now American Republicans, such as Cass, who worry about workers. How is it that he proves to be infinitely more humane than a contemporary French socialist?