The conservative blueprint envisions a flourishing society built upon a foundation of strong families and communities, buttressed by a free market. But cracks in that foundation are widening, the structure is swaying, and market forces are providing little support. In response, conservatives are turning their focus to workers.

This response emerges from an insight that I like to call the working hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy. Genuine prosperity depends upon people working as productive contributors to their society, through which they can achieve self-sufficiency, support their families, participate in their communities, and raise children prepared to do the same. And it is the labor market that determines where, how, by whom and at what price most work gets done.

The labor market’s outcomes, like any market’s, depend on the conditions in which it operates. Crucially, while a labor market left alone will seek an efficient equilibrium, economic theory never promises that the equilibrium will be a socially desirable, inclusive one. A genuine conservatism values markets as powerful mechanisms that foster choice, promote competition and deliver growth, but always in service to the larger end of a cohesive society in which people can thrive. Observing that deficiencies in the labor market’s outcomes have become acute, conservatives are beginning to ask which conditions are leading to those outcomes and how to change those conditions.

The Republican senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley are in the vanguard of that effort. Read Mr. Rubio’s report from May, “American Investment in the 21st Century,” which interrogates the business sector’s failure to make long-term investments in the nation’s economic future. Or watch Mr. Hawley’s maiden speech on the Senate floor, also from May, in which he excoriated the “new aristocrats” who “seek to remake society in their own image: to engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else.” Instead, Mr. Hawley said, “we need a society that offers rewarding work for every worker who wants it, wherever she is from, whatever degree he might have, whether their ambition is to start a business or to start a family.”