Peace Among Ourselves
Notes on the second National Conservatism Conference
In 2019, a group of conservative intellectuals assembled for a conference on the emerging school of thought known as national conservatism. They discussed topics that had become ubiquitous in the Trump era, such as immigration and the rise of China. But the talks also hinted at deeper lines of demarcation between the conservative fusionism of the late 20th century and the strands of nationalism and populism that were gaining prominence in the late 2010’s.
While that conference included a relatively diverse array of speakers, the purpose was to differentiate national conservatism from other right-wing factions. In the words of the conference’s organizer, Yoram Hazony:
“Today we declare independence from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing that matters in politics.”
NatCon II, held two years later in Orlando, overlapped with its predecessor in outlook but seemed to hint at a different intention. If NatCon I was about differentiation, NatCon II aimed at the synthesis of different elements and the forging of a new coalition.
Contradictions
At first glance, Dave Rubin didn’t seem like a natural fit for the National Conservatism Conference. He had spent the last several years moving towards a position that he identified with the classical liberal tradition but which - in modern American parlance - might more accurately be described as libertarianism. However, during his remarks at the conference’s VIP reception, he surprised many of us by signaling some sympathy with Hazony’s brand of conservatism, a tradition that derives more from Burke than from Jefferson, values political liberty but not in a monomaniacal way, and doesn’t shy away from the use of state power. Indeed, he went so far as to describe Hazony as one of his three most important intellectual influences, the other two being Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager.
It seems reasonable to infer that this shift in Rubin’s thinking, as well as the openness of the conference’s conservative attendees to Rubin’s evolution, was brought on in part by the urgency of the American situation. Since the first conference, a hostile administration had taken power. The wokist movement, still nascent in 2019, had figured prominently in virtually every campaign in the Democratic presidential primary, and ultimately, in Joe Biden’s successful general election campaign. The coronavirus pandemic made the first conference’s discourse on China and America’s fragile domestic supply chains seem frighteningly prescient.
However, it would be a mistake to think of this pursuit of common ground as strictly circumstantial. As political movements mature, it becomes necessary for them to leave the insulated walls of the ivory tower to interact, often uncomfortably, with other factions and schools of thought. Over time, if a movement is successful, it will begin to work out its contradictions with these other groups until they congeal into a broad electoral coalition.
This is always tricky in practice. In a later panel that included Rubin and Hazony, as well as Sohrab Ahmari and Douglas Murray, certain cultural divides became clear. On the way to this panel, another attendee predicted that an argument would break out between Ahmari and Rubin. This turned out to be wrong. In fact, Rubin didn’t make many bold claims at all and when he did take a side in some debate or another, he tended to defer to Hazony. Murray turned out to be the true outlier in the group. He clashed with Hazony and Ahmari on various questions of cultural norms and public morality and typically fell back classical liberal assumptions about the primacy of personal choice.
These are not necessarily bad assumptions, but he was out of step with the rest of the group in his seeming unwillingness to consider that others might not share them, or that the Right had moved beyond them. For example, when Hazony argued that communities should be able to maintain social norms rooted in religion, Murray observed that religiosity had declined in the West, as if that was a rebuttal. Indeed, many of Murray’s arguments amounted to some (admittedly hyper-articulate) version of “it’s the current year!”
Others seemed equally out of place, but for different reasons. On the second morning of the conference, Ted Cruz delivered a keynote address that was not well-received. While he signaled an openness to such populist priorities as vigorous antitrust enforcement, very little of what he said would have been out of place at CPAC in 2012. A few lines were especially galling, such as his calls to eschew “protectionism,” “isolationism,” and a right-wing version of “big government,” the last of which was taken by many as a shot at Josh Hawley, who had spoken the night before. The annoying thing about Cruz’s speech wasn’t so much that most of the audience disagreed with him. It’s that, instead of being honest about his Reaganite perspective, he tried to launder this perspective as the true essence of populism, which the rest of us had apparently misunderstood.
There were times when the conference’s ideological pluralism began to cast doubt on whether those present had anything in common at all. In one panel, titled Virtue, the Free Market, and the Nation, at least two of the speakers held fairly doctrinaire libertarian views. Another panel featured a conversation between Oren Cass and two union leaders about the possibilities of a renewed labor movement. But this was a necessary risk if the conference was supposed to err on the side of ecumenicalism.
Reconciliation
The conference’s first keynote address was delivered by a returning speaker, entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. Thiel’s speech at the first National Conservatism Conference, titled The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough, took it for granted that we should view issues through the lens of the nation-state. Thiel then evaluated the issues of college, war, trade, and tech through that lens. Thiel’s speech at this conference made a deeper case for nationalism, one that was rooted, somewhat surprisingly, in Thiel’s libertarianism.
In Thiel’s thinking, it’s a mistake to view national conservatism as being at odds with conservative perspectives that emphasize individualism. Juxtaposing the nation-state to more local forms of governance is the wrong comparison. The right comparison is between the nation-state and other, more globally-facing institutions.
When Thiel delivered the 2019 Wriston Lecture at the Manhattan Institute, he related an interesting example of transnational institutions supplanting national ones to the detriment of liberty: Margaret Thatcher’s support for European integration. Thatcher had hoped that a more liberal trade climate would help tame the unions. In practice, Britain got a much more heavily regulated economy under the auspices of the E.U. Worse yet, these new constraints on the economy were less subject to democratic accountability. It took a hotly-contested referendum and years of negotiations for the British nation-state to rid itself of them.
These questions of responsiveness underlie many of the concerns members of all factions of the Right share. The core institutions in our society suffer from epistemic closure, an impermeability to new ideas, priorities, and sources of information and insight. These qualities become more intense and harder to dislodge at larger scales. As dysfunctional as national states sometimes become, they’re at least susceptible to democratic change, however slow and uncertain this process may be. International institutions suffer from an added degree of separation from national populations, and the level of coordination required to reform or dismantle them is more difficult to achieve.
Thiel notes that, at Davos, everyone arrives as a representative of some institution or another, not as an individual. This is mirrored, even at the national level, in the administrative state. As J.D. Vance would note in his speech, no one elected Anthony Fauci to anything. He’s a creature of an impersonal institution, several steps removed from any real accountability to the public. The same is true of those who run the CDC, the Federal Reserve, and America’s universities.
The last of these, the universities, were ostensibly the topic of Vance’s keynote, though of course, it was about more than that.
In the final speech of the event, Vance covered many of the forces that were eroding our economy and culture. Most of these forces ultimately stem from our universities, the institutions that feed into every other major institution in our society. He closed with a quote from Richard Nixon, which - by Vance’s own admission - wasn’t inspiring but merely true: “The professors are the enemy.”
As the audience began to recognize the quote, they erupted with laughter and applause. Around that time, the man seated beside me told me that Glenn Youngkin had been elected governor of Virginia. A few minutes later, most of us were at the hotel bar chanting Youngkin’s name, and then the chant became, “Let’s go Brandon.”
The adversarial meaning of that chant and the adversarial nature of the Nixon quote hinted at what united all of the attendees: common enmities. Was Glenn Youngkin a populist? It didn’t matter. He had beaten the Democrats in a blue state. Were the universities the only important institutions in our society? No, but they poisoned all of the other ones and widened their detachment from reality. Could you have gotten any randomly-selected group of ten people at the conference to agree on who the president should be in 2025? Probably not, but you wouldn’t have to convince any of them that it shouldn’t be Joe Biden.
Some of those present, like Oren Cass, might have supported an industrial policy under any circumstances. Others see one as a necessary evil that we must accept to counter China. Perhaps Thiel would be more distrustful of national governments in the absence of global institutions. As things stand, he seems to have concluded, national sovereignty is a necessary counterbalance.
If there’s a way forward that doesn’t alienate any significant faction of the modern Right, it’s likely to be neither Jeffersonian nor Hamiltonian but Jacksonian. It could focus on countering power centers - like China, the Democratic Party, the administrative state, woke capital, and the universities - that we hate together. And someday, if we’re successful, we can argue about what should be built in their place.
Speaking of events, The Bull Moose Project (where I serve as a senior advisor) is holding one of its own in New York on December 14th. The event is called A Night to Save New York and will feature such speakers as Andrew Giuliani and Ryan James Girdusky. Details can be found at this link.