This piece originally appeared in Fusion.
With the tapping of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, it seems that the Republican Party has fully shed its old skin and revealed its new nature as the party of an altogether different, “national” conservatism. His selection follows the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, which offered further evidence of conservatives’ sense that the movement has broken with its past and is prepared for something different. Given Vance’s own appearance at NatCon, one might reasonably conclude that the rise of national conservatism has played a major and unambiguous role in the Republican Party’s metamorphosis.
But as I found as an attendee at NatCon, determining precisely what national conservatism’s impact has been, and what distinguishes national conservatism from the fusionism it has sought to depose, are matters of considerable disagreement among natcons themselves. This uncertainty about national conservatism’s essence, wed to a certainty that the old conservatism needed an update, are nothing new to the movement: when the first NatCon Con took place in DC five years ago, no one was quite sure what it was about, except that it seemed to augur a split with a conservatism gone stale after years of mindless sloganeering and continual losses since the days of Reagan. Five years, a few conferences around the globe, and one VP pick later, a second round of “the natcons take DC” affords an opportunity to ask these questions again.
Identifying exactly what is new about national conservatism is an especially worthwhile task, given its great success—or at least, the great success attributed to it during the kick-off to the three-day conservative confab. In their opening remarks, Chris Demuth, Chairman of the National Conservatism Conference, and Yoram Hazony, Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation (which runs the conferences), celebrated how national conservatism has become the mainstream. The Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard similarly boasted, “We’re not part of the conservative movement. We are the conservative movement.”
Here is a strong conviction that something fundamental has changed within conservatism, and for the better. But what is that something? Throughout the conference, it became clear that even champions of national conservatism, who believe that the movement is succeeding, are not in full agreement about what constitutes that success.
One way to approach the question is by asking where conservatism went wrong. (If your answer is “nowhere—conservatism has done splendidly over the last 40 years,” you probably were not in attendance.) Has conservatism’s failure since Reagan—a reasonable time frame because virtually everyone at NatCon agrees that Reagan (rightly understood) remains an inspiration—been a matter of holding the wrong principles, priorities, and policies? Or was our error a failure of implementation—not following through on our convictions, governing incompetently, and refusing to do what it took to achieve our goals? Put another way, is it that the conservative ship of state sailed in the wrong direction and needed a course correction, or that the captain read the map correctly but lacked the skill and drive to reach our destination?
At first, a belief in the former explanation seems to dominate, as any number of policy feuds at NatCon illustrated. Fusionists want free markets; national conservatives want industrial policy. Fusionists want an active foreign policy; national conservatives want restraint. Fusionists want cultural renewal through civil society; national conservatives want renewal through the firm hand of government. Dismissals of fusionism and the three-legged stool of free markets, an aggressive foreign policy, and a half-hearted social conservatism abounded. Certainly, it is hard to imagine panels titled “Corporations against Conservatives,” “Separation of Church and State Has Failed,” and “Working Class Conservatism” taking place at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute or the Club for Growth. A substantive divide seems clear: globalism and neoliberalism are out—nationalism is in.
But other remarks at NatCon suggest it’s not so simple. At the same time that speakers celebrated national conservatism’s success, many also emphasized a strong continuity with fusionism. Bovard insisted that national conservatism isn’t a deviation from Reaganism or fusionism, but a “reconnection with what those movements actually were”; Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts similarly stated that national conservatism is not a departure from conservatism, but a continuation of it. Many arguments throughout the week echoed older fusionist talking points: in the jibes at atheist cultural Marxists and radical secular globalists, one spots the same common enemy that spurred the Cold War’s original fusionist unity against the commie pinkos. In the same way, calls to drain the swamp and dismantle the administrative state suggest that national conservatives, just as much as fusionists, see government as the problem. So is national conservatism a decisive break with fusionist conservatism, or merely a revised version of it?
One answer on display throughout the week is orthogonal to both options: national conservatism is not quite about overhauling conservatism, but rather about returning to a genuine conservatism after decades of decay. In this way of thinking, conservatism’s mistake hasn’t been so much bad ideas as bad agents tasked with carrying out those ideas; in other words, the failure has been one of practice. In this telling, feckless fusionists held certain sound principles but refused to fight for them—or even worse, only pretended to hold those values as a cover for other priorities. What national conservatism offers, then, is a more pugilistic movement full of true believers who will do whatever it takes to do so. The natcons want to win more than fusionists. Real fusionism, you might say, has never been tried.
Many speakers gestured towards this view of the movement. Former Trump advisor Stephen Miller insisted that “being right and losing means nothing”; Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec stated that “for too long conservatives have only cared about principles but not about power”; Edmund Burke Foundation Executive Director Saurabh Sharma lamented four decades of “politicians who ran as great nationalists but ended their tenure as disgraced caretakers of national decline.” Reflecting the sense that genuine conservatives have been conned by Republicans who only feigned their support for all three stool legs, Senator Josh Hawley argued that the Party has depended on religious voters on election day, but left them high and dry when it came to delivering legislative victories. Here, national conservatism is less about crafting a new agenda than fighting harder for political change.
In a variation on the argument that we need a change in practice, some speakers seemed to think, not that we got particular policies or principles wrong and must correct them, but rather that the very terms of politics have changed, so that we now face challenges that fusionism never had to worry about. This sentiment can draw into the NatCon fold even those who might prefer the old fusionist faith. Thus sessions on the Left’s “weaponization of government” and the “criminalization of politics” could feature Senators Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott, and George W. Bush administration official John Yoo, who can hardly be called national conservatives. Nevertheless, they fear that the rise of “lawfare” and such developments as the imprisonment of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon (who was supposed to speak at the conference) call for new tactics that the fusionist playbook never needed to develop. Fusionism didn’t fail, exactly; it is simply inadequate to the times and must be supplemented by the stronger political willpower of national conservatism.
For all the castigation of establishment Republicans and their effete fusionism, I left the conference wondering if perhaps many of its attendees ultimately wished that something like fusionism could have worked. The old ways of the perfidious stool remain: we all appreciate free enterprise and the dream of supporting a family through one’s own labor; we all want a strong nation that can defend itself against its enemies; and we all want a culture that cherishes our traditions and upholds our Western heritage.
But clearly something went terribly wrong: buying a house seems impossible, our geopolitical stature has fallen, and a vile popular culture promotes vice and civilizational self-loathing. These conditions are only more apparent today than they were in 2019 at the first NatCon, so it only makes sense that so many conservatives would look to national conservatism as a possible fix. The National Conservatism Conferences have been an important forum to think through the causes of our decline and to search for solutions, and this one was no different.
But the disagreements within conservatism, and even within national conservatism, remain fierce, and the challenges to the natcons remain formidable. Perhaps the greatest risk for the movement, as for any insurgency, is that it secures a cosmetic win, but that everything under the surface continues as before. As Vivek Ramaswamy noted in his own speech, on the natcon-on-natcon violence between “national protectionists” and “national libertarians,” it’s become easy for Republicans to invoke “America First” without giving any thought to what it means. True, “nationalism” is no longer a dirty word, and Republicans are willing to call for a more muscular and public Christianity. But just consider the Republican National Committee’s recent abandonment after 40 years of its position calling for a national abortion ban. Is this the surest vindication of the natcons’ accusations of Republican cowardice, or the greatest proof of the natcons’ own impotence? The truth may be the gloomiest answer of all: both.
As the intra-conservative Sturm und Drang continues in the years ahead, conservatives of all stripes would do well to keep in mind a lesson from Friedrich Hayek, which he used to justify his own treatise envisioning a better politics, The Constitution of Liberty: “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning.” This has proven all too true of an ossified conservatism that refused to ask whether it was still speaking to the needs of the present. But as national conservatism’s prominence grows, so will its susceptibility to a similar decay. The possibilities are stark: you either die as NatCon, or you live long enough to see yourself become CPAC. Can national conservatism save the country before succumbing to either fate?
