The overwhelming sense was of a movement catching its breath.
E very major gathering of political conservatives causes people to check the temperature in the room. Last week, the annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington inspired commentators to talk about the divisions inside, as speakers marked their differences with the Trump administration or with each other. In many cases, that was rather the point. Yoram Hazony, conference organizer and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, closed the conference remarking that one of his intended purposes was to gather people together and disrupt what were “movement-rending” fights over foreign policy happening on Twitter/X.
The other thing these conferences attract is potshots. Reporters would sometimes get a picture of a side session that was sparsely attended, and it gave them a quick, visually comprehensible metaphor for the supposed lifelessness of an issue or cause. The truth is something else. NatCon is unlike all other conservative conferences in that a large majority of attendees are speakers, professionals in the movement, or grandees in one sense or another. It’s also a long conference, and so naturally, many of the people there are working part of the day from their hotel room, or — more likely — they are enjoying the conviviality throughout the conference hallways and in the hotel lobby. The schedule is so rich as to be overwhelming. My own session, in which four people spoke to various angles of the Trump doctrine or the current foreign policy divisions on the right, was scheduled at the same time as another panel on the arts and culture that I desperately wanted to see for myself.
What’s remarkable is how self-organized NatCon is. That is not to steal anything away from the titanic efforts of the Edmund Burke Foundation in pulling it off. But Yoram Hazony is not a household name. He doesn’t have the magic, televisual personality that, say, William F. Buckley did. And so it’s safe to say that this conference is not the product of his personal charisma, though I find him easy company. Although he has made a great effort to tap into the heads of different networks across the movement, the crucial thing Hazony did was provide a nucleation point. Are you on the right and wanting to have a substantive political debate? Well, it’s at this conference that you can debate what President Trump has done or what still must be done to adjust the conservative movement to this present age. It turns out that there are people across virtually every conservative think tank and institution who wanted this, at least to some degree. He also provided the word, the one that offends and inspires — and defines our cause: nationalism.
The true believers were in the room. The other remarkable thing about NatCon is the religiosity of the speakers, and not just on the obvious social-issues panel. Passionate Jews and Catholics have been a part of it, but Hazony and his team have done a remarkable job of reaching out to Evangelicals and other Protestants who are normally involved in intramural debates within their respective religious traditions. The spirit of the NatCon speakers on the culture war reflects the early spirit of National Review during the Cold War: containment is not enough. What we want to see is the rollback of the social revolution and restoration of godliness to the public square. Although this is only an anecdotal impression on my part, NatCon’s intellectual and political leadership seems notably more religious than the coalition of voters attracted to national-populism. I would bet this reflects a larger transformation of the Republican Party, which had a more secular leadership class in the ’80s and ’90s, and a more religious base. Now the dynamic is reversed. Polls show Trump’s GOP is basically untroubled by IVF and widely supportive of gay marriage. At NatCon, the failure of pro-lifers to bring their people over to an anti-IVF position is still seen as a scandal.
Some of the initial excitement has worn off. The first NatCon conference had a legendary quality to it. JD Vance basically hung out and took all comers throughout. Tucker Carlson, at his zenith, was another splashy get and showed genuine interest in the broader movement. Now that the NatCons are nominally in power, with many friends sprinkled throughout the administration, it’s natural to see at least some diminished energy.
The overwhelming sense I got at the conference was of a movement that was catching its breath, and perhaps in a mode of consolidation. For now, Washington is friendly territory, but the globalist establishment that is a common enemy is showing signs of weakness in Western Europe. I expect the action to move there and fast.