Politics is boring, conferences are boring, and theory is boring. A conference about political theory, held in a windowless basement of a chain hotel, promises to be gnaw-off-my-own-foot, shoot-me-now boring. But the fifth National Conservatism Conference in early September was anything but boring. When politics change, as they are now, politics needs ideas, and both must confer if they are to touch reality. The life of the mind needs the body politic.
You may actually have a life, so you might have missed the political mind maps circulating on social media lately. They show the detached lobes of the American left-brain and right-brain and map their networks of political thought. The blue network is shrunken and dense like a walnut. Surrounded by empty white space, it is a mass of dead ends and short circuits. The red lobe is bigger and baggier, and the connections between its nodes are longer and thinner. Not all of the nodes are connected to one another. The frontiers of the network fill the frame, but undefined white triangles are all over its interior.
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The red lobe is a work in progress. We can trace its development from the first NatCon conference in 2019, which combined the ambience of a tea party of the intellectuals with the ebullience of a cage-fight grudge match, to this year’s NatCon, which was a reunion of veterans on a victory lap. The theorists now share billing with politicians from the second Trump administration. Yoram Hazony, the convener of NatCon, wanted to build a big tent for the New Right and now the circus is in town. NatCon was full of talk about boring stuff such as building institutions for the long haul. The challenge now is less intellectual than political: creating movement conservatism for the 21st century.
Daniel McCarthy, one of the sharpest observers of the New Right, is correct that the New Right descends from the Old Right, that the Old Right was once also new, and that President Donald Trump has recreated the Right on new terms. Trump, McCarthy argues, has turned the Reagan-Bush era’s three-legged stool into a four-legged stool. Instead of free-market economics, foreign-policy evangelism, and actual evangelism from social conservatives, the New Right has economic nationalism, immigration restriction, a foreign policy focused on the national interest, and a fourth, stabilizing leg, supplied by social conservatives.
My impression differs. The Right is still a three-legged stool like the old conservative movement, but with significant modifications. It’s like the Ship of Theseus, whose planks were replaced midvoyage, so it was and wasn’t the same vessel. The new movement conservatism is the “Stool of Theseus.”
Immigration restriction is central to economic nationalism, and the advocates of one are all advocates of the other. They’re the same leg. If it were a real leg, immigration restrictions would be the bone, and tariffs would be the sinews. The muscle of the free-market leg is still there, but, unlike Trump, while the Republicans hold the House, the market is no longer unimpeachable. As McCarthy writes, Trump challenges economic libertarians to mobilize in favor of ordinary Americans. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the most dynamic sectors of the American economy. With great wealth comes a minimum of responsibility, and more if you want your society to be happy as well as rich on paper. This was heretical before 2008 but is now becoming dogma.
The social conservative leg is still there, too, though the intellectual edge tends to be traditional Catholic rather than evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox rather than unorthodox among the Jews. And American foreign policy is still global, but also altered. The world was there when George Washington advised his new nation to avoid foreign entanglements. So long as there are monsters, there will sooner or later come choices about whether to slay them or license their nuclear programs. Those who claim that Americans face a simple choice are wrong, whether they are 1990s holdovers clinging to illusions of liberal hegemony or 1990s holdovers clinging to the isolationist delusions of Pat Buchanan.
Reality is always moving, and the national interest is complex and requires regular recalibration. The New Right’s moves are less replacements than rebalancings. They could become sturdy refurbishments capable of bearing the weight of the body politic — but the stool can still topple.
The Old Right had a racist streak as broad as Huey Long. To shape movement conservatism in the 20th century, William F. Buckley broke with Robert Welch Jr. and the Birchers and later fired Joseph Sobran. If there is to be a movement conservatism for the 21st century, the New Right must break with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and the chorus of clickbait Charles Coughlins who blame the Jews for America’s troubles. Their mind map has already caused moral brain death in the left lobe, and it is bleeding into the right lobe.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.