So says Steve Bannon, speaking with me on the second day of the latest National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC. The former Trump strategist and MAGA firebrand was scheduled to address the gathering at the Westin Hotel the following day — but he shares his fiercest lines offstage in conversation with UnHerd. “These people aren’t fighters,” he says. “They have achieved nothing.”

The comments open a window onto the civil war roiling the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement. Despite President Trump’s victory in 2024, the mood at this year’s conference was a curious mix of triumph, defiance, and outright dismay. There were, of course, rote speeches about the radical Left, DEI, and Islam. But the bromides failed to mask the growing divisions elsewhere in the coalition. Especially on foreign policy, and doubly on Israel.

The Jewish state’s multiple wars in the Middle East have exposed deep fault lines within NatCon between pro-Israel hawks and those who call themselves realists, restrainers, or prioritizers — advocates for pivoting toward China and the Pacific over other adversaries. At a moment when NatCon seems at the peak of its influence, these internal divisions threaten to unravel the movement from within.

Founded in 2019, NatCon styled itself as the intellectual engine of Trumpism. Its early speaker lineups spanned the full spectrum of the Trumpian Right: neoconservatives, establishment Republicans, Christian post-liberals, and MAGA populists, from John Bolton to Tucker Carlson to the Claremont crowd. It was like the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, gathering, but with more brains and less Botox.

As the conference gathered strength and attention, the New Right’s various factions found common space — and a common cause in opposing the then-culturally ascendant Left and in promoting a conservative vision rooted in national sovereignty. The movement quickly went global, staging conferences in London, Rome, and Brussels (that last iteration was shut down by the Belgian capital’s mayor last year, handing the NatCons a perfect illustration of the censorious progressivism they sought to overthrow).

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All along, however, the movement was haunted by a question: Did NatCon represent a genuinely new and positive vision for the Right? Or had it merely reconstituted the old “fusionist” conservatism — resting on the triple foundations of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and cultural conservatism — only now under a banner of “nationalism” and with woke substituting for the Soviet Communism that galvanized its predecessor?

This week was the sixth installment. With National Guard troops patrolling the streets above, Washington’s conservative elite descended two floors beneath the Westin Hotel to debate the future of the movement. As interns from the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation buzzed around between stalls, orthodox Jews rubbed shoulders with portly academics from the country’s lesser-known campuses.

The dress code, ostensibly business casual, featured an astonishing range of windowpane suits and winklepicker shoes. If this was the “terrifying” face of the American Right that New York Times columnist David Brooks once warned of, I must have wandered into the wrong hotel.

The event began with a heartfelt plea from the organizer, the Israeli academic Yoram Hazony, urging participants to “feel gratitude” for this “unbelievable moment”. He added: “We’re doing so much winning that we say, ‘Please Mr. President, no more winning! I can’t take it anymore.’ There are an awful lot of people among us who are outraged — it’s like howling rage. Many of us can’t stand the idea” of actually being in power.

In short: Stop bickering — we’re in charge now.

If this was a call for unity, the next three days proved it a failure. Notwithstanding a parade of crowd-pleasing tub-thumpers railing against wokeness, lingering tensions on foreign policy spilled out into the open. In a breakout session, the pro-Israel hawk Max Abrahms mocked realists as Tucker Carlson-loving “MAGA isolationists” who had gone “insane” in their push to disengage from the Middle East. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, a restraint organ, shot back: “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why should we accept ‘America First’ — asterisk Israel? We shouldn’t.”

Reconciling staunch pro-Israel advocates with realists were always going to be an uphill battle. But it wasn’t until the wars in Gaza and then Iran that this fragile coexistence became more strained. Hazony had promised to provide a “balanced” conference and the Mills-Abrahms fracas certainly lived up to that ideal. Elsewhere, though, it was more disappointing. During “the Trump doctrine” talk, for example, speakers mostly spoke past each other, expressing vague platitudes (“you screw with us, we’re going to finish you”) and making limp attempts at triangulation (“realists and interventionists are a false dichotomy”).

The tensions carried into the evening. At the upstairs bar, a handful of realists in their 30s vented their frustration over cocktails: “Why do we keep coming to this conference expecting something different?” “It’s the same baby boomer Old Guard, which is totally blind to what is happening in front of us. Netanyahu has been to the White House more times than Melania.” “Yoram [Hazony] didn’t offer a solution to these divisions. Strategically, if you want a rapprochement, one side has to give something — and he hasn’t offered any olive branches.”

To be sure, the realists were given a bigger platform at this year’s conference. In previous years, Israel had been largely relegated to the sidelines. This time around, the Jewish state and its wars couldn’t be avoided. “Nobody said to be a good NatCon, you have to love Israel or you have to love Jews,” Hazony announced in his opening remarks. “That’s not what NatCon is for. It’s for restoring America and the spirit of national independence, interest, traditions, and God.”

If only the realists agreed. As members of the group swilled the last remnants of their cocktails, some plotted more extreme measures. “This alliance is becoming untenable,” said one. “If we end up supporting [Israel’s] military occupation of Gaza, we are going to be pulled into another Middle Eastern quagmire.”

I put these comments to Steve Bannon, who expressed sympathy for the position. “National conservatives are very neoconnish,” he said. “We saw through it at the beginning. It was neocons trying to make sure this new populist movement was still backing the American empire…. The only reason they exist is because they were worried about the rise of President Trump and wanted to nullify the populist tendencies of the movement.”

Bannon, who has taken an increasingly dim view of the Israeli leadership in recent months, came out swinging in his NatCon speech. The War Room podcast host laid into familiar targets in front of a sparse crowd: China, broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and impending civil war in Britain. But then he tackled a topic that he warned would be “unpleasant” to members of the audience. “Israel is a sideshow,” he boomed. “And Israel’s greater expansion [in the Middle East] is a sideshow to the sideshow… The existential threat to Israel is not in Tehran — it is in New York City.”

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He was referring to the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and likely shoo-in) Zohran Mamdani. “Mamdani is a Marxist and a jihadist,” Bannon fumed. “He’s a better-programmed version than Barack Hussein Obama” (emphasizing Obama’s middle name as if he were providing a clue in a puzzle). “He’s going to win in November and have control of the most important city in the world. Do you think he’s going to give it back? Do you think Sadiq Khan is giving back London? Or is Paris going back to France?”

The audience did not applaud or react to these remarks. But fears of Islamization, spurred by the asylum crisis in Britain, the rise of Mamdani, and events in the Middle East, were more pronounced at this conference than any before. As Jack Posobiec, a conservative activist, summed up in his speech: “These people are not American, and they don’t want to be American. If they don’t want to be a part of this country, they can go home.”

It felt, once more, like a desperate search by conservatives to find a new enemy that would allow them to paper over their own internal differences. After all, woke is on the wane, and at least in 2025, the Democratic path to national power looks arduous. The siege mentality that defined earlier conferences — when conservatives were being censored, corporations were bending the knee, and Trump was facing years in prison — had evaporated. 

Today, America’s most powerful institutions — universities, banks, Big Tech — bow to Trump, not Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi. This perhaps explains why so much of this year’s gathering rang hollow. A speech denouncing white guilt (“worse than any problem America faces today”) or one in which the literal Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, griped about the deep state, simply lacked the punch these topics carried in 2021.

Wielding enormous power and with their Leftist enemies on the backfoot, the NatCons failed to overcome their divisions, much less articulate a positive account of nationalism in the 21st century. But this time around, they had a new license to say “retard” — a privilege they exercised with gusto.

The result had been, I felt, leaders on autopilot, and a waning capacity for self-government. It might be too late to reverse this trajectory, but those of us who take civic nationalism and engaged democratic politics seriously ought to try.

This was the message condensed into the successful Vote Leave campaign message: “Take Back Control.” So there I was, doing my bit for an exercise in mass democratic engagement. We all know what happened next. Like my daughter, the Leave victory is now six years old. So how’s it going? Have we taken back control? Leaving aside Covid and the wrangling over how (or whether) to leave, there’s one clear measure where we can assess our leaders’ scorecard on returning democratic accountability to the British electorate: immigration.

If for me, supporting Leave was about democratic accountability, for many Brexit voters it was much more practical. Thanks to EU free movement rules, many felt the level of low-skilled immigration to the United Kingdom was too high, depressing wages. Many Leave voters sought to return immigration to British national control, in the hope that politicians would then use the powers they now possessed to lower immigration in line with the desires of voters.

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On this metric, Brexit has spectacularly failed. ONS statistics this week are expected to show that net migration has in fact more than doubled from the pre-Brexit level of 336,000 to over 700,000 in 2022. Some are predicting net migration for a single year could top one million. In the wake of these revelations, just 9% of Brexiters believe Brexit has been a success.

Where, then, is the “control” the Brexit campaign promised could be taken back? In truth, the real question this raises goes deeper than whether or not political leaders have betrayed their voters since 2016. It’s a question that was raised, or at least gestured at, by many at last week’s National Conservatism conference in Westminster, to shrill horror from the self-appointed Virtuous People in the press. Namely: what even is a nation? What, and who, is it for?

If you’d asked me this question while I was waddling around small-town England in 2016 with a bag of “Take Back Control” leaflets, I’d have said something to the effect that nation states are the generally-accepted modern scale for the governance of a people in a particular place. That in modern times this governance usually (though not always) happens via some form of electoral democracy. I might have added that nations tend to map partly, though not exclusively, onto a culture, language, and history — and that over time they often have a reciprocal structuring effect on that people’s idea of themselves as a collective with common interests.

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I might have said that the history of patriotic feeling that attends this marriage of language, culture, history, geography, and democratic citizenship is sometimes criticised for its propensity to spill over into chauvinism or hostility toward outsiders. But that we should set this against the fact that to work for its citizens, as a democracy, a self-governing nation must have a sense of who is and is not a citizen, and what if anything is due only to, or expected only of, those citizens. And, at the most concrete level, everyone there needs a good idea of where this applies: in other words, a nation needs clearly marked geographical boundaries.

Everything I did in 2016 was predicated on these things still being true and the proper way to govern a place. But though it gives me no pleasure to say so, and though I was a speaker at last week’s National Conservatism conference, I’m no longer sure this is the case. My worry is structural: that the nation-state form as such is now desired only by those at the bottom of the social scale, and no one with an iota of power cares what they think. Worse still, no one with an iota of power even cares who they are, or what nation they do or don’t in principle belong to.

The whole point of a democratic nation state is that we agree who The People are and what The Place is, and that we agree to abide by the electorate’s decisions (with some qualifications) on important matters concerning that people and place. But this week’s numbers reveal that the Tories, despite routinely making hostile noises about immigration, are not listening. They’re determinedly deaf to the majority view among Britons that immigration is too high: a view held by 57% of voters overall and 75% of Conservatives: so much so, that the Cabinet recently blocked all but one of Suella Braverman’s proposals for lowering it. And as pollster Matthew Goodwin set out last week, this is hardly the only policy area in which the Tories are obdurately cloth-eared.

Meanwhile, if the meaning of “listening” is ambiguous where the Tories are concerned, for Labour so too is the meaning of “electorate”. The week before NatCon, Keir Starmer floated a proposal to extend UK voting rights to tax-paying EU citizens living in the UK, as well as to sixth-form schoolchildren. In other words: citizenship doesn’t imply a bond of belonging or loyalty, but is instead more like a gym membership. Anyone who pays the subscription can join. And perhaps this doesn’t matter, because clearly the franchise doesn’t do much. Otherwise Starmer wouldn’t be proposing to extend it to children deemed too young to buy cigarettes.

In other words: if you ignore what our leaders say, and watch what they do, it’s clear that there is now very little elite support for the geographically- and politically-bounded, democratically-governed nation state that Brexit voters sought to defend. One party harrumphs about “boat people” while treating the UK’s physical borders as an obstacle to growing the economy. Meanwhile, the other party cheers this on, albeit purportedly for humanitarian reasons, and views the franchise as obsolete, too: little more consequential than a Strictly phone-in. But perhaps this is to be expected. We’re some distance beyond Britain’s industrial era now. And I’m not sure you can have democratic nation states in a post-industrial country: for the idea of mass democratic participation as such only came into being with the urbanisation and industrialisation of working people.

For most of 19th-century Europe, as A.J.P. Taylor shows in his classic 1941 history, for example, much of the land between Italy and Russia was governed by the Habsburg dynasty. In these territories, a dizzying array of languages, national cultures, and class interests interpenetrated. Under those circumstances, nation states simply weren’t a thing in the modern sense. With Habsburg rule as a kind of political emulsifier, shared linguistic or class interests sometimes weighed more heavily than geography. The Habsburg territory known as Bohemia, for example, is now part of the Czech Republic but also contained (among others) Poles, Hungarians and a great many German-speakers, a fact that Hitler used to justify its annexation in 1938.

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It was industrialisation, and with it the bleeding of power from the ancient aristocracies, that drove the shift from these more porous polities toward nation states as we know them. Wealth bled from farming towards mercantile elites. Tractors replaced peasants, who flocked to the cities and demanded industrial work. And many of the disputes in this turbulent age turned on such contests of power, between the old, landed gentry and newer centres of power.

Critics of last week’s NatCon conference often treat liberalism and nationalism as antonyms — but this would have made no sense two centuries ago, when the liberals were the nationalists. When students took over Budapest in the 1848 revolution, for example, what they demanded was not a million miles from what most Brexiters wanted: a voice, in a defined nation bounded by geography and citizenship rather than elite privilege or nativism. That is, in A.J.P Taylor’s words, “a democratic constitution with universal suffrage […] and equal rights for the nationalities”.

At this point in the story, such political possibilities were just emerging. Writing on Christopher Clark’s new history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, Daniel Zamora Vargas shows how this period also saw the emergence of the public political sphere— and with it, of the kind of engaged mass polity without which you can’t really have a democracy in the sense Brexiteers sought to preserve. It was, Vargas suggests, the inception-point for “political parties capable of disciplining their members” and of “binding them to commonly agreed positions”. In the wake of this febrile time, he writes, “the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades”.

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In his forthcoming book End Times, the political scientist Peter Turchin describes a similar — though less chaotic — process of electorate-formation in 19th-century Britain. As Turchin describes it, the mid-19th century in Britain saw a “messy” negotiation between the old landowning aristocracy, emerging mercantile elites, and working-class people, over what was due to whom. This culminated in the overturning of protectionist measures for British farming, reform to welfare provisions for the poorest, and in 1867 the Second Reform Act which granted all adult male property owners the vote. And it was in the course of that negotiation that the British polity became aware of itself as such: a trajectory that would culminate, in the early 20th century, in the universal franchise.

In other words, the age referenced by National Conservatism — the age of nation states — has its beginning point in the push first by the landless bourgeoisie and then by the industrial working class for a political voice within modernity. But we might also argue that it had its end point in two global conflicts between the resulting nation states accompanied by an orgy of industrial hyper-productivity, via total civilian mobilisation for munitions manufacturing.

Since then, we’ve been living in the ashes of the nation state order. Having read Taylor since 2016, I now understand a little better why the nations of Europe might respond to that catastrophe by seeking to replace the clearly somewhat combustible nation state format with the EU: a new emulsifier, with clear structural echoes of the Habsburg empire. Britain was never part of that empire, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that many in the British Isles should view this as an alien imposition. But it’s not as though we can return to the material conditions of the Habsburg age either, however wishfully the “post-liberals” may imagine doing so.

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Our situation now is a troubling one: a Europe that is largely post-industrial and, at least as far as its elites are concerned, functionally post-national. And this means, in the terms that emerged during the industrial era, post-democratic. For if working people gained a voice by dint of being indispensable to manufacturing, events since Brexit demonstrate that they may safely be ignored now high finance has replaced making things, without the wheels coming off the state.

Thus emancipated from any meaningful working-class ability to hold their feet to the fire, it’s all too predictable that those in a position to do so should opt for what Turchin calls the “wealth pump”: that is, abandoning rule for the public good, in favour of pursuing their own narrow class interests. In this case, that means turbo-charging finance and property via mass immigration, while running social solidarity infrastructures into the ground, and looking to others of the same post-national class for political, cultural, and ideological solidarity as they do so.

It’s hard to say for sure what forms of large-scale governance will emerge from this febrile situation. A considerable amount of power is already vested in international governance and NGO networks, for example, while capital has been radically post-national for some time. Meanwhile, the masses who once found a voice in aggregate via electoral politics, in the bounded nation state, are on their way to being as radically disempowered as prior to the franchise.

The fact that one side emits platitudes about “the most vulnerable in society”, and the other invokes the aesthetics of the nation state past, is neither here nor there. The nation is over. But the reaction is just beginning.

The intellectual fuel for this movement comes from Yoram Hazony, an Israeli academic and Orthodox Jew who came to the fore two years ago thanks to his book The Virtue of Nationalism.

As is often the case with much-discussed non-fiction books, the work ended up having two functions: the first was to provide a scholarly and well-thought-through counter-blast to a prevailing orthodoxy. In recent decades there has been something like a consensus around the idea that nationalism is a problem — indeed that for states in Europe it is perhaps the problem. Hazony’s book carefully and persuasively sought to blow apart this consensus. Nationalism is a force for good, he argues, and rather than being the cause of instability is, in fact, the best prerequisite for stability.

Which brings us to the second function: to be used by those who have not read it as a weapon to beat back a prevailing wisdom.

Hazony turns out to have been at the head of a distinct intellectual wind. His book has been succeeded by a number of equally thoughtful works around the same theme, all of which help to bolster the argument. Last September, Rich Lowry, the editor of the American conservative magazine National Review, published The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United and Free. And this was followed, a month later, by Return of the Strong Gods: nationalism, populism and the future of the West by RR Reno, the editor of the conservative religious journal First Things.

So why is nationalism be causing so much intellectual excitement now? The obvious explanation is that it comes after a period of liberal — indeed globalist — overreach.

During recent decades, the presumption among those in positions of power in western Europe, in particular, leant in a clear direction. This was often summed-up as the Davos worldview: the presumption that the future was inevitably one of greater integration, where states would be giving up ever-more sovereignty, borders would be less and less important, and the world presided over by a benign, internationalist, NGO-like political class. If this view has taken a battering, it is less because of the success of any intellectual counter-punch but, rather, because of events.

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The Eurozone crisis made visible what some economists had warned about for decades: it is difficult, if not impossible, to ever fully meld Greek and German fiscal habits (or in other ways to impose the behaviours of northern Europe on the continent’s south). And then there was the migration crisis of 2015, when even some of those who advocated most volubly for a borderless world began to balk at the reality of hundreds of thousands of people moving at speed into countries that could not accommodate them — and which in most cases did not want them.

These two events — among others — demonstrated that perhaps the internationalists did not quite know what they were doing. And it restored the idea that states needed to stand up for themselves and perhaps even go their own way on major issues of the day. The sentiment was in place, and had been acted on by a number of European governments, before the intellectual groundwork was laid, or re-laid.

And yet a certain odour remains around the term — an odour whose origins ought to be honestly acknowledged.

Last year, Hazony hosted a National Conservatism conference in Washington DC and the difference between the speaker line-up and content in that event, versus the one in Rome presents a demonstration of the problem which “nationalism” will always have when it moves. For while there are certainly figures in America who would wish to take nationalism to its worst possible ends, in general, American nationalism remains a reasonable and odourless political force.

America has asserted its nationalistic — and one might point out, unilateralist — tendencies under Democrat and Republican administrations. Under both parties, it has remained suspicious of those international institutions which require a giving up of sovereignty — such as the International Criminal Court. This is not to say that American nationalism could not go bad, only that it hasn’t done so in anything like a European manner.

In Europe, of course, the story is different. Contra at least one of the speakers at the conference in Rome, it is undeniable that for European countries in the previous centuries, there were at least two world-engulfing conflicts in which nationalism played a part, even if not the defining one.

It is entirely uncontroversial and true to state that nationalism led Europe to war in 1914. And while there is a get-out that the war that began in 1939 was — like its predecessor — caused not by nationalism but by German expansionism, nevertheless it is an intellectual overstretch to claim that nationalism played no role in either conflict.

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As I told the conference, in my remarks made at a sceptical distance on Tuesday, there is an answer to this. For to claim that nationalism causes conflict is to make an assertion that is far too simplistic. Nationalism can cause conflict and it can keep the peace. To that extent, it is like every other force in nature: it is able to be used for good and for ill, can lead to triumph and disaster. There is nothing unique about this.

Contra the sort of people who like to think that we can wage war for “peace” or wage campaigns against “hate” (what other human emotion will they come for next one wonders?), even love can cause wars. The Trojan Wars were caused by love; countless acts of violence are still committed each year in the name of love. To date, nobody has called for the eradication of that instinct.

But with nationalism, there is a residual sense that if only it could be eradicated, the world would not experience wars. It is a sentiment that is additionally simplistic because before Europe was wracked by the wars of nation-states, it was wracked by centuries of wars of religions — a fact the current generation might do well to remember.

In any case, the difference in the manner in which “nationalism” is heard in Europe and America is a problem worth contending with. The proximate distance in Europe between what one might regard as healthy nationalism and unhealthy nationalism is undeniably closer than it is in America. And the fall-off from a reasonable attitude towards nationalism to its ugliest elements is a cliff which European history has unarguably made vertiginous.

To me, at any rate, this is the aspect of the National Conservatism Conference which was most interesting. There have been efforts in parts of the press to pretend that the entire conference was filled with unacceptable far-Right elements and the like. Certainly some of those who were present are from parties which have far-Right pasts and other new parties who may well be a cause for concern in the present.

But to dismiss all of these — let alone figures like Chris de Muth, John O’Sullivan and Hazony himself — as somehow engaged in far-Right politicking is so ignorant as to be embarrassingly revealing of the person asserting them. The idea that a conference organised by an orthodox Jew should have been in any way anti-Semitic is ridiculous. The idea that a conference addressed by several well-known gays was homophobic is equally lazy.

But there is a reason why such anathematising occurs. Not every complainant is directed by ignorance or short-term political point-scoring. For the fact remains that across the continent of Europe there are dragons; there are movements like Casa Pound in Italy which would seem to want to replay the fascist past.

There are groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece whose members have indulged themselves in the ugliest attempts to simultaneously deny and replay the brutalities of the mid-twentieth century. Anyone concerned to keep such things in history would be motivated by the most legitimate imaginable fears.

And yet there is an over-reach happening — an over-reach caused by the cordon-sanitaire having been subtly but seriously wrongly placed. There are papers and politicians across Europe and America who look at swathes of Europe and claim them to be — and claim their governments to be – “far-Right” or otherwise unacceptable. Is everything “far-Right” once anyone says so? If there is a reason why such claims are rarely interrogated it is because there is so little reward – and some considerable risk – in carefully interrogating them.

Calling people “fascists” is easy and bestows on the accuser the instant breastplate of “anti-fascist”. But European politics is more complex than that. The simplistic analysis that believes that we are condemned perpetually to replay the 1930s and ‘40s is past usefulness and is indeed hampering any attempt to understand who to deal with across Europe. Not least because governments and parties are being called ‘far-Right’ when they are not, and whole countries and movements are being anathematised when they will — must, in fact — be partners in the years ahead.

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The principle reason why I attended the National Conservatism conference in Rome was to listen, and to work out a little further for myself the complex question of who one is comfortable with and who one is not. It is part of an ongoing research effort on my part — one in which I have been engaged for some years. All in the knowledge of one irrefutable fact.

The UK has now left the European Union. Outside of it — as inside — we will have to deal with the parties and governments who run Europe. It is simply not sustainable to expect that the only parties we can deal with are a small number of leftist and centrist parties, beyond which we should be ignorant and insulting. That isn’t to say we need to be moral relativists.  Very far from it. The point of paying close attention will be to make fine but crucial judgement calls.

Which is why in the coming months I plan to use this space to write at greater length and in greater depth about this subject. A subject which is one of the most fascinating and — for the writer — perilous jobs of political analysis in town.

That is to try to sketch out what the realities on the continent of Europe actually are. Not as we are told they are by people, publications and pressure groups who have a dated and prejudiced view of the present, but what they actually are in the round. I can think of no more interesting or perilous writing role. I look forward to bringing you along with me.

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At the inaugural National Conservatism conference, the latest high-profile attempt to add intellectual heft to Trump shaped conservatism, not a single mention was made of the row over the President’s tweets. For two and a half days, pro-Trump thinkers and politicos – including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, Fox News provocateur Tucker Carlson and White House National Security Adviser John Bolton – went about trying to build a new conservative coalition. For two-and-a-half days, they ignored the headlines.   

In one sense, this was unsurprising. The event’s organisers want to resuscitate nationalism as a mainstream political force and, in doing so, redefine modern conservatism. Attendees didn’t want to talk about a Twitter storm, they wanted to talk big ideas and the sweep of history. Trump’s outburst was an inconvenient intrusion on that. But the silence was nonetheless revealing. 

The conference’s organisers were at pains to make clear what the nationalist awakening is, and what it is not. It is not white nationalism. It is not ‘blood and soil’. Several alt-Right figures had been denied accreditation for the conference. On the opening night, co-convener David Brog pointed to the door and asked that anyone who defined what it means to be American in racial terms leave. “Your views are not welcome here,” he said. 

This was a far-cry from the rough and tumble of a Trump rally; it was a bookish crowd of bespectacled and besuited conservative thinkers quoting Burke and Xenophon. And, unsurprisingly, everyone except for bow-tied waiters going about their business, remained in their seats after Brog’s request. But not mentioning the news undermined the hosts’ objectives.

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Those objectives were set out unapologetically by Yoram Hazony, another organiser and a prominent Israeli intellectual whose influential 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism helped set the backdrop for the conference.

“Today is our independence day,” he declared:

“Today we declare independence from neoconservatism. We declare independence from neoliberalism. From libertarianism. From what they term classical liberalism. You can give it any name you want but that set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual as the only thing that an educated person needs to know about politics and if he or she knows the free and equal individual then he or she has the ability to set out and rule the world. That worldview we are declaring independence from today.”

*

Hazony’s call to arms was typical of the conference generally, which was as much about owning the libertarians as it was “owning the libs”. The event was another reminder – not that one were needed – that the coalition that constituted the conservative movement from the 1960s to the early 2000s lies in tatters. 

For decades, the majority of that movement accepted the logic of fusionism: the libertarian and traditionalist wings knew they needed each other and made peace, albeit an uneasy one, with one another. That has changed – largely thanks to Trump. 

Emboldened traditionalists, including the national conservatives, are reconsidering their answers to the biggest questions in politics. And, like an enthusiastic recent divorcee, they are playing the field in the marketplace of ideas. The breadth of mainstream Right-wing American politics is wider than it has been for generations. Proceedings at the conference were astonishingly nonconformist, a reflection of the fact that all bets are off on the American Right in 2019. Sometimes that open-endedness was thrilling. Other times it was unnerving.

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By JD Vance

Almost none of the economics in Tucker Carlson’s speech, titled “Big business hates your family”, would have been taken seriously in Right-wing Washington circles before 2016. According to Carlson, the main threat to Americans living the lives they want to live comes from business, not government. He praised Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, which she co-authored with her daughter, as “one of the best books on economics” he has read and more important than anything social conservatives have written recently. Echoing the Left’s critique of so-called woke capitalism, he described identity politics as a distraction obscuring who the winners are in today’s economy. 

The new anti-business consensus is striking and if there is a grand realignment happening in American politics (it certainly felt like that was what was happening among the national conservatives this week) it is far from clear who, if anyone, will be left to stick up for the market.

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Elsewhere, on the rise of China, technology, the opioid crisis and the consequences of deindustrialisation in America’s heartland, the new nationalists seemed determined to break with the past, but unsure on exactly which path to take instead. 

The outlines of a concrete agenda were discernible. Attendees voted in favour of a motion in favour of a new American industrial policy, securing the border was almost universally settled on as an urgent priority. The West’s welcoming into the fold of China, including its admission into the World Trade Organisation, was overwhelmingly spoken about with regret, and attendees were gearing up for a new cold war. John Bolton described this East-West showdown as having “elements of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. In his speech on Sunday night, Peter Thiel called for an FBI and CIA investigation into Google for “seemingly treasonous” cooperation with the Chinese. On Tuesday, the President promised to look into his supporter’s accusations. 

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At the crescendo of his speech, Thiel delivered a broadside against American Exceptionalism. “That exceptionalism obscured everything,” he said:

“The doctrine of exceptionalism has lead to a country that is exceptionally overweight, that is exceptionally addicted to opioids, that has exceptionally dysfunctional public infrastructure where it costs ten times as much to build a mile of subway as it does in socialist western Europe, that is in short exceptionally un-self-aware, exceptionally un-self-critical… Nationalism has nothing to do with this sort of exceptional un-selfawareness… Nationalism is going to ask hard questions.”

That might the start of the search for a new conservatism, but two and a half years into the Presidency of a self-described nationalist, the movement should arguably have fewer questions and more answers. Ultimately there was a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quality to the new nationalists gathered in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom. 

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Sometimes the brand of nationalism being expounded on stage sounded entirely innocuous. “To oppose nations is to oppose a force of nature,” argued Chris DeMuth. One minute Brog sounds like Oprah, or an actor delivering a banal ‘political’ Oscar acceptance speech: “We need to love our fellow citizens. We must feel connected to each other. A connection is deep enough to overcome our superficial differences.” Who could disagree with that? 

But then fellow organiser Hazony declared nothing less than Judeo-Christian jihad on liberals and fellow conservatives alike for trying to “privatise religion”: 

“We thought we could just stay reasonable having gotten rid of God’s scripture. And guess what, there’s no shred of truth to this at all. We tried it. We did. It turns out it was God and scripture that were holding the entire set of structures together. Not reason, tradition. You throw out Christianity and the Jewish contribution too with it, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border. They can’t tell the difference between paying back your debts and simply borrowing forever. The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion, the only way to bring it back to independence and health, the only way to do it is going to be to restore those traditions.”

What is it that Hazony wants? Is he hoping for some kind of spontaneous culture-wide religious revival? If so, he could be waiting a long time. Or does he want to nationalise God as part of an overtly political programme? That is not a solution that strikes me as being in keeping with America’s republican traditions, nor is it one that the country is likely to unite around. This was the problem with a lot of what I heard at the conference. Either conservative nationalism is a series of civic bromides that only the wokest of the woke would object to, or it is something spikier, something millions of reasonable Americans from both parties will take issue with, and with good reason.

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America’s new nationalists never miss an opportunity to emphasise just how divided the country is: ‘The times are dire’; ‘What can bind up our wounds? What can bring us together?’; ‘These are frayed times’. 

Yet they are unstinting in their refusal to build any bridges or acknowledge any share of the blame for that disunity. They appear oblivious to the risks of what happens when their theory becomes real-world politics, risks that chants of “send her back” in North Carolina on Wednesday made abundantly clear. In the eyes of many, the President and some of his more zealous supporters are a real source of conflict and division. Until they face up to that tension – perhaps by calling out, or at least acknowledging the existence of, Donald Trump’s racist tweets – their solemn sounding calls for national unity will ring hollow.