National Conservatism, Uncertain Prospects

A fter a well-covered conference in Orlando, and a few sallies in the Wall Street Journal, politics is still buzzing about the “national conservatives” — whether they offer a coherent addition or challenge to existing conservatism, and what their prospects are for the future.

I’ve been a national conservative since well before it was cool to say so. I remember what it was like to feel like a tiny, unwelcome ideological minority within the Right, when none of us could convince ourselves that we had any future. I remember at the time we talked about how one measure of our success would be that political chancers, opportunists, and the plainly insincere would come to parrot our views.

And so it has come to pass. It’s not as thrilling as I thought I would be.

Now, there are throughout the United States, Europe, and beyond many conservatives — young and old — who believe versions of what I do. Namely, that the post–Cold War political paradigm has run aground. After 1989, traditional parties of the Left embraced the market, sought upwardly mobile voters, and championed globalization. In America globalization really meant the incorporation of China into the global economy. In Europe, it meant the growth and growing power of the EU, the expansion of NATO, and the institution of the euro. Everywhere it meant the freer movement of goods, capital, and people across borders. This free movement was guarded from nationalist challenge by the cultivation of a liberal-technocratic elite committed to the program as a subset of human rights. The axis of elite media, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the elites of every important party could — sometimes with the help of the administrative state, or the emerging bureaucracies of the EU and transnational organizations — simply remove this “free movement” from democratic input.

That is why national conservatism’s rise has been greeted with small-d democratic pushback and elite brinksmanship. No better example was the triumph of Brexit, and the last-ditch attempts of Remainers to simply stifle it in the courts. But you can point to the intel agencies trying to undermine Donald Trump, or the authorities in Brussels seeking to punish Poland, Hungary, and a populist government in Italy, for things the European Union lets liberals in France and Germany do without so much as a warning.

My background as a relative “lifer” in this camp puts me in a position to warn people about how quickly fortunes can change.

The failures and corruption of liberal internationalism have given national conservatism life. This is true everywhere. It was the failure of the Iraq War that led to Donald Trump’s openly repudiating the Bush family while winning the Republican primary. Brexit was put over the edge by David Cameron’s failure to negotiate more space in the EU for national sovereignty when it came to his country’s borders. That, combined with Angela Merkel’s great invitation of 1 million migrants into the EU, showed voters that Europe’s leaders were blinded by their ideology. Terrorists used the migrant flows to commit the heinous attack on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, killing 130. The French national populist, Éric Zemmour, essentially launched his campaign for the French presidency in front of its doors a week ago.

Similarly, in Poland, it was the corruption of the previous small-l liberal conservative government that led to the outright win of Law and Justice — the populist, nationalist conservatives. The outgoing government had been caught suborning the central bank to help them during the election. In Hungary, it was the corruption and failures of the socialist party (MSZP) and the economic distress that Hungary experienced upon its incorporation into the EU that led Viktor Orbán to reinvent himself as a nationalist.

But connecting all of these particular failures was the worldwide financial crisis at the end of the first decade of this century, and the political backwash from it. It was at the depths of fiscal austerity in Europe, or the sluggish comeback in the United States, that one could look to see what globalization had wrought and then spit in disgust.

It is possible that liberal elites, too cosseted by their narrow ideology, too wrapped up in their own self-interest, and too bogged down by the weight of their own institutional and political legacy, will continue to deliver crappy results in government, and continue to bring national conservatism to the fore.

But 2022 is going to be a year of testing, particularly in Europe. I worry that the political backlash from this pandemic will sweep national conservatism away.

First there is the ideological paradox at the heart of the COVID crisis. Almost every national conservative has felt, in the last two years, something of the liberal and libertarian rising up within him. That feeling has been animated, in part, by governments’ diminishing liberty for the common good of public health. These burdens on individual liberty have mortified and scarred the lives of families, businesses, and civic institutions. National conservatives, who have spent the last half decade talking up duties and common sacrifices for common goods, can develop answers for this felt need to break out and let loose again — but it will be a dramatic change of key.

Then there is the immediate political crisis. While many leaders did see an initial boost in popularity at the start of COVID, growing anger, resentment, and tiredness under pandemic life may tip the balance of politics in Central Europe next year. The loss of actual, existing national conservative governments would be a profound loss for the movement internationally. Momentum and morale matter greatly to populist movements. Populist leaders are often themselves somewhat marginal — many of them chancers and opportunists, who profit during times of uncertainty but have trouble building and establishing the next paradigm.

Perhaps most troubling of all is that national conservatism began partly as a wish for peace, as a resistance to the idea of the United States — and the transnational institutions accountable to it — policing the world ideologically. It was a movement to better share the political and economic resources that came about after the Cold War ended.

But nothing sustains and enflames nationalism more than war. And suddenly, one can hear the drums faintly beating in East Asia, along the edge of Eastern Europe. War is sometimes just and necessary. But it is always destructive. Nationalism flames into an all-consuming fire in war, burns everything it touches, and extinguishes itself in the end. It would be a tragedy beyond reckoning if all the costs of nationalism come due before any of the good it offers is accomplished.