Much of the national-conservative movement seems to be more about angling for power than about genuine, good-faith disagreement.
Much of the national-conservative movement seems to be more about angling for power than about genuine, good-faith disagreement.
N obody likes being the subject of a hustle. Not least George D. O’Neill Jr., who details in a piece for the American Conservative his unpleasant experience of walking into what he understood to be a clandestine meeting of anti-establishment donors and political actors, only for it to be led by Matt Schlapp, best known for his role in organizing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “A head-fake to convince donors who are unwilling to support the Swamp to give money to a Swamp organization disguised as an anti-Swamp organization” is how O’Neill characterized this meeting. He’s not wrong.
Anti-establishment sentiments can often serve as a currency in ambitious political movements. The pitch often goes: The weak Republican establishment capitulates to progressives and subverts the will of its voters. What we need, then, is a new wave of conservatives — conservatives who more supposedly understand the plight of real Americans — who are willing to fight the Left. Presumably, the conservatives we need just so happen to be the very ones making this pitch. With the “right” elite in charge, this logic goes, conservatives can finally start winning.
It’s easy to detect the grift when it’s coming from a longtime insider like Schlapp. It’s much more difficult when it’s coming from promising politicians or ascending pundits. A decade or so ago, Beltway insiders hijacked the noble sentiments of the Tea Party movement to convert cheap anti-establishment rhetoric into raw political power. The same thing looks to be happening with the bourgeoning national conservative movement.
Political hopefuls see CPAC as a great opportunity to monetize counterfeit populism and grow their profile. See the example of Anthony Sabatini, the performative congressional candidate from Florida. Sabatini, when interviewed at CPAC, remarked that “there’s really no room anymore [here] for the old establishment politicians.” See, Sabatini is in politics for the right reasons. But, as is often the case with performatively anti-establishment politicians, he has a problem actually going to work. As a Florida state representative, he’s been criticized on multiple occasions — even drawing flak from fellow Republican lawmakers — for skipping work to go to fundraisers in D.C.
This isn’t to suggest that all anti-establishment initiatives originate from conscious hubris and insincerity. But what may start off as altruistic, if a bit naive, motives can mutate into something resembling status-obsession detached from its purported original mission. See the case of Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz, in 2016, ran as an outsider, incensed with the level of spending in Washington. It could fairly be characterized as his animating issue. Yet throughout the Trump administration, he was much more charitable, if not silent altogether on the matter. Now, Trump-friendly intelligentsia and power-brokers are far more allured by the use of government interventions to achieve conservative ends. This leaves deficit-spending and public debt considerably lower on the list of priorities than ten years ago.
Senator Cruz, unsurprisingly, took the stage at CPAC. It is understandable that one would adjust one’s rhetoric in light of new challenges conservatism faces. But for Cruz to ignore the debt issue altogether is bizarre to anyone who followed his 2016 presidential campaign. His speech culminated in a plea to subscribe to his podcast.
Cruz also spoke at the second National Conservatism conference (“NatCon II”) a few months ago to outline his updated vision. While his speech at this national-conservative confab was more conventionally conservative than most of the speakers and audience, he was far less animated about the singular threat of profligate spending in Washington. In fact, he didn’t mention it at all. This change of priorities suggests that Cruz cares far more about titillating political insiders, a group he likely views as kingmakers in the future of the conservative movement, than about advancing an intellectually consistent, substantive agenda. And it underscores how politicians in the past who attach themselves to anti-establishment campaigns often outlast their ostensible ideological underpinnings in an effort to retain power.
Senator Josh Hawley has the advantage of entering politics at a late enough stage that he didn’t have to make overtures to the traditional Tea Party movement, but his performance art is no less evident. In his speech at CPAC, Hawley doubled down on his decision to object to the certification of the 2020 presidential election, surely to prove his bona fides.
Hawley also leans into the whole socially conservative/fiscally liberal pose popular among national conservatives. He doesn’t pepper his speeches with Milton Freedman quotes or talk much about the virtues of liberty and a limited government. He does talk a lot about “the American worker,” his purported constituency, and professes an openness to more government spending. But what has he actually done on a legislative level to advance this cause? When faced with actual opportunities to burnish his fiscally liberal credentials, he has defaulted to the same reflexive opposition as many of his conservative colleagues. He could have, say, attempted to influence the final product of last year’s infrastructure package. But he was nowhere to be found in the bipartisan meetings with President Biden. Instead, he dismissed the bill as “radical left woke politics,” a criticism rebuffed by Senate colleague Bill Cassidy. If Hawley wasn’t trying to put his stamp on the final product of the bill, then was he exactly doing to help the lives of the group he identifies as his constituency? Not much. But he did have a nice speech at NatCon II that animated the lives of D.C. insiders who obsess over arcane ideas like post-liberalism, defying the “regime,” and puncturing the “ruling class.”
What’s most peculiar about this emerging faction of conservatism, though, is the method it uses to achieve power. To accrue popularity, national conservatives curry favor by leaning into red-meat issues that animate the conservative base. These issues range from Russiagate to vaccine hesitancy. But probably the most popular one is aligning — without any reservations — with President Trump. President Trump is still hugely popular with the base, and so you must play the game to grow an audience.
Take Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate race in Arizona, for example. He is an interesting enough guy with a unique background in venture capital, and he firmly fits within the national conservative movement. Knowing the roadmap to fame and power, though, he proudly declares — without evidence — that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and, for that reason, election integrity — a worthy cause, though often used with a different meaning by 2020 election truthers — is the most important issue moving forward. On why he is running, he maintains that he feels “called to do it.”
But what’s becoming increasingly transparent is that these figures use the oxygen and popularity they gain through appeasing the base to advance a far more complex, self-interested agenda — one that is unrecognizable even to the Republican base who supported them to begin with. Among these circles, there are growing calls to jettison timeless principles that have sustained the conservative movement for decades. Such principles include the separation of powers, pluralism, limited government, and broad rhetorical support for free markets. In doing so, this movement is taking direct aim at traditional conservative institutions — such as National Review — and looking to replace them with their own.
Stated differently, if Senator Hawley, for example, is popular among the Republican base, it is probably for the same reason that Marjorie Taylor Greene out-fundraises her peers: His unwavering support for President Trump, typified by his decision to object to Electoral College certification. It probably doesn’t have much to do with his views on Pelagian philosophy or masculinity. A conflation of the former with the latter allows the national conservatives to pitch their ideas and underlying philosophy as more important and influential than they actually are when it comes to policy-making.
One can more easily discern the grift outside the orbit of politicians. At NatCon II, Newsweek opinion editor and lawyer Josh Hammer lambasted “fusionism,” “purist laissez-faire” economics, and a pluralistic “values-neutral” interpretation of the Constitution. Departing from familiar conservative rhetoric, Hammer proudly asserted that conservatives must get comfortable with “wielding power to reconsolidate a fractured citizenry.” To better contextualize the motivations, it is helpful to ask two questions: 1) who exactly is his audience? and 2) how did he come to such strongly held stances?
On the first question, it is a quite esoteric speech for an event with an ostensibly more populist-friendly audience. Littered with the Very Online jargon of a would-be conservative intellectual, Hammer’s speech was not written for the people Pat Buchanan called the “conservatives of the heart,” who “don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke” but represent perhaps the most powerful force for actual conservatism in this country. What’s clear here is the dual approach. While CPAC is a platform to win over the base, NatCon is aimed at winning over an almost exclusively D.C.-based network, one eager to undercut prevailing institutions, such as the Federalist Society.
Unsurprisingly, to answer the second question, these views are a wholesale repudiation of . . . the Josh Hammer of a few years ago. After Trump was elected in 2016, Hammer penned an article headlined, “Free Enterprise Is Intrinsically Moral. In the Age of Trump, Here’s Why That Matters.” In this article, Hammer zealously defends the “intrinsic morality” and efficacy of free-market capitalism and warns of the dangers of “economic nationalism” or, as he calls it now, “national conservatism.” In fact, he went so far as to agree with a characterization of Trump’s strong-arming of Carrier as the “visible hand of fascism.” This is quite the 180 on topics so fundamental, like morality. If this is a good-faith change of heart — which it very well could be — one might expect intellectual humility to accompany the change. After all, Hammer’s own views a few years ago were 100 percent wrong and ineffective, according to his current standard. Instead, Hammer lambasts ideas he once held dear as “effete, limp, and unmasculine.” Likelier is that, as the Trump years rolled on, he sensed that conservatism was moving in a more populist direction and wanted to raise his status in an emerging political project.
Politics has always been a breeding ground for opportunism, but what makes this moment different is that much of the conservative infrastructure now rewards such self-serving behavior. You don’t exactly see many rising stars in GOP seeking to emulate Senator Bill Cassidy or Senator Rob Portman. Yet it was these senators — not the likes of Hawley — who had the maturity to hash out the details of a major piece of legislation. The House and Senate reflect the vast diversity of this country, so it’s understandable that policy-making requires compromise and coalition building. And this process necessitates politicians with humility who understand the complexities involved in such a profession. Now, there were persuasive objections (though largely grounded in the language of limited government national conservatives are so eager to leave behind) to the bipartisan infrastructure package. And not everyone who voted no on the final legislation is inherently a grifter. But you would think that having actionable legislative results for the national-conservative constituency should be a priority for its would-be leaders, especially if they are rhetorically eager to shed the label of fiscal conservative. That is, unless they are more interested in performing than in legislating.
We face profound issues in years ahead: an increasingly muscular China, a collapse of community, technological disruption, and an entitlement crisis. You would think that champions of the people would use their political capital to address those issues. Instead, proclaimed voices of the people — politicians and cable talking heads alike — wasted months on a completely rudderless attempt to overturn an election. Who benefited? Perhaps the political profiles of certain politicians in the eyes of right-wing infotainment, but who else?
Ironically, the real “red pill” might be realizing that much of the energy in the national-conservative movement could just be bids for self-advancement. O’Neill came to the conclusion that we should not donate to such D.C. grifts, as this only bankrolls “overhead, big salaries, lucrative consulting contracts for friends, fancy offices, and precious little actual engagement with voters or lawmakers.” Conservatism, Inc. he calls it. I think Populism, Inc. is a more suitable moniker.
To be clear, there are serious people arguing for a more populist conservative movement, and their arguments are worth taking seriously. But much of the national-conservative movement seems to be more about angling for power than about genuine, good-faith disagreement. And it’s a clarifying exercise to view such movements through the purview of pride and self-aggrandizement. Steve Bannon’s allegedly diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from his “We Build the Wall” crowdfunding campaign towards personal expenses is an extreme, but not uncommon example of that. So, too, are conservative institutions sprouting up under the guise of ushering in a more populist Republican Party.
In the end, O’Neil makes the case that the solutions are to be found at the local level. To a degree, he is correct. Local politics is important, and robust involvement in community politics lies at the heart of the American conservative tradition. But I think it may go too far to abandon all institutional initiatives and actors at the federal level. And new ideas at the federal level are not axiomatically bad. Instead, one should meet initiatives and individuals that promise to “shake things up” with healthy skepticism — especially when their proposed solutions would conveniently empower them.