Many see themselves as heirs of Reagan and Buckley while still hearing out the views of the nationalist-populists.
Many see themselves as heirs of Reagan and Buckley while still hearing out the views of the nationalist-populists.
A s more experienced members of the conservative movement debate where it is headed, we can get some sense of its direction from its younger adherents. While some young conservatives have embraced populism and nationalism, there are those who would rather hold fast to the beliefs of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. Many of the latter attended the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference, whose name has become ironic in that there is little “national conservatism” to be found there.
Though many NCSC attendees sympathized with the grievances of those who feel dispossessed or believe that conservatism has been ineffective in recent years, they are put off by the big-government tendencies of the new movement that has arisen on the right, as several told National Review.
A platform or ideology involving an expansion of government power is “antithetical” to what conservatives believe, said Hunter Oswald, a junior at Grove City College.
He said he understands that some people feel betrayed by the elites, believing that “we need to almost have some kind of vendetta against the people who have harmed us and have immediate action to do it.” Still, he believes that this “emotional response” can lead to misguided policies.
Nationalist and populist conservatives would better achieve their goals of helping American workers and families, Oswald said, with the limited-government policies that conservatives have espoused for decades. As he put it: “It sounds to me like you want less government. You want free-market policies. You want lower taxes. That doesn’t result from bigger government.”
For Gabrielle Dankanich, a senior at the Catholic University of America, the new movement has a “genuine concern for the future of our nation,” but its emphasis on isolationism is unfortunate.
Something she has noticed a lot of “is the pairing of isolationism with populism,” she said. “And that is horrifying to me because isolationism is actually ‘America last,’ not ‘America first.’ ”
Dankanich lamented the growth of the sentiment on the right, especially in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the United States, because of its role in the expansion of NATO, is at fault for the aggression of foreign powers. “That makes no sense,” she said. “Foreign nations have their own agency, and they were going to do it in some capacity at some point.” Such a blame-America-first attitude, in her view, is not compatible with the conservatism of Reagan and Buckley.
Oswald’s and Dankanich’s views are in sync with YAF at large, which has “always been a strong proponent of fusionism,” said spokeswoman Kara Zupkus, referring to the blending of the classically conservative and classically liberal traditions in NR’s pages in the 1950s and ’60s.
The principles in the Sharon Statement, YAF’s founding document, “arguably are antithetical to what the current populist movement is,” Zupkus told NR. “We very much recognize and value the importance of the free-market economic system. We recognize the importance, especially now with the rise of Russia and China, of a strong national defense.”
Drafted in 1960, the Sharon Statement posited that the market economy is “the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs.” It also called on the United States to “stress victory over, rather than coexistence with” international communism, calling it “the greatest single threat” to freedom.
“The populist movement’s position on specifically those two issues that are addressed in the Sharon Statement just doesn’t cohesively make sense at the current time,” Zupkus said. The populists are “wanting to ‘put America first’ ” as a means “to make America the best nation that it can be” — a sentiment that she agrees with. But “that doesn’t mean that we cannot be a strong voice for freedom around the globe.”
This year, those animating principles of the Reagan administration were alive and well at YAFCon. The headline speaker, former vice president Mike Pence, unveiled his Freedom Agenda, calling for “restoring the vitality of our economy through free-market principles” that undergird “the most powerful economic engine in the history of mankind.”
Pence also told the students that “American freedom means peace at home and stability abroad,” touting the Trump administration’s investment in the military, the largest since Reagan, as well as its efforts to push NATO allies to make larger contributions to the common defense. Finally, Pence condemned Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan and called for meeting Russia’s and China’s “grandiose ambitions with American strength for the sake of our allies and the free world.”
Other speakers echoed Pence’s remarks. Arthur Laffer, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts, outlined how laissez-faire economics could bring down inflation. Retired Hillsdale College professor Burt Folsom contrasted the free-market booms of the 1920s with the big-government recessions of the 1930s. Finally, Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) articulated how we can “enhance our deterrent posture over the next two to three years and, thereby, prevent World War III.”
This is not to say that populism and nationalism are entirely absent from the NCSC. Last year, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller advocated an immigration moratorium, protectionist tariffs, and isolationist, “America First” foreign policies. Some students in attendance disagreed with him. One such student was Kyle Poen, a graduate of Iowa State University, who told NR that Miller did not speak for “the entire conservative movement.”
“It was nice to hear from someone in the White House, someone who worked for the previous president,” he said. “But I think that when you start talking about things like an immigration moratorium, you lose a lot of people.”
Some of Miller’s sentiments were present this year. The closing speaker, Liz Wheeler, who signed on to the national-conservative “Statement of Principles” in June, said that the Republican Party “has been co-opted, in large part, by neocons who want to start wars and don’t want to equip our fighting men and women to win those wars.”
Her views were very much in the minority among speakers, however, and most attendees were skeptical of them. Nevertheless, these young cons were still willing to build coalitions.
“You can’t just cut someone off immediately because you disagree with one or two things that they have been saying,” Poen told NR. “You have to allow those ideas to be expressed, and you have to debate those ideas in public discourse respectfully.”
For Dankanich, cooperation would come from “a place of recognizing where we do agree,” though she added that conservatives need to ensure that “people who are beginning to lean toward isolationism and populism are aware of what it actually means for Americans.” Likewise, Zupkus observed that the camps can work together on “specifically social issues.” That’s an area where “we’re all pretty much on the same page,” she said. “So I think we need to work with them. We can’t completely isolate them.”
Such has been the history of the post-war conservative movement, respecting the differences of its factions without succumbing to factionalism. In his NR essay announcing the creation of Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley recognized that the word “conservatism” described the “distinct but complementary, even symbiotic positions” of traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and libertarians such as Frank Meyer. Now, young conservatives are faced with a test similar to that of their predecessors, uniting the many sides in working toward a common goal. Buckley did it before, and those who carry on the legacy can do it now.