The Left Misunderstands the Problem with National Conservatism

F lorida has emerged as the center of the American Right. It’s the adopted residence of former president Donald Trump, the dominion of Governor Ron DeSantis, and home to legions of young conservatives who’ve flocked to the state since the dawn of the Covid era, when it was seen as a beacon of normalcy set against the tenebrosity of tumultuous times.

So it’s not surprising that the National Conservatism Conference, hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation, held its third annual convention in Miami. After all, national conservatives are attempting to become for conservatism intellectually what Florida has become for Republicans politically.

There is some difference — and even disagreement — among the speakers and attendees. But the basic premise of the gathering was that we’re living through an epochal moment in the history of our civilization. National conservatives (NatCons) assert that liberalism, the dominant ideological paradigm in the West since 1945, amplified by the emergence of “neoliberalism” in the 1980s, has failed. Globalization has enabled “hostile foreign powers to despoil America.” Atomistic individualism has left people in a state of spiritual malaise.

In 2020, the NatCon narrative goes, during the nationwide racial reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, “woke neo-Marxism” completed its long march through society’s hollow and morally bankrupt institutions, officially supplanting liberalism as the unofficial dogma of the “regime.”

Moreover, NatCons deride the Right’s Cold War–era response to progressive cultural hegemony, fusionism, as an anachronistic marriage of convenience between God-fearing traditionalists, libertine libertarians, and defense hawks that was “unable to keep up with the times.”

This is why they insist that the Right must embrace a wartime mentality as a beleaguered, dispossessed minority. Disregarding the supposedly “effete” first principles of yesteryear, they stress the need for drastic measures: using the levers of state power to alleviate the plight of workers, reinvigorate religious life, and punish enemies and reward friends.

Despite these declaimed differences with traditional American conservatism, many political observers on the left have concluded that this is just the same old right-wing agenda “with the exact nature . . . tweaked to fit the opportunistic imperatives of the day.”

This is a common theme in left-wing political discourse. Progressives often do not see political fissures in their opponents’ camp. Thus, all divisions within the right, to them, can be reduced to mere abstraction. This hubristic, reductive understanding has its roots in the Marxist theory of “false consciousness” — the notion that moneyed interests, whether the feudal lords of Medieval times or the billionaires of today, continually introduce diversions and boogeymen to keep the masses from perceiving the true nature of their dire socioeconomic conditions, lest they revolt.

In the case of the NatCons, progressives such as Matt Yglesias have argued that the lip service they pay to the interests of the working class is all just a smokescreen for the same regressive program of redistributing wealth upwards. The best explanation they’ve come up with for this phenomenon is that the NatCon emphasis on Christian nationalism and preserving traditional culture and is just less-discreet white-nationalist dog-whistling.

This is mistaken. For all their flaws, the NatCons are not in the pocket of oligarchs on Wall Street, and they’re not further proof of America’s inherent bigotry. Branding the project as the same old prejudice in service of a classist agenda fails to capture the challenge NatCons present.

National conservatism correctly diagnoses many societal ills and rightly calls attention to traditional-conservative blind spots on class and culture. But its solutions fail to address these problems. They are a hackneyed hodgepodge of protectionism, industrial policy, and foreign-policy restraint often difficult to distinguish from isolationism.

Unfortunately, none of these policy prescriptions meaningfully addresses working-class insecurities or cultural decay. Protectionism, a recurrent form of economic illiteracy, is ill-conceived regressive taxation on domestic consumption. Industrial policy nearly always fails to produce its desired effects of establishing robust domestic-production capacity, because central planners picking winners cannot adequately respond to price signals. And the proclivity to retreat from America’s obligations on the world stage does nothing to help the poor. Pax Americana has been exceedingly beneficial, not only for global stability, but also for American prosperity. Money we spend on foreign policy does not significantly diminish our capacity to invest at home.

Some have argued that the NatCons simply represent the resurgence of the pre-war Old Right’s “commitment to protectionism, restricted immigration, and non-intervention abroad.” There is much truth to this. But the NatCons’ equanimity with using the heavy hand of the state to shield allies and pursue opponents is a new development on the right — and a distinctly worrying one. And it’s traditional conservatives committed to limited government — not progressives already enamored of state power — who are best positioned to understand and advance this criticism.

The root of national conservatism’s penchant for statism is its fundamental misunderstanding of what gave rise to this moment of profound disillusionment in America — for which the Left will not accept blame — and how to fix it. Workers have not seen their wages stagnate, health-care costs increase, and homeownership become unattainable because of “market fundamentalism.” Each one of these problems is the result of well-intentioned technocratic policies. The Judeo-Christian character of the nation has been debilitated, not aided, by the administrative state. Manning the levers of coercive state power for oneself will not remedy these problems; depowering the levers, however, will.

NatCons have forgotten that freedom does not have to persist in opposition to virtue. Indeed, the history of Western civilization informs us that freedom and virtue can complement each other in a Hayekian, non-Hegelian synthesis. Only when these two values coexist does human flourishing really take off.

The left-wing critique of national conservatism falls short because it’s based on the false, cynical premise that progressives’ political opponents are looking for new garb to disguise the same aim of self-enrichment. The NatCons themselves aren’t nearly as duplicitous as progressives make them out to be. A superior critique, from the right, accepts the sincerity of their ends, but rejects the nature of their means — whether in Florida or elsewhere.