National Conservatism Conference Shows a Movement Catching Its Breath

Every major gathering of political conservatives causes people to check the temperature in the room. Last week, the annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington inspired commentators to talk about the divisions inside, as speakers marked their differences with the Trump administration or with each other. In many cases, that was rather the point. Yoram Hazony, conference organizer and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, closed the conference remarking that one of his intended purposes was to gather people together and disrupt what were “movement-rending” fights over foreign policy happening on Twitter/X.

The other thing these conferences attract is potshots. Reporters would sometimes get a picture of a side session that was sparsely attended, and it gave them a quick, visually comprehensible metaphor for the supposed lifelessness of an issue or cause. The truth is something else. NatCon is unlike all other conservative conferences in that a large majority of attendees are speakers, professionals in the movement, or grandees in one sense or another. It’s also a long conference, and so naturally, many of the people there are working part of the day from their hotel room, or — more likely — they are enjoying the conviviality throughout the conference hallways and in the hotel lobby. The schedule is so rich as to be overwhelming. My own session, in which four people spoke to various angles of the Trump doctrine or the current foreign policy divisions on the right, was scheduled at the same time as another panel on the arts and culture that I desperately wanted to see for myself.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Every major gathering of political conservatives causes people to check the temperature in the room. Last week, the annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington inspired commentators to talk about the divisions inside, as speakers marked their differences with the Trump administration or with each other. In many cases, that was rather the point. Yoram Hazony, conference organizer and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, closed the conference remarking that one of his intended purposes was to gather people together and disrupt what were “movement-rending” fights over foreign policy happening on Twitter/X.

The other thing these conferences attract is potshots. Reporters would sometimes get a picture of a side session that was sparsely attended, and it gave them a quick, visually comprehensible metaphor for the supposed lifelessness of an issue or cause. The truth is something else. NatCon is unlike all other conservative conferences in that a large majority of attendees are speakers, professionals in the movement, or grandees in one sense or another. It’s also a long conference, and so naturally, many of the people there are working part of the day from their hotel room, or — more likely — they are enjoying the conviviality throughout the conference hallways and in the hotel lobby. The schedule is so rich as to be overwhelming. My own session, in which four people spoke to various angles of the Trump doctrine or the current foreign policy divisions on the right, was scheduled at the same time as another panel on the arts and culture that I desperately wanted to see for myself.