FreeCons Must Be Part of a Wider Conservative Movement. If We’re Provoking Schisms, Count Me Out

In June 2022, a group of conservatives and right-wingers published a ten-point manifesto: “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” The statement was part of the National Conservatism organization under the Edmund Burke Foundation, which holds periodic conferences. (Ron DeSantis spoke at the 2022 annual conference in Miami.) Its chairman is the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony.

In July 2023, another group of conservatives and libertarians published a different ten-point manifesto: “Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” The statement, drafted by a working group led by Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) and John Hood of the John William Pope Foundation, has its own competing Freedom Conservatism website.

Both statements of principles were modeled in structure and tone on the 1960 Sharon Statement, which was drafted by M. Stanton Evans, adopted by the Young Americans for Freedom at the home of William F. Buckley Jr., published in National Review, and served as something of an organizing credo for the conservative movement of that era. Each list of signatories includes quite a number of people I like and respect, as well as some I’ve been regularly at odds with. The NatCon statement was signed by Michael Brendan Dougherty; the FreeCon statement was signed by David Bahnsen, Jack Butler, Charlie Cooke, Zach Kessel, Ramesh Ponnuru, Noah Rothman, and Christian Schneider. A number of other National Review alumni or contributors can be found on each list. My natural inclination is towards the FreeCons, and in spite of one reservation with its language on race, I told Roy at the time that I’d be happy to have my name added to it. There were some important things left off the FreeCon list, but if the point of the statement was to stand up for a non-exhaustive recitation of principles that conservatives should not neglect or abandon, I was for it.

But if the FreeCon statement is to be used as a wedge in a schismatic war against the NatCons, count me out.

There’s no need for the two statements to be considered irreconcilably opposing views of the world. I agreed with about 95 percent of what was in the FreeCon statement, but I also agreed with about 85 or 90 percent of what was in the NatCon statement. As Michael has observed, there is plenty of overlap: “Both denounce crony capitalism, praise the family and the rule of law, commend the principle of national sovereignty worldwide, and clarify that racism has no place among conservatives. Both statements praise the contribution of immigration to national success, and both affirm that immigration policy must be tailored to the national interest.”

To the extent that the FreeCon statement omitted some things I cared about, such as the right to life and the necessity of public order, or things it soft-pedaled, such as the crucial importance of the family to society, I took it to be an acknowledgement that broadening one’s coalition requires limiting a statement of principles to a level of generality at which all the signatories are comfortable rather than aiming to exclude whatever is left out. I assume most of the signatories of each statement felt the same way.

The Sharon Statement was successful enough to be remembered 63 years later precisely because it aimed to broaden the tent — to fuse together into a coalition with some level of intellectual coherence the sorts of traditional, moral, nationalist, and religious conservatism represented by the NatCons and the emphasis on liberty and free markets represented by the FreeCons. Thus, the very first two principles were that “foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will” and that “liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.” The Sharon Statement talked about national sovereignty and national interest, but also said that “the market economy . . . is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government” and that “when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

There has, unfortunately, been a tendency of too many proponents of the NatCon and FreeCon statements, Roy and Hazony among them, to act at times as if signing one of the statements is a commitment to draw up sides rather than an invitation to build upon common ground. Roy’s argument for signing the FreeCon statement and his defense of it on this site was long on efforts to draw contrasts between the two groups, and to claim that the FreeCons are the sole heirs of the Sharon Statement. That’s at some odds with how others have received the statement; Scott Lincicome read the FreeCon statement as “expressly not intended to be an ‘anti-Natcon’ document.” But Roy has had an unfortunate tendency to speak on behalf of the signatories, which is not especially productive.

Hazony went off on Roy this morning on X, intemperately calling him a “lowlife.” He was responding to an interview Roy gave on the Law & Liberty podcast with James Patterson. It’s not hard to see why Hazony is upset, because Roy is going directly after his organization. While some of Roy’s criticisms involve important matters worth debating — and I share a lot of his concerns — he paints with a brush that is far too broad and too hyperbolic.

Roy starts off by essentially arguing that the NatCon statement was itself the product of an authoritarian movement, and that the FreeCon statement was aimed directly at competing with it (emphasis mine):

I think it’s become clear that the people on the right in particular who like the rise of authoritarianism, who are inclined, who believe that it’s a good thing, it’s a salutary development, have succeeded at moving beyond merely trying to align with Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at times, and instead try to build a permanent movement around authoritarianism. They call it national conservatism, by which they mean that the classical liberal movement is too nice; it’s too willing to engage in toleration of multiple points of view. And that what we really need is an authoritarianism of the right to combat the authoritarianism of the left.

And last year, in 2022, the national conservatives got together and created a statement of principles with 10 planks that they published at their website. They have conferences twice a year, usually one in the US and one in Hungary or some other aligned location. . . . Young people growing up today have had the impression that if you are to be a conservative, if you see yourself on the right or right of center, and especially if you see yourself as an opponent of the left, that nationalism and authoritarianism are the philosophies you need to adopt. And that trend, in particular, has become very concerning. It’s also become very concerning that a lot of politicians on the right have concluded that the way to win a Republican primary in particular, whether it’s running for president or running for Congress or state legislature, is to adopt these nationalist authoritarian positions because they see that as the base of the party. It wasn’t that long ago that the Tea Party was the base of the party. . . . That’s been replaced by this new theory that the base is nationalistic and authoritarian.

And so you put all these things together, all these different trends, and a bunch of other people felt that this was a great concern, “We need to do something about it.” And that the first step in doing something about it was to put together our own statement of principles.

Throwing around “authoritarianism” in an undefined way that sounds all too much like the sort of thing we hear from the left whenever conservatives do anything is counterproductive. Roy goes on to argue that the NatCons’ aim is “reformatting America as a white ethnostate”:

Now, there’s something that some will say out loud, and others will not say out loud, which is arguably the core animating concern that they have, which is not so much those things, though those things I think all of us would agree we don’t like about the state of America today. But the reason why they say America is lost is because of demographic issues. That is what you hear that some of the nationals say in their own settings and their own journals, and again, particularly the most frank and blunt and open ones who don’t worry about any pushback they might get on this topic. They say the biggest problem with America is that America is increasingly a multi-ethnic, multiracial society. That’s something that they believe will help drive America to lose its fundamental character. That America, in order to preserve its fundamental character, needs to be a white ethnostate.

And that’s why immigration policy is front and center, not just in the United States but in nationalist movements all around the world. . . . The reason why the nationalists say that we’re lost, already lost, because this is a demographic issue, that, well, America is already not American, if you think America should be a white ethnostate, and that’s why they lean towards authoritarian ideas because they know they can’t persuade a majority of the electorate to go along with reformatting America as a white ethnostate, most Americans don’t want that. And so that’s why they veer towards these anti-democratic, anti-Republican ideas of what America should be in the future.

Taken in the context of the interview, this was rather clearly intended to refer specifically to the NatCon organization and its statements’ signatories. On Twitter, Roy denied having argued that “all signatories of the NatCon statement of principles are racists who long for a white ethnostate,” but he doesn’t really renounce what he said. He argues that the NatCon statement is something of a smoke screen for the organization on immigration:

When you go over to the nationalists, it’s kind of the other half of that debate, where they’re saying they’re very skeptical of immigration overall. They believe that circumstances may often require a full moratorium on immigration. And what’s important to talk about there is that while that’s what they say in their statement, if you actually read what they write in their own journals, the speeches they give at their own conferences, their view of immigration is much more hostile. You hear rhetoric like, “Immigration makes America dirtier.” Immigration, again, despoils America’s ethnic homogeneity and racial homogeneity. A lot of comments of that sort. So while the national conservative statement is carefully worded to maybe mask some of these darker elements of the nationalist movement, it’s clear that that’s a big thrust of theirs.

Again: There really are some strains of ethno-nationalism on the right, but not only is this an overgeneralization, it also conflates legitimate cultural and economic concerns about immigration with racial animosity. If we closed the borders of the United States tomorrow and left them closed for a century, we still would not have anything vaguely resembling an all-white country, or even the massive white supermajority that existed in the country before the mid 1960s.

Roy goes on to accuse the NatCons of wanting to reject the American founding tradition in favor of blood-and-soil European nationalism:

The document makes it pretty clear that the most important thing that freedom conservatives stand for is individual and economic liberty. . . . The nationalists don’t believe in that tradition. They want to import the Hungarian or continental European nationalism, which is basically that your country is a collection of people who are genetically linked to each other with a common language and a common religion, and that’s it. That’s what a nation is. And there are nuanced versions of nationalism that are not completely incompatible with freedom conservatism. And I wouldn’t even call them nationalist; it’s more like that’s just patriotism, right? . . . One can have a very robustly pro-American and patriotic philosophy, and yet not be a nationalist in the way that we’ve described nationalism.

And so there are people, I think, in that way, you can look at the statement of principles that we’ve put out and the statement of principles the nationalists have put out and say, well, I agree with the majority of both of these statements, so which side am I on? And there have been a number of columns and articles that have kind of been in the zone, saying, “Well, I don’t want to really take a side here or I think there’s merit to both, so I’m going to just kind of sit this out.” And I think the mistake there is that if you are not trying to conserve the American founding tradition, that’s a core moral issue. Right?

I would agree that anyone who really wants us to become Hungary is subverting the American founding tradition. But is that really a fair description of the NatCon statement (which embraces “traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition”), or of a lot of its signatories?

There’s also this passage:

The core fight that really matters is do you believe that Americans should be trusted to live their own lives? That families should be trusted to raise their children in the way they see fit? If you don’t believe that, and the nationalists in certain places in their document don’t believe that, then that’s a problem. That is a clear area of distinction.

What does Roy mean when he says that the NatCons don’t believe “that families should be trusted to raise their children in the way they see fit”? The NatCon statement asks for a social orientation towards families, says that religious minorities should be free to hand down their traditions in “all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children,” and says this:

We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

It’s not clear what in this statement is supposed to promote state subversion of the authority of the family over children, and I suspect Roy is not talking from a position that is necessarily shared by a lot of the signatories of the FreeCon statement.

I respect Roy, and I have no problem with his arguing against those elements of the national-conservative scene that he finds ominous for the classical-liberal tradition in American conservatism. I’ve done my share of that. It’s also fair for him to argue that the NatCon organization’s people and its events aren’t always on the same page with their professed statement. That’s Hazony’s problem, not Roy’s, and in the long run it is likely to limit the appeal of the broad principles set forth in the NatCon statement. But the dynamic of Hazony and Roy having dueling statements of largely unobjectionable principle and then using the signature-gathering process on those statements to enlist signatories into a proxy war many of them didn’t choose is unhealthy. Our goal as conservatives should be to find the common ground, maximize the people united around it, and marginalize only those whose ideas and behavior really can’t be reconciled with the rest. Liberty-minded conservatives are still part of a coalition, and the FreeCon principles still aren’t anything like a complete statement of what conservatives should believe, what they care about, or what battles they must fight. For all of those, they need friends and allies. If you want me to sign up for a schism, count me out.