There has been a lot of talk about “national conservatism” as a new current of thought on the right. Its adherents are purportedly distinguished from other kinds of conservative by their renewed focus on matters directly pertaining to national sovereignty (trade, immigration, foreign policy); by their greater willingness to employ state power to secure political ends; and by their claims that the conservatism of the past few decades is inadequate to our present challenges and merely serves as a reinforcement of the status quo, whether intentionally or not.
But in a Public Discourse essay last Friday, I noted some of the flaws in national conservatism. The first is that it fits uncomfortably within the American political tradition, especially in its sidelining of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration goes unmentioned in last year’s National Conservatism Statement of Principles, signed by many leading national conservatives as an attempt to present consensus among them. Yoram Hazony, one of these leaders, believes the Declaration is an aberrant part of American thought. But this flies in the face of, among other evidence, the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln:
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