The National Conservatives Are Winning the Right’s Battle of Ideas
A recent gathering of right-wing politicians and intellectuals underscores conservatism’s increasing illiberalism — and suggests the GOP might move even further toward authoritarianism and phony economic populism.
Senator Ted Cruz, who gave a keynote address at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, pictured here speaking at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, DC. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
In late October and early November, prominent members of America’s political right descended on Orlando for the second-ever conference on “national conservatism.” From elected officials to right-wing intellectuals, the gathering and its various events offered crucial insights into the state of the conservative movement and its direction of travel in a post-Trumpified world.
So, what exactly is “national conservatism” and to what extent does it represent a break from the post-Reaganite consensus as we’ve known it? The question, it turns out, is not exactly an easy one to answer; the conference offered a complicated mixture of continuity and change, even from its immediate predecessor in 2019.
As longtime observers of American conservatism, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell — cohosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast — were following events in Orlando closely. Earlier this month, they sat down with Jacobin’s Luke Savage for a broad-ranging discussion of the National Conservative Conference (NatCon), the so-called national conservatives, and where the Right may be headed in the coming years.
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