National Conservatives Are Feeling Optimistic
At the hard-right National Conservatism Conference earlier this week, the gathered reactionaries — many of whom were close to or worked within the Trump administration — clearly felt the wind was at their backs.
Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally in Orlando, Florida, on June 18, 2019. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
The Capital Hilton in Washington, DC, is just three miles from Capitol Hill. But last week, these two places might as well have been on different planets. As congressional Democrats clenched their jaws and paced the halls trying to figure a way out of the mess that is the imploding Joe Biden campaign, the mood at the conference center was bright. The common areas were filled with smiling people in the requisite business casual attire — a mixture of young and old, almost all white, and mostly men — casually sipping coffees and pleasantly chatting. Strolling through these spaces, I overheard snippets of conversations about plans for the future: new jobs, hiring strategies, and next steps for the movement.
Inside the Presidential Ballroom, the first session’s tone was similarly upbeat. Christopher DeMuth, former head of the American Enterprise Institute and current conference organizer, welcomed the audience “to the mainstream” of the conservative movement. Next up was Yoram Hazony, the Israeli American political theorist and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosted the event. Co-opting the slogan of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, his opening speech, entitled “Yes, We Can,” began by underscoring how far their movement had already come.
“People are not afraid to use the word ‘nation’ anymore,” Hazony declared. “That’s a great success.”
Then came Rachel Bovard, a vice president at the Conservative Partnership Institute and rising right-wing firebrand, who proclaimed, “For the first time, we can look around and say we’re winning. The wind is at our backs.”
Rounding out the opening plenary, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, pronounced, “This is the future of the conservative movement and the next era.” Calling it “the second American Revolution,” Roberts predicted “a political, cultural, and social wresting from the Left all those institutions and centers of power they have steadily co-opted over several decades.”
For the past five years, the National Conservatism Conference, or NatCon, has brought together a veritable who’s who of New Right politicians, intellectuals, and movement builders from the United States and Europe. Since 2019, this group of conservative elites has been on a mission to remake the intellectual foundations of right-wing politics in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise.
Previous NatCon events in DC, Miami, London, and Brussels were billed as laboratories of ideas for a self-consciously “post-liberal” right that rejects liberal individualism and libertarian economics and promises to restore the centrality of religion, family, and nation to the conservative movement. Over the years, countless sessions have been devoted to the “New Nationalism,” the “New Jewish-Christian Alliance,” the “New Conservative Populism,” and the “New Natalism.”
But even as these ideas ascended on the political scene, the official mood of National Conservatism was dark and pessimistic. Speaking from their podiums, the right-wing elites who presided over these sessions routinely railed against the rise of “liberal totalitarianism” and complained that American institutions had been taken over by “woke Neo-Marxists” who were silencing conservative voices and destroying the nation. In the past, conference speakers routinely called for conservatives to fight back and win the existential battle against the “woke elites.” Indeed, they insisted, the very survival of Western civilization depended on it.
Yet, as Helen Lewis observed in the Atlantic last year, the Right’s dark worldview also demanded a sense of always being on the losing side of the war. Preoccupied with the Left’s power, NatCon events often felt more like highly elevated bitching sessions — with plenty of talk about the rise of the “Gramscian” left, the domination of “secular religion,” and the crisis of the “birth dearth” — and less like a plan for actually restoring civilization whose proponents thought they stood a chance of winning.
The atmosphere felt markedly different this time around. To be sure, dark apocalyptic leitmotifs of left-wing hegemony were still the driving force and spiritual energy of virtually every session I attended.
“We are in a cold civil war,” declared Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the board at the Claremont Institute, on the second day of the conference. “We are in a war with an enemy that would destroy us.” That enemy is the “woke group quota regime.” Republicans still “don’t know we’re in a war,” he insisted.
Klingenstein’s own Claremont Institute played a central role in leading the legal efforts to challenge the 2020 election and subsequent initiatives to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the nation. But calling too much attention to these activities would undermine the Right’s image of itself as passive victims of an oppressive left.
As the prospect of a second Trump presidency looms, however, more NatCons have started to publicly acknowledge their actual and potential power. Almost against their will, many have adopted a more confident vibe and a sense of excitement about the future. They are also lining up to help take over the administrative “deep state” that the Right has historically vilified. As Bovard, whose organization has been actively leading conservative efforts to roll back progressive achievements, concluded in her opening remarks, “Let’s get to work.”
Reactionary planning, as we might call this paradoxical amalgam of elite victimization and ambitious administrative organizing, is having its moment. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-plus page plan for a second Trump presidency, and the 2024 GOP policy platform have recently been in the spotlight. But these documents, while certainly illuminating, provide a relatively cold and bureaucratic version of what that future might look like. You sometimes need to read between the lines to get a real understanding of the stakes. Over the course of three days, the NatCons conveyed their vision for taking back the administrative state in more vivid detail and with a greater sense of the human drama that will unfold should the Right seize power and use the tools of governance to finally “own the libs” once and for all.
Blueprints for the Reactionary Deep State
In a packed breakout session on immigration, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a hard-right nativist outfit that poses as a neutral think tank, began by discussing plans in other countries, including Britain and Israel, for deporting refugees to Rwanda. Acknowledging that these far-right initiatives had all unraveled under judicial or political opposition, he nonetheless offered his own more ambitious “Remain in Mongolia” plan as a form of deterrence against would-be asylum seekers.
It could be “Botswana or Armenia,” he explained. The point, Krikorian underscored, is that the numbers will go down “if crossing the border simply lands you in Ulan Bakur,” mispronouncing Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Although “I hear it’s nice this time of year,” he added, “nonetheless, that’s not what you’re looking for,” and “the incentive is going to disappear.”
But even this would only be “second-best,” he explained. As executive initiatives, such programs can be “undone by future administrations.” Underscoring the need for a more permanent solution, Krikorian laid out a plan for the United States to withdraw from all international covenants — including the convention on refugees, the convention against torture, and the covenant on civil and political rights — that legally bind the nation to protect asylum seekers.
“Asylum,” he concluded, “must not be available to illegal immigrants. Period.”
He was followed by Tom Homan, the former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration, who promised, “If Trump comes back, I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Kevin Lynn, executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform, an organization whose name obscures its political alignment with the Right, then conveyed a host of ideas for how to curtail legal, as well as illegal, immigration, including ending programs aimed at workers in STEM fields, reducing the number of student visas, and asking foreign tourists to declare their pregnancies to prevent “anchor baby tourism.”
On the main stage after the lunch break, Stephen Miller, Trump’s diabolical sidekick on all things immigration, panned out from these policy plans to reframe the bigger political picture on immigrants. His speech exemplified reactionary planners’ amalgam of vindictiveness and uplift. After railing against the Joe Biden administration for knowingly letting the “world’s fugitives, predators, and rapists” into the country, he concluded with a note of inspiration. “Choose victory, choose optimism. Choose hope.”
Another session on “lawfare” featured a group of conservative legal luminaries who shared their plans for fighting back against progressives who had used the justice system to wage war against Trump and his allies during the Biden administration. The legal scholar John Yoo, who made a name for himself defending torture in the post-9/11 era, put it most plainly when he explained that conservatives had no choice but to prosecute their political enemies as well.
“Unfortunately,” Yoo lamented, “we’re going to have to use banana republic means and prosecute them too until they stop.”
“Democrats do not change unless they feel the pain of their own rules,” concurred Will Chamberlain, who currently serves as senior counsel at the Federalist Society. He went on to name the individuals at the top of the Right’s hit list: Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney and lead prosecutor in the case against Trump in Georgia; Kristen Clarke, who currently heads the civil rights division in the Department of Justice; Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the “hush-money” trial in New York; and, of course, Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Highlighting an urgent need for conservative lawyers to demonstrate more “loyalty” to the movement, Chamberlain also envisioned a broader internal campaign to pressure these “summer soldiers” — as he called them, quoting Thomas Paine — into supporting the cause. In the Q and A portion, eager young lawyers stepped up to the mic and asked how they could get involved.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the Supreme Court’s historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, the session on the pro-life movement was comparatively more somber. Introducing the panel, Catholic University professor Chad Pecknold declared, “The post-Dobbs reality is more difficult than ever.” Numerous speakers complained about the difficulties of enacting abortion bans at the state level and expressed anger at the Republican Party for dialing back its pro-life agenda in the new platform.
Undaunted, however, the panelists agreed that leaving abortion up to the states was insufficient and discussed plans for acting at the federal level.
Katy Talento, who served as “health adviser” on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council from 2017 to 2019, detailed how Biden’s “army of bureaucrats and political appointees have been quietly transforming federal agencies into Planned Parenthood” and sketched out plans for reversing those policies. The Food and Drug Administration, she said, could invoke safety issues to clamp down on the use of abortion drugs. With the help of artificial intelligence, which could be used to speed up the lengthy process of judicial review, an army of political appointees could work to roll back Biden-era regulations that undermine the pro-life movement.
“Everyone needs to start early,” she insisted. “The new administration is going to need all the help it can get.”
This is not to say that the conference speakers all sang in unison or offered coherent plans for every arena of governance. Despite broad agreement in many areas, there remained notable splits and contradictions on major issues. While the NatCons pride themselves on opposing “globalism” and were generally cool towards NATO, the conference organizers studiously avoided a full session on Ukraine, a conflict that continues to divide the Right. Meanwhile, the panel on Israel felt like a trip in the DeLorean to the 9/11 era. Conservative journalist Ben Weingarten, who seems to have imbibed his views from the Rudy Giuliani–era Manhattan Institute, went on about the rise of Islamism and the threat of sharia law being enacted in the United States. Details of the current war in Gaza were hardly mentioned, nor was the problem of self-proclaimed US nationalists offering billions of dollars of unconditional support to a recalcitrant client state.
Economics was another area of notable tension. A breakout session on “working-class conservatism” featured several individuals who claimed to represent a new direction in the movement’s stance on labor. But when issues of actual policy came up, this facade quickly crumbled.
Riley Moore, West Virginia’s state treasurer and a self-professed defender of “blue-collar” conservatism, admitted that, as a legislator, he had voted for right-to-work laws, a crucial weapon in the conservative war against unions. Despite branding themselves pro-worker, Riley and other panelists evaded questions about the PRO Act, the most important piece of labor legislation in decades, and were more than happy to dismiss the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, and public-sector unions on the grounds that they are associated with progressive cultural causes.
Earlier that morning, on the main stage, GOP senators Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Rick Scott of Florida, who have much more power to do something about labor issues, rattled on about balancing budgets, cutting taxes, and slashing regulations. It’s revealing that the Tea Party wing of the GOP, which still preaches the gospel of trickle-down economics, is also feeling the wind at its back.
“We can do it. And we must do it,” declared Lee in reference to their austerity-happy fiscal vision.
This moment underscored the essence of reactionary planning. While ostensibly forward-looking, its goal is ultimately a return to an idealized past when, as many speakers wistfully recalled, men were men, women were women, and the Christian Bible was taught in every school.
Reclaiming the Future
It’s too soon to say whether the Right will be able to accomplish this ambitious agenda. But if they can advance even a small fraction of their plans, a lot of pain and suffering will be in store at both the individual and institutional levels, especially for immigrants, people of color, women, and workers. Listening to these speakers reinforced my own sense of impending doom at the idea of a second Trump presidency.
At the same time, I could not help feeling a twinge of envy. The Right is currently experiencing the kind of hope that I remember feeling, however fleetingly, back in 2008, when Obama borrowed his “Yes We Can” slogan from Dolores Huerta, who coined the phrase for the United Farm Workers’ 1972 organizing campaign. It is the feeling so many of us experienced even more profoundly in 2016, when Bernie Sanders ascended on the national scene and upended the neoliberal consensus within the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, that kind of optimism is pretty much off the table for progressives in 2024.
Because the Democratic leadership was willfully blind to the most fundamental realities of Biden’s future, we are now all facing the likelihood of a second Trump administration. In this moment, the best we can hope for is that the Democrats can replace Biden with a younger and more charismatic candidate who has a fighting chance against Trump.
But in the long run, even as progressives expose and vehemently oppose the Right’s reactionary plans, they must also do more to provide an alternative vision. Leftism, after all, is supposed to be oriented toward the future. And that requires forging a more forward-looking vision and being bold about advancing it, even when doing so feels risky. Otherwise, we will be resigned to a future of reactionary rule from which the nation might never recover.