How ‘National Conservatism’ Has Changed the Right

(Daily Signal)—The Trump administration has launched a counterrevolution in American culture and government. As much as the credit for this sudden and dramatic reversal belongs to the president, it is further being fueled by larger changes in the conservative movement.

These changes were set in motion in part thanks to the annual National Conservatism Conference, initially created by Yoram Hazony, author of “The Virtues of Nationalism,” and hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation. The conference first launched in 2019 and just wrapped up its fifth such gathering on Thursday.

As a disclosure, I’ll note that my wife Inez Stepman is one of the hosts of the “NatCon Squad” podcast, an excellent weekly show that provides some of the most insightful analysis about contemporary politics. (Yes, I’m biased, but it’s true.)

The National Conservatism message has largely “won” on the Right. That’s in part because it’s strongly aligned with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Vance has spoken several times at the conference, including in 2024, when he spoke about how America is a “homeland” and not just an idea.

But in a certain sense, the movement has run alongside Trump and Vance’s success. It has thrived because it filled the vacuum of where the pre-Trump conservative message failed.

Addressing What Matters Most

Too often there was talk of liberty and the Constitution, of how the government had infringed on the rights of citizens. There was a clear understanding that the Left had gone too far, but little clarity about what to do about it.

The first National Conservatism Conference set the tone of how the Right needed to act if Western civilization was to survive and not either disintegrate or become a twisted, villainous version of itself, powerful but wretched.

The conference was met with a certain degree of scorn when it began, as many elements of the traditional conservative movement denounced it for embracing ideological heresies.

But it succeeded in large part because it was addressing the issues that the American people cared deeply about—issues the Republican Party and conservative institutions ignored or didn’t seem to be taking seriously.

For instance, why should Americans extol the virtues of free trade when it seemed to mean the disintegration of jobs, the breakup of communities, and the destruction of the “good life” at the heart of the American dream? Pointing to national economic growth or the benefit of cheaper consumer goods wasn’t good enough when communities were dying and local schools were allowing biological males in girls locker rooms.

Unsettled arguments had been treated as settled; dissent or second-guessing was looked upon as a betrayal; and any suggestion that the institutional Right had missed some things in the lead up to Trump taking over the Republican Party was often lambasted as a “sellout” of principles.

‘The Kingdom of God Must be Defended Like Any Other’

Much has changed now. The existential threat the Left poses to our way of life is more widely understood and acknowledged. The Right is more focused on issues directly related to the concerns of millions of forgotten ordinary Americans who are forgotten no more.

There is a much stronger focus on culture and the family.

Cultural issues are in the driver’s seat, not the backseat—or in a ditch by the side of the road. There is a more widespread belief that political and institutional power is a necessary component of change and success. The National Conservative movement reminded the Right that a great moral and spiritual deficit will bankrupt the country just as much as a fiscal one.

What National Conservatism brought to the larger Right is the mentality that the good things at the heart of Western civilization could not be defended by creating small islands of liberty in a sea of hostile leftism.

It wasn’t sufficient to just explain the virtues of free speech, to demand religious liberty, and to extol the virtues of the Constitution and limited government. The institutions and changing culture of Western societies controlled by the Left had not only ghettoized traditional cultural and religious ideas, but they had also set them on a path of ultimate annihilation.

National Conservatism took hold because it embraced a maxim excellently conveyed in the 1964 movie, “Becket,” which is about the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who defended the church against a corrupt and hostile state.

When Becket, played by Richard Burton, decides to excommunicate a state official who killed a priest—thereby angering the ruling regime—three court bishops begged him not to take that action because it would “strike a blow that will split Church and State for a generation.”

Becket rebuked them sharply, saying, “If I do not strike it now, the Church as we know it now will not survive a generation.”

The bishops answered back, “God will see that it survives.” But Becket had none of it and concluded in a spirit that I think is emblematic of the mindset of National Conservatism: “No, the kingdom of God must be defended like any other kingdom.”

It’s not good enough to accept being a “remnant,” mere dissenters clinging to a handful of battered, infiltrated bastions just waiting out the clock and hoping that something will change.

It’s About the Institutions, Stupid

What was needed was an aggressive counter, an attitude that the institutions of Western civilization do not belong to the Left. We can build and use our own political and institutional power to ensure that we live in a good society of human flourishing.

That mindset has produced tangible results.

For instance, the second Trump administration has done something that Republicans had never seriously attempted to do regarding higher education. Instead of just grumbling about the loony Left that’s taken over college campuses and turned them into woke madrassas, as conservatives have done for more than half a century, the administration defunded or threatened to defund them.

No longer could schools actively violate the law with impunity and carry out policies that discriminated primarily against white and Asian students. By doing so, colleges risked losing in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars. States followed suit with their own demands that higher education change its ways—or else.

And for the first time in a long time, even elite universities such as Harvard must take the Right’s demands seriously, because conservatives are serious about using real political power against them.

Even long-standing demands such as defunding the ideologically compromised NPR and PBS, long talked about by conservatives but seemingly never taken seriously by Republicans in office, have suddenly come to pass.

It turns out, you can just do stuff.

There are other big changes, too. The Trump administration hasn’t just secured the border, it’s deporting thousands of people who have come here illegally, and taking amnesty off the table. The United States is a nation, as National Conservatives have argued, not just an economic zone. With limitless illegal and even legal immigration, it becomes impossible to maintain the cultural bonds that are necessary for a healthy and thriving people.

The emphasis has moved away from raw economic competition to family-building and uplifting the American citizens that the state has a duty and obligation to.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum going. Trump and the Right’s more confrontational attitude have thrown the Left and its disgraced, untrusted institutions into disarray. That doesn’t mean that a “Retvrn”—“reject modernity, embrace history“—is guaranteed and that the West has been fully restored. Far from it. It’s going to take a generation—or likely generations, plural—to rebuild what has been lost.

All that it means is that we are at the beginning of the beginning. We have a new lease on life, so to speak. And that’s thanks in large part to the changes that National Conservatism has brought to America and other Western nations.