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Editor’s note: For Independence day this year, please enjoy Carson Holloway’s timeless review of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism, from our archives (originally publish July 5, 2017).
The presidency of Donald Trump raises the question of patriotism more forcefully than it has been raised for a long time in American politics. On the one hand, Trump and his followers think of their movement as a restoration of a proper patriotism, an effort to rescue a country and a people, the true interests of which have been shamefully neglected by an excessively cosmopolitan elite. On the other hand, Trump’s critics think that he appeals to a dangerously atavistic nationalism, an unenlightened and extreme love of country that neglects our duties to the world community. Thus the Trump movement and the controversy it has created force us to ask: what is a just and reasonable patriotism? More specifically, what kind of patriotism is appropriate to a country like America, which is founded on universal principles and not on any particular and exclusive ethnic or religious identity?
This question is especially relevant for American conservatives. In general, patriotism looms larger in the minds of conservatives than in the minds of their liberal counterparts. Conservatism is about preserving, as much as circumstances permit, the country we have inherited, and such an enterprise necessarily presupposes patriotism—a loving approval of that country’s way of life and a desire to see it safely extended into the future. This is not to say that American liberals are unpatriotic. It is just that their patriotism is rendered more complicated, and perhaps more qualified, by their commitment to progress—which necessarily entails a belief that the country is imperfect, and hence more in need of improvement than of preservation—and by their commitment to cosmopolitanism—which leads them to think in terms of political obligations aside from, and maybe in some cases more compelling than, those they owe to their country.
The present question of patriotism is also more compelling for American conservatives simply because the Trump phenomenon arose on their own political turf. Trump is not a conventional American conservative, but his movement is certainly of the right. He has, for the present at least, taken over the traditional political instrument of American conservatism, the Republican Party. His candidacy first swept aside his conservative opposition and then co-opted a good deal of it. These reasons, too, force conservatives to ask themselves whether they can support the kind of patriotism to which Trump has so successfully appealed.
In this context, American conservatives—and anyone interested in American politics—should welcome the publication of Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism. As his subtitle indicates, Hayward’s book offers in the first place an account of the intellectual journey of Jaffa and Berns, two students of Leo Strauss who became in their generation two of the leading scholars of American political thought and the American regime. Unlike their great teacher, however, Berns and Jaffa did not limit their intellectual activity to the realm of scholarly and philosophic inquiry. Strauss was primarily an interpreter of the great texts of the western philosophic canon, seeking to understand them on their own terms and to use them as a springboard for his own philosophizing. He rarely commented at length on any of the political questions of the day. In contrast, Jaffa and Berns chose to be both scholars and public intellectuals, offering commentary from roughly the right side of the political spectrum, Jaffa operating from the Claremont Institute and Berns from the American Enterprise Institute. Accordingly, the story of their thinking, of their agreements and disagreements, is to a considerable extent an account of many of the important issues with which conservative intellectuals have grappled over the last fifty years.
Although Hayward writes with a winning affection for Jaffa and Berns, both of whom he knew personally, his primary aim is not to provide a pair of intellectual biographies. Rather, his main interest lies with the key issues themselves, using Jaffa and Berns’s arguments to explicate them. The book is not and does not claim to be an academic study of Jaffa and Berns’s political thought. Indeed, for whoever wishes to take up the task, a scholarly book (perhaps beginning as a doctoral dissertation) remains to be written on Strauss’s first generation students who took up the study of the American regime, including not only Jaffa and Berns, but also Martin Diamond and Herbert Storing.
Hayward, however, writes here for a more popular audience of thoughtful citizens, offering them an accessible account of the questions that Jaffa and Berns pondered and that played an important role in conservative intellectual debate during their careers: Can modern political science be morally serious without being moralistic, avoiding the extremes of scientistic value neutrality, on the one hand, and ideological fanaticism, on the other? What is statesmanship, and how can it be guided by high principle while also accommodating the intractable imperfections inseparable from political life? To what extent can conservatives look upon Abraham Lincoln as a model of American statesmanship? What role, if any, should natural law and natural rights play in the exercise of the judicial power? Can equality be understood as an intelligible and limited political principle, or must it degenerate into an unreasoning and unquenchable passion?
All of the questions that Hayward explores are of perennial interest to students of American politics. Once again, however, none is of more immediate importance than the question of patriotism and its proper basis, which is a key theme of the book, as its title indicates. What does Hayward mean by asserting that “patriotism is not enough”? He seeks to remind us that, at least for a political community like the United States, a healthy politics requires more than just a sentimental attachment to the country and its interests. As he says, “American patriotism is based on ideas.” Unlike most countries, America was founded at a particular moment in time and, more importantly, on the basis of certain moral and philosophical principles to which its founders dedicated it. American patriotism, therefore, needs to be an enlightened patriotism, in the sense of being informed by knowledge of the founding principles and reflection on how to preserve them and apply them anew in each generation.
Put another way, America has a political identity much more distinct, and much more central to its being, than other nations, many of which have existed for a long time and maintained some kind of stable identity under a variety of regimes. At least until recently, a perfectly good Frenchman might be a republican, a monarchist, a socialist, or a communist. A good American, however, must be committed to a particular political creed: the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence and the republican self-government under law established by the Constitution. Accordingly, American patriotism, and American conservatism, is concerned with understanding and preserving this creed, the way of life to which it gives rise, and the institutions and mores that sustain it. This is the kind of patriotism and conservatism taught by both Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, whatever disagreements they had on other questions.
Hayward’s book is so timely precisely because the kind of patriotism he discusses provides a useful corrective for Trump-style nationalism. The patriotism to which Trump appeals is almost entirely affective and hardly at all intellectual. As has been observed many times, he almost never refers to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the founding more generally. Instead of meditating on the country’s highest ideals, Trump usually expresses patriotic solicitude for its most elementary needs. He wants America and its citizens to be safe and prosperous.
One can see this, for example, in the way Trump talks about how immigration should be regulated. A conservative in the mold of Jaffa, Berns, and Hayward would remind us that the immigrants we admit should understand, believe in, and have the habits necessary to preserve the doctrine of natural rights and constitutional self-government. Trump has never said anything like this, but has instead simply held that we need to make sure that the immigrants we let in “love our country and love our people.”
As Hayward’s book rightly reminds us, Trump’s emotive patriotism is “not enough.” As a candidate for the presidency, Trump was once asked in what sense he is a conservative. He replied that he wants to “conserve the country.” There is no reason to doubt his sincerity in this. Trump seems to be animated by a genuine protectiveness for America and its citizens. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the country cannot be conserved or preserved without going beyond sentimental patriotism and adding an intellectual appreciation for the founding principles and disciplined thought about how to carry them forward. An America that is safe and prosperous, but not committed to constitutional self-government and natural rights, would no longer be the same country.
This is not to say, however, that there is anything wrong with the kind of patriotism to which Trump appeals. That it is insufficient does not make it irrelevant. Feelings of love for the country one inhabits—irrespective of its regime or form of government—are a natural and just human impulse. Among American statesmen, there has been no greater teacher of philosophic, principled patriotism than Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, even Lincoln admitted the legitimacy of the more elementary patriotism to which Trump appeals. In his famous eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln noted with approval that Clay loved his country both because it was a “free country” but also in part because it was simply “his own country.”
Moreover, Trumpian patriotism is politically effective not only because it speaks directly to the simple and untutored love of country that any ordinary person feels, but also because it addresses the vital link between the nation’s well-being and the self-interest of individual citizens. Thus Trump denounces certain trade practices, for example, as not only bad for the country, but also as contrary to the economic interests of the working- and middle-class voters whose votes he sought and won. This is, to be sure, not the lofty, principled politics of, say, Lincoln’s effort to preserve respect for the equality of rights promised by the Declaration of Independence. But neither is there anything illegitimate about it by realistic political standards. On the contrary, the American founders themselves recognized and taught openly that most ordinary political activity is animated by self-interest. Thus, when Trump appeals so directly to the economic interests of those whose support he courts, he is only doing what the founders expected that politicians would do as a matter of course.
Accordingly, we can say not only that Hayward’s principled patriotism provides a useful corrective to Trump’s emotive and interest-based nationalism, but also that Trump’s nationalism provides a useful corrective to a patriotism based only on philosophic principle. They are mutually correcting and mutually supportive. On the one hand, a patriotism that is based only on the principles of the founding cannot succeed in winning elections, because voters rightly demand that any political movement that seeks their support have some plausible plan to address their ordinary interests. On the other hand, a patriotism that is based only on the untutored loves and interests of ordinary voters cannot preserve our precious inheritance of a regime based on natural rights, the rule of law, and self-government. A movement that acknowledges each of these concerns amounts to the kind of patriotism, and the kind of conservatism, that can both win elections and deserve to win them.
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world.
In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and research area. That’s true, but I really should talk about the Iraq war as well.
As the build up to the war began, my classmates and I at my isolated lefty college were shocked. How could anyone want to start a second war after just invading Afghanistan? How could anyone think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11? How could anyone believe this was a good idea?
I soon realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Conservative friends and family members were swept up in post-9/11 patriotism/panic.
Some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned
And then, during spring break, the war began. I watched in shock as the United States unleashed its might on Iraq. I was torn. I wasn’t one of those lefties who defended Saddam Hussein (we had some at my college). I wanted him gone. But even at 20 I knew this wasn’t the way to do it.
I continued with my plan to work in the US intelligence community while also pursuing scholarly studies. I got an internship with a defense contractor, was assigned to an intelligence agency. A few years into my career, I got accepted to a PhD program, was offered a promotion at my firm, and was offered a permanent job with the government agency. I went the PhD route (whether or not that was the right choice is the topic for another post).
I said this post wasn’t going to me about me, and I meant it. I gave this background to explain how I became involved in the bigger debate about the Iraq war: whether it invalidated liberal internationalism. While I was working in DC I also became part of a foreign policy group, the Truman National Security Project, meant to revive muscular liberal internationalism within the Democratic Party. I left after a few years, but the debates we had there stuck with me.
Liberal internationalism is a specific orientation towards the world. Advocates believe there is an international order that can be mutually beneficial. States should resolve disputes peacefully and multilaterally, through the United Nations and other international organizations. Human rights should trump narrow security interests. And states’ foreign policy should focus on upholding this international order.
Historically it had been tied to the US Democratic Party. This changed with the Bush Administration. A group of thinkers within the Republican party–growing out of the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Soviet policies–sought to ensure US primacy while also defending democracy and human rights. They saw the response to 9/11 as a way to advance these goals, as signified in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Bush drew on similar language when justifying the Iraq War.
The Bush Administration’s use of liberal internationalist arguments to justify the Iraq War did trap some liberal internationalists. For example, the prominent liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War. This has given rise to the pejorative “liberal hawk” moniker-the claim that liberal internationalists are basically war-mongers. We’ve seen this deployed against Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
As a result, some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned. To these policy thinkers, liberal internationalism is an “increasingly unsustainable grand strategy.” Others have gone further to question the validity or even the existence of a liberal international order, which liberal internationalism is meant to sustain.
But liberal internationalism is not dead.
First, Americans do not support an isolationist or restrained foreign policy. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that US voters are “weary” of military interventions, but have not rejected American leadership in the world.
The irony is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks.
Second, there is more to liberal internationalism than military interventions. This is what restrainers tend to suggest-that, since liberal internationalists tend to just be hawks a liberal internationalist grand strategy will lead to another Iraq war. And, to be fair, the liberal side isn’t helped when prominent members like Anne-Marie Slaughter praised Trump’s poorly-thought out air strikes on Syria. But there is a lot more to liberal internationalism- multilateralism, respect for human rights, upholding international institutions.
More importantly, those who assume the Iraq war damned liberal internationalism seem to ignore its relevance outside the United States. Many countries around the world look to the UN to reflect their views and advance their interests. This is why Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was concerning: other states take this, and other UN bodies, very seriously. The rest of the world–especially the Global South–has an interest in a robust UN, which only a liberal internationalist grand strategy can ensure.
Additionally, many countries depend on the liberal international order for support. The UN, while far from perfect, performs services no state can legitimately do on its own, such as supporting economic development, protecting cultural sites, and keeping the peace between combatants. Persistent security threat–like that of ISIS and other militant groups in the Sahel–require the international community’s assistance.
The irony, then, is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks. They approach the relevance of liberal internationalism only in terms of whether America will invade another Middle Eastern country.
It gets a little tiresome when debate over US international action boils down to “but the Iraq war was bad.” Reducing the debate to pro/con military intervention makes it hard to effectively respond to crises, as arguably occurred in the Obama Administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the Syrian civil war. It also leads to poor analysis, such as when Middle East experts, viewing everything through the lens of another Iraq war, assumed that Saudi Arabia would pull America into a war with Iran.
But liberal internationalists are also at fault. They’re attached to US primacy, from Madeleine Albright’s invocation of America as the “indispensable nation” to Joe Biden’s foreign policy promise to “place America at the head of the table.” They seem obsessed with looking tough–which I suspect is behind the cheerleading of air strikes. They haven’t figured out a way to support human rights and a robust US international presence while also criticizing the Iraq War.
And that is the issue. Liberal internationalism is still viable, and much of the world depends on America’s continued support of this grand strategy. But US foreign policy debates revolve around that horrific and illegal invasion of March 20th, 2003, rather than the full set of policies we could adopt.
UPDATE: Edited to fix a typo
The American right is in one of its periodic fits of introspection and internecine dispute. The midterm elections, which were widely anticipated to deliver victories for the “new right,” ended up being rather disappointing for the GOP as a whole. Instead of sweeping into power, Republicans not only failed to recapture but in fact lost control of the Senate, and they only narrowly secured control of the House. Moreover, political candidates aligned with nascent conservative factions plausibly bore much of the blame.
The relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative movement has never been direct. Even so, throughout the history of modern conservatism, different factions have gained dominance by securing champions in the political arena. The presence of such champions helps to mainstream a given group’s ideas, create new institutions dedicated to those ideas, and elevate actors within existing institutions who favor new currents over those who are seen as clinging to the status quo. The success of such champions, furthermore, can pave the way for the political triumph of like-minded compatriots.
The failure of such would-be champions, on the other hand, produces precisely the sort of infighting the right is seeing now. Given that the midterms failed to provide a decisive victory for any conservative faction, they all continue to advance their own priorities and interests while harshly criticizing the others. They agree, rightly, that there is much in modern American life that requires serious correction, but they differ in the prescriptions they propose.
One of the contenders for control of the movement is national conservatism, whose adherents claim to be the most fiercely agitated about modern American life and the best equipped to address what agitates them. But despite its leaders’ proclamations to the contrary, national conservatism is uniquely ill-equipped to accomplish what it sets out to do, because of its uncertain relationship to the American political tradition and its comfort with the sources of many of America’s current ills.
The Principles of National Conservatism
National conservatism can be broadly defined, as it has many adherents who hold a variety of positions on key policy questions. Last year, however, many of them signed a Statement of Principles written on behalf of national conservatism’s flagship institution, the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was meant to convey consensus on certain beliefs.
National conservatives attempt to distinguish themselves by their focus on the interests of the nation, as such; by their special attention to issues that directly concern the nation’s relation to other polities (especially immigration, trade, and foreign policy); and by their greater willingness to employ power at the national level to effect policy desiderata. The Statement—some of whose signers hail from other nations—puts it this way:
We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.
In the specifically American context, it endorses “accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance.” This is all welcome, to a considerable extent, but it also sounds rather familiar. Concerns about our nation’s borders, our nation’s economy, and our nation’s presence abroad are common themes for conservatives, even in the restrictionist, protectionist, and less interventionist forms national conservatives favor.
Of course, as much as conservatives love to describe what they believe, they take equal—or perhaps even greater—joy in describing what they do not. One account, written by David Brog of the Edmund Burke Foundation, forcefully rejects alleged myths about national conservatism. Two are worth discussing here. Do national conservatives oppose the free market? No; they admire it, Brog wrote, but they “see the free market as the best means to an end and not an end in itself.” This makes them “willing to depart from orthodox laissez faire when the national interest requires it.” Are they foreign-policy isolationists? No; they reject the stale, discredited consensus of interventionism, but “see strengthening allies like Japan, South Korea, India, Israel, and Ukraine as the best way to protect our interests abroad.”
Yet these “myths” contain more truth than Brog admits. At the third National Conservatism conference in 2022, also a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, statements praising free markets were nearly always followed by caveats large enough to call into question the first part of the statement. “Ronald Reagan’s agenda was successful because it fit the specific needs of his time. We don’t need to—and we shouldn’t—throw out all our old ideas,” Rachel Bovard said at the conference. “But we do need to reprioritize them now—when our most basic government and economic institutions are ideologically weaponized against the public.” Similarly, the conference provided evidence both for and against isolationist tendencies. Some national conservatives, such as conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia as an exemplar of national sovereignty, but many others question the U.S. interest there.
Concerns about our nation’s borders, our nation’s economy, and our nation’s presence abroad are common themes for conservatives, even in the restrictionist, protectionist, and less interventionist forms national conservatives favor.
Embracing the Constitution, Rejecting the Declaration
Interestingly, there was a large Hungarian presence at the conference. This gave the proceedings a rather cosmopolitan flavor. Indeed, national conservatives sometimes drain conservatism of much of its national—that is, distinctly American—meaning. Nowhere in the Statement of Principles, for example, is the Declaration of Independence mentioned, or even implied. As one assessment of the Statement of Principles observed, “The national conservative effort to effectively write the Declaration out of American nationhood is manifest.”
Perhaps this can be attributed to the influence of Yoram Hazony. Hazony has been at the center of many recent attempts to define and advance national conservatism. Hazony is co-drafter of the Statement of Principles, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the author of both The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and last year’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In the latter book, Hazony explicitly pits the Declaration against the American political tradition. In his view, the Declaration promoted
the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as “self-evident” before the light of reason; whereas the Constitution of 1787, drafted at a convention dominated by the conservative party, ended a decade of shocking disorder by restoring the familiar forms of the national English constitution.
Thereafter, everything bad in American politics has descended from the Declaration, and everything good in American politics has descended from the Constitution.
Hazony’s book frames this understanding of history, and the Anglo-American conservatism that emerges from it, as a rediscovery. But, as one review pointed out, it is better understood as a theory, and a flawed one at that. Start with the Declaration itself. It was not one-off twaddle by Thomas Jefferson. Although he was a primary force behind the document, he co-wrote it with John Adams, the kind of figure Hazony otherwise incorporates into his vision of what conservatism is supposed to be. Near the end of his life, Jefferson said the Declaration “was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”
It’s true that the Constitution represented a move toward stronger national authority than the earlier Articles of Confederation. But was it really a restoration of British government? As one Hazony reviewer has pointed out, the Constitution’s primary advocates said otherwise. In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton, another figure of whom Hazony approves, argues that the ratification of the Constitution presents an opportunity for Americans to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Why does Hamilton believe Americans are capable of designing a new government? Because, as he wrote in Federalist No. 9, “the science of politics . . . like most other sciences, has received great improvements,” including new ways to limit government power. And in Federalist No. 84, Hamilton explicitly distinguished the Constitution from its British precedents. In the British context, bills of rights are “stipulations between kings and their subjects” and therefore “have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants.” In our system, by contrast, “the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.”
In other words, historical evidence supports the idea that, though America owed a great deal to what came before, it was nonetheless consciously distinct. During the ratification debates, it was the Constitution’s opponents, the anti-Federalists, who believed that the document was attempting to restore British monarchical forms. As another reviewer of Hazony’s book pointed out, “Hazony argues that the anti-Federalists were right in their analysis but wrong in their value judgment.”
Most historical assessments judge the American Founding as something new. Hazony does not. “It is easy to overestimate how much of a change was involved in this establishment of republican government in America,” he writes. But in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood argues that “the Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.” To be sure, the American Revolution was not the French Revolution. In important ways, it was held in check. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the power of its change.
We should consider ourselves fortunate, not weirdly embarrassed, as Hazony seems to be, about the Declaration’s centrality in American political life.
Abraham Lincoln, likewise, confounds Hazony’s analysis. Hazony writes that, “although Lincoln comfortably mixed Jeffersonian rhetoric with his imposing biblical imagery, his policies as president were in a tradition the Federalists would have easily recognized.” But Lincoln did more than comfortably mix these things. Jeffersonian rhetoric was central to his time as a public figure. Of the Declaration, Lincoln wrote that he gave “all honor to Jefferson” for introducing “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” He also said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Contra Hazony, Lincoln believed that the Declaration and the Constitution were inextricably linked. The Declaration, with its principle of “liberty to all,” was the “apple of gold,” around which the Constitution, “the picture of silver,” was framed. To take an example from Lincoln’s time: It took the moral force of the Declaration, together with the Constitution, to end slavery. We should consider ourselves fortunate, not weirdly embarrassed, as Hazony seems to be, about the Declaration’s centrality in American political life.
Losing Sight of American Tradition
What accounts for Hazony’s embarrassment? It seems like an attempt to create a new political tradition that he thinks better serves his current ends. But that would be at least as much a form of abstract rationalism as anything the Declaration attempted—one totally alienated from the unique American context. In its more benign forms, such thought would elide the distinctions between the American and British political traditions. We have already seen how they are distinct, though to confuse them is perhaps somewhat understandable.
But to confuse the American tradition and the Hungarian, as some national conservatives do? That’s a bit more of a stretch. Whatever popularity Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban might have with his people, why should even a good American nationalist be so invested in a European nation the size of Indiana with the population of Michigan? Any honest attempt to compare our national situations or traditions would find little overlap. Yet many conservatives praise Hungary anyway. Such praise often elides the two nations’ distinctions, and it fails to note that Orban’s government has played nice with Russia’s and has invited Chinese investment.
Still, it would be problematic for a supposedly American nationalism to be so focused on another nation even absent these other factors. This is what can result from untethering nationalism from America’s actual political tradition. That’s why that tradition is what should motivate American conservatism. At its best, America’s tradition is both concrete and accessible, powerful enough that a refugee from Cold War–era communist Hungary could say to his family that they were fleeing to America because “we were born American but in the wrong place.” National conservatism, at its worst, inverts this, redefining the American political tradition so that it somehow finds better expression elsewhere. Conservatives thinking about how best to confront our very real problems should root themselves in a proper understanding of America, and of its political history and traditions.
National conservatism often has trouble with this. The most obvious evidence comes in deviations from the American traditions of limited government ordained by the Constitution.
Return to the statement of principles. It contains a section on economics that, again, contains much one can agree with. “We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition.” It continues: “We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state.” So far, there is little deviation from the recognizable tradition of American conservatism.
But here comes the caveat: “But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation.” The statement then goes on to lament that globalized markets empower America’s enemies, weaken America economically, and enable “transnational corporations” to flood the country with goods that weaken national virtue. Thus, the statement asserts:
a prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.
It adds helpfully that “crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.”
It is true, though not very controversial, to assert that “the free market cannot be absolute.” But while globalization has presented many challenges to America, the picture the statement paints of America’s economic situation is both hyperbolic and selective. Both trade and automation have played a role in reducing manufacturing employment, yet manufacturing remains a significant driver of our economy. And while both Adam Smith and Milton Friedman would agree that national security is an acceptable free-market exception, we already have many policies in place to that end. Moreover, many people work hard to take advantage of that exception. If you want to know why sugar is so much more expensive in the United States than elsewhere, thank the Florida sugar lobby’s success in making its product a national-security priority.
It is prudent not to be completely closed off to government policy in this area, to be sure. China presents a real threat to the United States. Actions like banning TikTok, a Chinese spyware app featuring short videos (which are pointless at best and soul-destroying at worst), and reshoring certain critical industrial capacities are worth considering. Still, we should be very careful how we do such things.
Internal Contradictions
There are also contradictions in this part of the statement of principles. As one assessment of the statement has argued, the attempt to “restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare” sounds a lot like industrial policy, in which the government picks winners and losers in the economy. If we’re going to see more of that (and let’s be clear, there is already a great deal of it), based on past examples, we’re going to see more of the same “crony capitalism” the statement ostensibly condemns. And if we’re going to see an expanded role for the government economically, it’s very hard to envision how we’ll achieve a “drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state.” Yet this is a policy priority the statement explicitly invokes.
On the one hand, this framework increases the scope for political patronage. Indeed, at last year’s National Conservatism conference, one speaker explicitly called for conservatives to “be a little less principled” so that we can “build an interconnected web” of “client interests” that are “committed to our political success.” And on the other, it increases the scope for action through the administrative state, an explicitly anti-constitutional part of our government bequeathed to us by the Progressive Era and grown by subsequent deviations from our constitutional order. Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), who is one of the closest things in Congress to a national conservative, has said that “we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.”
That national conservatives would have an interest in aggrandizing this feature of modern politics is, unfortunately, consonant with their deprecation of federalism. On this subject, the national conservative statement of principles does gesture toward an appreciation. “We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers,” it reads. “We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values.” However, it includes two statements that render these appreciations somewhat empty. “We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom.” More ominously, it adds that “in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”
This gets the relationship between the states and the national government quite wrong. The states don’t have significant powers for the sake of convenience or efficiency. The states are, rather, meant to be serious political entities in their own right. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The states are not mere administrative units. Any political movement that does not understand this will have trouble succeeding in America—or it will “succeed” in a way that will not be recognizably American.
The states don’t have significant powers for the sake of convenience or efficiency. The states are, rather, meant to be serious political entities in their own right.
Defending the Status Quo
Attempts to criticize national conservatism often invite accusations that critics are merely gatekeepers, defenders of the status quo. To the extent they have anything to say, the argument goes, all such critics can do is attack those who actually take our problems seriously.
To be clear: modern American life is dissatisfactory in all sorts of ways. Though it remains possible to live a good life in America today, and while there is much that can be achieved through our political system by ordinary means, there is also much that needs improvement, even salvaging. It is unclear, however, that national conservatives should be the ones to lead such an effort. The contradiction about cronyism and the error about federalism help explain why.
National conservatism, supposedly a challenge to the status quo, actually doubles down on it. One of the biggest failures of conservatism since the end of the Cold War is its evolution into a business headquartered in Washington, DC. Increasingly, conservatives cared more about status and power in the institutions in the DC-centered conservative movement than about their ideological commitments. Conservatism lost a focus not just on the culture but also on the political importance of the states. To the extent that conservatives achieved success in these fields, they were often afterthoughts, exceptions, or even accidents. DC was the aim. Of course, as long as DC is our national seat of government, there will always be some need for a conservative presence in it. What truly national ends this country has, let’s debate them, and then pursue them well, through a restored emphasis on the proper channels of deliberation and decision-making that the Constitution ordains. But everything else must be redistributed back to the people and to the states.
National conservatives often forget or even downplay the virtue of restoring congressional supremacy and reviving federalism as a genuine distribution of power. This defect arises, in part, from the weak relationship between national conservatism and the American political tradition. In these respects, it is not a disruption from the centralizing status quo, dependent on deviations from our constitutional order, but a continuation of it. Some of its proponents, so keen on invoking “the people,” appear to be nothing more than power-hungry status-seekers casting about for a group in whose name they can create a comfortable life in DC. It seems we have a new vanguard looking for its new proletariat. They seek not to diminish the Beltway’s grimy sinecures, but merely redistribute them.
If this is all national conservatism amounts to, then it deserves neither prominence within the right nor electoral success. Indeed, as recent midterm elections showed, national conservatism has not in fact achieved such success. For now, therefore, its Beltway entrenchment remains uncertain. As for prominence on the right, for better or worse, national conservatism is now a recognized, coherent faction. It has introduced—or, more typically, renewed—a focus on certain issues that are welcome parts of intra-conservative political discussions and debates. But as a new direction for the conservative movement, it leaves much to be desired. Any conservatism that fails “to defend what is best in America. At all costs. Against any enemy, foreign or domestic,” as National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. put it, will not be worthy of the name.
If you've wondering who's behind those warm, fuzzy, and seemingly inclusive Jesus Gets Us ads that are all over TV, did you have "shadowy Christian billionaires" on your bingo card. One of them is the virulently anti-LGBTQ Hobby Lobby guy. And those ads are about to appear during the Super Bowl.
When flyers began appearing around the University of Colorado Boulder, announcing that an enrolled student with ties to the white nationalist group Patriot Front, the campus’s independent student newspaper took notice. It secured an interview with the student, Patryck Durham, who admitted to being affiliated with Patriot Front and to publishing social media posts encouraging the killing of immigrants and Black people, but said UC officials were aware of all this before he enrolled and that it was “in the past.” Within hours, the story had taken a turn:
Durham did not definitively say whether he still held the violent beliefs that appeared in his social media posts, which were published in 2021.
“I can’t put an exact date on it because a lot of this stuff is messy. But it’s been, I think, a year or more by now,” since he was last affiliated with Patriot Front, Durham said.
Early Thursday morning, Jan. 26, several hours after Durham spoke with reporters for this story, the University of Colorado Police Department (CUPD) responded to reports of suspicious activity in Durham’s residence hall.
According to police records, officers found Durham with two people that police described as “older friends from Longmont,” just before 2 a.m. Durham failed to clarify to law enforcement how he knew the two individuals in his room, and witnesses told police they felt uncomfortable with the presence of Durham and the other adults.
One of the witnesses told police the pair of older adults were part of the white nationalist group Durham has been affiliated with. The two individuals were “told to leave the building” and did, according to police records.
According to the police report, witnesses also saw Patriot Front messages and propaganda on Durham’s laptop. Witnesses told police Durham was communicating with members of the hate group through the messaging app Telegram.
Sources who described the encounter to the CU Independent and The Bold did so on the condition of anonymity, as they were worried they would be harmed for coming forward. People familiar with the incident said Durham returned to the dorms the next day, Jan. 27, to move out.
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