National conservatism, the post-liberal movement that theorized the use of state power to wage right-wing culture war, stands historically triumphant. And yet, as the natcons met last week in downtown Washington to celebrate their conquest and stomp on the face of liberal democracy, they encountered a nettlesome problem. It was the same one that has popped up recurrently in right-wing nationalist movements over the centuries: what to do about the Jews.
As in past years, the National Conservatism Conference featured an eclectic array of spokespeople. There was Jack Posobiec, a popular right-wing conspiracy theorist, and John Eastman, the attorney who oversaw the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, along with some Republican senators (Eric Schmitt, Jim Banks, Josh Hawley) and Trump-administration officials (Russell Vought, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, Harmeet Dhillon).
The big secret of intellectual right-wing authoritarianism is that it’s just not very intellectual. At the conference, opposing views appeared only as straw men. With one exception—a panelist at a forum on higher education who attacked John Stuart Mill’s classical argument for free speech—I heard zero attempts to articulate liberal ideas, even if just to rebut them. Likewise, with one major exception, I heard no attempts to define any limiting principles to the natcons’ enthusiasm for crushing the opposition with any weapon available.
This is not a small problem. Liberalism constitutes the idea that governments must be bound by neutral rules designed to protect the rights of the individual. The most charitable reading of the national-conservative point of view is that, because the left constitutes an existential danger to liberty and is itself illiberal, the right is entitled, indeed obligated, to destroy it using any means necessary.
If the old red lines no longer obtain, what new lines would the natcons respect, if any? Defining a workable alternative to liberalism is a difficult challenge, one the natcons did not even attempt to meet with anything deeper than sloganeering—specifically, “You can just do things,” a mantra I heard incessantly at the conference. The you in this formulation is the natcons themselves, once they control the state. They extend to their opponents no such liberty. National conservatism is not so much a new way of wrestling with the dilemmas posed by liberalism as permission to avoid wrestling with them at all. The philosophy, such as it is, can be summarized as: impunity for us, punishment for them.
But exactly who is the us, and who is the them? This is where things get tricky.
In his opening remarks, Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-born Jew, complained that the post-liberal right has shockingly been infiltrated by anti-Semites. “I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he noted. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”
In fact, the amazing thing is that a faction as theocratic and nativist as the national-conservative movement ever had Jews in it to begin with. Hazony is one of the movement’s founders, many of its fellow-traveling intellectuals are Jewish, and its conferences attract disproportionate numbers of Orthodox Jews.
Generally, the natcons expound the position that the United States is a Christian country but that Jews deserve protection as junior partners, and that observant Jews have more in common with the Christian right than either has with secular liberals. (The term Judeo-Christian gets thrown around a lot, which at least some of them seem to appreciate.) “Jews and Christians are partners in the effort to uphold the moral framework that sustains our society, including marriage,” Rabbi Ilan Feldman declared last week at a panel calling for the reversal of the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “Sadly, too many Jews, like Christians, have turned away from their traditional values but still speak in the public arena in the name of Judaism.”
In his remarks, Hazony explained that he has spent years building goodwill by defending various right-wing nationalists from charges of anti-Semitism. “It makes you really popular,” he said. “Everybody is really grateful: I’m the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism.” Yet now, “for reasons that I don’t necessarily understand,” he has discovered that those erstwhile allies “think Jews are a big problem.”
Hazony did not offer any theories as to why this sudden transformation has occurred. He appeared genuinely baffled that anti-Semitism would pop up in, of all places, a reactionary nationalist formation dedicated to purifying the homeland of foreign influences.
Even a glance at his own conference agenda should have given him an inkling. Senator Eric Schmitt gave a speech arguing that liberals had turned American identity into a “deracinated ideological creed.” The American people, he argued, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” He counterposed the Americanness of Scots-Irish families and his own German ancestors from before the Civil War against “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” (Rootless cosmopolitans, you might call them.)
Various speakers echoed versions of this theme. Posobiec mocked the idea that immigrants could become assimilated. “Did these mass migrants suddenly erase centuries of culture?” he asked. “Did they erase their old loyalties?” Vought mocked former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for having opposed Donald Trump’s first-term Muslim ban. At a panel debating Middle East policy, one questioner brought up Israel’s inadvertent 1967 attack on an American warship, an event of obsessive fascination for anti-Semites and few others; another casually invoked the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt.
The most revealing sign of the times may have been the persistent efforts to rehabilitate the legacy of Pat Buchanan, who, even more than Trump, represents the Republican Party’s embrace of blood-and-soil nationalism. One speaker, Representative Riley Moore, received a big round of applause by boasting of his efforts to have Trump award Buchanan a Presidential Medal of Freedom. A table in the hallway distributed Buchanan merch.
In the 1980s, Buchanan crusaded against the federal prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an accused former Nazi death-camp guard living in Cleveland, an odd fixation for a man who was otherwise hostile both to procedural rights for criminals and to immigrants. Later, Buchanan wrote a book blaming the West for going to war with Nazi Germany. His contempt for minorities and Israel eventually grew so overt that Buchanan felt uncomfortable in the GOP and ran for president as an independent in 2000.
Buchanan is hardly alone in representing these once-banished values. The right is now teeming with ideas about the past (such as blaming Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, for World War II) and the present (such as redefining Americanism as an ethnic identity) that would have horrified the Republican Party of a previous generation. Because Buchanan arrived at these ideas earlier and more openly than his contemporaries, his rehabilitation by the natcons is a signal to the right-wing intelligentsia that the Trump-era party is open to strains of at least quasi-fascist thought.
In theory, a movement dedicated to restoring traditional culture or limiting immigration is not inherently doomed to devolve into anti-Semitism. But the post-liberal American right set out to destroy the guardrails that restrained anti-Semitism, without giving any thought to what might happen next. That the post-liberal politics they created would look a lot like pre-liberal politics was the most obvious possibility in the world. It did not take a genius to anticipate this. National conservatism may be recorded in history as a movement of activists who thought hard about how to gain power, and little about anything else.
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