Editors’ Note: Charles R. Kesler’s cover essay for the Winter 2023/24 CRB, “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism,” considered the manifesto published by the Edmund Burke Foundation, “National Conservatism:

A Statement of Principles,” arguing that, despite the new movement’s virtues, our politics requires instead a distinctively American conservatism upholding constitutionalism rooted in Revolutionary principles. We’ve invited responses from several of those who drafted and those who signed the Statement.

Yoram Hazony

The distinguished Claremont Institute scholar Charles Kesler has written a lengthy and at times passionate essay explaining why he did not sign the National Conservative movement’s 2022 Statement of Principles. I remain unconvinced by his argument. Kesler endorses the Statement’s principal aims and admits that many of his friends and associates have signed it. I think Kesler should sign as well. My colleagues and I would welcome it if he did.

Kesler’s reasoning about the Statement of Principles is troubled by a mistake a scholar of his stature should have been able to avoid. Rather than addressing himself to the Statement as written, he is determined to “examine this manifesto…closely”—which turns out to mean looking for the hidden meaning behind various word choices, as well as reading it in light of certain passages from my books and essays.

This approach is mistaken because the Statement of Principles is a compromise document, drafted by a committee of nine prominent scholars and writers in consultation with perhaps a dozen others. It was intended to lay the foundations for a broad movement, and for this reason its language was carefully designed to bridge the differences among the various Natcon factions, including Straussians, Catholic natural law theorists, Burkeans, and Machiavellians (or “realists”).

What makes the Statement of Principles such a powerful and successful instrument for knitting the Natcon coalition together is that it does not attempt to be a detailed statement of the views of any one faction, author, or signatory—myself included. Although I have played an important role in the National Conservative movement from its inception, the same can be said of other influential figures, including Christopher DeMuth, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, John O’Sullivan, R.R. Reno, and Anna Wellisz. The writings of Michael Anton, Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, Mary Eberstadt, David Goldman, Ofir Haivry, Ryszard Legutko, and Roger Scruton all had a very great impact on the movement in its first few years. So did mass media figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Douglas Murray, and Jordan Peterson.

With so many outstanding personalities involved, I find it exceedingly difficult to accept Kesler’s assertion that my particular brand of Burkean conservatism “sets the tone for the movement.” I don’t think this assessment reflects the reality of a Natcon movement bursting with divergent intellectual currents pulling in different directions.

Given this reality, an appropriate approach to the intellectual substance of the Natcon movement would draw a clear distinction between a) what a big-tent, compromise document such as the Statement of Principles has to say; and b) the views of particular authors such as myself. I will adopt this dual approach in this reply to Kesler.

Reading the Natcon Statement of Principles

The first meeting of what became the National Conservative movement took place in Glen Cove, New York in December 2016. Drafts of a proposed Statement of Principles were already circulating among Rusty Reno, Josh Mitchell, John O’Sullivan, myself, and others in January 2017. But it took a few rounds of drafting over more than five years to reach the document as we now have it. For a long time, it seemed as though an agreement would not be possible.

The final, successful push to complete the Statement of Principles took place in the spring of 2022. Chris DeMuth, who had been serving as chairman of the National Conservatism conferences since 2019, was the acknowledged senior figure in the movement, and he took it upon himself to select the eight members who would join him on the revived drafting committee: Will Chamberlain, Rod Dreher, N.S. Lyons, Daniel McCarthy, Josh Mitchell, John O’Sullivan, Rusty Reno, and me.

The document we produced begins with the words: “We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.” It goes on to endorse “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.” The Statement explains:

We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

The remainder of the Statement articulates a joint approach to subjects such as national independence, imperialism and globalism, national government, God and public religion, rule of law, free enterprise, public research, family and children, immigration, and race.

In some parts of his essay, it seems as if Kesler likes and even admires the Statement of Principles, as when he writes:

The nation-state as a political form is under insidious pressure these days both from above—from international and transnational organizations, laws, and ideological-cum-religious movements; and from below—from racial, ethnic, sexual, and tribal-cultural factions…. The big thing the Natcons get right is the present duty to come to the defense of decent nation-states against their enemies and critics.

Or when he says:

National conservatism rightly argues that the nation-state is a respectable and essential form of human self-government, and that it is proper and obligatory for such states to pursue the safety and happiness of their own nation first and foremost.

In these passages it is clear that Kesler is some kind of National Conservative, and a natural to sign the Statement of Principles. He almost says as much himself when he writes that “I did not sign it, not so much because of what it said but because of a certain unease over what it did not say.”

What, then, does the Statement of Principles neglect to say that Kesler finds so objectionable? He ends up mentioning quite a few things. Yet in concluding his essay, he boils his objections down to one:

The nationalism [that National Conservatism] prefers is not the same as that advanced in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist…. The Natcons risk supplanting Americans’ actual political inheritance with a faux inheritance.

This is Kesler’s central charge: that what the authors of the Statement of Principles have composed is not a document sketching the common ground that unites the diverse factions of contemporary National Conservatism. Instead, the authors have presented an alternative to American nationalism, which is likely to sneak up on its signatories unawares, stealing their rightful inheritance and replacing it with a “faux inheritance.”

In other words, Kesler believes the Natcon Statement of Principles is a Trojan horse, whose secret meaning is that American nationalism is to be overthrown and replaced by something else entirely, which he calls the “Natcon theory of nationalism.” What is the substance of this alternative? Kesler runs quickly through a series of baleful characteristics that he finds lurking between the lines of the Statement of Principles:

1. International nationalism. One of the most gratifying aspects of the Natcon movement is that it brings together nationalists and conservatives from many different countries, who have been forging friendships across borders, learning from one another, and collaborating on a variety of intellectual and practical projects. I find it difficult to understand what could be wrong with this. But Kesler seizes on it and twists it into something pernicious. For him, it is an indication that Natcons are “wary” of the “love of one’s own” that normal nationalists feel. As he puts it:

What is this nationalism that dominates the new age, according to the Natcons? How do they define it? Not as, in the first place, a preference for one’s own nation…. But rather as…“a commitment to a world of independent nations.…” They seem wary of the love of one’s own that is a natural root of nationalism.

In this passage, Kesler establishes an unnecessary dichotomy between “a preference for one’s own nation” (which he takes to be good) and “a commitment to a world of independent nations” (which he regards as bad). Once this false dichotomy has been established, Kesler then applies it to slandering national conservatives in a dozen countries by claiming that “they seem wary of the love of one’s own.”

What is so maddening about this accusation is that, in real life, there is no contradiction between having “a preference for one’s own nation” and “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” The opposite is true: not only in America, but in Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Israel, and India, I have found that nationalists, in whom the love of their own people burns bright, are also those who most readily feel the pain of other nations whose independence has been endangered or lost. It is this natural inclination to sympathize with at least some other peoples that is the source of the Natcons’ more general commitment to the principle of national independence.

2. The idea of the nation. In the Natcon Statement of Principles, the phrase “the idea of the nation” appears only once—in the heretofore uncontroversial passage quoted above, which proposes that the concept of the nation, having fallen into disuse after 1989, must be revived if we are to develop a viable alternative to the idea of a globalist world order.

But Kesler seizes on the words “the idea of the nation,” pulling them out of context and using them as the basis for another false dichotomy, this time between one’s actual nation (good) and “the idea of the nation” (bad). Once this unnecessary dichotomy has been hatched, Kesler makes it into something pernicious, suggesting that Natcons are not committed to the reality of their own nation, but only to an abstract “idea of the nation” that (for reasons Kesler does not provide) must force all nations to become similar, if not identical, to one another. As he puts it, “In order to fulfill [the Natcons’] ‘idea of the nation,’ every nation must be refashioned, or at least reconceived, in light of that idea.”

Here, too, Kesler does not seem to be talking about any actual, living Natcons. I’m sure that somewhere in history—during the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps—one can find utopian revolutionaries whose “idea of the nation” is a cookie-cutter template used to “refashion, or at least reconceive” every nation the French armies can get their hands on.

But no one I have ever met in the Natcon movement resembles Kesler’s description. These are nationalist conservatives after all, and their purpose is to get the Jacobin “new world order” types off their backs so their respective countries can return to self-government and the cultivation of their own political, legal, and religious traditions.

3. Community rights over individual rights. Kesler’s reading of the Natcon Statement unleashes a third false dichotomy—that between group rights (bad) and individual rights (good). As he has it, Natcons are committed to prioritizing the former over the latter:

[For Natcons] “individuals” as such never exist because they are never outside of the nation or its constituent social groups…. As with Progressivism, a certain priority for group or community rights over individual rights is almost assured, no matter how often Natcons say favorable things about individual rights.

Again, Kesler is ascribing views to the Natcons that no one in the movement holds. If I’m not mistaken, there are plenty of National Conservatives whose view of the relationship between the rights of communities and those of individuals is similar to his. And even those who do emphasize the fact that individuals “are never outside of the nation or its constituent social groups” only say this to make the point that wherever individual rights and liberties are upheld, this is because certain inherited norms are being effectively transmitted in these societies. Neither the Statement of Principles nor any actual Natcons I’ve met give “priority” to the rights of the nation over those of individuals.

There are more such examples, but these suffice to make my point. When Kesler says he has “examine[d] this manifesto…closely,” what he means is that he has read into the Statement of Principles a set of views that are neither required by the text, nor endorsed by any of its co-authors and signatories. He then assembles these fabricated views into a “Natcon theory of nationalism” that no one espouses, and to which no one would ever have given his signature.

Tradition and Truth

Charles Kesler’s arguments are not directed against the Statement of Principles as a stand-alone text. At times, he explicitly reads the Statement as if it were a mouthpiece for my books—a method of interpretation that is inappropriate for a co-authored document, and manifestly unfair to the Statement’s co-authors and signatories, none of whom thought he was endorsing my views when he joined the Statement.

Kesler levels at least two criticisms of this kind. First, he asserts that the Statement illicitly conflates American and British nationalism. In fact, a connection between the American and British conservative traditions is mentioned only once, in passing, in Article 6 of the Statement, which deals with the principle of “Free Enterprise.” But for Kesler, this is enough to license a sweeping attack on the Statement of Principles—because the Anglo-American tradition is, after all, “a major theme of Hazony’s writings, especially his recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery.” Second, Kesler claims that the Statement of Principles dangerously denies the existence of a universal natural law that can be discovered in all times and places through the exercise of reason alone.

As the editors of this symposium have asked that I keep my response brief, I will restrict myself to the second of these criticisms.

Kesler invokes two of my books, The Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism: A Rediscovery, in a section of his essay entitled “Standards and Traditions.” In this section, he rehearses Leo Strauss’s well-known argument against conservatism, which begins by proposing a false dichotomy between philosophy and tradition. According to Strauss, we can either a) accept inherited traditions as true, in which case we have embraced “relativism” since traditions vary greatly from one time and place to another. Or we can b) exercise reason to evaluate our inherited traditions, in which case we are appealing to a universally accessible standard of right that is independent of and “external” to our inherited traditions.

The validity of this argument is widely accepted in Straussian circles, and Kesler repeats it without hesitation, maintaining that “Natcons need a standard of some kind by which to defend national traditions…. That is, they need a standard whose validity is in principle external to or superior to tradition as such.”

Kesler takes this to be an argument not only against my Burkean conservatism, but also against the Natcon Statement of Principles as a whole. He justifies this confusion by claiming that “[t]he meaning of the Natcons’ reliance on tradition is clearer in Hazony’s writings than in the Statement, though it is implicit in its insistence on each nation…following ‘its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.’”

Kesler thus attributes a full-blown Burkean conservatism to the Statement of Principles. But he has read this phrase out of context, and so he misunderstands its purpose in the broader Statement of Principles. Here is the same passage as it appears in the first article of the published text:

1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people.

Read in context, it is clear that the only point at issue in this passage is whether each nation capable of self-government should have the right to “chart its own course” in public matters; or whether its policies should be determined by supernational bodies such as the European Union, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and so on.

The Statement of Principles is entirely silent regarding the epistemological question Kesler raises: it says nothing about whether Edmund Burke is right to regard inherited national traditions as a legitimate source of knowledge; or whether Leo Strauss is right that we can only escape their relativism by means of universal moral standards accessible to reason alone. Indeed, the Statement’s silence on this question is exactly what we should want in a compromise document, the purpose of which is to allow Straussians and Burkeans to adopt a joint approach to public affairs in areas where there is common ground.

As an aside, I find it remarkable that Kesler considers allowing each nation to govern itself “in accordance with its own particular…inheritance” to be implicit proof that one is a Burkean conservative (and therefore a moral relativist). After all, this was exactly the policy endorsed by American Federalists such as George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouverneur Morris. In making this argument, Kesler inadvertently grants one of the central historical claims I made in Conservatism: A Rediscovery (which he is otherwise at pains to deny): that the Federalists were a nationalist conservative party whose worldview was in many respects traditionalist—and for this reason vehemently at odds with the Enlightenment-rationalist views of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other admirers of the French Revolution.

Be this as it may, Kesler thinks he’s found implicit proof that the Statement of Principles is Burkean and so he runs with it, asserting that “the Natcons in their Statement of Principles, following Hazony…make national traditions the standards” by which they define morality. He thus accuses the Natcon Statement of moral relativism, which he believes derives from me.

This is all rather strange, since I am no moral relativist. But it gets even stranger, because Kesler makes this claim in the middle of an astonishing soliloquy in which he appears to acknowledge this fact:

To [Hazony’s] credit, he recognizes there are good traditions (e.g., American freedom) and bad traditions (e.g., American slavery), and hence there must be some standard by which to distinguish good from bad that isn’t simply reducible to tradition or inheritance as such. He calls that standard “general principles”—general, not universal; hoping that these can be apprehended by experience rather than by reason. But his main example (in his earlier book, The Virtue of Nationalism [2018]) is hardly modest or simply empirical: namely, the Ten Commandments, which he calls “the moral minimum,” and suggests has to be mixed with any nation’s traditions if its nationalism is to be respectable. With the Ten Commandments…we are back to what Thomas Aquinas described as the natural law…. This is more the territory of the older American conservatism, however, than of National Conservatism, in whose Statement of Principles neither natural law nor natural rights nor the Decalogue is mentioned…. Rather than indicating a moral standard by which to judge national traditions, the Natcons in their Statement of Principles, following Hazony, seem keen to do the opposite, to make national traditions the standards by which to define the moral minimum, if not quite moral excellence in full. Thus, at one point (in Conservatism: A Rediscovery) Hazony condemns slavery as “that unspeakable digression from the course of English constitutional history.”

In this passage, Kesler insists that the Natcon Statement of Principles is “following Hazony” into a dangerous relativism by accepting “national traditions” as the ultimate arbiter of morality. Yet almost in the same breath, he muses over the fact that I regard the Ten Commandments as the “moral minimum” securing the legitimacy of the state, and that with Thomas Aquinas I have “scouted” the natural law. He even teases me, saying that I stand closer to “the older American conservatism” than I do to National Conservatism.

Some of Kesler’s inconsistency stems from a genuine desire to be fair to me. He keeps noticing that I’m no moral relativist and wants to spot me some credit for that, which I do appreciate.

But it also means he can’t get his story straight: is Hazony’s Burkean conservatism quietly leading the Natcons into a depraved moral relativism, or not?

The reason Kesler can’t give a straight answer is that he doesn’t actually know what is in my books. For example, he doesn’t seem to know about my explicit endorsement of natural law in The Virtue of Nationalism as the foundation for the order of national states (chapters 7 and 18); or about my argument in Conservatism: A Rediscovery that the Hebrew Scriptures, which provide the best description of natural law we have, are the only sound foundation for political conservatism (chapter 4). Similarly, in repeating Strauss’s claim that the conservative’s reliance on tradition amounts to moral relativism, Kesler seems completely unaware that in Conservatism, I included an 18-page section on “Tradition and Truth,” which explains why this crumbling old calumny was never true, and should be retired from respectable discussion of the subject (chapter 3).

Had Kesler done more of the reading, he might have attempted a serious refutation of my arguments against Strauss—instead of circulating these half-hearted accusations of moral relativism, which even Kesler himself does not really believe.

***

A Joint Effort

I don’t expect Kesler to read every word I write. But I do expect him to understand what my colleagues and I in the National Conservatism movement are trying to do, and to help us in any way he can.

America and other Western nations are in the throes of a cultural revolution that is all too likely to end in the final ruin of these countries. It is late in the day, and at this terrible moment the Natcon movement has raised a flag around which many of the best scholars and writers of our generation have rallied.

The movement’s Statement of Principles sets aside the familiar arguments over historiography and theory that divide us into rival factions. It offers practical principles that reasonable men and women—those who are left—can agree on as the basis for a joint effort to save ourselves and the civilization we cherish.

In joining the Statement of Principles, neither I nor the other signatories have given up a whit of our old views on the abstruse subjects that are our pride and specialty as scholars and writers. What we have done is to admit that all members of the rival tribes that constitute the broad national conservative camp are our brothers—and that the time has come to say this openly and to act on it.

I have taken pleasure in debating Charles Kesler about matters of historiography and theory and will continue to do so. But I also recognize that we are brothers, and that our disagreements must not prevent us from standing together, as brothers, in this time of disintegration and peril.

Yoram Hazony is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.

***

John Fonte

Charles Kesler did not sign the National Conservatism Statement of Principles “not so much because of what it said but because of a certain unease over what it did not say.” The Statement mentions the Constitution, but not the Declaration of Independence. Nor does it mention natural law, natural rights, the social contract, or that America is exceptional because, unlike most other nations that developed organically, it was founded. Kesler believes that with these omissions, national conservatism could “risk supplanting” American conservatism.

Yet many of us who signed the Statement agree with him that our founding principles rooted in natural rights are central to American nationalism. Those signatories include the Claremont Institute’s president, chairman of the board, and eight other employees or fellows. The Statement is a political, not a philosophical, document. It is a broad declaration of democratic nationalism’s general principles, specifics of which will obviously differ from nation to nation. The Statement reflects the thinking of American and Western conservatives alarmed at the undermining of democratic sovereignty, patriotism, religion, and the traditional family by powerful globalist elites in America and Europe. We believe the mainstream conservative response to this progressive revolutionary assault on our civilization has been inadequate, to say the least. We are not in a mere policy dispute but a regime struggle, and the Statement’s political purpose is to rally a counterinsurgency against the global woke revolution.

National Conservatism represents a political-intellectual coalition that includes West Coast Straussians and paleoconservatives, realists, traditionalists—students of Harry Jaffa and adherents of Willmoore Kendall, united at last. Signatories disagree on the historical role of John Locke and natural rights, but, as noted, they are united on patriotism, religion, family, and democratic sovereignty. Is there tension and disagreement on some issues? Of course. Such is the nature of coalition documents; different signatories are inevitably going to place different emphases on different parts of the document. The old conservative fusionist coalition contained philosophical divisions, but it achieved political success in the struggle against world Communism. Kesler refers in his essay to Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. The Statement is an example of practical reason and wisdom, in the sense that it represents a prudent political response to today’s revolutionary global challenge. Kesler’s oeuvre, his explication of the achievement of the American Founding, is an example of both theoretical and practical reason.

Kesler expends considerable ink defending Buckley-Reagan conservatism against what he perceives as unfair Natcon criticism. Nevertheless, in February 2020 the National Conservatives held a conference in Rome entitled “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations,” signaling a continuity with Buckley-Reagan conservativism. Indeed, the main Natcon criticism is of conservatism “since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” as the Statement says—that is, the mainstream conservatism of the ’90s and 2000s rather than the Buckley-Reagan years.

Kesler objects, too, to the formulation “Anglo-American political tradition,” citing Americans’ rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, and a national church. He’s right, the two nationalisms, British and American, are different: subjectship versus citizenship, organic development versus founding. At the same time, Americans inherited English law, literature, ideas, institutions, representative assemblies, and religious organizations. An analogy can be drawn with the term “Judeo-Christian.” Judaism and Christianity are two different religions, but hold enough in common to make the concept of “Judeo-Christian” intelligible and valid.

Kesler is also troubled by the Natcons’ “idea of the nation” which, instead of recognizing the ways in which the American regime (e.g., its form of government) founded and shaped the nation, emphasizes the nation shaping the regime. But the “idea of the nation” the Statement of Principles affirms prefers a “world of independent nations” and “oppose[s] transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government.” In short, there is plenty of room for the West Coast Straussian interpretation of the American Founding within National Conservatism’s general principles.

Nearly a decade ago, in another CRB cover essay (“The Crisis of American National Identity,” Fall 2005), Charles Kesler wrote, “The American Creed is the keystone of American national identity, but it requires a culture to sustain it.” Our “task,” he declared, is “to recognize the Creed’s primacy” and “the culture’s indispensability.” As an American National Conservative I agree, and I believe many other signatories do as well. National Conservatism is, as the Statement puts it, “an essential, if neglected, part of the Anglo-American conservative tradition.” Don’t worry, Charles: it will not supplant “Americans’ actual political inheritance with a faux inheritance.”

John Fonte is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute.

***

Paul Gottfried

Charles Kesler ends his spirited essay on the National Conservative movement by noting that “the Natcons risk supplanting Americans’ actual political inheritance with a faux inheritance, all in the name of tradition. The result might be National Conservatism in some sense, but would scarcely resemble American conservatism or American constitutionalism at its best.”

Although I may be more sympathetic than Kesler to National Conservatism, I agree with him that its defense of nation-states doesn’t seem particularly well designed for the American case. Like Kesler, I have to question whether the traditional European concept of nationhood can be applied to the American experience—without considerable squeezing and twisting. Here, one size definitely does not fit all.

Like Canada, outside of Quebec, the American colonies in the 18th century were predominantly Protestant and made up of a population that was mostly Northern European in origin. But, quite significantly, Canada and what became the United States went different ways politically, one remaining under the British Crown and the other giving itself a republican constitution. That fact was important for determining the separate identities of these two ethnically and in many ways culturally similar countries.

It goes without saying that culture is as critical for creating and maintaining a regime as a particular government is for shaping a people. It is simply not the case that one population can be exchanged for another without risking the survival of its political institutions, at least as those institutions were originally conceived. This country’s settler population was suited for building a constitutional society of the kind we once had, while much of today’s American population seems unfit to maintain that inheritance.

What defined the American republic was, in any case, its political founding, not its antiquity nor any particular dynasty. It seems to me that the Natcons’ natural target audience are Central and Eastern Europeans and such culturally unified non-European nations as Japan and Israel. I couldn’t imagine a demoralized, ostentatiously masochistic country like Germany fitting the Natcon model for a self-respecting nation-state, nor would Western countries strongly committed to globalist and multicultural agendas seem likely candidates for mass conversion to the National Conservatism Statement of Principles. Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, rather than England, Spain, or Germany, are countries in which a majority of citizens would probably resonate to the Natcons’ call for combining democracy with nationalism and historic tradition.

Kesler’s stated concern that the traditions of some nations may lead them into aggressive actions against their neighbors doesn’t seem particularly relevant here. National Conservatism is certainly not defending imperialist aggression on the part of any nation-state. Such behavior clearly violates the rights and existence of other sovereign nations. We can be sure National Conservatism’s directors do not view Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as a defensible national tradition and would be more likely to side with the victim of this aggression, but they would do so without belittling Russian cultural and religious heritage or Russia’s right to exist as an independent nation-state.

I must also observe that Kesler’s insistence on natural right as the basis for legitimate government occasions for me certain problems. By now the list of natural rights has been greatly expanded by our opinion-makers to include feminist instruction in public schools, gay marriage, and even surgery for those who are uncomfortable with their birth sex. Although Kesler may himself insist on a shorter, more traditional list of inborn individual rights, this doesn’t obviate my question about how far he would go in making his understanding of “natural right” obligatory for the entire human race.

And let’s not imagine that the only alternative to natural right for moral standards in international relations is “relativism”! Kesler, Yoram Hazony, and I would all agree mass murder is evil, but only one of us would bring up natural right to condemn this iniquity. The other two might cite the Ten Commandments or invoke the long-accepted moral standards of all civilized nations (most of which have never embraced natural right) to condemn such an enormity. But there is certainly no reason to think that without natural right we cannot agree on what is good or evil. Unfortunately, the invocation of natural right or human rights has often been accompanied among American liberal interventionists by an unseemly will to dominate other peoples.

In all fairness, it should be mentioned that the belief in natural right does not necessarily lead to a politics of global intervention. More often than not, I find myself agreeing with the foreign policy prescriptions of Michael Anton and other Claremont scholars, even if I do not share their natural right position and continue to debate it with them.

Paul Gottfried is editor of Chronicles magazine.

***

Josh Hammer

National Conservatism has attracted no shortage of engagement, both positive and critical, since it burst onto the American scene with its inaugural Washington, D.C. conference in July 2019. I covered that conference for The Daily Wire at the time. Since then, I have grown in conjunction with the movement itself: I joined the Edmund Burke Foundation in 2020 as a research fellow, have spoken at three Natcon conferences spanning two continents, co-hosted the “NatCon Squad” podcast for nearly three years, and signed the Statement of Principles.

As National Conservatism has grown in stature and developed a reputation for hosting the Right’s most interesting conferences, the attacks on it have grown more frequent and voluble. Typically, these attacks have come from a leftist, libertarian, or “Conservatism, Inc.” perspective. But the Claremont Institute, where I was a 2018 John Marshall Fellow and still maintain close (if informal) ties, is neither leftist nor libertarian nor part of Conservatism, Inc. And there is no “Claremonster” (as those at the Institute are affectionately known) better positioned than Charles Kesler to issue a challenge.

Kesler’s essay reminded me at times of Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams’s similar remarks at “NatCon 2,” the Orlando conference, which were subsequently published in November 2021 as “The Founders and Nationalism” in Claremont’s online journal, The American Mind. But Kesler’s stipulated reasons for refusing to sign the Natcon Statement of Principles, as Williams and many other prominent Claremonsters did, are unpersuasive. Williams’s piece landed some punches; Kesler’s essay meanders and gives off an impression that he wrote it primarily to convince himself.

Kesler makes clear that his issue is with traditionalist, Burkean conservatism. He advances familiar Straussian and natural law-based arguments pertaining to rationalism and the universal accessibility of reason. But if he is so troubled by traditional Burkean conservatism and Edmund Burke Foundation Chairman Yoram Hazony’s two recent books on nationalism and conservatism, then he should have written an essay on that.

By instead choosing to focus on the alleged threat of the Natcon movement more generally, and its Statement of Principles specifically, Kesler also inadvertently places himself in tension with some of his very own colleagues. Is it really his contention that Williams and all the other Claremonsters who signed the Statement—Larry Arnn, Tom Klingenstein, Michael Anton, Arthur Milikh, et al.—are naïve to the “threat” posed by National Conservatism? Can Charles Kesler really be the last remaining “pure” Claremonster, singularly capable of preserving Harry Jaffa’s legacy from the false temptations of the moment? Or has Kesler misunderstood the Natcon movement and its Statement of Principles?

National Conservatism, as I see it, is predicated upon two overarching principles. First, Natcons believe the American conservative movement has made a wrong turn, perhaps especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, by embracing libertarian excesses at the expense of virtuous, traditionalist aims. As Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Henry Olsen wrote for Liberty Matters in 2021, the decades-long result of fusionist conservatism is that “[v]irtue, shorn of any legitimate political claim upon freedom, [has become] freedom’s handmaid.”

Second, Natcons believe in the legitimacy of the nation-state and the illegitimacy of the imperious supranational organizations that seek to undermine it. Kesler may consider an “international movement on behalf of nationalism” to be “paradoxical,” but how else to interpret Brexit in 2016 and the many grassroots initiatives across the world since then to reassert national sovereignty? National Conservatism is thus arguably more descriptive than prescriptive: it formalizes an already-ascendant global tide.

That’s the movement, in a nutshell. Natcons frequently disagree when it’s time to get more granular. And the National Conservatism conferences air those disagreements onstage: Oren Cass debated Richard Reinsch on industrial policy at “NatCon 1” (D.C.), and Eugene Meyer defended fusionism against critics such as Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy at “NatCon 3” (Miami).

More to the point, does Kesler really think that Yoram Hazony speaks for Larry Arnn when it comes to natural rights? Does he really think that Hazony and R.R. Reno see eye to eye on natural law? To ask such questions is to demonstrate the silliness of this exercise. But in order for Kesler’s essay to be cogent, Hazony’s many personal predilections would have to overlap perfectly with the dictates of the Natcon movement. Anyone who has ever attended a National Conservatism conference or checked out an episode of “NatCon Squad” knows the movement is more than one man.

There is ample room for the Claremont Institute’s timeless teachings within the broader Natcon framework. Presumably, that is why so many other Claremonsters signed the Statement of Principles. Charles Kesler has every right not to join the movement, but for the time being he has made a mountain from the Natcon molehill.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation.

***

Victor Davis Hanson

Charles Kesler has adroitly pointed out that the National Conservatism movement—for all the grand claims to originality in its Statement of Principles—is in several ways not all that different from periodic conservative reappraisals of the past. In their pushback against the Republican Party establishment, the Natcons’ “populist spirit” was anticipated by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Tea Party conservatives, although the specific issues at stake were different, since, as Kesler notes, “politics doesn’t stand still.”

But when he turns to National Conservatism’s philosophical approaches and their consequences, Kesler becomes understandably somewhat more critical. In particular, he is correct to emphasize that, although several other nations increasingly reject globalization, fluid borders, and continental identities—and so can be valued allies—their nationalism is nonetheless not always our own.

A central problem Kesler identifies within National Conservatism, as put forward by Yoram Hazony, is its idea of what a “nation” is. To Hazony and the Natcons, nations seem to be organic and to exist simply by nature. In this view, kindred linguistic and ethnic groups gather into a “homeland” as a homogeneous sanctuary, coalescing and adopting a political structure that promotes their innate commonality. Yet the American experience has been quite different: individuals from different ethnic groups came together here and created a new nation based on shared principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Although the new nation was built on certain classical and English traditions, particularly the English language and common law, from the start the United States welcomed religious diversity. The Natcons may miss the newness of the American nation and its stark differences from the European experience. Certainly, nowhere abroad is there anything similar to the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the singular historic ability of America—at least, perhaps, until recently—to assimilate quite different groups of legal immigrants into the body politic.

Although Kesler lauds the Natcons’ goal of a beefed-up, don’t-tread-on-me U.S. military that exudes deterrence, he is right that Hazony’s admirable rejection of “liberal imperialism” nowhere lays out a positive agenda of what a National Conservative foreign policy should be, in order to defend its interests abroad. I would suggest that National Conservatives, beyond rejecting endless war and nation-building abroad, might better adopt Jacksonianism’s “no better friend, no worse enemy” approach, preferable to both neo-isolationism and neoconservative interventionism.

Fear of imperialism shouldn’t prevent us from destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq, eliminating the Iranian arch-terrorist General Qasem Soleimani, giving Israel the wherewithal to destroy Hamas, promoting the Abraham Accords, or helping to ensure freedom of navigation on the world’s often-dangerous and now-endangered key maritime commercial lanes—the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Black Sea. Our past problem in the Middle East was not so much “imperialism”—we sought neither natural resources nor territory in our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in bombing Libya. Rather, American blood and treasure were spent in discretionary military occupations with Wilsonian self-righteousness, in places where our original national interests quickly disappeared and our often-naïve continued presence was not appreciated among peoples with no history of, or apparent fondness for, self-government.

One criticism of the National Conservatives, as well as of Donald Trump, that Kesler doesn’t particularly emphasize is their apparent trust in a “managed economy,” or at least in greater reliance on the wisdom of the government to craft policies helpful to the beleaguered middle class. Such an agenda is exemplified by the MAGA adherence to “free but fair trade” enforced by punitive tariffs. There is also now a hands-off approach to Social Security and Medicare reform, despite their rendezvous with insolvency. Demanding symmetrical and reciprocal trade agreements is critical. Yet just as the left-wing Solyndra and “Build Back Better” subsidies proved disasters, it is almost certain that populist economic managers and regulators would likewise possess less savvy than our traditionally free but reasonably regulated markets.

Kesler is also right to be both sympathetic to National Conservatism’s rejection of pure rationalism and yet uneasy about its either/or approach to the Western Enlightenment and national religion. Faith and reason are not antithetical but complementary, as the Neoplatonic Church Fathers realized centuries ago. America adheres to Enlightenment principles enshrined in its Constitution, while reserving a place for faith to acknowledge the limitations of pure reason. Some Americans are even atheists or agnostics and yet remain upstanding citizens and promoters of American conservatism. We need not concern ourselves with their degree of religious observance, beyond encouraging the nonbeliever to follow some of the founders in grasping Christianity’s positive moral influence on our laws and way of life.

Finally, we should remember that National Conservatism is a response to a liberal agenda far more extremist than that of even just two decades ago. The border is now not just porous but nonexistent. Crime is not just rising but often construed as not crime at all. The goal of judging others by the “content of our character, not the color of our skin” has been superseded by tribal chauvinism, segregation, and “good racism” (called “antiracism”) that doesn’t combat but promotes a racial spoils system. Transgenderism is now a purported third sex, and biological males claim a civil right to dominate if not destroy women’s sports. Deterrence abroad is replaced by abandoning $50 million in munitions to terrorists in Kabul, paying billions of dollars to win back hostages, ignoring serial attacks on America’s overseas installations, and allowing Chinese spy balloons to drift across the United States with impunity.

In addition, National Conservatism emerged almost by default to confront left-wing extremism after Republicans lost seven out of the last eight presidential popular votes; they have not won more than 51% of the vote since 1988. No wonder, then, that efforts were long overdue to enunciate conservative principles aimed at winning over middle-class Americans on the basis of shared national and class interests rather than tribal ones. Charles Kesler’s constructive essay doesn’t reject that effort, but rather refines and hones its welcome message.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow of Classics and Military History at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

***

Mark Krikorian

The (probably made-up) African proverb says that when elephants fight, the grass is trampled. Not wanting to be trampled, I’ll steer clear of the philosophical disagreement between Charles Kesler and Yoram Hazony, to which Kesler devoted so much of his recent meditation on the shortcomings of National Conservatism. But as a lifelong conservative who voted for Ronald Reagan’s reelection by absentee ballot from inside the Soviet Union, I feel the need to defend the Natcon Statement of Principles, which I, along with many others, happily signed.

The upshot of Kesler’s essay is stated in the title: National Conservatism is different from, and indeed opposed to, a distinctly American conservatism. I think this is mistaken in two ways.

First, he accuses Natcons of opposing “Buckley-Reagan” conservatism because they believe “the former New Right of Buckley and Reagan” to have been “myopically libertarian and temperamentally unserious about politics and morals.” I’m sure there are some on the Right who hold these views, but where does Kesler get that from the Natcon Statement? He’s closer to the mark when he says Natcons “charge that the ‘fusionism’ of Buckley-style conservatism didn’t work, at least in post-Cold War conditions.” The dependent clause there is the issue, isn’t it? The end of the Cold War has shaken up politics worldwide in ways that are still unfolding. Those changes don’t necessarily mean today’s challenges are utterly different from those of the past, but that their relative saliency has certainly changed, with what John O’Sullivan calls the National Question coming to the fore. National Conservatism isn’t a break with traditional American conservatism but an evolution in response to changed conditions. As Abraham Lincoln put it during the Civil War: as our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

This is why libertarians, an eccentric part of the Right’s coalition when the preeminent issues were expansionist Communism and excessive taxation, are gradually becoming an eccentric part of the Left’s coalition, since they agree on issues of sovereignty and immigration. With the existential Soviet threat gone, much of our leadership class, whatever their partisan labels, have veered off into post-Americanism, which is precisely why it is so imperative that, as Natcons, “[w]e emphasize the idea of the nation.”

And this is where Kesler’s second mistake comes in: he exaggerates the difference between American nationalism—really, American nationhood itself—and other nationalisms. He writes, “For most nation-states the state or the constitution is the expression of the nation, but the nation comes first, in theory and usually in practice too…. For the United States, the emphasis is on the regime or the Constitution and its principles as the fundamental phenomenon that shapes the nation.” But these are not necessarily contradictory. Our constitutional order, our regime, is indeed an expression of the unique characteristics of the inchoate American nation, but then, as Kesler rightly notes, that regime in turn shaped the nation. The American nation in some form had to come first, otherwise the regime would be different. As political scientist Samuel Huntington put it in his book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004):

Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.

And, I would add, it would have a radically different constitutional order.

We are not a “proposition nation” but, as John Fonte has said, a “proposition-plus nation.” Have the principles of the Declaration enshrined in the Constitution played a larger role in American identity and nationalism than in those of other peoples? Yes, of course. But it’s a matter of degree, not of kind, and it is no obstacle to what Kesler derides as “internationalist nationalism.”

In the end, Charles Kesler appears to share most of the policy goals laid out in the National Conservative Statement of Principles, which is, after all, a political document, not a philosophical treatise. So, if he is reluctant to become a card-carrying National Conservative, perhaps he’ll join us as a fellow traveler!

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

***

N.S. Lyons

“Cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.” Perhaps it’s unorthodox for a conservative to quote Mao Zedong, but he did know a thing or two about politics. For one, he understood that politics is not a debate club. Or, as he might as well have put it: there comes a time to know what time it is.

What time is it in America? The hour is already very late. We are ruled by a regime that deeply hates and fears the bulk of its own people, and is demonstrably willing to do whatever it takes to retain power. A regime that characterizes its political opposition as “extremists” and “domestic terrorists,” and uses its security services to surveil and intimidate even the most ordinary dissenting citizens, treating them as enemies of the state. One that wields the law as a weapon, flagrantly showcasing a two-tier legal system as it routinely seeks to arrest, humiliate, and destroy its political enemies while shielding its friends and foot soldiers from accountability. A regime that now holds hundreds of political prisoners. That has turned the tools of its military counterinsurgency apparatus on its own people. That colludes with the world’s most powerful technology and media companies to establish vast systems of mass censorship, propaganda, and reality distortion. That has successfully corrupted nearly every public and private institution with a distinctly totalitarian state ideology. Surely no one should already better understand the situation, and the stakes, than those who follow the work of the Claremont Institute. The affectation of an “extremely untimely” Buckleyan conservativism dedicated to losing with gallantry is doubtless pleasant in the moment, but is ultimately suicidal.

Mao instructed revolutionaries to seize power by struggling to control the “pen,” the “knife,” and the “gun” (that is, the propaganda and administrative institutions, the intelligence and security services, and the army). By this measure the progressive Left has already achieved near total victory. By contrast, old-guard conservatives have—for almost a century now—utterly failed to conserve much of anything, republic included. And none of their habitually muttered invocations of the Constitution’s sacred text have turned the tide in the least. Sadly, theirs is a god that failed—whatever regime we live under now, it is not the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, this struggle is hardly confined to America’s shores. All across the Western world, regimes are converging on the same form of authoritarian managerial technocracy, treating popular sovereignty with disgust and brooking no dissent. New legislation in Canada proposes life in prison for “hate speech.” Britain already arrests hundreds of people per year for holding the wrong opinions. Germany’s interior minister says right-wingers who “mock the state” will be preemptively ejected from the financial system, have their business licenses revoked, and be banned from traveling. At the behest of the E.U., Poland’s new “centrist” government has cast aside the rule of law in order to arrest political enemies and purge the Right from all institutions.

Some of these countries have written constitutions, others don’t—it hardly matters. What they all share, along with the United States, is a near-identical ruling class of transnational managerial elites who believe they alone possess History’s mandate to reengineer society. And what they hate and fear above all else is the nation: the existence—and yes, the very idea—of a distinct and sovereign people that lies beyond the reach of their totalizing hunger for conformity and control. Hence, they hate and fear democracy, too—the self-governance of a nation. This global battle between transnational managerialism and sovereign democratic nationhood now defines 21st-century politics.

When a government deliberately abets an invasion of some 10 million foreigners across its borders, ordinary citizens recognize this isn’t merely a violation of the rule of law. They correctly intuit it as something far graver: it is treason. Against the Constitution? Against rules written on a page? No, it is treason against the nation: an assault on the very body politic, which preexists the government and transcends its form. Ordinary Americans understand this just as the French or Irish do.

The Constitution was a very fine document, successfully codifying the unique character of the young Anglo-American nation. Many of us dearly hope it can yet be restored and re-enforced, in spirit and law. But the time for conservatives’ hubristic habit of quibbling over American exceptionalism or the precise meaning of America’s founding has well and truly passed. Now is the time to cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.

N.S. Lyons is an essayist and geopolitical analyst. He is the author of The Upheaval on Substack.

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Daniel McCarthy

During the Cold War, conservative foreign policy was chiefly framed in terms of opposition to the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet threat was gone, movement conservatives divided over the meaning of conservatism. Both neoconservatives who wanted the U.S. to promote liberal democracy on a global scale, and paleoconservatives who called for the U.S. to pursue more limited, specifically national interests frequently claimed to be the heirs of Cold War conservatism’s thinkers and statesmen. But was Pat Buchanan or William Kristol the real Reaganite? For his part, William F. Buckley, Jr., the last of the original movement conservative leaders, did not adopt anything like a systematic foreign policy in the last 20 years of his life.

By the late 1990s there was once again an unequivocal movement conservative foreign policy inasmuch as a more expansive approach prevailed over the realist or less-interventionist approach within the conservative movement’s magazines, think tanks, foundations, and the Republican Party apparatus. Yet it came about not because it followed logically from the movement’s principles but because its supporters took over the institutions that claimed to speak for conservatism. The winners wrote the history of the movement, claiming that they were indeed the natural, legitimate heirs of Buckley and Ronald Reagan and that those on the Right who dissented from the “neo-Reaganite” consensus were, as an infamous David Frum column had it, “unpatriotic conservatives.”

Having won the conservative movement, the supposed neo-Reaganites proceeded to wreck it with policies that inflicted terrible damage on the country. The very name of movement conservatism was ruined along with the reputation of most of its leading magazines, think tanks, and Republican politicians. Donald Trump stepped into the political vacuum, and National Conservatism is an attempt to rebuild conservatism after the movement’s implosion.

In economics, too, the end of the Soviet threat meant that new questions had to be answered. Conservatism and capitalism, whatever their tensions, were allies against Communism during the Cold War. In practice, free trade and economic liberalism were useful strategic tools, particularly with respect to China. Traditionalists such as Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk staunchly defended private property and freedom from central planning, even as they expressed certain moral reservations about capitalism, and free traders at the Cato Institute condemned President Reagan during his administration.

Again, the same magazines, nonprofits, and Republicans that chose internationalism in foreign policy chose globalism over nationalism in economics as well. The dissenters were airbrushed out of conservatism’s family portrait, and here too National Conservatism represents the path rejected by movement institutions. This is also the path represented by Donald Trump and endorsed by the Republican Party’s increasingly working-class base.

Movement conservatives reached another crossroads with the “culture war.” Just as capitalism and conservatism could put aside their differences in opposing Communism, so a certain hedonistic, liberationist spirit could join forces with Christianity against the drab atheism of the Eastern Bloc. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were on the same side with God and country in that conflict, and both rebellion and orthodoxy could rally to the banner of freedom against despotism. Truth be told, that old freedom coalition still has some life left in it in this age of left-wing puritanism. But now, much more than in the Cold War, America and the West need a moral wisdom that is more than opposition to despotism. If in the abstract it’s hard to define authentic religion in a disinterested way, in practice it’s no harder than making the kinds of decisions about justice and other hotly disputed universals that every regime routinely makes. I do not think Charles Kesler himself is in any doubt about whether the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Church of Satan counts as authentic religion—at least I hope he isn’t.

Much as the collapse of Communism necessarily changed the circumstances of movement conservatism in foreign policy and economics, in cultural politics the triumph of radical ideology within America’s institutions created a situation vastly different than when Buckley or Reagan were speaking out against the counterculture. Movement conservatism’s institutional leaders tended to be complacent, thinking that what had won the Cold War must inevitably win the culture war too. And having chosen to promote worldwide liberalism in foreign policy and liberal economics at home (including a broadly liberal immigration policy), movement conservatism’s gatekeepers were at least as concerned in the ’90s and 2000s about suppressing the “isolationist” or “nativist” Right as they were about combating the culturally radical Left. The politically correct Left was their ally against the wrong kind of Right. National Conservatism’s cultural and religious policies are little different from the policies most grassroots Christian conservatives have supported for decades. What’s new about National Conservatism is that it connects these cultural positions with arguments in favor of the nation-state in world affairs and in favor of citizens and domestic industry in economics.

Kesler’s qualms about National Conservatism go beyond questions of the right policies for America. His concern is primarily for American nationalism’s philosophical foundations. I am more skeptical than he is about the proximity of right foundations to right conclusions—there are simply too many instances of persons with the right theory never coming around to the right policies, and too many contrary instances of persons who are wrong in theory but right in practice. The fact that so many seemingly principled movement conservatives either acquiesced to bad leadership or actively participated in setting a disastrous course for 30-odd years calls for sharper scrutiny and criticism of the movement, not finding fault with those who didn’t commit its mistakes.

There is certainly more work to be done on the theory of American nationalism, and to the extent Kesler can derive correct answers from the truths of the Declaration of Independence to the great questions facing Americans after the Cold War, he will make a supreme contribution to National Conservatism and movement conservatism alike. In the meantime, a National Conservatism of which he disapproves will flourish because movement conservatism is bankrupt.

Daniel McCarthy is editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a contributing editor of The American Conservative.

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R.R. Reno

I’ve never given much thought to conservatism. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Michael Oakeshott, and others in the conservative canon. I’ve even read William F. Buckley, Jr.’s youthful polemic, God and Man at Yale (1951). My point is that I don’t wonder what conservative camp I belong to. I’m an American, and I’m worried about the future of our country. Those worries oppress my mind, leaving little room for concerns about what counts as “conservative.”

Not surprisingly, as an American, my worries revolve around liberty. The third decade of the 21st century is not witnessing a new birth of freedom. To the contrary, our time is one of profound threats:

Globalism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many in the West were imbued with utopian hopes. Democrats and Republicans heralded the shining dawn of an age in which the free flow of labor, goods, and capital would knit the world together. A new Leviathan emerged, the “rules-based international order.” Like Communism, globalism turns out to be a god that failed, but not before weakening a linchpin of America’s tradition of freedom, our national sovereignty. We are not as far gone as Europe, where Brussels rules supreme. Nevertheless, our situation is not good. Cosmopolitan elites smile on our non-functioning southern border. Post-industrial wastelands dot our country, and failed military adventures in the Middle East seem unable to stimulate second thoughts in D.C. think tanks. Those who call for any retreat from the utopian dreams are derided as “protectionists” and “isolationists,” or even as “authoritarians” and “fascists.”

Oligarchic technocracy. You don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to recognize that massive concentrations of wealth threaten self-government, another pillar of American freedom. Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has more influence over public health and educational policy than elected officials. Our tax code subsidizes the transmission of vast wealth to universities and nonprofits that employ armies of technocrats dedicated to supplanting our fallible judgment with “best practices.” I can’t think of a slogan more antithetical to the American tradition of freedom than the mindless imperative “Follow the science!” Self-rule is being supplanted by the rule of experts.

Moral-cultural disintegration. Marriage is kaput. Fertility is falling well below replacement. One hundred thousand Americans die of drug overdoses each year. Polling shows that trust in our institutions has reached all-time lows. These conditions lead to nihilism and license, not ordered liberty. Meanwhile, statues are toppled. Our national inheritance is derided as racist. The ritual use of land acknowledgments implies that our country is illegitimate. Is it any wonder that the public mood is sour? Neither shame nor resentment can sustain a culture of freedom.

What’s a patriotic American to do in 2024? The situation is very different from the one facing William F. Buckley when National Review was founded in 1955. We live in a liquid world. Authorities, institutions, and even nations are dissolving. An anti-human regime of technocratic control fills the vacuum.

We must take the measure of the past 40 years. Freedom has been undermined by a long season of unbounded capital, porous borders, and moral deregulation. Serving the best interests of our country requires reversing these trends. Let’s get on with this crucial task, and let the historians determine what kind of conservative that makes us.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things magazine.

***

Marion Smith

The question posed by Charles Kesler as to whether National Conservatism seeks to achieve a homogeneity of nations or enforce a morally relative standard among governments is, as yet, unresolved by the Natcons.

All men are created equal. But it does not follow that all nations are equal. Some nations maximize their own human potential sooner and better than others due to their economic, cultural, and moral traditions as well as “accidents” of geography. Some nations flourish while others perish. The most successful belong to a shared Western civilization or have modeled significant elements of their regimes on the tried and true principles of the United States. Formidable countries like the now-defunct Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China can be powerful but not good, and are therefore inferior. Any movement that attempts to treat all nations as morally equal independent of the justice of their national culture and customs is unlikely to succeed in America—and rightly so. Morally relative nationalism would fit nicely with a certain stripe of foreign policy realism but is a poor guide for our statecraft.

Well-meaning conservatives take for granted that the American nation will be sustained by its brilliant founding and that its internal enemies will be constrained by parchment barriers. But the moral and cultural wellsprings that shaped the founders and that sustained early conservatives have all but dried up. Even the very memory and meaning of those times are barely evident on the mental map of America’s young. Although Michael Oakeshott may be correct that “truth and experience are given together, and it is impossible to separate them,” political movements tend to emphasize one or the other. Mainstream conservative institutions have long favored creed over tradition.

National Conservatism’s contribution was to give a platform to views long excluded by the tidy institutions and tame conferences of today’s conservative establishment. A new fusionism might have worked in the 21st century, except that the conservatives who came after William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan, as Kesler acknowledges, were—intentionally or unintentionally—blind to the pressing issues of our time. These include the hollowing out of American manufacturing, the collapsing ladder of economic opportunity, plummeting literacy and education, the suffocation of Christianity in the public domain, making a farce of free market principles while supporting big business as deficits and the national debt soared, and mainstream conservatism’s persistent unwillingness to confront the Chinese Communist Party. In short, Natcons have proven a willingness to let sparks fly in the hopes that it brings some light.

Yes, the “cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” as Thomas Paine declared. And for that reason, Americans are uniquely well positioned to lead the free world. But only if we unapologetically affirm the Western cultural roots and distinctly American national traditions that have birthed and sustained our system of government—the most reasonable republic on earth.

Marion Smith is president of Common Sense Society.

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A Response

by Charles R. Kesler

My cordial thanks to the ten National Conservatives who took up my gauntlet. Four had a hand in drafting the National Conservatism Statement of Principles (Yoram Hazony, N.S. Lyons, Daniel McCarthy, and Rusty Reno) and six signed it (John Fonte, Paul Gottfried, Josh Hammer, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Krikorian, and Marion Smith). I had been invited to sign it, you may recall, but declined, for reasons I tried to articulate in the essay that led to the symposium.

My respondents took different tacks toward my essay, ranging from the complimentary to the nearly dismissive, as in N.S. Lyons’s stern Maoist exhortation, “But the time for conservatives’ hubristic habit of quibbling over…the precise meaning of America’s founding has well and truly passed. Now is the time to cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.” Josh Hammer wondered if I thought I were “the last remaining ‘pure’ Claremonster”—I don’t, but thanks for asking. He added that I’d made “a mountain from the Natcon molehill,” which is an oddly subterranean way to conceive of his fellow Natcons.

Victor Davis Hanson, by contrast, found much to praise in my “understandably somewhat more critical” account of National Conservative philosophy, and agreed that “the Natcons may miss the newness of the American nation and its stark differences from the European experience.” As usual, he also had some trenchant foreign-policy advice for his friends. Paul Gottfried, often a critic though always an intelligent one of Claremont’s view of things, explained that “like Kesler, I have to question whether the traditional European concept of nationhood can be applied to the American experience—without considerable squeezing and twisting.”

Several respondents protested I had gone wrong by mistaking the Statement of Principles for some kind of philosophical exercise. It is “a compromise document,” insisted Yoram Hazony, “intended to lay the foundations for a broad movement….” It is “a political, not a philosophical, document,” added John Fonte, one of those “coalition documents” almost designed to allow “different signatories…to place different emphases on different parts of the document.” Mark Krikorian echoed it was “a political document, not a philosophical treatise.” In fact, in perhaps the only bit of news he broke, Hazony revealed it took “a few rounds of drafting over more than five years to reach the document as we now have it. For a long time, it seemed as though an agreement wouldn’t be possible.” Christopher DeMuth chose eight members to join him on a “revived drafting committee” in spring 2022, according to Hazony, which succeeded in pushing the Statement to completion.

So it was not easy to agree to this “big-tent, compromise document,” which is not “a detailed statement of the views of any one subgroup, author, or signatory, myself included,” writes Hazony. Whose views does the Statement represent, then? Although he pleads “Kesler doesn’t seem to be talking about any actual, living Natcons,” I can’t find any who own up to the whole Statement without winking.

***

Still, they didn’t call it a Statement of Compromises for, in Hazony’s words, “a Natcon movement bursting with divergent intellectual currents pulling in different directions”; they called it the National Conservatism Statement of Principles. Even while extenuating it as a political work product, Hazony admits “its language was carefully designed to bridge the differences among the various Natcon factions….” Carefully designed, though apparently not meant to be read “closely,” the term he puts in quotes when characterizing my CRB essay. He treats the word almost like an epithet. I plead guilty to reading the document closely, in search of the principles it says it contains.

Almost all group documents are, in some sense, a compromise, from church covenants to partisan platforms, from the Declaration of Independence to The Federalist. Compromises may betray principles or they may serve and ultimately vindicate them. The presence of compromises ought not to disqualify readers from taking a serious look at them and their related principles.

What Hazony and most of the respondents seem to object to is that I don’t take the Statement at face value, i.e., that wherever I look closely I see things. To begin with, their international campaign for nationalism strikes me as paradoxical. The love of one’s own nation, if that is what nationalism is, strikes me as rather different from loyalty to “the idea of the nation,” which the Statement promotes. They don’t see a problem. In fact, avers Hazony, “The opposite is true: not only in America, but in Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Israel, and India, I have found that nationalists, in whom the love of their own people burns bright, are also those who most readily feel the pain of other nations whose independence has been endangered or lost.”

That is certainly a fascinating list. It confirms Gottfried’s intuition that “the Natcons’ natural target audience are Central and Eastern Europeans and such culturally unified non-European nations as Japan and Israel.” Not “demoralized, ostentatiously masochistic” countries like Germany or Spain. To which I would add the question, where on the list are those other nationalisms where “love of their own people burns bright” like Russia, China, and Hamas? These didn’t make it on Hazony’s list for the obvious reason that love of one’s own people doesn’t always translate into feeling the pain of others “whose independence has been endangered or lost.” Hazony argues that “in real life, there is no contradiction between [my words are quoted] having ‘a preference for one’s own nation’ and ‘a commitment to a world of independent nations.’” But obviously, in real life, there often is. Though this is not a necessary contradiction, it is common enough to undermine the Natcons’ formula of entrusting each nation to trade exclusively on its own stock of national traditions, following “its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.”

***

Morally and intellectually this formula is absurd because it is open to evil, not to mention confusion—however defensible it may be for statesmen to trust national traditions politically when dealing with free, moderate, and constitutional nations. The thought that National Conservatives—indeed, that all conservatives—need a better guide than tradition, because not just any old tradition will do, sends Hazony into a kind of tizzy. He and I have debated these issues before, so we do not need to do it again now. Permit me, though, to make two observations about how he argues his case in our pages.

First, he assimilates my essay’s arguments with him to political philosopher Leo Strauss’s critique in Natural Right and History (1953) of Edmund Burke. I am flattered by the comparison, as Yoram should be, too! Nonetheless, I’m afraid it is a bit of a red herring. I mention Burke only in passing and only to suggest gently that I don’t read Burke, as Hazony does, as a thorough-going traditionalist. As the first defender of the respectability of a system of political parties, Burke was an innovator, too, and a defender of the British Constitution partly on the grounds of its conformity to nature. Nor did Strauss, I think, regard Burke as a defender of tradition in Hazony’s sense. Steven Lenzner’s article “Strauss’s Three Burkes” (Political Theory; August 1991) shows beautifully the complexity of Strauss’s famous pages in Natural Right and History.

How thorough-going a traditionalist is my friend Yoram? Here is a revealing passage from his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery. “The individual escapes the traditions of his own tribe only by joining a new one,” he argues. “The feeling that one has escaped the competition of local traditions and entered a way of thinking that is universal is simply a part of the illusion….In reality, no one ever escapes the competition among local traditions.” I’d say the problem of relativism remains, therefore.

Second, the simple point that underlay my criticism of National Conservatism’s betrothal to national traditions—that the old is not the same as the good—was not Burke’s discovery, anyway, but one familiar to him and us through Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, among others. Burke was hardly a relativist, even though he didn’t believe in what Hazony claims I believe in as the sole antidote for the snakebite of relativism, “the existence of a universal natural law that can be discovered in all times and places through the exercise of reason alone.” That is Yoram’s overstatement, among other reasons because reason is never alone.

Others of my friends, like Dan McCarthy and John Fonte, join him in expressing astonishment that I suspect National Conservatism of preparing a kind of alternative to genuine American nationalism. Yet where is the “creed” then in the Natcons’ account? Creed and culture are both essential components of American nationalism, which as Fonte notes I have argued before; but the Natcon version appears to be culture all the way down.

***

Some of the respondents make the useful point that National Conservatism’s objections to the older American conservatism are less sweeping than I imply. “Kesler expends considerable ink defending Buckley-Reagan conservatism,” writes John Fonte, “against what he perceives as unfair Natcon criticism….[But] the main Natcon criticism is with conservatism ‘since the fall of the Berlin Wall,’ as the Statement says—that is, the mainstream conservatism of the ’90s and 2000s rather than the Buckley-Reagan years.” Krikorian makes this point, too. Just when I might have accepted their point as a friendly amendment, N.S. Lyons interjects, “By contrast, old-guard conservatives have—for almost a century now—utterly failed to conserve much of anything, the republic included. And none of their habitually muttered invocations of the Constitution’s sacred text have turned the tide in the least.”

Which exclamation raises more generally the relation between National Conservatism and the New Right of our day. I raised the question at the beginning of my original essay. The former movement is, I think, a subset of the latter, whose members are younger, wilder, and bear more web scars. Unlike the Natcons, who think they are ascendant, buoyed by a resurgent age of nationalism around the globe, today’s New Right tend to be embittered and disillusioned. All around them they see gods that failed: Communism, of course, but also capitalism, conservatism, and the Constitution. Lyons’s piece is a compendium: “All across the Western world, regimes are converging on the same form of authoritarian managerial technocracy, treating popular sovereignty with disgust and brooking no dissent…. The Constitution was a very fine document, successfully codifying the unique character of the young Anglo-American nation. Many of us dearly hope it can yet be restored and re-enforced, in spirit and law….”

First, however, comes “struggle.” Our young New Right would like to believe in the Constitution again, but they have been taught that great document was a child of its age, an emanation of “the young Anglo-American nation.” They fear that nation is probably beyond revival or restoration, even though all those invocations of our sacred text seem belatedly to be having an effect against abortion and affirmative action. As today’s New Left has become openly and viscerally anti-American, so our New Right threatens to become openly post-American, post-constitutional. Though the two movements are related, National Conservatism may not be able to subsume or even restrain its younger brother. The international return to sovereign national traditions, on offer from the one, may pale beside the other’s blood cry of “struggle.”

What comes after the Constitution? What comes after America? Pray to the God Who never fails that we will not have to find out.