If you want to see where MAGA is headed, look no further than this week's National Conservatism summit.
Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:
In a speech at last year’s Republican National Convention, then vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance shared his philosophy of national identity. “America is not just an idea,” he told the crowd. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As I wrote last year, Vance’s speech electrified far-right corners of X, whose denizens rejoiced that contained within those clichéd sentiments was evidence that the potential veep shared their opinions on immigration. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third-world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.” Vance’s Republican National Convention speech wasn’t the first time he had held forth on the theme of America consisting of a particular kind of people. Days before the convention, Vance made a similar speech at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering that attracts right-wing intellectuals, nationalists, and the nationalism-curious. The crowd also leans religious. At that same event, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) delivered a keynote titled “The Christian Nationalism We Need.”
This week marks National Conservatism’s sixth annual conference, and judging from the speaker lineup and schedule, it promises to be its most politically charged. When this group began to meet, the conference talk titles were vague and sleepy. Back then, panels included “Cutting Through the Noise on Big Tech” and “Five Myths About China.” Over the last six years, the conference has hosted various conservative stars, including media personality Tucker Carlson, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Brexit leader Nigel Farage, and post-liberal theorist Patrick Deneen. National Conservatism “emerged as a guiding light of the MAGA movement—of the America First movement in general,” notes Ben Lorber, who studies Christian nationalism at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates.
This year’s National Conservatism Conference appears to be less about abstract intellectual debates and more about policy and action, a kind of an IRL Project 2025 for the administration going forward. Session titles include “Overturn Obergefell” and “Fighting the Woke-Islamist Alliance on University Campuses.” This year’s speaker lineup is also spicier: It includes former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Jonathan Keeperman, a far-right publisher whose Passage Publishing releases works that celebrate fascism; and Calvin Robinson, a firebrand Anglican priest who was defrocked earlier this year when he made a Nazi-salute-style gesture at a Michigan anti-abortion rally. Vance isn’t speaking at this year’s event, but other Trump administration luminaries are, including US Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, director of the US Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), a reliable fixture at these events, will also be there.
The conference website says it aims to bring together people who are devoted to “the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” But behind those lofty goals is a more specific agenda. My colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year’s event, noting that “for all the ‘owning the libs’ discourse, the attacks on so-called gender ideology, the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism,” the attendees “rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.” At this year’s conference, that theme is again on full display, with one entire breakout session devoted to “The Threat of Islamism in America” and a speech titled “The Case Against Birthright Citizenship.” As much as conference organizers may have been emboldened this year by MAGA’s rise to power, National Conservatism also appears to be influencing the evolution of the Republican party. A close look at the organizers reveals a religious-nationalist ideology that undergirds the conference and, increasingly, MAGA itself. The figures behind the National Conservatism movement champion the general idea of nationalism, but they have strong ties to a particular nation—and it’s not the United States. The conference is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit founded in 2019 by David Brog and Yoram Hazony, that describes its mission as “strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.” Brog, a lawyer and former chief of staff for Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), was the executive director of the evangelical Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel. Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher, political theorist, and Biblical scholar, was a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Edmund Burke Foundation’s annual revenue is modest—just $1.2 million in 2023—but as investigative reporter Walker Bragman recently reported, it was launched with deep connections to the conservative movement. One early donor was the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund, which kicked in $100,000. Its namesake is a powerful Republican donor who chairs the board of the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank. Another major contributor is the Common Sense Society, which describes its mission as a “celebration of the political, intellectual, and cultural inheritance which constitutes our shared civilization.”
[...] The vision of a single religion as the glue that holds a nation-state together is a major theme at this year’s conference. As Hazony explained to Ezra Klein, “the central place of Anglo-Protestantism in America, with a strong Old Testament taste, the English language, the common law.” Those ideas would certainly seem to resonate with conference speaker Nate Fischer, who runs a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. Fischer’s firm oversees the Highland Rim Project, which seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America, what its website describes as “thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.” Fischer’s National Conservatism talk is titled “Building American Institutions in the Digital Age.” William Wolfe, the former Trump administration official who tweeted approvingly about Vance’s RNC speech, is scheduled to speak on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice,” a noteworthy topic given the recent decision by the IRS to allow churches to endorse political candidates. Earlier this week, he posted on X, “We must reignite the Protestant spirit in America.”
Another speaker is Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson, who says he is in favor of repealing the 19th Amendment and instead instituting a household-based voting system, is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist. At last year’s National Conservatism conference, his speech was one of the most strident, bemoaning the depraved state of American culture, which he blamed on secularism run amok. “If we will not have the Appeal to Heaven flag,” he warned, referring to the Christian nationalist banner that made headlines last year when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife, Martha, flew it over the couple’s vacation home, “then we are going to have the tranny flag.” Wilson told me via email that he is looking forward to the conference and “meeting like-minded folks and networking,” and also representing the “evangelical Protestant voices” that he believes are “underrepresented in the conservative resistance to clown world.”
The NatCon Conference reveals where conservatism is headed, and it’s a scary vision.