National Conservatives are Fighting for You
We’re not PART of the conservative movement. We ARE the conservative movement!
The post National Conservatives are Fighting for You appeared first on The American Conservative.
National Conservatives are Fighting for You
We’re not PART of the conservative movement. We ARE the conservative movement!
We Are The Majority
Welcome to NatCon4!
I know this is early for some of you. But I can’t apologize for my energy this morning. Because yes, I’ve been up with my four-week old baby since 3:30am. And if they scheduled me any later in the program, I might sound like Joe Biden outside the hours of 10 and 4.
As you may know, I was supposed to be joined in this session by our friend Steve Bannon, who last week became the latest political prisoner of Merrick Garland’s Committee for Public Safety.
No doubt the media thinks this is a potential “gotcha” side-bar to NatCon4. As usual, their narrative is not only wrong, it’s corrupt.
Let’s be very clear about who the people are snickering and high-fiving about persecuting Steve Bannon.
They’re the same politicians, donors, and journalists who celebrate the serial sexual predator Bill Clinton. Who say nothing about Senator Bob Menendez, federally indicted for being bribed by a foreign nation, still voting on legislation in the United States Senate. Who protected Jeffrey Epstein—and continue to protect both his murderers and his child-abusing Democrat clients. And who cheerlead the illegally open borders now facilitating the trafficking of children, fentanyl, and violent criminals into our country.
That’s who put Steve Bannon behind bars last week—for the “crime” of refusing to cooperate with their three-year insurrection against the Constitution and the rule of law. The media thinks the story is a bad look for us!
In reality it’s just another reminder that no matter how fed up you are of what the left is doing to our country today—you’re not fed up enough.
And yet, look around. The mood of this conference is not anger but excitement. Because we know this is the first conservative conference in memory when we can look at our country and the world and say we’re winning.
As we gather today for this fourth Conference on National Conservatism, we do so with the wind at our backs. The left is in a global panic. The corporatist right is utterly irrelevant.
National conservatism today is the undisputed majority political coalition and persuasion not simply in the Republican Party and in America, but across the West.
We’re not PART of the conservative movement. We ARE the conservative movement!
And yet, national conservatives must express this fact not as a boast, but as a responsibility. The country we love—the country we would lead—is in grave danger.
Helping America through this moment will be the greatest challenge any political coalition has faced since the Civil War.
But we’re up to this challenge for the same reason we’re national conservatives in the first place. We see the fight we’re in for what it is.
Our movement is America’s slow-kindled corrective to the Washington Republican establishment’s willful neglect. We’re America’s answer to the hollow men who betrayed our workers to corporate exploitation, our taxpayers into unsustainable debt, our sons and brothers into un-winnable wars, and our citizens into unconstitutional servitude.
We are—and must be—conservatives of action. This is what sets national conservatism apart. We don’t live in a fantasy world of what ought to be. We live in, and will fight to fix, the wreckage of what is.
Beginning of the Story: The Enemy Above
National Conservatism is not an ideology or a faction; it’s a perspective. It’s the realization that the trajectory and stakes of our national politics have fundamentally changed. Even labels like “extremism,” “fanaticism,” and “weaponized government” fail to capture what the elite left has become.
They literally convicted their chief political rival of felonies without proving he ever committed a crime. They literally helped a genocidal, enemy regime cover-up its creation of a global pandemic. They literally conspire to kidnap struggling, mentally ill children that parents refuse to mutilate.
And almost every corporation, university, government agency, newsroom, and Democrat politician and staffer in the country agrees with them.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are no more Rubicons to cross. There are no more norms to uphold. America is fighting for its life—and America’s elites are on the other side.
It’s been a long time coming, this realization. But for anyone paying attention, it has been coming.
I’m a millennial. In my adult life, I’ve lived through the elite lies that led us into the Iraq war. The boondoggle that was Afghanistan. The financial collapse. The failure of Obamacare. Mass, warrantless surveillance by government and corporations. The China shock, which hollowed out middle America. The opioid epidemic. Covid and its paranoia and coverup. Hillary Clinton’s Russia hoax. The Black Lives Matter riots and the neo-racist DEI regime.
The real scandal is not that we have endured this generational orgy of corruption, dishonesty, and betrayal. The scandal is that the elites responsible for all of the above were protected, promoted, enriched, and even celebrated for it.
And even today, establishment Washington is led by people who think that’s okay.
Because they participated in the system. Or got rich off it. Or live in fear of being cut off from it.
For decades, as elite institutions were captured and corrupted, Republican elites husbanded their influence, hoarded their privilege, and reserved their ire for…us.
Whenever any conservatives tried to stop or defund the Left’s march through the institutions, we were smeared by our ostensible leaders as “far right…” “arch conservatives…” “isolationists”…or even “unChristian.”
We were told to “respect norms” and “play the long game” while our sovereignty, economy, and culture went up in flames.
Like the false prophets in Jeremiah’s day, those who claimed to lead us“healed [our] wound…lightly, saying ‘peace, peace’ when there [was] no peace.”
National Conservatism is America’s answer to a left destroying our country and a right that wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them.
The bad news is that the Republican Establishment is unprepared, ill-equipped, and too weak to face this moment and its perils, let alone overcome them. Those unwilling to perceive reality cannot be persuaded by argument. They must be replaced—now.
The good news is they are being replaced by us.
Zero Sum
Do not be tempted by talk about a “new fusionism,” sharing a “big tent” with the corporate, congressional yes-men who voted to fund the Left’s anti-American jihad all these years. Their time has passed.
On the other hand—and however tempting—National Conservatives need not punish old guard Republicans. All we need to do is ignore them. They wet their beds—now they can sleep in them.
Our focus must be on the Left and the elite institutions they wield like cudgels. For the fight we’re engaged in now is not merely existential. It’s also zero-sum. Only one side is going to win and one side is going to lose. National Conservatism represents the side that will not, cannot, and must not compromise away or give up on America.
So yes, National Conservatives will fight. But: to win, we must lead.
How to Lead and How Not To
And we must lead as only National Conservatives can today: as the true, sole majority of the American Right.
To reunite the conservative movement, we need to understand how we became so divided under the Establishment.
The fusionist conservative coalition of the 1980s succeeded because it met the needs of its time. The Republicans who inherited Ronald Reagan’s coalition tried to freeze its agenda in amber—even as the country and the threats facing her mutated.
Today Reagan’s “pro-growth” economics and “strong national defense” have descended into mindless military adventurism and misguided economic abstractions that have only accelerated the degradation of our culture, traditions, and sovereignty.
A National Conservative coalition must reunify the Right by reclaiming the real moral and intellectual traditions the fusionist generation actually drew on! On this point, pearl-clutching pundits and social media trolls are both wrong. National Conservatism does not demand deviation from Reaganism, fusionism, and constitutionalism…but a reconnection with what those movements actually were.
Contrary to the neocon op-eds, the Cold War was won by a nationalist conservatism that resisted global communism and also American imperialism and hubris. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan all pursued strategies and alliances that prevented wars—not ones that constantly drew us into them.
Similarly, National Conservatives should reclaim Reaganism from libertarian economic revisionists. Like Reagan, National Conservatives can distinguish between free trade in theory, and free trade in practice. We understand that predatory foreign commerce must be met with the economic self-defense used by Reagan himself—import quotas, protection of American industry, and where appropriate, tariffs, levied in pursuit of freer, fairer trade. There’s nothing “Reaganist” about enriching our geopolitical adversaries by giving them free access to our industries, workers, intellectual property, and markets.
Nor should National Conservatives dismiss the prudent skepticism of libertarians—from Murray Rothbard to Ron Paul—about sovereignty-stealing outfits like the World Trade Organization and treaties rigged for Wall Street against Main Street.
Like William F. Buckley, National Conservatives can remind the right not to accept corporate tyranny simply because it’s perpetrated by the private instead of the public sector.
National Conservatives should, on principle, hold corporations accountable when they threaten the values that make this country work. When they de-bank conservative customers, suppress patriotic speech, and monopolize and distort free markets, they must pay a swift, severe, and certain price.
We must signal to Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and Big Finance that the conservative movement is not their partisan shield. Our principles are not for sale. National Conservatives are shrewd enough not to be bought by some sponsored op-ed or “consulting” expert manipulating words like “liberty” and “free markets” to cloak corporate cronyism.
That kind of vending-machine partisanship is how the Republican Establishment got us all into this mess in the first place.
Congress must finally do its job—and get control of the federal and state agencies the left has weaponized against the American people.
No constitutional republic can exist with a Department of Homeland Security who believes “being religious” is an indication of domestic extremism.
With an FBI that shows up at the homes of peaceful pro-life demonstrators with their guns drawn.
With a surveillance state that bucks any check on its own power.
These institutions must be drastically reformed or dismantled and rebuilt. Not as part of some committee white paper or press conference. This has to happen next year.
And for goodness sake, National Conservatives must restore accountability to the federal work place. If bureaucrats underperform or abuse their power, they either go to jail or get fired. Period.
Finally, we need a political coalition that has the courage to understand where we are—and what is required to battle this country back to a Constitutional order. The elite left has no shame or fidelity to their oaths of office. They’re not inspired to their better angels because the right sets a better example. We have seen for decades: They’re emboldened by our inaction. They laugh at it.
The left isn’t going to stop weaponizing institutions against us until they have a taste of their own medicine. Until they truly believe the right will use the left’s own precedents against them.
As during the Cold War, no one wants to live under Mutually Assured Destruction. But as long as amoral adversaries embrace lying, treachery, and terror as legitimate partisan tactics, it sure beats unilateral assured destruction.
No one is happy that American politics has become so totalizing. But that’s what happens when you stand up to totalitarians. Appeals to the Constitution and the Founders and “disagreeing without being disagreeable” will not move the Alvin Braggs and Fanni Willises and Jack Smiths of the world.
National Conservatives are and must be constitutionalists. But for the Constitution to matter again—at all—the right must be prepared to fight on the left’s absolute terms. Like it or not, ready or not, they are coming for our rights, our freedoms, and our kids for God’s sake! To them, the Establishment Right has always said, let’s make a deal.
To them, National Conservatives must say, molon labe.
Take The High Ground
Let the Establishment talk of the high road. We will take the high ground.
We can unite and lead the conservative movement. We can unite and lead the nation. We can win this fight.
Conservative principles are not meek and deferential—that was just our failed, former leaders. Our ideas are battle-tested over centuries and forged in the fights that have come before—against authoritarianism, communism, tyrants great and petty. They have triumphed over atheism, relativism, nihilism, and fascism. Our values were made for this moment, and they cannot be compromised. The stakes are too high.
The fight we’re in is to preserve our whole way of life, as heirs to the Western tradition. And we will win because unlike the left, we know who we are—that we’re made in the image of God, that men are men, that women are women, that each precious human person is unrepeatable and unmatched in dignity and worth from conception to natural death.
And we define our common identity not by our creed or our tribe or our race or pronouns, but by our country, the sovereign land in which we have built the freest society the world has ever seen.
America was built by Americans, not simply by ideas. It can only be saved by Americans, too. The left understands this. They are working right now to make us into a different country. It’s a perilous time for the values and the country we hold dear—but champions of the good, the beautiful, and the true do not change with the times… we change the times.
As National Conservatives, we may not have chosen this moment. But as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote, we are called to serve faithfully not in the moment of our choosing, but of our testing. The political coalition necessary to save this country is forming now, today, with all of us.
With the courage of our convictions, love of our country, and faith in our Living God…let’s get to work.
Thank you.
The post National Conservatives are Fighting for You appeared first on The American Conservative.