The Authoritarian Plot
The fourth National Conservatism Conference began on a triumphant note. “Welcome to — ready or not — the mainstream,” announced Chris DeMuth of the Heritage Foundation during an opening plenary. When the movement first appeared, he went on, “many thought it outré and a bit scary.” Why? “We favored sovereign nations with borders,” he said. “We want government to be actively concerned with maintaining a healthy culture and a strong society.” Five years after the movement hosted its first conference, DeMuth said that natcons “are no longer intellectual lone wolves baying at the moon.” “We are now traveling, on the move. Traveling with packs, some of them friendly, some of them hostile, into uncharted territory.”
Conservative operative Rachel Bovard would claim on the same morning that national conservatism “today is the undisputed majority political persuasion across the West”: “We are not part of the conservative movement. We are the conservative movement.” DeMuth and Bovard overstate matters by more than a bit. Natcons have not conquered the conservative movement or become entirely mainstream. Labour recently won a historic victory in the U.K., and in France, voters shellacked the far right. In the U.S., Donald Trump has a real shot at returning to the White House — but the election isn’t over yet, and a victory dance would be premature. National conservatism remains minoritarian, for now. They puff themselves out to seem bigger than they are, much like an angry cat.
But the cat still has claws. Natcons haven’t won over the right, but they’ve grown their influence and could help shape a second Trump administration. The success of Project 2025 depends partly on staffing the government, for example, and the conference was full of young people eager to stretch their muscles. Several senators appeared at the conference, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio, who is a leading candidate to become Trump’s running mate. Should Trump win the election, natcons may become more relevant than they’ve ever been, and that bodes ill for the future of our multiracial democracy.
An unapologetic obsession with race and fertility marked all three days of the conference and sets natcons somewhat apart from a mainstream they despise. On the second day of the conference, I attended a panel on “Surviving Late Liberalism,” which promised a presentation from former Trump official Jeremy Carl. In 2020, HuffPost reported that Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, had called the Black Lives Matter movement “racist.” Media Matters found that in 2015, he favorably cited Jared Taylor of the white-nationalist organization American Renaissance. Carl told Media Matters at the time that he “would not have intentionally cited American Renaissance in any article I wrote” and that he “simply missed the sourcing.” That’s hard to believe after hearing him speak.
At NatCon, Carl spent much of his time promoting his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, and he decried an “anti-white regime” that “manifests in dozens of areas.” Diversity, he said, “is almost inevitably a synonym for less white,” and though adding whites would often make a system more diverse, “nobody’s interested in doing that because really all they’re interested in is having less white people involved.” Carl went on to say that he originally wanted to call his book It’s Okay to Be White — an unmistakable white-nationalist dog whistle. The phrase originated on 4chan as part of a trolling campaign; white nationalists would eventually adopt it. As the Washington Post reported in 2023, they frequently added “neo-Nazi language, websites or images to fliers with the phrase.” Carl’s publisher didn’t go for it, he complained a little wistfully.
He later speculated that a “post-white America” would denigrate “much of the cultural, political, and social legacy that built the country” and spoke of a need to “reform” civil-rights laws. “There are some questions on our side of the aisle as to whether we should use civil-rights law or fundamentally reform it. And I think the answer is both,” he said, adding that lawfare had become necessary. “But I also think we need to fundamentally transform a set of laws that were designed for a world 60 years ago that no longer really exists,” he went on before invoking a mythical “white genocide.” The phrase has been “the favorite term of perhaps the farthest reaches of the right,” he said, but “I don’t know that it’s an inaccurate description of” the situation.
A day later, Hillsdale College professor David Azerrad warned that liberal “idols” are “centered on the aggrieved groups who have the greatest of all contemporary privileges, the privilege of having their purported oppression be recognized by the state. Black people, first and foremost, followed closely by women, especially if they’re childless, followed closely by members of the so-called LGBTQ community with Hispanics, Muslims,” and “Native Americans” as people with disabilities “trail far behind.” Azerrad later described the white-nationalist website VDARE as being merely “anti-immigrant” and portrayed it as a victim of political persecution at the hands of New York attorney general Letitia James. “At its core, the regime today is anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian,” he added, before repeating familiar — and false — great replacement theories. He complained of an “intentional demographic transformation of America into a majority minority country through large-scale immigration,” and said, “What diversity ultimately really means is fewer whites. In the end, it may well mean no whites. Whites are bad, non-whites are good.”
Azerrad and Carl are extremists and proud of it. There’s no way to shame them. Carl said that in his book, he talks “about something perhaps more extreme, American whites being victims of a cultural genocide,” adding, “I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room.” But the line between a troll and a true believer can be thin, if it exists at all. He was received well by the crowd and spoke to a packed breakout room, telling us that his book had provoked great interest on Capitol Hill. “Just yesterday, I was asked by a number of senior Hill staffers to come give a presentation on the book,” he claimed, and said that a staffer who worked for a “very, very mainstream member” had invited him to speak with the boss. If Carl is telling the truth, his radicalism is finding a comfortable home within the right, and that has implications for our political future.
Today’s natcons share with Trump a deep hostility to multiracial democracy and the very notion of pluralism. They do not want to share America with immigrants, with non-Christians, with LGBT people. If they attain the power they seek, they’ll try to roll back what racial progress we’ve achieved, push LGBT people back into the closet, and make America an even more difficult place for women and non-Christians to live. “I want to talk to you tonight about the future,” Hawley said on the first evening before calling for Christian nationalism. (Though several prominent speakers were Jewish, the movement’s overarching vision of Christian supremacy threatens them, whether they’re inclined to believe this or not.) Natcons sometimes speak of “restoration,” as if they will return America to some long-forgotten version of itself. In truth, though, the dispute between liberalism and national conservatism is not about progress versus the past, but a conflict between dueling visions of the future.
The natcon future looks a lot like J.D. Vance, who appeared at a VIP dinner a few hours after Azerrad’s speech. Vance first spoke at NatCon before he was a senator, and he was comfortable here, talking to friends. At the dinner, he shied away from sweeping pronouncements — conscious, perhaps, of outshining his potential boss. But he knew the crowd well and spoke of a country invaded by immigrants, controlled by elites who were crushing the American Dream. “Look, the thing on immigration that no one can avoid is that it has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” he said. The city of Springfield, Ohio, had been inundated with Haitian immigrants, he complained, before saying that America is not an idea but “a nation.” He will be buried in his family’s ancestral plot in eastern Kentucky, he said, and he hoped his children would follow him. “That is a homeland,” he declared.
Whose homeland will it be? Vance seems to think it belongs to him, or to his wife’s immigrant family, who did not “abuse” asylum laws as he claims Springfield’s new residents have done. His future is bleak; his America is paltry. An alternative is necessary, but as NatCon drew to a close, liberalism seemed more shambolic than ever. NatCon speakers relished President Biden’s apparent decline and saw an opportunity to press the attack. They thought little of Vice-President Kamala Harris, whom Vance sarcastically called “the prize at the end of the rainbow.” The prospect of a Black and South Asian woman at the top of her ticket forces NatCon’s racism into sharper focus — and illustrates the stakes.
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