The MAGA New Right

National Conservatism

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National Conservatism

The most formally organized of the three main intellectual camps of the MAGA New Right, per Laura K. Field. National Conservatism (NatCon) serves as a “big tent and umbrella for the movement” — organized, formal, and institutionally connected in ways the other camps are not.

Core Beliefs

National Conservatism promotes the idea of a single, relatively homogeneous nation-state that is under threat from within and without and needs to be protected. Its core commitments:

  • Nationalism over globalism: Against free trade, international institutions, and open borders; for economic nationalism and trade protectionism
  • Cultural homogeneity: Promotes a particular vision of American national identity that is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) Christian, Western, and white
  • Anti-immigration: Shares with other New Right camps a hostility to immigration, particularly from non-Western countries
  • Rejection of pluralism: Directly challenges America’s tradition of religious and cultural pluralism; some NatCons openly endorse Christian nationalism
  • Statism: Unlike traditional conservatism’s suspicion of the state, NatCons are willing to use state power to enforce cultural and economic nationalist goals

Organization

National Conservatism is distinct in having formal institutional infrastructure:

  • Edmund Burke Foundation — founded by Yoram Hazony; organizes NatCon conferences
  • Regular conferences in the United States and abroad (four NatCon conferences in the US between 2019 and 2024)
  • First Things magazine — R.R. Reno’s journal; important NatCon venue
  • Heritage Foundation — the flagship conservative think tank, which under Kevin Roberts moved sharply toward National Conservatism; co-author of Project 2025

JD Vance was a speaker at three of the four US NatCon conferences between 2019 and 2024. The Claremonters and NatCons significantly overlap; Thomas Klingenstein is both a Claremonter and a major donor to National Conservatism.

Key Figures

  • Yoram Hazony — Israeli-American political organizer; The Virtue of Nationalism (2018); founder of the Edmund Burke Foundation
  • R.R. Reno — Yale PhD in religious studies; editor of First Things; author of The Return of the Strong Gods (2019)
  • Josh Hammer — University of Chicago JD; media personality; proponent of “Common Good Originalism”
  • Kevin Roberts — President of the Heritage Foundation; architect of Project 2025
  • Christopher Rufo — activist and Manhattan Institute employee; culture war strategist
  • Christopher DeMuth — former president of the American Enterprise Institute
  • Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton — politicians who have embraced the movement

R.R. Reno’s “Strong Gods” Framework

Reno’s 2019 book The Return of the Strong Gods provides the movement’s emotional and spiritual vocabulary. He argues that postwar liberalism promoted “the gods of weakening” — openness, flexibility, tolerance, pluralism — at the expense of the “strong gods” of love, loyalty, solidarity, and transcendence. Liberalism “trains us to be loveless and therefore to be something less than human.” What is needed is a “restoration of love” through the strong gods.

Field: “It is a refrain that you will hear across the New Right. It is based on misunderstandings both of human nature and of liberalism, but Reno is confident.”

Relationship to Other New Right Camps

National Conservatism is a “big tent” that overlaps with both the Claremonters and the Postliberals. Figures like Thomas Klingenstein straddle both Claremonter and NatCon worlds. JD Vance moves comfortably between Postliberal and NatCon spaces. The NatCon conferences have been a venue where all three camps interact.

NatCon Conferences: The Tent and Its Limits

NatCon 1 (Washington DC, July 2019): Opening day coincided with Trump’s “go back” tweets about the Squad. Conference chairman Christopher DeMuth (AEI president 1986–2008) gave the movement mainstream credibility. Peter Thiel delivered the keynote (“Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough”). Key tension: culture warriors vs. economic populists. Julius Krein and Oren Cass made the strongest economic cases; a resolution for industrial policy passed 99-55. Tucker Carlson straddled both camps. JD Vance gave “Getting Beyond Libertarianism.” Culminating speech: Josh Hawley, youngest senator — standing ovation.

The Brimelow problem: Hazony rejected Peter Brimelow (founder of white nationalist VDARE) from NatCon 1. Brimelow wrote an essay expressing shock, noting Hazony’s positions “sounds exactly like positions we have argued for years.” Despite the exclusion, law professor Amy Wax made racially charged claims in a speech not posted to NatCon’s YouTube channel. Hazony defended Wax; she did not return to subsequent NatCon speaker lists. Paul Gottfried, at his 2019 HL Mencken Club conference, mocked NatCon as organized by “a Zionist philanthropist” and praised Wax for “said what speakers were not supposed to mention.”

NatCon Rome: Guest of honor was Viktor Orbán, interviewed by DeMuth. Orbán on Syrian refugees: [gestured zero] “In Hungary, we have this number of Muslim migrants” — crowd applauded before he could continue.

NatCon 3 (Miami, 2022): Hazony declared 2020 “a watershed year” in which “hegemonic liberalism came to an end” replaced by “woke Neo-Marxism.” Conclusion: “The only thing strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity.” Explicitly declared America “a Christian nation… and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”

Field’s summary: “As Hazony’s big tent grew, space was made for increasingly ‘controversial’ figures and ideas” — including Paul Gottfried, Darren Beattie, Jason Richwine, and Nathan Pinkoski.

NatCon 4 (Washington DC, Capital Hilton, July 8, 2024): Field attended. Six US senators on the roster; Josh Hawley and JD Vance were keynote speakers. Steve Bannon had been listed but had to report to prison. Chris DeMuth opened with: “Welcome to the mainstream!” Major donors: Heritage Foundation, Jim DeMint’s Conservative Partnership Institute, Thomas Klingenstein. Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College now explicitly on the program.

New major theme: “Lawfare: The Criminalization of Politics” — a panel featuring John Yoo (author of the Bush torture memos) and John Eastman speaking on “Living in the Shadow of Lawfare.” The movement that claims to defend the rule of law was platformed by figures who had weaponized legal theory to subvert an election.

International contingent: representatives from the recently defeated British Tory Party; a substantial delegation from Modi’s India; the expatriate Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi; Gladden Pappin and Balázs Orbán from Hungary; Ryszard Legutko of Poland (who received an award). Curtis Yarvin was in attendance.

Fringest speakers: Paul Gottfried, Jonathan Keeperman (aka L0m3z), and Jack Posobiec — whose speech was titled “This Year We Can Save Western Civilization.” Posobiec had published a book called Unhumans (War Room Books) the day before; Vance provided the blurb.

David Azerrad (Hillsdale College; PhD University of Dallas; originally from Montreal) gave a speech titled “Enemies of the State: The Left’s Schmittian Politics.” He had denounced Martin Luther King in Paul Gottfried’s Chronicles magazine (2023). At NatCon 4, he pearl-clutched about young men turning to Andrew Tate for manly advice — while his own speech was described by journalists Annika Brockschmidt and Ben Lorber as containing “an unabashedly White nationalist” dimension.

Josh Hawley’s declaration: Hawley concluded the day by explicitly embracing the Christian nationalist label: “Some will say now I am calling America a Christian nation—and so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism—and so I do… My question is, is there any other kind worth having?” Douglas Wilson — the Moscow, Idaho theologian whose Canon Press published Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism — was a new addition to the NatCon speaker roster.

Field’s verdict: “National Conservatism, which began as a group of Trump-supporting misfits, was now the heart of the party.”

Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the most concrete expression of what National Conservatism looks like as a governing agenda. It involved firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with far-right loyalists — an implementation of Vermeule’s “integration from within” strategy through a different institutional mechanism.

The Global Context

National Conservatism is part of a broader international trend. The MAGA New Right often imitates Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which Orbán has called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian liberty.” Figures like Gladden Pappin (president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs) serve as active bridges between the US movement and European right-wing authoritarianism.

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