On its face, the gathering seemed to be an attempt to superimpose an intellectual framework onto the brute force of Trumpism and, to a certain extent, the populist rebellions that have swept countries from Italy to Poland to the United Kingdom. But at a deeper level, this event was about the future of conservatism at a time of deep fracture within the movement. According to those gathered, the conservative establishment in Washington has been revving in neutral ever since Trump was elected president, knowing they have to go with the moment but unwilling to truly question long-held conservative principles. The elite insurgents at the Ritz would like nothing more than to see the old marriage between hard-core libertarians and social conservatives permanently ended, and to build new institutional alliances around a positive, unifying vision of nationalism. “The right has been too economistic in its thinking for a long time, and too libertarian,” Yuval Levin, the policy wonk and author who was recently tapped to lead a new division at the American Enterprise Institute focused on family and civic life, told me. “I think it needs to be more concerned with social and cultural questions—not just two or three that we sort of call the social issues, but the foundations of a free society and family and community and civic life.”…

Chamberlain counts himself among the generation of young conservatives who feel disillusioned by what their forebears built. He came of age during the Iraq War and the financial crisis, and “it became very hard to justify being a Republican where this obvious failure was being papered over by the leaders of the conservative movement,” he said. He has been encouraged by Trump, but doesn’t see the new nationalist movement as essentially Trumpist. He also doesn’t think Trump is racist: Trump’s latest tweets were problematic because they diminished the importance of citizenship, Chamberlain said, not because they had anything to do with race. Still, he believes that conservatives can and will take racism seriously, and that there’s room for critiques of problems such as mass incarceration in the new nationalism. “Failing to account for systemic discrimination against a group of citizens—that would be a problem for a meaningfully nationalist movement,” he told me.