What do the national conservatives want?

Conference-goers — a politically disparate association of West Coast Straussians associated with the California-based Claremont Institute, post-liberals, right-wing populists, and any number of other ideological subgenres grouped together in what has come to be known as the “New Right” — come together in the belief that the conservative movement has failed to fully harness the relative cultural conservatism of the American electorate. There remains some ambiguity about what the national conservatives are for, but they know what they are against — what Israeli–American conference organizer Yoram Hazony described in his speech as “the idea of a public liberalism and a private conservatism.” For too long, national conservatives argue, the Right has seen the protection of liberty as the sole purpose of political life and has largely relegated discussion of virtue to the private sphere. But “there is no real wall separating the public from the private — that’s a myth,” Hazony says. “The public sphere reaches down into the private.” Politics, in other words, is not downstream from culture.

In the minds of the national conservatives, the peculiarly libertarian brand of pre-Trump conservatism — what many on the New Right derisively term the “dead consensus” — has little to offer American voters beyond tax-cutting and deregulation; it sees the highest political good as the prospect of “doing your taxes on a postcard,” rather than a substantive vision of human flourishing. National Conservatism II showcases a general sense of impatience with this more moderate center-right orientation. “Neoliberal platitudes are not going to save our late-stage republic now,” Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer tells his audience. “Values-neutral proceduralism, such as exaltations of laissez-faire absolutism and legal positivism in constitutional law, will not save America now. Corporate tax cuts and other Wall Street Journal editorial-board prescriptions simply are not going to cut it. We need a more muscular, assertive, and masculine vision of conservatism.”

There remain serious disagreements, of course, about what this “more muscular, assertive, and masculine vision of conservatism” looks like in practice. If the consensus is truly dead (and not everyone in the conservative movement agrees that it is), then a new one has yet to be born. The question of what might come after the Paul Ryan–era platform is central to National Conservatism II, but it has yet to be answered in full.