In fact, there is no evidence that immigration to the United States today actively promotes “weakness or instability.” (The dynamics of migration and assimilation are very different in Western Europe, where they also differ from country to country, but the manifesto has an American focus.) For that matter, research indicates that immigrants in the United States today are assimilating as much as ever. But never mind all that—to the NatCons, these points probably just amount to more evidence that American universities are churning out globalist propaganda, a crime for which they ought to be defunded. So far, at least, even the apparent Hispanic realignment toward the GOP isn’t making a dent in the national conservatives’ visceral hostility to immigration.

To be fair, the manifesto does end with a strong condemnation of racism that points to “the history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences”—a phrase perhaps intended to emphasize that the condemnation is directly primarily at more overt racism, traditionally understood, without placing progressive identity politics on the same level. This may signal that the national conservatives are serious about distancing themselves from some of the more odious figures in their project’s orbit. (One may wonder if that includes Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor who said during her talk at the first National Conservatism conference in 2019 that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Wax is not among the NatCon statement’s signatories.)

If so, good for Hazony and the NatCons. But that doesn’t change the fact that their “statement of principles” is a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology. It advocates or justifies a total immigration shutdown, heavy-handed promotion of religion by the state, the strong-arming of public universities into serving “the national interest” without any clear conception of what that means, and federal crackdowns on ill-defined “lawlessness” and “immorality.”