“The outside pressure of Communism” helped unify the American Right during the Cold War—that’s how Matthew Continetti put it, as we spoke in the dining room of the American Enterprise Institute, where he serves as director of domestic policy studies. Existential struggle with the Soviet Union, that is, led various factions within conservatism—free marketeers, social traditionalists, foreign policy hawks—to put aside their differences and fight the common enemy. After the Cold War, many Republicans and conservative thinkers settled on a consensus characterized by deregulation, expanded global networks of trade and migration, and investment in national security, with some endorsement of conservative moral positions on family life and civil society. The unraveling of George W. Bush’s presidency and the rise of Donald Trump shattered that consensus, leading to an intensifying debate about the future of the Right.

That debate is reflected in rival mission statements by conservative organizations. In 2022, the Edmund Burke Foundation, led by Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony, released “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” which declared: “We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.” A year later, a group of “Freedom Conservatives” produced as a rejoinder its own “Statement of Principles,” contending that “individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

The signatories of each document include accomplished figures: former National Review editor John O’Sullivan, Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, and First Things editor R. R. Reno were among the drafters of the “National Conservatism” manifesto; spearheaded by policy wonk Avik Roy, the “Freedom Conservatism” platform was signed by current National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and conservative luminary George F. Will.

The role of state power is a major point of disagreement between the two camps. Many national conservatives believe that the Right should “realign” around a politics of working-class solicitation and proactive government intervention in the economy to help achieve the common good. The freedom conservatives, by contrast, maintain that this approach could result in a corrosive statism and American decline.