As Republicans across the country vie for control of Washington, D.C., conservative activists once again have their eyes hundreds of miles south in Florida.
The third National Conservatism Conference in Miami, affectionately known as “Natcon 3,” is a gathering of the GOP’s leading Florida men: Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Marco Rubio, and Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee during this year’s midterm elections.
Ever since the national conservatives began gathering in 2019, they were seeking to fortify the governing agenda of another Republican leader who has since moved to Florida: former President Donald Trump.
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The event is organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is in turn chaired by Yoram Hazony, whose 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism was a top Trump-era treatise.
Originally intended to mount a conservative defense of nationalism compatible with Trump’s “America First” campaign slogan, the national conservatives clearly wanted to chart a different course from that of former Presidents George W. Bush and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Over time, this grew into skepticism of Big Tech, a rejection of woke capitalism, and a willingness to rethink the global economy, especially insofar as its current terms could be said to advantage China.
“Milton Friedman was right: People should be free to choose … but truly free people choose to put their culture, their families, and their national survival ahead of the GDP,” said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
“We see the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race,” states the Natcon 3 about page.
The Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard put national conservatism’s objectives in tension with the following: “Amnesty. Free trade. Engagement with China. Market self-regulation of Big Tech and Big Banks. Foreign adventurism.”
The alternative to this vision, Bovard said in her remarks to the Miami gathering, is an “image of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s boot, stamping on an unborn baby’s face. Forever.”
“The Left is playing for keeps,” DeSantis warned. “This is not an easy fight because they have so much support across the commanding heights of society. It requires that, yes, we use common sense, and yes, we understand the issues and [are] correct on those. But more and more, it requires that you do so by demonstrating courage under fire because if you stand up for what’s right, you are going to get attacked by the corporate press. You may get censored by Big Tech. You will get smeared by the opposition. If you’re not willing to take the arrows, you’re not going to get anything done.”
What these various strains of New Right conservatism want to get done can be a matter of debate. Some prioritize the nation-state, especially over supranational organizations; others emphasize the “common good” over individualism and free markets; others still espouse highly specific flavors of religious conservatism; some just want a willingness to fight.
A similar event organized by the older-line Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Washington, D.C., in July featured one keynote address in which former Trump trade adviser Robert Lighthizer denounced libertarianism just hours before Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called for a renewed libertarian populism. A second keynote address by Red Tory author Phillip Blond featured sharp criticism of national conservatism and a call for empire.
It’s unmistakable that social conservatism generally, and Christian conservatism, in particular, would play a bigger role in the GOP governing coalition as the national conservatives understand than in the old “three-legged stool” description of the Right or the fusionism associated with the late National Review senior editor Frank Meyer.
Hazony and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) both talked up the Bible as a foundational text. “The day that you stop being afraid of being a Christian, the day that you stand up and say that America is a Christian nation, that is the day that woke neo-Marxism has met its match!” Hazony said, according to the event’s Twitter account.
“There is no idea that is more central to American life than the dignity of the common person,” Hawley said. “That’s an idea that’s given to us by the Bible.”
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“In woke America,” Bovard said, “public schools feature pornography but ban the Bible.”
Overturning Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and the Bible were conservative activist priorities before Roe v. Wade. They might be again.
