Beyond Trump

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Conservatives debating conservatism.

At this year’s Natcon—the National Conservatism Conference in Washington—speakers showed the movement is still defining itself.

Washington Bureau reporter Carolina Lumetta has the story.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Last week, more than a thousand attendees with pockets full of business cards flocked to a Washington hotel for NatCon. They went to sessions aimed at determining what the conservative position is on issues like artificial intelligence, foreign policy, and more.

CARLSON: NatCon is sort of this United Nations of the right wing and I think that that's very encouraging.

David Carlson manages conservative brands as a strategist with Beck & Stone. He has attended NatCon for three years.

In the exhibit halls, conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute handed out their latest magazines and books. In hallway conversations, attendees discussed philosophers Nietzsche and Kant, debated whether the U.S. is or should remain a dominant global force, and created new think tanks on the spot. NatCon has become the primary stomping ground for the conservative elite.

CARLSON: The vibe has changed. The energy has shifted. NatCon is ascendant in the ranks and halls of Congress and in the White House, obviously. And I think everybody's super optimistic.

This year, a record number of speakers came directly from the Trump administration, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and Budget Director Russ Vought.

VOUGHT: There are so many overlapping aspects of the rise of Trump, President Trump's agenda, the America First movement, and the rise of the national conservative movement.

While President Donald Trump says that he is the author of the America First ideology, NatCon claims the mantle of determining what counts as conservative. The first conference was held in 2019, helmed by Israeli philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony. He invited then up-and-coming author J.D. Vance to discuss how the conservative movement should move away from libertarianism.

VANCE: So I want to thank Yoram and David for putting together a conference like this, I think it's important for folks like us to get together and talk about and think about some of the big issues…

Vance spoke at every NatCon until this year. In his opening day address, Hazony urged the movement to adjust course. For the first time in four years, former speakers and attendees now hold influential positions in the government.

HAZONY: Our job is to pull together journalists, academics, think tank people, writers, people who work in the field of ideas to bring them in together into a coalition and to hold it there to be the intellectual substrate, underpinning, of this nationalist movement. That’s what we do.

In the first 8 months of the 2nd Trump administration, conservatives have differed over several key policies. After the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear capabilities, some conservatives praised it as a smart decision to aid Israel and cripple a foreign adversary. Others said it was hypocritical to promise no new wars and then bomb another country. So Hazony and the NatCon organizers decided to include balanced perspectives on the panels this year to showcase the range of conservative thought. The fault lines appeared on the first day during a breakout session titled America and the Israel-Iran war. Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms argued for what he calls a realist position: U.S. intervention.

ABRAHMS: I'm not going to say that we we can just wash our hands of any concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. That would be absurd. But it's weaker. It's much weaker than it was had there not been an intervention.

His fellow panelist argued defending Israel is not in America’s best interests. Curt Mills is the executive director of the magazine, The American Conservative.

MILLS: Why are these our wars? Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it's advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First, asterisk Israel?

While the debate grew heated at times, most NatCon attendees said it’s more important to wrestle with these questions than avoid them. Brad Littlejohn hosted a table in the hallway for the conservative economics think tank American Compass. He is also a WORLD Opinions contributor.

LITTLEJOHN: NatCon is not really serving as a place for developing a substantive policy agenda, but it is a kind of convening where every year we sort of find out what is the Overton window within which the conservative movement can operate… until the next NatCon.

While conservatives cheer Trump’s election win, they’re also thinking about 2028 and what a unified conservative movement should look like then. In his speech, Hazony urged conservatives to debate issues without personal attacks.

HAZONY: This is not this is not just a sideshow. I want to know: how is J.D. Vance going to win the next election if what we're doing outside for four years is tearing each other apart, accusing one another of the most horrible things, smashing one another in public?

Brand strategist David Carlson says answering that question will take more than simply articulating the right ideas.

CARLSON: I think the real threat is electoral probability post-Trump…whether he runs for a third term or whether he doesn't, he will one day no longer be running for president. And confronting that is paramount, figuring out how we can continue to win without the sort of human charisma that Trump has is a difficult one, because the ideas are good, but sometimes elections aren't just about ideas.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta in Washington.

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