A conference that has struck fear into the conservative old guard and served as an ideas lab for policies now being implemented in the Trump administration kicks off Tuesday.
Now in its fifth year, the National Conservatism Conference is not a flashy rally like the Conservative Political Action Conference or events that Turning Point USA packs with young people and pyrotechnics. Rather, it has fostered the intellectual muscle behind the aggressive, nationalist power-wielding that has defined the second Trump administration and rapidly taken hold on the right.
"I do think that NatCon represents the conservative movement at this point," said Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute who's a speaker at this NatCon and those in the past, noting the high number of former speakers now in the Trump administration. "These ideas are not only driving the movement, but they're popular enough to get elected."
This week, the gathering will preview more targets for its movement — such as taking aim at Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. An "Overturn Obergefell" session Wednesday night will be a public event. (Breccan F. Thies goes deeper on this in The Federalist.)
And it is an important forum to assess live debates still happening on the right and in the Trump administration. While there is broad agreement in the "national conservative" space on issues like immigration — they support more restrictions, on the off-chance you assumed otherwise — there are still divisions on issues like tech and foreign policy that will be hashed out at this year's gathering.
Anna Wellisz, president of the Edmund Burke Foundation that puts on the conference, said there are "bright eyed" conservatives who are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence and "very pro tech," while others are more concerned about "what technology will do to that life, what it will do to families, to children, to surveillance."
On the tech front, keep an eye on the "AI and the American soul" breakout session Tuesday morning; and pay attention to the "America and the Israel-Iran War" breakout session Tuesday afternoon, where bubbling differences on Israel policy (which I wrote about recently) could be on display.
This year's big speakers include Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Wellisz said that the conference has been influential over the past several years because it has been a forum for debate on the political right, defining what it means to be a national conservative.
"It's simply conservatism — and national, because conservatism is attached to a place, a people," Wellisz told me. "It's not a planetary movement, not a galactic movement. It's not a starship enterprise and a federation. It's a nation, a place, a place you love, whose culture you take your own, whose language you understand, whose history speaks to you."
Vice President Vance, as a Senate candidate in 2021, gave a NatCon speech on how "the universities are the enemy," and other speakers in 2024 focused on taxing university endowments and getting red-state governors to put more pressure on trustees. Now, the Trump administration is aggressively cracking down on universities, and the president signed a bill that raises taxes on university endowments.
"Usually you don't get that chance in your career to see something go from its intellection formation to practice. Sometimes you do, but it's over like, 20 years," Bovard said. "We've seen it over like, five years."
The national conservatism statement of principles first released a few years ago — whose signatories includeTurning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, investor Peter Thiel and many others — endorses restrictions on immigration; the national government intervening "energetically to restore order" in states where "lawnessness, immorality, and dissolution reign"; promotion of the Bible in public life; and free enterprise with the caveat that "the free market cannot be absolute."
The popularity and influence of national conservatism have rocked thinkers and institutions that dominated the right in the pre-Trump era of politics.
As something of an answer to national conservatism, free-market evangelists put out a Freedom Conservatism statement of principles that stressed "liberty" and greater individual choice — with signatories including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Karl Rove, Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, and "The View's" Alyssa Farah Griffin — and held a conference earlier this year.
Avik Roy, a main crafter of the Freedom Conservatism statement of principles, was motivated in part by wanting to expose young people to those classical principles they might not be seeing — noting a 17-year-old now was 7 when Trump first ran for president.
If you believe in freedom as a principle, Roy said, "that means that you have on a fundamental level, a confidence that people, when left to their own devices, will do the right thing and will do things, will achieve great things. And If you subvert or subordinate freedom to other goals, what you're basically saying is that you don't trust people to live their lives the way they want to."
After attending the conference in 2021, columnist David Brooks (no relation to me) wrote in The Atlantic that NatCon gave him the "sinking sensation" that NatCon was "the future of the Republican Party."
Bovard was heavily featured in the introduction to that piece, saying she had "absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group."
"The most striking thing to me about it was that he sort of created, or tried to portray me as being manipulated or something," Bovard said.
"I just think he got it completely wrong. I was reflecting a lot of what the younger conservatives were feeling at the time," she added.
And that is why I'll aim to stop by NatCon — if the congressional schedule allows — to see what they're feeling now.
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