Common Objects of Love or of Fear?

Hope and hostility at NatCon 4

A note to readers: I’m still tinkering a bit with the format and schedule of this Substack, but my plan at this point is to do a weekly full email (with all the “In the Pipeline,” “On the Bookshelf,” etc. features) on Monday or Tuesday, and then a second set of reflections, varying widely in length, on Thursday or Friday.

Last week, I had the honor to attend my sixth National Conservatism conference (four in the US, two in Europe). That record might suggest an element of fanboyism, but in fact, I’ve had my fair share of worries or disagreements throughout. NatCon 4 was no exception, and although I enjoyed and profited greatly from many of the sessions, I wanted to reflect this week on some of the deep unresolved tensions on display.

Optimism or Pessimism?

When you’re trying to mobilize a political movement, there’s always a conundrum. On the one hand, nobody wants to be a loser, so you want to be able to message to your people that they’re on the winning team, that their efforts are succeeding and their enemies are in terrified flight, or soon will be. On the other hand, you’ve got to keep people engaged and not complacent, so you want to be able to keep the urgency of by stressing that your enemies are strong, powerful, and closing in for the kill; that only concerted, unified action here and now can keep the movement alive. So, which is it gonna be? “We’ve got them on the run, let’s deal the final killer blow”? or “They’ve got us surrounded, only courage can save us now”?

Ideally, you find some way of saying both. This might be as simple as saying, “We’re winning on A, B, and C fronts; but meanwhile, we’ve been losing on X, Y, and Z fronts. Let’s take courage from the former and use that courage to redouble our efforts on the latter.” That can certainly be a fully rational answer in principle. Or you might try and frame it as a battle vs. war matter: “We’ve been focusing all of our attention on this particular point, and are routing our enemies in our own sector thanks to your courage and ferocity; but meanwhile, our allies, who are weaker and wimpier, have been getting obliterated, and so things are looking bad for us on the strategic front.” Or, slightly differently, it might be a matter of part vs. whole: “we have successfully established our faction as the leading faction within our coalition; but meanwhile, our coalition as a whole has been getting its lunch eaten by the Left.”

All of these strategies were, in one way or another, on display in some of the key plenary addresses at NatCon 4. The National Conservative Conference wanted to convince its attendees that all the momentum was with them, that they were the future of the conservative movement, and that since its inception five years ago, the movement had scored an impressive list of successes. On the other hand, many speakers could not resist the apocalyptic rhetoric that is the stock-in-trade of both parties these days. Indeed, how could they? As James Davison Hunter observes in Democracy and Solidarity, “Identity groups become so deeply attached to their own impotence, exclusion, and subordination because they provide the premises upon which the group’s existence depends. So even while the group seeks to avenge injury, it reaffirms injury as the foundation of its existence; even while it seeks to resist its subordination, it reinforces its subordination as the basis of its identity.”

Thus it was that however much several of the key speakers sought to strike a positive, upbeat note, the rhetoric kept being pulled back in a darker direction. Thus, in the opening session, we were admonished, “We’re facing a cultural revolution from neo-Marxists…the degree to which it’s succeeding is astonishing….Our enemies—people who want to make sure we don’t have any foothold in power—have succeeded far more than we have.”* This, however, could be offset by the triumphalism that at least the NatCons had succeeded in dethroning the discredited establishment Republicans—no empty boast after the selection of J.D. Vance, a mainstay of the conference, as Trump’s running mate.

Common Objects of Love or Common Objects of Fear?

While all of the plenary speakers seemed to agree that it was better for conservatives to be united than divided (indeed, who could disagree with that?), they could not seem to agree on what should unite them. Was it common objects of love or common objects of fear? Josh Hawley gave a wonderful keynote address on the first night of the conference that began with Augustine’s idea of a nation as united by common objects of love, and called for a kind of “Christian nationalism” that would return to this foundation of shared love of God, homeland, family (while explicitly repudiating the more noxious forms of “Christian nationalism”). “Let us not be controlled by fear,” he exhorted. And James Orr, on the final night of the conference, declared, “The way we’re going to win is not by hating them back, but by loving what is ours more fiercely than ever.” This called to mind Giorgia Meloni’s quotation, at the first NatCon Europe conference, of one of my favorite passages from The Lord of the Rings: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” By this account, conservatives are only warriors per accidens: fundamentally, we rally around the goods we all love, and fight only when those goods are under threat.

But there was a very different vision also on offer, one that acknowledged, tacitly or explicitly, that we did not all agree about what it is we were seeking to conserve, but that this didn’t really matter; there will be plenty of time to argue about that later in the gulag. Thus we were told in the opening session that we need to unite now because “the woke left wants to unite us all in prison….Against this adversary, a divided, hyphenated conservatism cannot stand.” Such speakers tacitly acknowledged that the conference encompassed a disorienting kaleidoscope of inconsistent viewpoints and values, but hoped that if we could all be herded together by common objects of fear, we might make up a critical mass to get something done.

Indeed, so urgent was it to fight back that we must not be too squeamish about the means of our fighting. The Left had decided already that this was going to be total war, and we must embrace it: “There are no more Rubicons to cross; there are no more norms to uphold.” Sure, we should care about the Constitution, but “the Right must be prepared to fight on the Left’s absolute terms for now” if there’s going to be any constitutional order left to defend. Did this mean adopting a no-holds-barred posture of mutual assured destruction? Perhaps, but hey, “as long as amoral adversaries embrace lying, treachery, and terror as legitimate partisan tactics, it sure beats unilateral assured destruction.”

But does it, really?

Thought or Action?

Related to the point above, I discerned a repeated tension on the question of just what sorts of conservatives we should be: were we ideas people, or just activists? To be sure, conservatives have a deserved reputation for being tweedy eggheads. The Left, we are often told, keeps winning because they have an organized ground game; we, however, float around at 35,000 feet hosting book clubs on Tocqueville and Burke. While the conference was being organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which had previously sought to brand itself as a place of big ideas (indeed, much of the movement’s momentum derived from Hazony’s impressive recent works of political theory, The Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism: A Rediscovery), there seemed to be a sense that the time for thought was over, and the time for action was at hand: “We won’t defeat them by spouting abstract principles or articulating a rich vision of conservatism; we have to fight.” We were told that the movement had been bogged down with too many academic debates and it was time for clarity, unity, and action; indeed, Protestant NatCons were specifically charged with the sin of being overly consumed with abstruse theoretical debates.

On the face of it, these seem like reasonable charges. It really is the case that we conservatives spend way too much time talking about our fine-grained differences from one another and way too little time actually getting to work to move the needle on policies we can all agree with. Indeed, this is part of the natural maturation curve of a movement: begin by hosting salons and open-ended conversations to hash out ideas, but eventually, start hammering out some action items. So I do not necessarily disagree. That said, there was something a little off in these exhortations to “stop arguing and get in line.” (Indeed, given that I can testify from personal experience that the main arguments among Protestant NatCons have been whether to tolerate overt racism in the movement, I’d like to suggest that maybe such “theoretical arguments” have their place!) I found my sense of unease put into words the final night by Rusty Reno, in his award speech for Polish conservative intellectual Ryzsard Legutko, where he argued that an emphasis on the priority of thought over action is a hallmark of conservatism; it is what sets us apart from the Left. Reno quoted Legutko as saying that the “greatest error of the modern world” was summed up in Marx’s statement, “philosophers have merely sought to interpret the world; we mean to change it.” “We serve the truth, we do not use it,” Reno went on. “That is the difference between us and the Left.” Legutko himself, in his acceptance speech, insisted, “We must not underestimate the power of logos.” Indeed.

To be clear, there is no need to pit thought and action against one another per se. The breakout panels I attended were full of extremely smart, thoughtful people making learned arguments ordered toward very practical policy outcomes. But too many of the exhortations from the main stage, in my view, undermined these efforts, focusing instead on generating heat rather than light. Of course, perhaps that is just how political movements work: demagogic energy to mobilize the foot-soldiers, while sober-minded general staff confer quietly in the side-rooms. Fair enough; but the general staff must always beware of the possibility that the fired-up troops will choose another leader.

Which God are We Conserving?

While the conference seemed united in the refreshing awareness that politics today is become a war of rival religions, they did not seem entirely united on which religion we were fighting for—or if that mattered. This, of course, relates to the previous questions: if what unites us is essentially a common enemy, then we can united around a least-common denominator; but if what unites us is a common love, we’d better make sure it’s the right one. If it is action, not thought, that is called for, there’s no sense worrying about theological debates; but if conservatism is ultimately committed to a defense of the order of reality, well then, we will have to get down to metaphysics and theology before we can get very far.

A consistent theme of talks I went to was the necessity, indeed the inevitability, of some kind of public religion. I highlighted in last week’s Substack the panel I chaired on this, but it was also a key theme from the main stage. Every polity worships some God, inscribes some kind of Ten Commandments in its law, and celebrates some kind of liturgical calendar, as our recently-concluded rainbow festival demonstrates. National conservatism, however, seemed a bit divided on whether it sufficed for every culture to return to protecting and honoring its traditional religion—the ashes of its fathers and the temples of its gods—or whether some traditional religions were, you know, true, and others were just plain false. Thus, while Al Mohler declared in a special plenary session, “Any conservative tradition not rooted in ontology will not last long,” and “I do not want to confuse Christian theology with some vague concept of nationalism,” other speakers from India invited us to join them in celebrating the “cultural conservatism” of their own explicitly Hindu nationalism—one that has been none too kind toward Christians in recent years.

Now, there is no question that conservatives of different principles, different communities, and even different religions can in principle make temporary common cause against the universal acid of modern progressivism that seeks to dissolve all principles, communities, and religions beyond expressive individualism. But such co-belligerency can only ever be temporary and ad hoc, and must be gone into with eyes wide open. If we lose sight of that fact, then any political victory we might be fortunate enough to win will prove Pyrrhic—as this week’s Republican National Convention has forcefully demonstrated.

*attentive readers may notice that I have omitted attributions for some quotations—specifically, any that might be considered controversial or unflattering. I have done this out of respect for my long friendship with some of the key leaders of the conference. (For the record, none of the quotes were by J.D. Vance, who is pictured at the top just because his was the best NatCon picture I could find online!)