The National Conservatism Conference is hosting “NatCon 3, a gathering of “national conservatives.” I have written about national conservatives and their critics here, here, and here, for example.
Earlier this year, a group of distinguished public intellectuals issued this statement of National Conservative principles. The group includes a few subscribers to this blog (or “newsletter,” to use the Substack lingo). It also includes Balázs Orbán, the political director for Hungary’s controversial prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
The Statement elicited “dismay” from a group consisting of “critics of contemporary liberalism from both Left and Right.” The group includes some Americans, but mostly Europeans. The “open letter” in which this group sets forth its objections is here.
Much of what the National Conservative’s Statement includes should not be controversial for American conservatives. For example:
We wish to see a world of independent nations.
We oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies.
We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers.
We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values.
We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom.
We believe in the rule of law. . . .In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance.
We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. . . But the free market cannot be absolute.
We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy.
We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race.
However, other statements will raise concerns among many conservatives. For example, before declaring their desire for a world of independent nations, the authors explain:
We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.
Shortly thereafter, they add that “each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.”
Nearly everyone would agree, I hope, that each nation capable of self-government has the right to chart its own course in accordance with its own heritages without being invaded or sanctioned. But this doesn’t mean that nations should reject sound universal principles that are preferable to aspects of their national tradition. Nor does it mean that those who believe in sound universal principles should resist advocating them universally.
As Peter Berkowitz says, the national conservatives are “mischaracteriz[ing] a genuine problem, which is not universal principles but a particular progressive interpretation of their substance and reach.” Among the sound principles worthy of universal advocacy (but not imposition) are these that Berkowtiz cites: “That all human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with unalienable rights, that government’s chief purpose is to secure basic rights and fundamental freedoms, and that just government power derives from the consent of the governed.”
Another sentence in the Statement that concerns me is this:
Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.
Berkowitz contends that, as applied to the U.S., this directive is inconsistent with the National Conservatives’ insistence that a nation should “chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.” He writes:
Some Christian-majority nations. . .believe that Christianity requires a wall of separation between church and state to protect religious liberty. In some Christian-majority nations, this belief draws sustenance from biblical teachings about the dignity of the individual, the imperfections of humanity, the corrupting effects of power, the impossibility of coercing genuine faith, and the duty to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
One such Christian-majority nation is the U.S. While affirming that religious faith is essential to the well-being of a free people, the American founders generally thought – along with the weight of religious authorities in America at the time – that only a Christianity that neither sought nor exercised political power could remain true to Jesus’ teaching.
I’m less certain than Berkowitz that our American heritage, viewed as a whole, is inconsistent with the view that our public life should be rooted in Christianity. I’ll leave that question to the historians.
But whatever they might conclude, I favor a nation in which neither Christianity nor any other religion seeks to exercise political power or is declared the root of public life.
A third, and related, objection to the National Conservative’s Statement centers around its version of federalism. The authors say:
We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
I’m troubled by the idea of whoever happens to be in charge of the national government at a given moment intervening energetically in state or local affairs to curb what he or she deems “immorality.” As the critics who signed the “open letter” put it: “We cannot outsource our political prudence solely to the nation-state.”
I’d like to think that one can be a nationalist and still agree with that sentiment, insofar as it contemplates a robust role for subdivisions of the national state (rather than international bodies).
Well all I know is that since the beginning and to today every law signed by the president is dated "in the year of our Lord..."