hazony, yoram

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MERRI OK

NEW RT

pt 2

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Welcome to the Court of History. I'm Sydney Blumenthal. I'm here with my

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uh co-host Sean w alen of Princeton. We are here on Legal AF, subscribe to Legal

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AF. We are um joined by Laura Field, the author of Furious Minds, the making of

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the Maga New Right, discussing not simply the philosophical in um ideas

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behind Trump and Trumpism and the infrastructure, but their real influences

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AN 12 25

Brookings Institution nonresident fellow and philosopher Laura Field says a 77-year-old book can explain the MAGA new right, and much of it deals with the rejection of truth.

Author Richard Weaver wrote a book in 1948 that describes the basic contours of the New Right’s closed philosophical approach. Field said you can hear the book’s title, “Ideas Have Consequences,” as a popular catchphrase among conservatives.

Field said Weaver explored a philosophical concept called nominalism, which involves the “rejection of universal concepts and absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths.” Nominalism believes that there is no universal objective moral reality, and “it does not exist as an expression of the divine,” said Field.

By challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, Weaver said modern man had “succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.”

“In my research on the MAGA New Right and in the countless hours I’ve spent in conservative academic circles, I’ve heard this Weaver-esque refrain again and again,” said Field. “It is hard to think of a single significant thinker of the MAGA New Right who would disagree with his assessment of the ways in which modern thought is inherently corrosive or who would dissent from his insistence that we must restore some kind of transcendental moral orthodoxy to our politics.”

But when Weaver argued that modern ideas are evil, Field said “he helped legitimate the repression of anyone who thinks about truth differently.”

“When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”

Israeli political theorist and conservatism advocate Yoram Hazony promotes in the United States, that “the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religionof woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.”

“These ideas, to [Hazony], justify limiting immigration as a way to maintain cultural cohesion,” said Field.

Similarly, Field argues that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance seek “to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share [their] vision.”

:{:{“It is not the model that America’s founders aspired to,” said Field. “That country is a liberal democracy, and one of its major aspirations — and sometimes its achievement — is that it allows people who have different orientations and belief systems to live together in relative peace and freedom. That is the vision for our country that we must strive to achieve.”}:

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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10 25

the Princeton Tory* is a magazine of conservative political thought written and published by Princeton University students. Founded in 1984 by Yoram Hazony, the magazine has played a role in various controversies, including a national debate about white privilege. Notable alumni associated with the magazine include United States Senator Ted Cruz, Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and the current United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Four editors have gone on to be Rhodes Scholars.

History

Founding

In the early 1980s, there were several failed efforts to create a magazine with a conservative viewpoint at Princeton University, including the Madison Report, which had a circulation of 2,500 but folded due to financial difficulties.^[1] In October 1984, a group of students including Yoram Hazony and Amy Bix, began publishing the Princeton Tory, planning for six issues in the initial year. They sought to publish a "thinking journal" and provide a forum for moderate and conservative viewpoints on a campus that was in their view dominated by left-wing politics. Hazony attributed the failure of the previous attempts at conservative publications to their tendency for sensationalism and mud-slinging. In contrast, the Tory was founded to highlight cogent argumentation with early issues addressing topics such as religion in politics, the composition of the Supreme Court, and the university's endorsement of a nuclear freeze.^[2]

"Pen over the sledgehammer"

In 1986, the Tory found itself in disagreement with future noted conservative Dinesh D'Souza. At Dartmouth College, student staff members of the conservative Dartmouth Review had taken sledgehammers to a shanty town set up by protesters calling for divestment from South Africa over its Apartheid policies.^[3] D'Souza, a Dartmouth alumnus, in arguing that Princeton would not see similar political violence, was quoted in the Daily Princetonian as saying, "At Dartmouth there is a healthy activism on both the left and the right. At Princeton, politics masquerades as fashion. There are more conservatives who are more confident in their actions at Dartmouth. At Princeton, you only have the Tory, which is too cerebral to be considered."^[4] This critique promoted a response from Tory publisher Dan Polisar: "D'Souza criticized the Tory for being 'too cerebral.' If that means that we do not favor using sledgehammers as a tool for political debate, then we do not object. We would rather demonstrate that the problems symbolized by shanties are exacerbated by divestment, as we did in our October issue, than to stage an attack on the symbols themselves... Campus conservatives are proud of this restraint, and should receive credit, not blame, for choosing the pen over the sledgehammer."^[5]

Controversies

Tal Fortgang and "White Privilege"

In April 2014, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang penned an essay in the Tory entitled, "Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege." Fortgang wrote the essay in response to being told by a classmate, after expressing his views on welfare and the national debt, to "check his privilege." He stated, "The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laserlike at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung."^[6] The essay was picked up by *Time* magazine,^[7] led to an appearance on Fox News^[8] and caused a firestorm of criticism from the left and support from the right.^{[9][10][11][12}]

Fortgang made use of his own family's history, with a grandfather exiled to Siberia, a grandmother sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a great-grandmother and five great-aunts and uncles who were shot in an open grave outside their hometown. His grandfather and father built a wicker basket business and emphasized education. Fortgang wrote, "While I haven't done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone has sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life, but that is a legacy I am proud of. I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing."^[13]

Wendy Kopp and Teach for America

Wendy Kopp, the founder of noted educational non-profit Teach for America, has come under some criticism for having been a staff writer for the Tory while a student. Corey Robin, a fellow member of the Princeton class of 1989, wrote critically of her association with a paper committed, in his view, to the selfishness of capitalism, and some of whose founders, Hazony and Polisar, he describes as "hardcore Zionists" with "storied if peculiar careers on the Israeli right."^[14][15]

Notable alumni

Lawrence Otis Graham, Class of 1985. Author, "Member of the Club", ISBN 0060184124
Yoram Hazony, Class of 1986. Founder of the Shalem Center.
Wendy Kopp, Class of 1989. Founder, Teach for America.^[16]
Ted Cruz, Class of 1992. United States Senator from Texas,^[16] presidential candidate.
Danielle Allen, Class of 1993. Harvard political scientist, Marshall scholar.^[17]
Pete Hegseth, Class of 2003. Secretary of Defense, United States Senate candidate, Executive Director of Vets for Freedom, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America.

References

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RWW 9 24

*Analysis

Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has spent his short career in politics soaking in and promoting anti-democratic ideas. It is terrifying that he could become vice president to Donald Trump, the oldest presidential nominee in history, who is displaying his own increasingly aggressive dictatorial intentions. Americans’ freedom and our future as a democratic society are at stake.

Vance’s leap into the U.S. Senate in his first run for elected office was funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has openly expressed his contempt for democracy. Over the past few years, Vance has aligned himself with different strains of the “illiberal” right, including Christian nationalism, right-wing Catholic integralism, “National Conservatism,” anti-immigrant nativism, and, of course, “America first” Trumpism.

While these movements and their leaders have different underlying motivations and priorities, they share a willingness—or eagerness—to sacrifice democracy and Americans’ freedom in order to impose “traditional” values and their vision of “order” and an ideal society on all Americans. For some, that vision goes back centuries, well before America’s founding. Some openly call for an American Caesar.

Vance’s anti-feministand anti-LGBTQ allies “aim to control women’s reproductive choices and individual freedoms concerning gender, sexuality, and identity,” among other things, as journalist Molly Olmstead has noted.

Like the authors of Project 2025, the policy roadmap for a second Trump term, right-wing factions aligned with Vance have abandoned a libertarian distrust for government power in favor of an intention to use power aggressively to reshape our country. Vance has been clearon this front, saying when it comes to the exercise of our power.”

VID]

Vance “comes from an authoritarian, reactionary tradition that explicitly rejects conservatism, liberalism, and democracy,” writes political analyst Matthew Sheffield, formerly a conservative activist. “Trump wants absolute power, and Vance wants him to have it to destroy what he believes to be a decadent and corrupt society.”

* Vance has repeatedly spoken at “National Conservatism” conferences; the movement’s statement of principles declares that “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.”

Vance described his outlook in a far-right podcast appearance in 2022, recounted by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:

Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s banson certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.

Before Vance decided to run for office, he called Trump “reprehensible” and wondered whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” But when Vance became a candidate in the MAGA Republican Party, he flipped so hard that former Trump aide Steve Bannon suggested that Vance could be, as a reporter paraphrased, “St Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could.”

J.D. Vance vs. Democracy and Freedom

Vance has echoed hard-right calls for “regime change” and said it is necessary to “get pretty wild, pretty far our there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Vance expressed a desire to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes” and ignore the Supreme Court if it objects.

Vance says if he were vice president in 2020, he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence refused to do: Vance would have abused his power, ignored the Constitution, and refused to accept the electors certified by states that Trump was contesting.

* Vance defends the illegal “fake electors” scheme that Trump strategists used to try to override the will of the voters. Vance says Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were addressing a “very legitimate grievance” and says “I can’t help but roll my eyes” at the idea that Trump threatens democracy. “I don’t believe this is about some deep principle,” he says. “This is about power.”

In a

VID]at the National Conservatism conference in 2021, Vance said the movement has to “aggressively attack the universities in this country,” claiming that they “transmit deceit and lies” rather than “knowledge and truth.” Vance has praised Hungary’s dictatorial leader Viktor Orban for his “smart decisions” in seizing control of universities. Trump’s own Agenda 47 calls for seizing the endowments of top universities to fund an anti-wokeness online academy.

At this year’s National Conservatism conference, Vance said that the American nation is not an idea but “a people with a common history,” and he claimed that immigration has made western societies “poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” a preview of his recent willingness to spread dangerous lies about Haitian immigrants for his own political gain—despite the very clear harm it has brought to the community of Springfield, Ohio.

While Vance as VP candidate has adopted Trump’s deliberately muddled stance on access to abortion, his own opinion has been that abortion should be banned without exceptions for cases of rape and incest. In 2022 he called for a “federal response” to prevent women living in states where abortion has been banned from traveling to states where abortion remains legal. Last year he signed a letter urging the Justice Department to ban the mailing of abortion medicine, part of Project 2025’s agenda.

Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which was passed to protect legal recognition for same-sex couple’s marriages if the MAGA Supreme Court justices reverse the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling as religious-right groups are urging them to do. Vance has defended far-right “groomer” smears. He introduced legislation that would ban higher education institutions from teaching about gender-affirming care and ban any federally subsidized insurance plans from covering it.

Vance is aligned with Christian nationalists who seek to dismantle separation of church and state. Vance is scheduled to join dominionist New Apostolic Reformation figure Lance Wallnau’s “Courage Tour” in Pennsylvania Sept. 28. In 2022, Vance told Christian-right radio host Eric Metaxas that “one of the great evils of modern liberalism is this pretense of neutrality” on religion, claiming that “if you can’t say a prayer before a public school session, then you’re not neutral, you’re explicitly anti-Christian.” Vance said the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can’t talk about Jesus in a public school.”

Birds of a Feather: Vance’s Ideological Connections

Vance has spoken at National Conservatism conferences and events organized by “post-liberal” thinkers—who want to abandon liberal democracy—and advocates for integralism—a sort of right-wing Catholic version of Christian dominionism. At a 2023 conference at Catholic University, Vance identified as “a member of the post-liberal right.” Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism was reportedly assisted by priests connected to Opus Dei, which has invested decades in building political power among and for right-wing Catholics in Washington, D.C.

Journalists and scholars like Laura Field have published quite a few detailed looks into Vance’s ideological allies, many of which are linked to in this post. Here are brief descriptions of just a few of the many far-right and antidemocratic intellectuals and institutions that Vance is associated with:

Curtis Yarvin is a self-described monarchist and founder of a school of thought called “neoreactionism.” He argues that a visionary leader should seize power and dismantle the current regime. When Vance was describing his plan to fire federal employees and defy the Supreme Court, he acknowledged Yarvin’s influence, saying, “So, there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things.” Vance calls Yarvin a friend; both have benefited from Peter Thiel’s support.

Patrick Deneen is a Notre Dame professor who has written books about the failure of liberal democracy and the need for “Regime Change,” the title of his latest book. To Deneen and his fellow “post-liberal” Catholic thinkers, “this means replacing the people and institutions that dominate America’s cultural, economic, and political life with a new elite willing to eschew liberal norms in service of supposedly higher ideals,” writes scholar Damon Linker. In other words, Deneen wants to put the power to govern in the hands of a conservative aristocracy. In 2023, Vance attended a speech by Deneen, praised his book, and “wrapped him in an enthusiastic hug,” Politico reported.

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard University professor and former Supreme Court clerk who promotes a form of integralism, which he calls “common good Constitutionalism.” He says it “does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” That means the government wielding authority “against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them” and changing laws around “free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters.” Journalist Sarah Jones notes, “integralism imagines a future when the state may punish the baptized for violations of ecclesiastical law”—a frighteningly far cry from the American principle of church-state separation. Vance appeared at a conference with Deneen and Vermuele at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, in 2022.

Rod Dreheris a blogger, author, and right-wing culture-warrior who in recent years moved further to the right and actually moved to Hungary where he functions as a sort of international p.r. agent for Orban’s authoritarian and Christian nationalist government. Dreher is a friend of Vance; in an article for a Hungarian conservative publication this summer, he compared Vance to a young Orban and said Vance “embodies” Trumpism.

* Yoram Hazonychairs the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was created in 2019 to promote National Conservatism. Vance has regularly spoken at its conferences. Its statement of principles declares, “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.” When journalist Katherine Stewart asked about minorities in such a model being stuck with an outsider status, Hazony said, “That simply is reality,” adding that minorities would not get the same treatment as the majority, but “should be grateful for the fact that you’re not persecuted as minorities often have been in history.”

Claremont Instituteis a think tank that ramped up its attacks on multiculturalism in advance of the 2020 election; the New York Times has called it a “nerve center of the American right.” Claremont is home to Michael Anton, who called the 2016 presidential election “the flight 93 election”—referring to the flight hijacked during the 9/11 attacks in which passengers stormed the cockpit. Anton’s book called for a stop to the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for or experience in liberty.” He has suggested that an American Caesar is inevitable.

Claremont was also a center of pro-Trump activity after the 2020 election. Claremont lawyer John Eastman has defended his involvement in Trump’s efforts to stay in power by saying Trump’s presidency was necessary to save America from a left bent on its destruction. Politico reports that “Vance is “closely tied to Claremont circles,

speaking at their events and appearing alongside their scholars.”

Two Futures: Freedom or Fascism?

Long before Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate, there was a mountain of evidence that Trump’s election would threaten Americans’ freedom and undermine democracy: Trump’s own threats to jail his political opponents, go after universities and media outlets he doesn’t like, and carry out vast police state operations against immigrants; Project 2025 plans hatched by former Trump officials to give him virtually unchecked power; and the MAGA Supreme Court justices preemptively telling Trump he would not be held accountable for crimes committed as president.

Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance—cheered by “post-liberal” and anti-democratic leaders—is confirmation that the authoritarian threat to freedom and democracy is an urgent issue in this year’s presidential election—and that the threat will continue regardless of the outcome.

Tags: Adrian Vermeule Donald Trump J.D. Vance John Eastman Michael Anton Patrick Deneen Rod Dreher Authoritarianism Christian Nationalism Election 2025 MAGA National Conservatism Claremont Institute

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/postliberalism/

salon kat j

...For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported, this year'sNatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called forblacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments; and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)...

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no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Viktor Orbán in 2014, Wikimedia Commons

Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College — a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."