In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher built a new conservatism around markets and freedom. Today, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and a motley group of Western politicians have overturned that orthodoxy and erected in its place a statist and anti-woke conservatism that puts national sovereignty before the individual. Increasingly, conservative nationalists are part of a global movement with their own networks of thinkers and leaders united by a common ideology. They feel that conservatism belongs to them now, and they may be right.
Despite its name, national conservatism cannot differ more from the ideas of Reagan and Thatcher. Instead of being skeptical of “big government,” national conservatives think that ordinary people are currently besieged by impersonal global forces and that the state is their savior. Unlike Reagan and Thatcher, they abhor the pooling of sovereignty in multilateral organizations, suspect free markets of being rigged by elites, and are hostile to immigration. They despise pluralism; above all, the multicultural type. Their obsession is to dismantle institutions that they consider contaminated by wokism and globalism.
Instead of a luminous belief in progress, the national conservatives are overcome by declinism. William Buckley, an old-school thinker, once joked that “a conservative is someone who stands up to history and yells at it to stop.” By comparison, national conservatives are revolutionaries. They see the West not as a radiant city perched on a hill, but as Rome before the fall: decadent, depraved, and on the verge of collapsing in the midst of a barbarian invasion. Not content with resisting progress, they also want to destroy classical liberalism.
Some hope that all this will subside. The National Conservatives are too incoherent to constitute a threat, they say. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni supports Ukraine; Orbán has a soft spot for Russia. The Polish Law and Justice party (PIS) is anti-homosexual; In France, Marine Le Pen is permissive. Furthermore, the obsession with national sovereignty would make people worse off if trade collapses, economic growth stagnates, and civil rights are curtailed. Voters will undoubtedly choose to restore the world created by liberalism.
Such a vision shows unforgivable complacency. National conservatism is the politics of complaint: if policies lead to bad results, its leaders will blame globalists and immigrants; and they will argue that this only shows how badly things are going wrong in the world. For all their contradictions, national conservatives have been able to unite around their hostility toward common enemies, including immigrants (especially Muslims), globalists, and all their supposed accomplices. The US elections are nine months away and Trump is already undermining NATO.
The National Conservatives deserve to be taken seriously also because of their electoral expectations. Trump leads the polls in the United States. The far right is expected to do well in the European parliamentary elections in June. In Germany, in December, the far-right Alternative for Germany reached a record percentage of 23% in the polls. In the United Kingdom, anticipating the electoral defeat of Rishi Sunak, the vocally pro-Brexit and anti-immigration Conservatives are already scheming to take control of the party. In 2027, Le Pen could well become president of France.
And the national conservatives matter because, when they manage to win the elections, everything changes. With their desire to take over state institutions, including the courts, universities and the independent press, they consolidate their control over power. This is what Orbán’s Fidesz party has done in Hungary. In the United States, Trump has been explicit about his autocratic intentions. The people who work for him have drawn up policy documents that lay out a program to control the federal bureaucracy. Once institutions are weakened, it can be difficult to restore them. In Poland, the PIS had the same program before being ousted from power after last year’s elections. The center-right coalition that defeated him is now struggling to assert its control.
Given all this, how should traditional conservatives and classical liberals confront national conservatism? One answer is to take people’s legitimate complaints seriously. In many Western countries, citizens perceive illegal immigration as a source of disorder and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will become poorer than them. They are distressed about losing their jobs because of new technologies. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been taken over by hostile, illiberal and leftist elites. They see that globalists have prospered in recent decades as members of a selfish and arrogant caste that likes to believe that their rise is the product of meritocracy when, in reality, their success has been inherited.
These complaints have some merit, and belittling them only confirms how out of touch with reality the elites are. Instead, old-fashioned conservatives and liberals need policies that address them. Legal migration is easier if illegal migration is stopped. Restrictive planning rules exclude young people from the housing market. We must put an end to closed businesses. To have the truly open society they claim to aspire to, liberals must push for elite intellectual institutions (major corporations, newspapers, and universities) to embody the principles of liberalism rather than succumb to censorship and groupthink. As much as the illiberal left and right are mortal enemies, their high-voltage disputes over woke support each other.
To lessen national conservative fears that people’s way of life is threatened, liberals also have to vindicate some of their opponents’ ideas. Instead of engaging in ethical posturing, they should recognize that the left can also be illiberal. Should they be too squeamish about defending principles like free speech and individual rights against the excesses of the left, liberals will fatally undermine their own ability to defend them against the right. Instead of ceding the power of national myths and symbols to political opportunists, liberals must overcome their shame at patriotism, the natural love of country.
The great strength of liberalism is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements dismantled the idea that some people were more important than others. Socialist arguments about justice and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about freedom and efficiency led to freer markets and limits on state power. Liberalism can also adapt to national conservatism. Right now, it’s lagging behind.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix