After Nationalism: What Next for American Conservatism?

This is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks given at a recent Faith and Law forum held in Washington DC.

In February of 2017 I attended a book launch in New York City for the release of conservative journalist Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option. The event featured not only Dreher, but also Rusty Reno of First Things and the New York Times’s Ross Douthat. It was jointly sponsored by both Reno’s magazine and The American Conservative, where Dreher at that time served as an editor and did most of his writing.

In the years since that event, Dreher and Reno have both become closely linked with the National Conservative movement which has been primarily led by the Jewish biblical scholar Yoram Hazony. Both Dreher and Reno have spoken at NatCon events. Additionally, Dreher serves as a visiting fellow with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank closely associated with Hungarian Prime Minister and nationalist conservative figurehead Victor Orban. Reno, meanwhile, joined Hazony in endorsing The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe, which was published by Idaho pastor and provocateur Douglas Wilson’s Canon Press, and serves as the most developed theoretical text defining Christian nationalism in particular.

It is not hard to see some foreshadowing for their future turn to national conservatism in Dreher and Reno’s work even in 2017. The Benedict Option begins with the presupposition that progressive liberal western culture is hostile to Christian faith, and that western Christians will need to adopt new strategies of cultural engagement to survive the coming storm. Reno had written a similar book at the same time, though more positively framed. His book was Resurrecting the Idea of Christian Society, a book whose title echoes T. S. Eliot’s essay on “The Idea of Christian Society,” whose critique of liberalism in many ways anticipated more recent critiques from the American New Right.

In his follow up book, Return of the Strong Gods, published in 2021, Reno defined what he called the “post-war consensus,” which was a bloodless sort of global order primarily organized around free trade and the ascent of the managerial class, which facilitated the global economic system. The goal of this consensus was to build a post-war social order that would make something like the horrors of World War II highly unlikely, if not impossible, to ever recur. Reno’s book in particular, and especially his notion of the “post-war consensus,” has become a key text in New Right critiques of our current cultural and political moment.

In fairness to both Reno and Dreher, Reno has not himself deployed the theme of the post-war consensus in the way others have since his book came out, and Dreher has opposed the turn toward ethno-nationalism on the right, sometimes at considerable personal cost to himself. This is perhaps most clearly seen when he provided further proof of Alastair Roberts’s claims that Wolfe’s podcast cohost Thomas Achord was maintaining a variety of pseudonymous social media accounts where he routinely posted racist and misogynistic content. It would be unjust to both men and especially to Dreher to lazily equate them with a figure like Wolfe. Even so, both men have been fellow travelers with the nationalist right as a part of their rejection of Reaganite conservatism.

Here is what’s interesting about that 2017 evening in Manhattan, however: There were other speakers and groups represented there that you might not expect, looking back on it from the vantage point of 2026. The panel responding to Dreher’s book also included former Obama administration faith outreach director Michael Wear, who now runs an organization called the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Alongside Wear on the panel was Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Rivers, who also has served as the Executive Director and Senior Fellow for Social Science and Policy of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies at Harvard.

There was another panelist as well: Randall Gauger, who served as a pastor in the community that published the magazine which served as the evening’s third sponsor, alongside First Things and The American Conservative: a magazine called Plough which is published by a community of non-violent Christian socialists who live from a common purse and take lifelong vows of pacifism, poverty, and obedience as part of their common life as Christians. (Disclosure: I serve as a contributing editor with Plough.)

The question you are likely asking as you listen is something like this: What are non-violent Christian socialists and former Obama staffers and directors of programs at Harvard focused on the Black church doing at multiple events alongside prominent natcon speakers, one of whom has endorsed the work of Stephen Wolfe?

This is the answer, I think: Everyone involved in these conversations at that time sought to oppose an ideology they sometimes called “liberalism” but which is best thought of as a kind of hardened individualism that said “you belong only to yourself and if anyone else tries to guide or limit the ways you express your freedom they are a tyrant.”

What unified them—us, really, as I was at the event and now am a contributing editor with Plough—was a sense that there was something deeply wrong with a world that told people that it was exclusively up to them to, in the words of former Supreme Court associate justice Anthony Kennedy, “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” I expect virtually everyone at both events would agree with these words written by the New York Times columnist David Brooks upon Kennedy’s retirement in 2018:

Professor Kennedy gives us a homework assignment that almost none of us can actually fulfill. Each of us has to define our own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Wow! That requires a lot of background reading. If your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do it, but for the rest of us it’s going to be tough. We’re busy!

You wind up with a society in which the schools, the public culture, even the parents say: It’s not our job to instill a shared morality and worldview from scratch. That’s something you have to do on your own. The practical result, given this impossible task, is that most people wind up without a moral vocabulary, with only scattered shards of values, with no firm foundations for when times get tough.

To Brooks’s list I would add the fact that a society that regards the capacity for such self-definition as the essence of the good life is also inherently a society hostile to the poor, the elderly, and the disabled, all of whom for different reasons will struggle to accomplish the goal that many of our peers regard as the essence of “a life worth living.” In other words, Kennedy’s vision of individualistic liberalism unintentionally birthed a society of spiritual orphans that had great difficulty knowing how to value or care for disadvantaged people.

Whatever would come to divide those of us in those two rooms later on, all of us recognized then and, I pray, still do believe that there is something quite cruel about the naked individualism entailed in the sort of procedural liberalism that defined the era of American life running roughly from Reagan to Obama.

That is what united us, anyway. But what divided us? Why was it not terribly surprising to find all of those people and organizations together in 2017 and yet practically unimaginable to imagine such a gathering in 2026?

The answer here is a function of how one thinks about belonging and political life. The error of what I am calling “procedural liberalism” and what Reno has alternatingly called both “the post-war consensus” and “the dead consensus” is that it did not offer a robust account of belonging. Rather, it tended to frame political life in terms of autonomous actors creating identities from nothing while rejecting all forms of unchosen identity. To borrow a phrase from the Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, the dominant narrative of that time was that I have no story except the story I chose when I had no story.

Politics, in this understanding, is essentially the task of organizing public life and enacting policies that facilitate self-creation. The trouble, of course, is that none of us actually are autonomous in any real sense. Our lives are records of debts we owe from the moment we enter the world, which we only do after spending our first nine months literally living from the body of another. This means that all of us spend part of our life too week and contingent to be able to self-create. It also means that those of us who pass through longer periods of weakness, vulnerability, or heightened dependence will be regarded with some measure of suspicion by the mainstream, which will tend to think, even if it does not say so explicitly, that such lives are not worth living. That, of course, is the ugly subtext to contemporary debates surrounding not only abortion, but also euthanasia, disabilities, and mental illness. Some of our neighbors seem not to understand that Swift’s modest proposal was not suggested in earnest. Indeed, it is probable that the rise of medical assistance in dying is simply the natural destination of a politics arranged around accomplishment and self-creation.

A political vision that seeks to banish questions of belonging in the name of emancipation, thus, cuts so radically against the grain of human existence that it can only prop itself up via artifice and a great expense of blood, particularly the blood of the weak and the vulnerable. And this is precisely what has happened in recent years as that vision has begun to fail.

So much for the procedural liberals then.

What, then, divided the group that became known as national conservatives from an alternative group, which I will refer to as solidarity conservatives?

The answer is in how each group addressed the problem of belonging as it relates to public life. 

For national conservatives, the problem facing us now is that “America” has been diminished to an “idea” rather than being “a people.” Vice President Vance put it this way in 2024,

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty—things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.

In his book The Virtue of Nationalism Yoram Hazony defines a nation in a similar way–as a common people unified by common culture, tradition, ways of life, and so on. Entailed in this claim is, of course, a rejection of what has come to be known as “propositional nationhood,” as the marker of American identity. 

Some voices on the new right, such as Christian nationalist podcaster C. Jay Engel who lives in a far right “aligned community” associated with Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellows, are quite explicit about this fact, arguing against propositional nationhood and in favor of a nation for “heritage Americans” instead. Indeed, Engel explained his decision to move to the Ridge Runner compound in Tennessee by saying that his home state of California had too many Indians in it now, who he referred to by using an ethnic slur. Others, like Vance, are not quite so forthright, even as it remains difficult to identify where precisely he would differ from Engel with regards to the rejection of propositional nationhood.

The most straightforward definition of a nation in the sense that the national conservatives mean it, however, comes from Stephen Wolfe. For Wolfe, common culture, customs, rituals, etc. arise from a common people who share a common place and ethnicity. He claims in his book that nations, properly speaking, cannot consist of a plurality of ethnic groups, but must necessarily be confined to single ethnic groups to be genuine nations, writing that,

I use the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another. Since every people group has internal differences, ‘nation’ is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.

I say this is the more honest treatment for the simple reason that if you reject the notion of America as being an idea, as Vance plainly does and as many of the nationalists do, and instead seek to anchor our national identity in vagaries such as “culture” or “ways of life,” you will then have to provide an account of what precisely anchors that culture or way of life. And your answer will either cash out to values (which can then be articulated as propositions) in which case you arrive at propositional nationhood through a better, clearer route or your answer will cash out to genetics. 

Appeals to “common culture” as a way of sidestepping this problem do not work because culture itself is contingent on something and any honest account of this problem must define what that something is—and ultimately the something will either be ideas we give our assent to and submit to as expressed through our living or it will be the claims of kin and fatherland. Wolfe is honest about this. Given that Hazony, the leading figure of national conservatism, endorsed Wolfe’s book, calling it, “A pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory,” it seems that Hazony, at one point at least, was not categorically opposed to Wolfe’s treatment of ‘the nation.’

In practice, then, the national conservative answer to the problem of political belonging, which the proceduralist liberals failed to address sufficiently, is rooted in ethnicity: We experience belonging, on the public level, via the shared customs and ways of life adopted by people united by common ancestry and heritage.

This sort of nationalism immediately crashes into two problems.

First, the stipulated definition used by Wolfe is largely a contrivance in two different ways. First, in the aftermath of Westphalia and the Berlin Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, we simply no longer have a global political system that treats “nations” in the way Wolfe or Hazony call for. There are virtually no nation-states today that are properly “nations” in the way defined by Wolfe. To remedy that, their project inherently requires undoing several centuries of global geopolitics–a work which seems to me utterly impossible.

Indeed, even the nations one might, at one point, have recognized as nations in the Wolfe sense of the term are contrivances in another: That we now think of “English” as a certain sort of national or ethnic identity is largely a historical artifact resulting from the fact that 1000 years ago King Alfred and his grandson King Aethelstan successfully merged many of the various kingdoms on the island of Great Britain to form “England.” But if you had told a 9th century Mercian or Northumbrian or East Anglian that all three of them shared a common nation and ethnicity they would have laughed at you, if not worse.

Simply put, the notion that large-scale political societies should exist as ethnically constituted “nations” is not really how national identity has ever worked historically–it has always been much more malleable–and it certainly isn’t how modern nation-states have been defined.

There is a second problem for the natcons as well within our own context in the United States, which is that America has often, though not always, been uniquely friendly to immigrants, relative to many other nations at least. We have often regarded our common culture as consisting less in highly specific shared religious identity, cuisine, civic customs, and so on and more in terms of a still positive but more modest commitment to liberal democratic life–a life that certainly has positive substance to it and common customs and culture and objects of love and even its own sort of virtues, but all of which are construed in ways quite distinct from the traditional identities of many European societies.

Within the parameters of shared democratic life, our nation has been able to include a quite broad range of cultures in ways that European nations never quite managed in the same way: We welcomed the Lutheran Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes who farmed much of middle America (some of whom were my ancestors). We were, at the very least, happy to benefit from the labor and skill of the Chinese immigrants who built most of our early industrial infrastructure, even if we also often treated them deplorably. We also received Catholic Irish and Italians and Orthodox Greeks who filled our urban factories in places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Boston–not without difficulty, of course, but also with greater success than is found in much of the western world traditionally. All of this, of course, is to say nothing of the Afro-Americans who were brought here against their will but have contributed their own talent and labor to the democratic culture of our nation. Indeed, Afro-Americans in particular have often been more faithful to our nation’s founding vision than many white Americans–is that not, after all, the entire point of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech? King did not reject the American democratic project, but rather called on America to more fully exemplify the democratic ideals she was founded on.

Further, the particular life of the American nation has proven itself to be remarkably malleable–consider how many times we have amended our constitution, for example? To take another example of this changeability, consider that our nation’s flag once bore 13 stars but now bears 50. What does a term like “heritage American” even mean, then, given how fluid America has been as a country?

Thus the problems with a nationalist conservatism that seeks to solve the problem of political belonging via a thick and rigid account of the nation founded on, minimally, common “culture” and, often in practice, shared ethnic origins. In the world created by technological and political realities of the past two centuries, such a strategy cannot work because it is simply not possible to reverse all that has happened in the past 200 years. And in America especially, such a strategy cuts against the grain of our national project in ways that render it, ironically, anti-nationalist if we are speaking of how our specific nation has traditionally existed.

So whither belonging?

Are our only choices a cold sort of utilitarian, procedural liberalism that grounds our common life in nothing but self-actualization facilitated via the market or a nationalism that is, whatever else one might think, utterly impracticable?

To answer the question, I want to extend an observation I made earlier in this paper regarding our dependence and contingency as human beings. No one here today is, or ever will be, entirely self-sufficient. We come wearing clothes made by other people, having eaten food grown or raised by others–and both our clothes and food likely came to us from some considerable distance away, being transported by still other people. This contingency is not foreign or weird or unnatural: it is, rather, unavoidable.

After all, each of us only comes into this world because our bodies are sustained by our mother for nine months and then we live off of her care for still longer. Indeed, as a species it takes humans a great deal of time to mature–sexual maturity comes in our teen years, physical maturity a few years after, and our brains continue to mature and change well into our 20s. In other words, the very nature of our existence as humans speaks to a high degree of need and dependence that we all experience in certain phases of life. Likewise, as we approach the end of our lives we will decline into what Shakespeare referred to as “second childishness… sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,” and find ourselves similarly vulnerable and needy.

One response to this dependency, of course, is to try and suppress it, mask it, or chip away at it–which is what we have spent a great deal of time doing for many decades now in America. If we make enough money we can genuinely remove some forms of dependence on others or, minimally, we can at least relocate the sources of our care to distances sufficient that we needn’t see them or think about them particularly much. 

Yet this is a losing struggle. It seems to inevitably lead to rapidly declining birth rates, which will have catastrophic long-term affects. It also means that when we find ourselves in positions of acute dependence, as most of us will late in life and some will sooner in the event of a catastrophic injury or health crisis, that we have no one to turn to for aid, save the state–which incidentally relies on a sufficiently large tax base of prime-age workers to provide the revenue it needs to offer the care required.

We have had a political order designed to maximize lifestyle choices. The nationalists propose a system to maximize national identity. What I want to propose is a political order that regards human contingency and dependence as normal, and recognizes that much of what makes human life enjoyable and pleasant is bound up in the giving and receiving of care. In short, I am calling for a system that regards dependence and the care called forth by that dependence as normal and that sees the purpose of politics as being to facilitate and support human communities in their work of caring for one another and seeing to one another’s needs.

What would that look like, in practice? For now I want to consider three angles that might help us define what such a political vision might be. I will start by working from a fairly theoretical level to a more granular policy level vision.

First, building off what we already said, the early Protestant theorist Johannes Althusius treats the purpose of politics in his Politica, published in the early 17th century. Althusius argued in it that the purpose of politics is to insure that the social relationships we all unavoidably have, as I have already mentioned, are mutually beneficial and delightful.

Put another way: He wants a social order built around symbiotic social relationships rather than parasitic social relationships. So one way of defining this political vision is to say that it is anti-exploitation. It sets itself against any sort of political vision that denies the humanity of another, reducing certain human persons to something lesser which can be freely exploited, mistreated, or abused. Needless to say, such a vision would find much to condemn in how we presently treat the unborn, the immigrant, and the elderly, as well as many others.

Second, we could also use the language often put forward in Catholic social teaching. Indeed, the term “solidarity” itself is a key concept for Catholic social teaching, dating all the way back to Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII sought to define a political economy that preserved the right to private property while condemning the excesses of the 19th century, which so frequently led to the abuse of workers. If we found our vision on solidarity, then the tradition of Catholic social teaching would insist that this political project must find ways to encourage a family wage for workers, for example, as well as economic policies that offer a robust social safety net, including support for healthcare, unemployment insurance, and care for the disabled. Catholic social teaching, then, has quite stringent economic standards, which address questions of poverty and workers rights, at the very least.

A third and final angle we might consider: One of the unique challenges of our technological moment is that some of the chief forms of exploitation currently practiced seem to target people as consumers rather than as workers. This is significant because I think most of the time when we use language of “exploitation” we tend to think of exploiting people who find themselves trapped in some kind of situation that easily becomes coercive: think of the exploitative supervisor at work or the exploitative landlord who mistreats residents. 

But the advent of the smartphone along with certain legal norms that now hold has created an environment in which consumers can be exploited quite easily, as in the cases of sports gambling as well as, I would argue, online pornography. These are both industries founded on exploitation. Pornography does involve exploitation of workers, of course, as the harrowing tales told by many former sex workers shows. But both of these vices also trade on a certain exploitation of the consumer–offering a quick and easily accessed hit of dopamine upon which they can over time become dependent and which tends to draw the consumer away from human connection and into deeper isolation and, in the case of gambling and potentially pornography as well given the arrival of Only Fans, toward financial crisis. 

If you read The Athletic’s reporting on the suffering experienced by sports gambling addicts at the hands of companies like Fan Duel and Draft Kings, you will see a form of exploitation that is not per se coercive, and yet nonetheless draws users into a kind of entrapment which is perhaps all the more isolating for being “chosen” in a sense. The widely read Harper’s feature on so-called “gooners” tells a similar story about pornography: A growing group of mostly young men increasingly organize their lives around the consumption of pornography and marathon sessions of self-pleasuring as they consume practically unfathomable amounts of pornographic content. The women these men are leering at and consuming as objects are obviously exploited. Yet there is some sense in which these young men are as well–the men profiled in the story are someone’s son, someone’s brother, sometimes even someone’s husband–probably soon to be ex-husband, one has to think. There is an immense human tragedy that can be easily minimized given the grotesqueness of the behavior.

What does this mean on the level of politics? Several years ago I used a children’s story to illustrate the point: The story comes from the delightful Frog and Toad stories by Arnold Lobel. In one of them, the eponymous characters are enjoying some cookies that one of them baked. The story is built around their attempt to stop eating the cookies: They first try to use “will power” to stop. But that is insufficient. So they try various things–putting the cookies in a box, then tying a string around the box to keep them from opening it, then putting the box on a high shelf to prevent them from untying the string and opening the box. Eventually they give up and throw the cookies outside for the birds to eat. As the story ends, one of the friends says to the other “now we have no cookies,” to which the other replies, “but we have lots of will power!” Writing at the time, I said:

The idea is best summarized, as one friend helpfully put it, as resetting society's defaults to favor people's long-term interests rather than short-term pleasures. At present, we make it easy for people to indulge in in short-term pleasures provided by exploitative powers that will, stretched out over time, leave them poorer, more lonely, and less able to contribute to their communities. We also make it harder to pursue things that will be in our best interests long-term. This is precisely the opposite of how it should be.

We want to make it easier to choose virtue and harder to choose vices on a broad, societal level. How can we address this problem, such that we are not reducing our citizens to a bleaker version of Frog and Toad trying not to eat the cookies? It seems to me there are specific cases where the equivalent of throwing the cookies outside so the birds can take them away might be called for–the examples of online gambling and online pornography being the two chief examples of this.

What we need today is not a return to liquid modernity of the sort that defined the post-Cold War world. We do not need a social order that views any kind of unchosen obligation or intervention in one’s life as tyranny. That only leaves us isolated and alone. 

Yet nationalism is not a solution either, if only because the nationalist plan is so dependent on contrivances and impossible political goals that it will tend to make us both angrier (as long hoped for goals are shown to be impossible) and more closed off to our actual flesh and blood neighbors with whom we share a place.

What is needed, it seems to me, is the embrace of a political culture that normalizes care and dependence, opposes exploitation of all forms, and seeks instead to normalize practices and habits that reckon with the full ontological density of our neighbors. The benefit of this plan, it seems to me, is that there are some instances of relatively low hanging fruit where we might build broad coalitions to accomplish specific goals. And perhaps in the course of building those coalitions and living within them we will once again learn to see our neighbors as beloved creatures of God–for that, of course, is precisely what they are.