In The Claremont Review of Books winter 2023/24 issue, the magazine’s editor Charles Kesler published “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism.” Siding with American conservatism, Kesler offered a respectful critique of National Conservatism, a transnational movement that embraces citizens of several Western nations, many of whom Kesler counts as friends and colleagues. CRB’s spring 2024 issue followed up with “National Conservatism and Its Discontents.” The symposium features thoughtful, mostly amicable and conciliatory replies to Kesler from 10 signers (including four co-drafters) of “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” which the Edmund Burke Foundation, chaired by Israeli author Yoram Hazony, published in June 2022. Kesler provides a characteristically incisive response.
Much of the lively CRB exchange revolves around questions of tone and emphasis. The debate also exposes a fateful division among conservatives over fundamental principles and constitutional bedrock.
In his winter essay, Kesler highlighted National Conservatism’s important contribution: “The big thing that the Natcons get right is the present duty to come to the defense of decent nation-states against their enemies and critics.”
The nation-state’s principal enemies and critics spring from the progressive left, which mounts attacks from opposite directions. Proponents of identity politics, mostly intellectuals and activists, put group loyalty – racial, ethnic, and sexual – ahead of the nation. So-called liberal internationalists – political science and law professors, government bureaucrats, and diplomats – seek to subordinate American decision-making in domestic as well as foreign affairs to international organizations. Nevertheless, the left-wing contingents agree: The power and prerogative of nation-states – not least those of the United States – must be devolved to other entities, either subnational or supranational.
Kesler also examined two problems with National Conservatism. First, despite its criticism of classical liberalism’s supposed abstraction from the particularities of tradition and peoplehood in favor of universal principles – often articulated as natural rights – National Conservatism, Kesler maintained, organizes itself around an abstraction and issues in universal political prescriptions. Instead of starting with the American nation and its founding principles and constitutional traditions, National Conservatism begins with, as its Statement of Principles proclaims, “the idea of the nation” and “the tradition of independent, self-governed nations.”
Perhaps the abstraction from America is the price that U.S. conservatives must pay to join forces not only with conservatives of various Western nations but, as the Statement envisages, to build a transnational movement that also embraces conservatives of non-Western nations. Then, however, National Conservatism is not proposing an alternative to “universalist ideologies” but an alternative universalist ideology. Why, though, would an American conservative prefer National Conservatism’s universalist ideology, which is grounded in a general theory of the nation-state, to the universal principles on which the United States is founded and which express the American spirit and which structure and elevate American traditions?
Second, according to Kesler, National Conservatism demotes America’s distinctive form of nationalism while assimilating America to a “generic nationalism” suitable for all times and places. The American nation, argues Kesler, is “limited and shaped by human equality, liberty, and consent.” The Natcon Statement echoes these hallmarks of the American constitutional tradition but obscures the original.
For example, the Statement, following the U.S. Constitution, asserts that the nation-state should “secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty.” The Statement espouses “private property and free enterprise” not only for the prosperity they bring but also because they reflect “traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition.” It expresses belief “in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers.” And it repudiates racism and insists that nation-states must reconcile “the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.”