Nationalists consolidate US right — with one small crack

The schism that Hazony sounded his alarm about is very far from the present for the Republican Party. Tucker Carlson is perhaps the most well-known voice in the MAGA-centric media to criticize Israel directly, but others have followed, from podcaster Theo Von to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky.

Israel — not the Jewish state’s right to exist, but the US taxpayer’s role in defending it — was the largest source of disagreement at the conference. Hazony made room to air it out, attending a debate between pro-Israel academic Max Abrahms and skeptical American Conservative editor Curt Mills.

“Israel has made a crucial investment in appealing to President Trump’s vanity,” Mills said, adding that Republicans are “risking the generational impression that all the GOP delivers is tax cuts and wars in the Middle East.”

Abrahms, like Hazony, suggested that this summer’s US airstrikes in Iran proved the skeptics wrong. They hadn’t sparked World War III; they hadn’t dragged US troops into another Middle East conflict. He read back multiple quotes from Carlson predicting horrors that the B-2 bombers did not unleash.

“I urge everyone to look towards President Trump, whose foreign policy stewardship in the Middle East has been strong precisely because he’s rejected so much of what both the neocons and MAGA isolationist-realists have to say,” Abrahms said.

The tense debate ended with conservative podcaster Auron MacIntyre noting that “every political philosopher from Machiavelli to Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt has said that when you have another country defending you, when they are actually the ones using their sword on your behalf, you lose sovereignty to them.” (He later apologized for invoking a Nazi intellectual.)

That that conversation happened at all shows what Trump has done for conservative nationalists, demolishing almost any of their barriers of propriety or need for self-censorship.

A further example of that shift came from Russell Vought, the White House budget director, who recalled how during the 2016 campaign, the future president split the GOP with what then-House speaker Paul Ryan called a “Muslim ban.” Ryan was right to call it a fight “about the definition of conservatism,” Vought said.

“That is a conversation that I think that we’re able to have now,” he added. “We are remembering that a nation has many things that keep it together, has a religious heritage in which its civic life is based on Judeo-Christian worldviews.”

Under Trump, in the eyes of conference attendees, conservatives could defend ideas that they saw as lost in Europe’s multiparty governments or forbidden in countries without a First Amendment.

“The United States is the last country in the Western world that is still upholding robust religious freedom and free speech protections,” said Kristen Waggoner, the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative group that litigated in the Dobbs decision.

I spend a lot of time listening to both parties talk about their paths forward — and the differences of late make my head spin.

Democrats and progressives are unsure of much, wary of offending anyone in their coalition, and unclear who will lead them in 2028.

These are not problems for the conservative movement. It’s led by one man, and it’s acting on his agenda.

Progressives look longingly at European social democracies, where national health insurance and robust public transit were won years ago. National conservatives see a rising populist movement that can win everywhere, but will win first in the US.

“We don’t have a movement that is writing op-eds against the steps that the president is taking,” said Vought. “There is great enthusiasm for what is going on.”

The Israel issue was an outlier. There is a young faction of the movement that wants to extricate US money and power from the rest of the world, Israel included. There are online edgelords (not present at the conference) who indulge in old-fashioned antisemitism.

But beyond Greene and Massie, that’s not taking hold among elected Republicans, largely because it’s incompatible with the overall NatCon vision.

The idea that supporting Israel could pull the US into a wider conflict was seen as an outdated, old idea from “Conservatism, Inc.” Terrorism could be prevented by keeping terrorists out of the country — not, as the neoconservatives thought, by bringing Jeffersonian democracy to Kabul and Baghdad.

“9/11 at its core was an immigration problem,” said Daniel Horowitz, the host of the Conservative Review’s podcast, at one of the conference’s foreign policy discussions.

“If you don’t let them in, they couldn’t have done that harm.” Trump could solve that problem, too. He already was.

There were other worries at the conference about what issue, or which faction, might wreck the project. In her opening remarks, the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard warned that “Silicon Valley disrupters” could bring some unsavory ideas about humanity into the movement.

“Transhumanism isn’t cool,” she said. “It’s not interesting. It is an existential threat to human dignity.”