NatCon and the Odd Bedfellows

On NatCon’s unifying rally points as well as the coalition’s weak points.

A NatCon After Action Report from Ignatius of Florida, a Friend of the OGC.

Two weeks ago, I attended the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Washington, D.C. This event brought together organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and Hillsdale College, with conservative and right-wing speakers and politicians such as Senator J.D. Vance, Senator Josh Hawley, Jeremy Carl, Paul Gottfried, and the OGC’s good friend Auron MacIntyre in attendance. What could unite such a group? Nothing less than the progressive hegemon and the failings of “conservatism” of the last fifty years.

Michael Malice, while an unfunny troll, makes a valid point in his book The New Right: that it is easier to define the Right by what it is opposed to rather than what it stands for. The “New Right” can be defined as a loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism. They despise the social hedonism of the Left. They reject egalitarianism in all its prevalent forms. They oppose the centralization of power under what has been dubbed “gay race communism” (notably referred to as such recently by Tucker Carlson). But what do they stand for? Just as the Catholic Church realized that it could not define itself by anathemas, and thus called the Second Vatican Council, so too did the Right need to define itself in a positive form.

National Conservatism is the New Right’s attempt to categorize itself. They disdain libertarianism, which they blame for leading society to hedonism, seeing it as an unconditional embrace of free trade. They abhor the neoconservatives who have killed America in the name of spreading “democracy” to countries that hate us. Instead, National Conservatives categorize themselves as embracing Hamiltonian economic policy and foreign policy realism, and they maintain that America is primarily a Christian Nation. America isn’t some creed or idea; it is a people to the National Conservatives.

But there remain divides within them, divides that are on the fringes but can illuminate to us what the Right is made of today. The two most dominant groups on the Right are the National Conservatives, who are the ideologically committed opponents to liberalism, and what has been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” The PayPal Mafia are not ideological conservatives. They are Silicon Valley Technocrats who have become opponents to progressivism only as of late, either for personal reasons or because it disrupts their own technological progress.

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the like are the financiers of candidates and faces like Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, and Blake Masters. These fast-growing stars of the still-formulating Republican Party owe their successes largely to Thiel. Musk himself has recently joined the ranks in financing Donald Trump’s campaign. These power brokers hate our current elite, but they are not as ideologically committed to opposing liberalism.

At NatCon, you could see the bristling of the Thiel Network peek through. While the National Conservatives have aligned themselves behind programs like Project 2025, the Thiel Network has other plans. Vivek Ramaswamy came to make an appeal to “National Libertarianism.” To decouple from China, he said, we must embrace our other Asian allies. We must deal with the immigration crisis, he claimed, but we should allow for skilled migrants — a stance echoed by Donald Trump occasionally. The PayPal Mafia don’t oppose immigration because of a belief that America is a people rather than a creed; they oppose mass migration for populist reasons, first and foremost, and also because of how it fuels progressivism.

The two sides also have wildly different plans for bureaucracy. The Thiel Network pushes for a massive shutting of the doors of bureaucracies which to them are no good. The Project 2025 crew calls for the closure of certain agencies, such as the Department of Education, but they are far more willing to make use of other departments for staffing and pushing their goals. The best example is their proposal for the use of the Department of Health and Human Services to stop abortion. These are very different views of what the role of a bureaucracy should be.

This divide seems to be about two different “right-wing” (if you consider the PayPal Mafia right-wing) paths for America. These two, as in the past, are united primarily by a common enemy. Progressivism, liberalism, whatever euphemism they choose to call the current zeitgeist — they both despise it. But their ideological underpinnings, why they support what they do, are radically different. Many of their core approaches to governance and policy are nearly incompatible.

NatCon attempts to put forward a positive vision for conservatism, but they are not a monopoly on the “MAGA vision” for America. The Thiel Network is wrestling with them for the keys to the kingdom. Vance appears as a stark truce between the two sides, representing blue-collar National Conservatism as a surrogate of Peter Thiel. The two groups are odd bedfellows, much like Trotsky and Stalin during the reign of Lenin, or the Second Triumvirate, if one needs a comparison to Rome. The Right is still paralyzed into unity through anathema, but there may be a future where that isn’t the case. Keep your eyes open to the arms race within the Trump administration, which will show which vision for America will manifest. The National Conservative vision is promising, to say the least.