From Libertarianism to National Conservatism

“National Conservatism, one strand of a broader emergent post-Cold War fusionist conservative movement, has the potential for both capturing youthful energy and enthusiasm while grounding and directing it with prudence and realism.”

Florida was recently host to the second National Conservatism conference, or NatCon II. The event was run by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a group headed by Israeli scholars Yoram Hazony and Ofir Haivry. Anyone involved in political culture on the Right is affected by the tides and currents in American political culture: what happens in the imperial center often ripples out into the provincial periphery, after. The question is, does National Conservatism have a serious, sustainable future? If so, this will be because its appeals take hold among the young, as Ron Paul-style libertarianism did in 2008 and 2012. Will this happen? Perhaps, or maybe not. History is not preordained and is written after the fact.

First, we might define some terms. Libertarianism, at its most basic, is the belief in individual liberty as the fundamental, foundational ethical value and the highest good of political life. Government is inevitably a threat to liberty in the libertarian worldview, always on the look-out for new areas of life to intrude into and new powers to grab and use against the sovereign individual. A vision of the rugged, self-reliant individual, strong in his self-belief and competent in his actions motivates what one might call the libertarian mythos.

Self-interest and non-aggression oil the gears of social relations, the market the purest expression of enlightened self-interest’s ability to enable the flourishing of human freedom and prosperity. As Tanner Greer argues in a blog essay on America’s “New Right,” the libertarian ideology of its Libertarian adherents is matched by a kind of don’t-tread-on-me, leave me alone folk libertarianism invested in autonomy and self-reliance, rooted in the Scots-Irish culture that comprises one of the four American folk-cultures, still strong today.