Reading Thomas Meaney’s February dispatch for Harper’s Magazine from the July 2019 conference of self-described nationalists and conservative reformers is like cracking the seal on a university student’s time capsule—a reflection on a complex world from within a hermetic microcosm.
Meany’s retelling of his expedition among the disaffected right, who chose the discordant venue of the Washington D.C. Ritz-Carlton hotel to lament the plight of America’s neglected classes, benefits from the passage of time. It inventories the diverse parade of notables in attendance, and it details the narrow contours of the debate over just how systemic America’s problems are and which nefarious cohort is responsible for them. All these elements are familiar to those who read contemporaneous accounts of this event.
What’s unique in Meaney’s account is the sense the reader gets that, among the conferees, Donald Trump and his administration are vague abstractions. Then-National Security Advisor John Bolton’s appearance on the scene illustrates this splinter group’s conundrum. His refusal to pander to the nationalist conservative’s conceits and insecurities renders him in the eyes of the conference’s attendees more a curiosity than a representation of the systemic obstacles in the way of their vision.
The reality of Donald Trump’s years in office presents a problem few nationalist conservatives dare confront. There’s a discontinuity in their idea of what Trump represented, what they believe he was elected to do (and, more importantly, to reject), and the mixed results of the bargain they made in 2016.
Foremost among national conservatism’s projects was the restoration of American sovereignty. The forms the nationalist right hoped this would take include not just reversals of the Obama administration’s lax enforcement of immigration law and the pursuit of more restrictive trade practices. But what nationalist conservatives got falls short of what they imagined.
As of last month, 93 miles of a new border wall have been constructed along the 1,954-mile frontier. Only 3 of those miles can be considered new construction, despite the president’s allocation of unappropriated funds under the guise of a national emergency toward that purpose (a precedent to which a Democratic successor in the White House will undoubtedly appeal to achieve their parochial aims). Despite the hostile climate toward illegal migrants that has prevailed since Trump took office, apprehensions at the southern border have increased year over year since 2017. The Department of Homeland Security estimated in 2019 that the illegal immigrant population is on the rise.
On trade, the president renegotiated the NAFTA treaty, but the new treaty looks a lot more like the old treaty than Trump advertised when he promised to “terminate” the 1993 agreement. What’s more, the new trade agreement is one with which congressional Democrats are particularly fond—an enthusiasm that their Republican colleagues did not share. The new agreement strengthens labor laws across North American borders, involves necessary protections for digital trade, and includes provisions that tighten “country of origin” rules. What the new deal will not do is create many new employment opportunities. According to the US International Trade Commission’s analysis, the “USMCA” trade deal is expected to add $68 billion and 176,000 new jobs to the economy—the rough equivalent of one lukewarm month of job growth. Were we delivered from the tyranny of the Trans-Pacific Partnership for this?
Of course, the primary antagonist in Trump’s trade war has been China, and it’s hard to say the effort has been worth the fight. The signing of a “Phase I” agreement with China last month eases tensions by restoring China’s agricultural purchases to 2017 levels over the next two years and includes a commitment from China to crack down on intellectual property theft—a commitment the Chinese government made to Barack Obama, too. But the pain the trade war inflicted on some of the nationalist conservatives’ most favored constituencies has been devastating. The U.S. manufacturing sector fell into a mild recession this month after several quarters of slow or negative growth, and some manufacturers say trade-related tensions with China contributed to that condition. America’s farmers who lost access to the Chinese market were the beneficiaries of a $28 billion rescue package from the federal government—more than twice the automotive bailout that fueled a populist revolt under Barack Obama’s administration. Nevertheless, ten states recorded a record number of farm bankruptcies in 2019, a year in which overall Chapter 12 declarations rose by 20 percent.
Surely, this is not the national “industrial policy” that Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass advocated in theory and which conference attendees supported by a vote of 91 to 55. But if this administration could not deliver for its most ideologically simpatico constituents, what future administration will?
Trade policy aside, the results of the president’s generally pro-market, pro-business policies are hard to deny. In relative terms, among the greatest beneficiaries of these policies have been America’s blue-collar workers, whose wages are now rising faster than their degree-holding white-collar counterparts. This demographic, we were told, had been left behind by Republicans’ blinkered commitment to free markets. And yet, while U.S. life expectancy is back on the rise and “deaths of despair” have stagnated, this upturn is limited largely to America’s educated urban centers—not Appalachia or the post-industrial Midwest, despite the more favorable economic conditions that prevail there today. We’re left to conclude that the Marxian worldview, which attributes every human frailty to economic conditions, is as flawed as ever. Moreover, the mediating institutions that buttress strong communities and from which the “forgotten man” is estranged cannot be imposed on the nation from the top down.
And what are we to make of the national conservative’s hostility toward the American “empire,” which Donald Trump was expected to dismember through retrenchment? From the start, an administration staffed by conventional Republicans produced a largely conventional Republican foreign policy. The president aggressively prosecuted anti-terrorism campaigns abroad, oriented U.S. strategy toward the containment of near-peer competitors like Russia and China, promoted the adoption of representative democratic institutions abroad, and oversaw the expansion of NATO (much to the chagrin of the populist right).
When this administration sought to placate and mollify America’s enemies, like the Taliban and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, it has failed. Where it has (albeit reluctantly and belatedly) pursued aggressive containment strategies, as it has against Iran, it has succeeded. The president’s audacious reimagining of America’s relationship with Israel is arguably a function of Trump’s disdain for staid convention, though revolutionary changes in the global energy market facilitated actions and would be available to any other president. But where Trump has doubtlessly indulged his instincts—ordering the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria and leveraging the power of the presidency against Ukraine in pursuit of domestic advantages, for example—he not only failed but invited a political backlash. America’s footprint abroad is smaller than it has been in 60 years, but that is the result of increasingly stable political conditions abroad. These are the fruits of American engagement, not retreat.
Of all the hobgoblins that haunt conference attendees, few so rile national conservatives as much as the power wielded by Big Tech. Though it is often challenging to separate dispassionate concerns from the class resentments that pervade this movement, the populist right’s mistrust of a heedless class of technocratic elites who routinely subordinate the national interest to commercial considerations has merit. But does this movement’s avatar in the White House hear their concerns? Republicans in control of the Federal Trade Commission balked at stiff penalties for Facebook when it was found to be abusing users’ privacy. For all of Trump’s populist antipathy toward Amazon and its reliance on the taxpayer-backed U.S. Postal Service to cushion its bottom line, neither he nor the legislature sought to curtail those advantages. Indeed, Trump only heaped opprobrium on progressives for successfully lobbying against the local tax incentives that would have made New York City Amazon’s second home. And like the progressive reformers he opposes, Trump’s public ire toward Silicon Valley is not reflected in his efforts to siphon campaign funds from the pockets of the Bay Area’s billionaires.
At the outset of his presidency, venture capitalist and democracy skeptic Peter Thiel counseled the president to disrupt the status quo as much as possible. In his personal conduct, Trump has followed Thiel’s advice. But in policy, the Trump administration has on balance rejected the exhortations of its nationalistic cohorts. To the extent that the president gets high marks from the right, it is for pursuing conventionally conservative policies. From appointing judges with the Federalist Society’s imprimatur to restoring due process rights once subordinated to the objective of social leveling; from the administration’s supply-side economic prescriptions to its extroverted and muscular foreign policy—Trump gets his highest marks from Republicans when he is doing traditionally Republican things.
It is when Trump is at his most disruptive that the world comes down around his shoulders. That is what the nationalist conservative movement has not reconciled, and why it has taken on a theological flavor to justify its program of ever-more-invasive intrusions into private life. The radical revision of the social compact the national conservative movement envisions is a remedy wildly disproportionate to the scale of the challenges facing the country.
In a sense, true national conservatism has never been tried. But any political philosophy becomes hard to distinguish from sophistry if it has no practical application. And like all who cling to such dubiously exculpatory narratives, they’re unlikely to devote a moment’s thought to why their ideals were not—perhaps cannot—be applied. The unavoidable conclusions are too terrible to contemplate.
