“The national conservative movement doesn’t stand for anything. I’ve never had anybody come to me and say, ‘I’m a national conservative.’ We’re in the fifth year, and it still hasn’t caught traction.”
So says Steve Bannon, speaking with me on the second day of the latest National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC. The former Trump strategist and MAGA firebrand was scheduled to address the gathering at the Westin Hotel the following day — but he shares his fiercest lines offstage in conversation with UnHerd. “These people aren’t fighters,” he says. “They have achieved nothing.”
The comments open a window onto the civil war roiling the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement. Despite President Trump’s victory in 2024, the mood at this year’s conference was a curious mix of triumph, defiance, and outright dismay. There were, of course, rote speeches about the radical Left, DEI, and Islam. But the bromides failed to mask the growing divisions elsewhere in the coalition. Especially on foreign policy, and doubly on Israel.
The Jewish state’s multiple wars in the Middle East have exposed deep fault lines within NatCon between pro-Israel hawks and those who call themselves realists, restrainers, or prioritisers — advocates for pivoting toward China and the Pacific over other adversaries. At a moment when NatCon seems at the peak of its influence, these internal divisions threaten to unravel the movement from within.
Founded in 2019, NatCon styled itself as the intellectual engine of Trumpism. Its early speaker lineups spanned the full spectrum of the Trumpian Right: neoconservatives, establishment Republicans, Christian post-liberals, and MAGA populists, from John Bolton to Tucker Carlson to the Claremont crowd. It was like the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, gathering, but with more brains and less Botox.
As the conference gathered strength and attention, the New Right’s various factions found common space — and a common cause in opposing the then-culturally ascendant Left and in promoting a conservative vision rooted in national sovereignty. The movement quickly went global, staging conferences in London, Rome, and Brussels (that last iteration was shut down by the Belgian capital’s mayor last year, handing the NatCons a perfect illustration of the censorious progressivism they sought to overthrow).
All along, however, the movement was haunted by a question: Did NatCon represent a genuinely new and positive vision for the Right? Or had it merely reconstituted the old “fusionist” conservatism — resting on the triple foundations of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and cultural conservatism — only now under a banner of “nationalism” and with woke substituting for the Soviet Communism that galvanized its predecessor?
This week was the sixth instalment. With National Guard troops patrolling the streets above, Washington’s conservative elite descended two floors beneath the Westin Hotel to debate the future of the movement. As interns from the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation buzzed around between stalls, orthodox Jews rubbed shoulders with portly academics from the country’s lesser-known campuses.
The dress code, ostensibly business casual, featured an astonishing range of windowpane suits and winklepicker shoes. If this was the “terrifying” face of the American Right that New York Times columnist David Brooks once warned of, I must have wandered into the wrong hotel.
The event began with a heartfelt plea from the organiser, the Israeli academic Yoram Hazony, urging participants to “feel gratitude” for this “unbelievable moment”. He added: “We’re doing so much winning that we say, ‘Please Mr. President, no more winning! I can’t take it anymore.’ There are an awful lot of people among us who are outraged — it’s like howling rage. Many of us can’t stand the idea” of actually being in power.
In short: Stop bickering — we’re in charge now.
If this was a call for unity, the next three days proved it a failure. Notwithstanding a parade of crowd-pleasing tub-thumpers railing against wokeness, lingering tensions on foreign policy spilled out into the open. In a breakout session, the pro-Israel hawk Max Abrahms mocked realists as Tucker Carlson-loving “MAGA isolationists” who had gone “insane” in their push to disengage from the Middle East. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, a restraint organ, shot back: “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why should we accept ‘America First’ — asterisk Israel? We shouldn’t.”
“The mood at this year’s conference was a curious mix of triumph, defiance — and outright dismay.”
Reconciling staunch pro-Israel advocates with realists were always going to be an uphill battle. But it wasn’t until the wars in Gaza and then Iran that this fragile coexistence became more strained. Hazony had promised to provide a “balanced” conference and the Mills-Abrahms fracas certainly lived up to that ideal. Elsewhere, though, it was more disappointing. During “the Trump doctrine” talk, for example, speakers mostly spoke past each other, expressing vague platitudes (“you screw with us, we’re going to finish you”) and making limp attempts at triangulation (“realists and interventionists are a false dichotomy”).
The tensions carried into the evening. At the upstairs bar, a handful of realists in their 30s vented their frustration over cocktails: “Why do we keep coming to this conference expecting something different?” “It’s the same baby boomer Old Guard, which is totally blind to what is happening in front of us. Netanyahu has been to the White House more times than Melania.” “Yoram [Hazony] didn’t offer a solution to these divisions. Strategically, if you want a rapprochement, one side has to give something — and he hasn’t offered any olive branches.”
To be sure, the realists were given a bigger platform at this year’s conference. In previous years, Israel had been largely relegated to the sidelines. This time around, the Jewish state and its wars couldn’t be avoided. “Nobody said to be a good NatCon, you have to love Israel or you have to love Jews,” Hazony announced in his opening remarks. “That’s not what NatCon is for. It’s for restoring America and the spirit of national independence, interest, traditions, and God.”
If only the realists agreed. As members of the group swilled the last remnants of their cocktails, some plotted more extreme measures. “This alliance is becoming untenable,” said one. “If we end up supporting [Israel’s] military occupation of Gaza, we are going to be pulled into another Middle Eastern quagmire.”
I put these comments to Steve Bannon, who expressed sympathy for the position. “National conservatives are very neoconnish,” he said. “We saw through it at the beginning. It was neocons trying to make sure this new populist movement was still backing the American empire…. The only reason they exist is because they were worried about the rise of President Trump and wanted to nullify the populist tendencies of the movement.”
Bannon, who has taken an increasingly dim view of the Israeli leadership in recent months, came out swinging in his NatCon speech. The War Room podcast host laid into familiar targets in front of a sparse crowd: China, broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and impending civil war in Britain. But then he tackled a topic that he warned would be “unpleasant” to members of the audience. “Israel is a sideshow,” he boomed. “And Israel’s greater expansion [in the Middle East] is a sideshow to the sideshow… The existential threat to Israel is not in Tehran — it is in New York City.”
He was referring to the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and likely shoo-in) Zohran Mamdani. “Mamdani is a Marxist and a jihadist,” Bannon fumed. “He’s a better-programmed version than Barack Hussein Obama” (emphasising Obama’s middle name as if he were providing a clue in a puzzle). “He’s going to win in November and have control of the most important city in the world. Do you think he’s going to give it back? Do you think Sadiq Khan is giving back London? Or is Paris going back to France?”
The audience did not applaud or react to these remarks. But fears of Islamisation, spurred by the asylum crisis in Britain, the rise of Mamdani, and events in the Middle East, were more pronounced at this conference than any before. As Jack Posobiec, a conservative activist, summed up in his speech: “These people are not American, and they don’t want to be American. If they don’t want to be a part of this country, they can go home.”
It felt, once more, like a desperate search by conservatives to find a new enemy that would allow them to paper over their own internal differences. After all, woke is on the wane, and at least in 2025, the Democratic path to national power looks arduous. The siege mentality that defined earlier conferences — when conservatives were being censored, corporations were bending the knee, and Trump was facing years in prison — had evaporated.
Today, America’s most powerful institutions — universities, banks, Big Tech — bow to Trump, not Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi. This perhaps explains why so much of this year’s gathering rang hollow. A speech denouncing white guilt (“worse than any problem America faces today”) or one in which the literal Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, griped about the deep state, simply lacked the punch these topics carried in 2021.
Wielding enormous power and with their Leftist enemies on the backfoot, the NatCons failed to overcome their divisions, much less articulate a positive account of nationalism in the 21st century. But this time around, they had a new license to say “retard” — a privilege they exercised with gusto.
