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Manifesto Destiny

By
Editors

“National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles” contains ten guiding ideals for the New Right.

The National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) has become a pilgrimage site for interpreters of conservatism today. In speeches by J. D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orbán, and Giorgia Meloni, journalists look for ways to understand the “New Right,” which claims to reject the economic and foreign policy dogmas of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. What do the power players in a potential second Donald Trump administration really believe?

In 2022, some of them told us. “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles” is the closest thing the movement has to a manifesto; its signatories include Trump official Michael Anton, culture warrior Christopher Rufo, and Vance’s political mentor, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Another notable endorser is former senator Jim DeMint, who heads an organization devoted to vetting and training young ideologues for government appointments under Trump. We annotated some of the manifesto’s most revealing — and disturbing — arguments.

“Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.”

— The NatCon manifesto advocates the equality of sovereign nations — threatened by a vaguely defined “homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium,” not US hegemony. It also includes an interventionist wink that some countries may not be “capable of self-government.”

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