The Big Con

Tempers flare at this year's National Conservatism conference.

According to a report by the estimable Kelley Vlahos, this year’s National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC came replete with fireworks—of the figurative variety. In a debate moderated by Modern Age editor Dan McCarthy, American Conservative editor Curt Mills faced off with Northeastern University scholar Max Abrams over Israel. Abrahams touted the alleged success of the US attacks on Iran and deemed those whom he called “MAGA isolationists realists” as “insane.”

Mills parried by asking:

“Why are these our wars? Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it's advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First — asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn't.”

That NatCon is open to debate on Israel is a good first step but overall, its brand of nationalism is inextricably linked with a particular brand of Israeli nationalism. The NatCon conference is the creation of the Edmund Burke Foundation, whose founder is the Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, a former speechwriter to Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. An admirer of the violent Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane, Hazony and his family have made their home in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The closer one looks, it is hard to escape the conclusion that NatCon is simply neoconservatism by another name. It’s a Trump-era rebrand for an ideology that has fallen into disrepute with the President—not so much for its ideas but for its personnel (see, for eg., John Bolton).

Unfortunately, the NatCon re-brand seems to be working. Several high-profile Israel First figures long associated with the NatCon conferences have made their way into the Trump State Department, particularly on the Policy Planning Staff.

As Col. Douglas Macgregor and I pointed out after last year’s NatCon conference,

For ethno-nationalists like Hazony and his American disciples, the July 2018 adoption by the Knesset of the Israel Nation-State Law was a watershed moment. The law, among other things, says that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” Such a declaration may be well within the boundaries of the Zionist political tradition, but few things could be more antithetical to the American political tradition.

James W. Carden is editor of TRR.