November 5, 2024
by Jack Hunter
As a libertarian, my rudimentary understanding of the still budding national conservative movement is that it rejects the old traditional conservative consensus of limited government, in exchange for a more aggressive Right unafraid to wield government power for conservative ends, even if that meant crossing traditional boundaries like private property and free speech.
If progressive and centrist Democrats seek to ignore constitutional limits without hesitation to impose their vision, national conservatives would now do a rightwing version of this. If a fusionist mission was to restrain government, national conservatism would instead use it, without apology, for ostensible conservative ends.
If those libertarian wussies of old couldn’t get the job done, Natcons now would.
Furthermore, from a natcon view, the rise of former president Donald Trump and ancillary Republican figures like his 2024 vice presidential pick, Ohio Senator JD Vance along with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, created a “Make America Great Again” playground that makes this new conservatism possible and even probable.
The Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard declared at the fourth annual National Conservatism conference in July, “We’re not part of the conservative movement. We are the conservative movement.”
That’s a bold statement. Still, my old bosses Senator Rand Paul and his father, former Congressman Ron Paul, were and are significant players in the conservative movement. They aren’t national conservatives. Rand Paul was also Bovard’s old boss. As libertarians, they might find points of agreement, particularly on foreign policy, with national conservatives, but it’s hard to imagine them agreeing that industrial policy or ditching Section 230 that protects social media platforms from liability is a good idea.
Libertarian-friendly speakers at the NatCon conference, like Sen. Mike Lee and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, could not fairly be categorized as national conservatives. In fact, Ramaswamy said at the conference to Reason, “I think it's been decided, as obviously as it possibly can be, that America First is the future direction of the Republican Party… From where I sit, the most important debate for the country to have is the intra–Republican Party and even intra–America First debate between the national protectionist and national libertarian wings.""I don’t care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state," he added.
Ramaswamy is a popular MAGA figure, allied with Trump and admired by his supporters. If JD Vance is a firm national conservative, it is fair to say that Ramaswamy is not.
More importantly, what has actually transpired on the Right during the MAGA era, as it relates to differences between national conservatism and the more libertarian or constitutional conservatism of the past?
Let’s look at what’s happening with Trump’s presidential campaign. From a national conservative perspective, Trump says he will end the conflict between Ukraine and Russia through diplomacy and stop any further U.S. tax dollars from fueling it, an issue Vance is particularly out front on. Trump has said he will slap tariffs on foreign goods. He has also threatened to jail his opponents over alleged election fraud, to arrest and imprison for one year anyone who burns the American flag, and to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, U.S. citizens or not.
I’m not saying national conservatives are necessarily eager to jail or deport people for these acts. But they are examples of wielding government power beyond constitutional norms to punish enemies, and I suspect some natcons wouldn’t be too mad about it.
Also, if there are other major national conservative-aligned efforts that have occurred since Trump’s election in 2016, my apologies, but these come immediately to mind. One could say Governor DeSantis targeting Disney as a private business is a natcon move, and it is, but Trump himself criticized it as a mere “political stunt.”
From a more fusionist perspective, Trump also disagreed with DeSantis in September when the 2024 GOP presidential nominee came out in favor of legalized recreational marijuana in Florida - the most quintessentially cartoonish libertarian position (though right) that he could possibly take.
Trump’s intent to end the Ukraine-Russia conflict through diplomacy is something both libertarians and natcons would like to see. He said at a campaign rally in early September, referring to reported efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to censor citizens’ speech, “I will bring back free speech in America... I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.” Free speech is something Trump endorsers and surrogates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard have put at the center of their support for him.
Trump promises deregulation, to cut the Department of Education, to make his 2017 tax cut permanent and even to establish a government efficiency commission headed by billionaire X owner Elon Musk.
All of these sound good to small government advocates, but Trump has actually done unprecedented outreach to libertarians in the 2024 cycle in the hope of earning some of their votes in what could be a close election.
Trump spoke at the Libertarian Party national convention in May where he was actually booed by many in attendance. He was the first major party candidate in the LP’s history to speak at their convention. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Ramaswamy spoke too.
But Trump also received some big cheers at the LP conference - particularly when he promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, who is currently serving double life sentences plus 40 years for running a website where the sale of narcotics and other illegal activities took place.
“Free Ross” signs have been regular staples at libertarian events for over a decade, where his mother Lyn Ulbricht is often seen trying to rally support and attention on her son’s plight, and whose absurdly long sentence relative to the crime committed is a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment. “On day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served,” Trump said. “He’s already served 11 years. We’re going to get him home.”
In other words, if Trump wanted to do the most libertarian thing imaginable to please hardcore libertarian activists - something few of them would have imagined possible - this was it. Trump repeated his promise to commute Ulbricht’s sentence in July at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville.
At that conference, Trump promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet,” music to libertarian ears. Libertarian Party officials say they have worked with Team Trump to grant Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a full pardon after President Joe Biden cut a plea deal with him in June. Trump has also said he will appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet.
In 2018, President Trump signed the First Step Act, the greatest criminal justice reform bill in modern American history, something he has touted to black audiences during this campaign including befriending popular rappers as surrogates. “I am absolutely thrilled with tonight’s passage of the First Step Act,” said longtime criminal justice reform advocate Sen. Paul at the time. “True to its name, this prison and sentencing reform bill is a much-needed first step toward shifting our focus to rehabilitation and reentry of offenders, rather than taking every person who ever made a mistake with drugs, locking them up, and throwing away the key.”
Trump’s list of libertarian-friendly rhetoric and initiatives is long, including his vow to take on the Deep State in a more substantive manner than his first term. RFK Jr. and Ramaswamy recently had an in-depth interview with popular conservative pundit Tucker Carlson on this subject, Trump’s role in battling it, each man a strong critic of the concept and/or reality of a deep state.
Meanwhile, high profile national conservative, or at least NatCon adjacent, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, wrote an essay after Joe Biden’s terrible, mentally deficient debate titled, “Biden’s performance should make us grateful for the deep state.”
Not exactly MAGA reading.
This is not to say that most or perhaps any national conservatives necessarily agree with Ahmari on the positive value of the deep state, but it is indicative of how scattershot the NatCon movement is - as most movements tend to be - as opposed to imagining yourselves as the sole conservative movement and natural inheritors of MAGA.
Robert Bellafiore attended the National Conservatism conference and noticed how little consensus there was, and even wondered if some attendees actually longed for fusionism or at least a fresh version of it.
“Here is a strong conviction that something fundamental has changed within conservatism, and for the better. But what is that something?” Bellafiore wrote for Fusion. “Throughout the conference, it became clear that even champions of national conservatism, who believe that the movement is succeeding, are not in full agreement about what constitutes that success.”
He continued, “But as I found as an attendee at NatCon, determining precisely what national conservatism’s impact has been, and what distinguishes national conservatism from the fusionism it has sought to depose, are matters of considerable disagreement among natcons themselves.”
“At the same time that speakers celebrated national conservatism’s success, many also emphasized a strong continuity with fusionism,” Bellafiore observed. “Bovard insisted that national conservatism isn’t a deviation from Reaganism or fusionism, but a ‘reconnection with what those movements actually were’; Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts similarly stated that national conservatism is not a departure from conservatism, but a continuation of it.”
“So is national conservatism a decisive break with fusionist conservatism, or merely a revised version of it?” he asks.
I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure they know either.
But I do know Donald Trump and his MAGA movement represents the current base of the Republican party and likely will for some time to come.
And within it, libertarians have had as much to work with as anyone else.
Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us. Jack has written regularly for the Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The American Conservative, Spectator USA and has appeared in Politico Magazine and The Daily Beast. Hunter is the co-author of the The Tea Party Goes to Washington by Sen. Rand Paul.