March 11, 2025
By David B. McGarry
Last month, Freedom Conservatism convened its first conference in Washington, D.C. The Freedom Conservative movement published its statement of principles in 2023, and since has gained hundreds of signatories, including myself. The statement identifies both the poison afflicting the American body politic and the remedy for it. “Authoritarianism is on the rise both at home and abroad,” the manifesto reads. “More and more people on the left and right reject the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.” Although many signatories usually support Republicans, statement stands athwart the current direction of the GOP — and many of its associated intellectuals — towards bigger, more muscular government, fiscal incontinence, and mercantilist economics.
The FreeCon conference boasted representatives from leading think tanks, including the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute, and leading conservative thinkers such as George Will, Jonah Goldberg, and Charles Murray. Like any good gathering of conservatives, it intertwined wonkishness with humor, optimism with realism, and maths-and-graphs economics with political economy. The agenda and speaker lineup made one thing clear: conservatives must think hard not just about their philosophy but about the details of policy-making. In a social-media-driven political culture, in which vibes are replacing thought as the currency that buys the public’s approbation, a recommitment to seriousness and grown-up governance will do much good.
This gathering of the FreeCons drew responses from onlookers, both friendly and unfriendly. Despite their differences, admirers and critics seemed to agree that Freedom Conservatism must answer the question of whether it can rekindle the fire of liberty in the hearts and minds of the public and manifest its principles in tangible political victories. The answer to this question might have more to do with the next generation than with the present one. Can Freedom Conservatism bequeath to young conservatives a love of liberty and American republicanism? No less solid a foundation will withstand the appeal of bullying statism, which always tugs hard on the human heart.
American conservatism is experiencing a protracted identity crisis. In one sense, this is nothing out of the ordinary. Conservatives, rarely a bunch for rigid, uniformity orthodoxy, have waged internecine conflicts for decades and have amassed the modifiers to prove it: neocons, paleocons, reformicons, the list goes on. The grudge matches have become legend: Meyer vs. Kirk, Nixonions vs. Reaganites, foreign policy hawks vs. doves, and now freedom conservatives vs. national conservatives.
These battles are not a sign of weakness. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 37, liberty and order must coexist in a free government, yet they cannot but coexist in tension with one another. Throughout American history, political factions have struggled to navigate between unity and consolidation, and pluralism and decentralization. Conservatives, likewise, have argued among themselves to identify the proper balance.
The current moment does have certain peculiarities, however. Sixty years since Goldwater’s run and nearly a half century since Reagan first sat behind the Resolute Desk, the conservative movement and the Republican party seemed to have completed a thorough change of management. As the GOP drifts toward statism, the sort of intellectual conservatism that is native to America — emphasizing individual liberty, decentralized governance, free markets, blind justice, etc. — has found itself evicted from halls of power. The case of antagonistic writers seems to be that Freedom Conservatism is an anachronism, a discarded relic of a bygone and better forgotten age.
I do not believe Freedom Conservatism has outlived its usefulness, though. For one, it is quintessentially, unapologetically, uniquely American. Even as American government has evolved from the system prescribed by the Constitution, certain assumptions about the nature of man and justice still obtain among the American people, hardwired into our habits, worldviews, and sympathies. Most Americans have not read John Locke or The Federalist, but we remain a “classically liberal” people insofar as we tend to be skeptical of centralized power, are disposed to believe individuals should generally be left free to conduct their own lives and finances, and regard the United States as a successful alternative to European models of state and society. The fact that some antagonists cannot see that Freedom Conservatism — aside from its philosophical merits — deserves consideration because it fits the character, history, and traditions of the American people calls into question their judgement on political matters, generally.
It’s true that Freedom Conservatism’s tradition is an old thing, forged by reason and experimentation and tested by time and experience. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration of Independence amounted to the American encapsulation of the political tradition of “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney etc.” — “an expression of the American mind,” he called it. This was Abraham Lincoln’s faith and the battle cry of freedom that animated Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan. It is the inheritance which freedom conservatives have received, gratefully, from their ancestors and which they seek to pass on — not just untarnished but polished brighter than ever — to their children.
Recurring at the FreeCon conference was a mild discomfort with its location: Washington, D.C. The venue was nice, and the weather nice enough, but freedom conservatives understand that the day-to-day business of government is best done as close to the governed as possible. Restoring constitutional balance means not just reforming the federal government but returning many of its accumulated powers to the states. Besides being an American tradition, government of the people, by the people, near the people has fostered republican virtues and healthy democratic politics since the nation's founding (before, even). That giant sucking sound of Washington, D.C. hoovering up powers constitutionally and prudentially best left in state capitals has nationalized and toxified American politics. For that reason, it was announced that FreeCon conferences will be held in various regions, escaping Washington for the places around the country in which governance ought actually to be done.
Better yet, FreeCons argue, are private associations and institutions of civil society, especially the church and the family. As the government — and especially the federal government — cannot coerce virtue, it also cannot coerce happiness. To the annoyance of would-be reformers, no federal infrastructure program or subsidy can engineer society just so and save humanity from its own shortcomings. “Human nature is more intractable than ant nature,” as Winston Churchill wrote.
Responding the National Conservatism’s Statement of Principles — a foil of a sort to the FreeCon document — Charles Kesler wrote this: “What the National Conservatives are actually offering, then, is not so much the return of American nationalism — or of a purely traditional form of American conservatism, shorn of neos and libertarians — but a re-writing of American conservatism along new, less brazenly American lines, assimilating it, in effect, to the nationalism of other nations, beginning with Great Britain.” Despite their dislike of imports and distrust for immigrants, national conservatives have a peculiar taste for importing decidedly foreign sensibilities. Freedom conservatives, alternatively, espouse something of a philosophical Monroe Doctrine.
From any phylum of self-described conservative, the indictment that an idea’s age disqualifies it also rings discordant. Human nature does not change with the years; we remain the rational, political, and social animals described by Aristotle. As Newton gave way to Darwin in the pantheon of scientists, neither the ends towards which man and good government aim nor the best means to pursue them changed a bit. Centralization, which conduces to unaccountable governance and a monarchical executive, remains dangerous. Planning and price controls remain ill-advised — as they were for Hammurabi and Diocletian, Roosevelt and Nixon, Sanders and Hawley.
On the economic front, although they scorn the purportedly played-out policies of the 1990s, the (newest) New Right recurs to those of the 1890s and William McKinley — or, for that matter, George III. Their affection for labor unions harkens back to medieval guilds. These policies are commonly known as progressive. National conservatives determined to assert central planning and industrial policies as right-wing aims forget that knowledge problems and the corruption of special interests apply to everybody, not just liberals. Electorally buoyed Republicans can micromanage economies no better than joyful Democrats. The response of financial markets to President Trump’s announced and then swiftly postponed tariffs on North American trade show that the laws of economics bend for nobody’s political movement.
Freedom conservatives understand these constraints and seek to work within them. They know that a popular and successful administration will raze government-erected barriers to prosperity, allowing Americans to flourish. They seek to make markets safe and orderly, not to plan them. Voters will chafe against economic stagnation, and right-wing cheerleaders for protectionism, industrial policy, and Big Labor will find that Americans’ frustrations with the languid Biden economy will become trained on a languid Trump economy, should one be allowed to develop. To economic policy and the damage that ensues from their favored interventions, many national conservatives seem to have a Hamletian approach: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Markets disagree, and their feedback is unyieldingly honest; ignoring their tidings comes at great peril.
So, will Freedom Conservatism succeed in its aims? In the short term, it will likely achieve some. The most successful aspect of the second Trump administration is its assault on bureaucracy. The Republican party burns with fervor to tear down the administrative state, a sine qua non of revitalizing the Constitution and restoring meaningful self-government to the American people. Moreover, the federal judiciary is now more faithful to the Constitution than any time in recent memory. At the state level, Freedom Conservatism–aligned lawmakers institute reforms to better their constituents’ lives, no less significant for their distance from the lights and cameras trained on Washington, D.C.
The immediate success of other aims, however, seem less certain. Intra-conservative fights can be bloody, and their outcomes unsure. National conservatism has been advancing of late, but the tide of battle is always subject to reversals. The FreeCons show no signs of retreat; indeed, they are happy warriors.
But the immediate outcome of factional struggles can also be misleading. Short-term political ascendency seems to be taken by some as final evidence of intellectual credibility. Funny notion, this. What is is not necessarily what ought to be. Ideas are true or untrue, good or bad, irrespective of their cash value. And true, good ideas tend to survive periods when they’re out of fashion. Republicans were scarce in Napoleonic France, yet that fact did not vindicate the morality of dictatorship. An idea’s momentary unpopularity shouldn’t discourage its purveyors; Isaiah had a job to do.
In the long term, therefore, Freedom Conservatism’s prospects seem bright. Jefferson in his First Inaugural argued that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Whatever errors may find momentary purchase, if Freedom Conservatism is right about human nature and its theory of good government — and I believe it is — its principles will be proven by experience and vigorous public debate.
On July 5, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge pronounced the principles of the Declaration of Independence “final.” Man’s natural rights to himself and his liberty, to his labor and his property, to consent to his government and chart his own course — these are the American creed and woven deeply into the fabric of the Constitution. “No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions,” Coolidge added.
Whatever the regressives on either the right or the left might say, freedom conservatives will stand firm.
David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance