NatCon Travelogue

It was Definitely National, Somewhat Conservative, and Very (Classically) Liberal

I’m not usually in the business of writing travelogues. But NatCon UK has become a bit of a propaganda event, with bad people on both sides projecting their wish/nightmare fulfillment onto the event, regardless of what actually happened. So I think it’d be useful for me to recount my time there.

I arrived late thanks to an Air Canada flight delay of over 90 minutes. Initially scheduled to arrive just before Mary Harrington and Alex Kashuta spoke, I had instead arrived after. These were some of the more talked about speeches of the entire event, and in Mary’s case, one of the most memed online, both pro and against. The rhythm of the event was an alternating cycle between 4-5 speakers presenting for around 90 minutes, then an hour break for food, discussion, and networking, where people would circulate around the venue and booth area. This was a fairly soft schedule, and there were always a few dozen people (of the 800 total registered attendees) drifting around the booth area during the speeches (which in the later half of the event, more often than not included me). 

One Twitter User, in Response to Mary Harrington

The speakers were almost all very available to speak with regular conference guests after the speeches. I saw this availability culture build through cyclical reinforcement: students would ask questions which speakers genuinely enjoyed answering, word of mouth would spread, and more speakers would stay in public areas for longer periods of time. 

I was asked a few times why I thought the students here asked particularly good questions. I responded with the following anecdote: Every NatCon, Yoram Hazony, the conference organizer and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, brings out the NatCon statement of principles and remarks that almost no one has signed it, including most of the speakers. I think this is intentional: Yoram isn’t dunking on himself, he’s reminding people that open disagreement is necessary and good. NatCon lacks the type of conference-going who runs on automatic scripts and fears deviation, and I think this is the reason.

The coalitions of NatCon Miami (the only previous iteration I’ve attended) and NatCon UK could not be more different. In Miami, every other booth wanted to sell me on their specific cocktail of tariffs, subsidies, strategic partnerships, and labor laws that they had scientifically proven (with varying rigor) to be better than the rest. In London, not a single person proactively tried to speak to me about trade, and among the dozen or so that I asked, there were more supportive of free trade than against.

The American speakers seemed distinctly out of place. After J.D. Vance spoke, a bunch of Brits asked him why he didn’t support Ukraine more, including one who seemed quite offended. He mostly replied by saying it was a decision based on American interests. I asked him whether he supports GPU export controls on China, and he said yes. Michael Anton made his co-panelists visibly uncomfortable whenever he mentioned intelligence agencies, despite clearly pulling punches compared to his NatCon Miami speech. Kevin Roberts was probably the most well-received American among locals, but didn’t say anything particularly ambitious.

Before I make fun of media misconceptions about who was on what ‘side’, I should mention that I had one such misconception myself. There were two protestors outside the NatCon venue with signs saying “Say No to the Tories”. I initially thought they were complaining about the Tories not being Conservative enough, which was a fairly common sentiment throughout the conference. Apparently these were left-wing/anti-brexit people who the local political scene were familiar with. 

The British left-wing media, upon covering a conference involving Alex Kaschuta and Michael Anton, seemed to have fixated on Douglas Murray and Triggernometry, both pretty much classical liberals, as the real “hard-right” threat. I’m surprised that Douglas spoke at NatCon at all, considering his ideology and open conflict with American immigration restrictionist Pedro Gonzalez (Pedro’s reply). Douglas’ oratory skills are stellar and certainly held the room at his dinner address, but there was little if anything in his speech that deviates from mainstream British Conservatism. I don’t know what my takeaway from this is. That the British left-wing media is too lazy to read through the transcripts of their speeches? It really is not at all ambiguous who made the more ambitious speeches at NatCon. The meta-theme is that you can basically make as extreme of a point as you want as long as it is detailed and esoteric enough. 

So far, my review has been relatively positive. Nothing really justifies my subtitle: “It was Definitely National, Somewhat Conservative, and Very (Classically) Liberal”. 

One theme NatCon shares across the pond is opposition to ‘neoliberalism’ – a word famously used by people across the entire political spectrum to denote people they don’t like, and by a different group of people across the entire political spectrum to denote people who believe in any amount of economics, there’s not much insight you can get to what ‘opponents of neoliberalism’ think from the term alone. 

Here is my fundamental critique of NatCon UK.  In the US, the twin forces of ‘neoliberalism’ and mindless culture war grievances were intertwined. NatCon Miami was a revolt against both, with the combined beliefs labelled “boomer conservatism”. NatCon UK was the substitution of one half of boomer conservatism with the other. This isn’t to say that there aren’t insightful ways to fight the culture war. NatCon Miami included speeches detailing a model of success in reforming the administrative state, a keynote address detailing legal methods to combat ESG, a panel on combating far-left journalists, and many more. All I want from these panels are clear data points about the real world as it is, not as you want it to be. It can be as ideological or partisan as you want, that isn’t the problem. But at the end of the day, there has to be something to take away. Instead, here’s what we had:

There’s no conservative coalition without a fair portion of culture war. But this is more than a fair portion, and there’s more on different days. Detractors might say “Of course you would say that, you’re an autist who cares about machine learning and export controls”. In truth, there is a type of conservative with unconditional disdain for cultural principles that are worth standing for. But even NatCon UK speakers told me they believed there to be far too much culture war at this event. Moreover, without a substantive policy backing across the whole of government, there’s little reason to expect an aesthetically more “anti-woke” party to actually change the direction of government. All of these are obvious lessons to the American new right, inseparably intertwined with the critiques of “neoliberalism”. Once again, I cannot understate how well this was done at NatCon Miami. But for now, it seems the British NatCons have just wandered from one side of the desert to the other. 

P.S.: I didn’t find any place in the narrative to fit this, but the speech which changed my mind the most is friend of the newsletter Eric Kaufmann’s speech “In Defense of Particularistic Nationalism”. It was very well executed with a solid logical backbone.