The Natalism Conference

More like Normieism conference.

If you will be in San Francisco April 17th 6:30 PM, consider attending New World Dinner 5 — an IRL meetup hosted by yours truly. Please sign up if you want to attend.

The Natalism Conference was not a gathering of either fascists or tech oligarchs. It was just a gathering of normal, agreeable social conservatives.

I got a hint of this before the conference even started. On the flight from DC to Austin, I met a few very mainstream conservatives headed to the same place. A few people messaged me telling me they would be attending both NatalCon and Reason Weekend — a surprising overlap!

Two weeks ago, a left-wing journalist told me that she was just bored with left-wing conferences — everyone tiptoed around the most important disagreements. How did NatalCon manage to recreate that environment with right-wing people?

Friday

I walked into my first side event and immediately saw friend of the show Jeremy Carl . I joined his conversation with another conservative think-tanker. A minute later Lyman Stone walks in. Later in the day, I joined up with a half dozen of DC locals. Most of us had come in on the same flight.

Many speakers are scholars at social conservative think tanks — Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies, Jeremy Carl and Scott Yenor at the Claremont Institute, and Terry Schilling at American Principles Project. The same is true of the attendees. Even if they weren’t professional conservative scholars, they tended to have the same beliefs and personality type — scholarly, mostly agreeable, and compromising.

I’m increasingly convinced that any issue promising social conservatives a path to mainstream prominence without the usual social conservative badges will go viral — think wokeness, trans, school choice, or natalism. Every time one of these issues pop up, it sparks an ensuing media fascination about whether this will be the Next Big Thing or the next electoral old maid. Honestly, pronatalism could be either.

A few hours later, I walked into the main event with an Indian on my left and a Jew on my right. You can imagine my shock when a cast of pale-white protestors started calling us Nazis.

Source: AJA Cortez

Upon walking into the venue, a friend came up to me and told me “I’ve never seen a higher ratio of journalists to attendees “(probably around 1 journalist for every 3 attendees, by my estimate). I’ve seen private events blow past the ratio, but it’s hard to think of a nominally public event that matches it. Surely, part of the reason everyone held back at the main conference was because there was a journalist around every corner.

The night begins with an intensely academic speech by Alex Petkas. The speech made my personal top 3, but clearly put some of the crowd to sleep. “Classicist Alex Petkas was extremely smart and articulate, but his talk about Spartan mating customs was bizarrely irrelevant to modern fertility issues,” wrote fellow speaker Bryan Caplan. I found Petkas’s speech very relevant on an esoteric reading, so perhaps Petkas got his intended reaction.

I would describe the next three speeches as social conservatism and populism with pronatalist characteristics. That’s much more generous than my fellow reviewers. Caplan again: “Ultimately, I have to blame the organizers for selecting terrible opening speakers. What were they thinking?!” Jack Posobiec, Terry Schilling, and Steve Turley delivered charismatic applause lines while occasionally invoking family and responsibility. It’s safe to say none of them pushed the frontier of natalist philosophy or science.

That night, I headed to one of the many journalist-free side events, often with people who held their tongue at the main event – not even because they were particularly scandalous, but because the main event had such a strong vibe of holding back and not rocking the boat. The side events were an improvement, but the vibes were still off. They solved the causal roots of the conference — journalists and a mandate to socially coalition-build — but did not fully reverse the underlying culture set by the central conference. Maybe this can be a learning experience about fertility.

Saturday

The next morning, a few hundred of us crowded into the AT&T Convention Center for the full-day event. I enjoyed the talks much more on Saturday. Cremieux, Lyman, Dan Hess / Bryan Caplan’s debate, and Jonathan Keeperman’s closing speech were the highlights for me. All four were interesting and informative.

With few exceptions I’ll get to, speakers didn’t question fundamental premises. When speakers did mention key divides like biotech, immigration, and regime change, it was done with passive-aggressive jabs rather than informed debate. To be clear — several of the speakers and attendees do great work individually. Lomez questioned the wisdom of bringing natalism into the political arena at all. In his aforementioned keynote, Alex Petkas painted a Straussian picture of martial mating customs — rituals of controlled trangression and maturity. I didn’t catch Razib Khan speaking about the tech-trad alliance, but I expect it was one of the more thoughtful speeches. But most speeches and attendees were more interested in adding epicycles while rome burns. More fundamental questions were answered in a post-event discussion between Dan Hess and Lomez than the entire two days of main events.

Contrary to Bryan and Lyman, I was fairly disappointed by the attendees of the main events (not the side events). There wasn’t actually much first principles thinking or fundamental questioning, just a combination of typical grievance-airing and echoing the frameworks of the speakers.

Let me bust a common myth: there simply was no mainstream tech right contingent at the conference. Several people are making this obviously false claim. Stop it. Promoting pronatalism is honorable, but you should do it honestly. It is true that prominent founders and investors, most famously Elon Musk, care about pronatalism. Some interesting biotech founders showed up, who might become central figures in tech if biotech blossoms. However, It is not true that anyone remotely close to mainstream power or prominence within the tech right showed up in Austin. Not only did the leadership of a16z, Founder’s Fund, Palantir, Anduril, etc. not show up — with half an exception none of their employees or GPs did either. 8VC is headquartered in Austin, but Joe Lonsdale spent his weekend elsewhere. This was not a place you could learn about the beliefs, plans or personality of the tech right. Worse yet — by believing the tech right was represented by this extremely unrepresentative and non-powerful subgroup, the ‘trads’ are vastly underestimating the degree of conflict and visceral hatred for the people who would criminalize various bio-technologies. Saying that the “tech right” was well represented at NatalCon isn’t just a matter of truth in advertising — it’s a matter of deluding yourselves into misunderstanding your own political coalition.

Afterparties

The real philosophy happened when the journalists were gone. These were my favorite parts of the conference.

I met many interesting philosophers —both liberal and not-quite-liberal — who stayed away from the main event. The afterparty was where I had the best conversations about the philosophy of fertility, Schmitt and Hobbes, militarism and the classics, and the connection between fertility and singulatarianism. It was the only setting where I heard frank discussion about immigration and welfare. 5/5 of the most interesting conversations with new people I had at side events (only 2/5 of these people also attended the main event). The afterparties solved many of the problems of the natalism conference and ended with a bang.

As for advice for making the conference better, I’d make the main days more like the afterparty, not make the main event a mainstream media spectacle, have the conference (and especially breakout events) be more conflict oriented, and generally embrace the naturally disagreeable culture of the right.

To me, the Natalism Conference, and similar vibes at other similar right-wing conference, represented the end of an era. The exciting, ambitious, and secretive conference-energy has moved away from the right. Everything had melted away into a combination of think tank and normie conservative culture. The days of 2021 NatCon are over — at least for now.

End

After that I was thrown into a whirlwind of my own making, with back-to-back meetings and events in Austin and NYC. I honestly don’t clearly remember much of it. Surely there are some people I needed to follow up with who I didn’t write down.

My highlight of the entire trip was my reader meetup in NYC, which brought together truly some of the most interesting people who comment on this substack. If you’re interested in experiencing the same thing in SF, consider the SF meetup next week.