By John Hood
Monday, November 03, 2025
Have national conservatives won the fight for the right?
That’s certainly the view of many jubilant populists and no small number of
frustrated or depressed conservatives. At the most recent NatCon conference in
Washington, D.C., featured speakers included Office of Management and Budget
Director Russell Vought, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, U.S.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Senators Josh Hawley and Jim Banks,
activist Steve Bannon, and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — all
longtime voices on the nationalist-populist right with significant roles within
or in close proximity to the Trump administration.
President Trump has imposed the protectionist tariffs he
has always wanted. Congress has enacted his big, beautiful bill, including a
massive increase in federal debt and Trump’s desired carve-outs for tips,
overtime, and Social Security income. Panicked CEOs, university presidents, and
foreign leaders continue to jockey for the president’s attention.
It’s over, proclaim the NatCons and their allies. We
won!
Who lost? Zombie Reaganites, market fundamentalists,
neocons — the epithets vary, but their subjects aren’t hard to identify. Those
who continue to advocate limited government, free enterprise, fiscal restraint,
federalism, and the rule of law. Those who seek to conserve the civic
republicanism and classical liberalism that powered the American Founding.
Those who think manners and mutual respect still matter in politics.
Those of us who, even now, refuse to see what time it is.
As a co-founder of the Freedom Conservatism project, I
suppose I’m one of the chronometrically impaired. When I look at today’s
nationalist-populist right, I don’t see a triumphant movement propelling
America into a brighter future. I see a mad scramble of squabbling factions,
some blithely utopian and others longing for an imaginary past, some led by
well-meaning but misguided people (including friends of mine), and others by
unhinged conspiracists or cynical hucksters.
And when I examine the first nine months of the second
Trump administration, I don’t see a steady stream of NatCon victories. I see an
incoherent mixture of wise policies, foolish policies, welcome surprises, and
reckless bets, plus plenty of grift, graft, and grossness. The same
reconciliation bill that expanded deficits and junked up the tax code with
populist gimmicks also slashed taxes on business investment, expanded school
choice, strengthened defense and public safety, and initiated needed reforms of
Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and student-loan subsidies.
On both foreign and domestic policy, President Trump has
indulged his own instincts rather than adopt a thoroughgoing national populism.
As he did during his first term, Trump has brought some smart, principled
people into government service who truly want to unleash American enterprise,
restore equal protection under the law, and tame the administrative state. But
he has also hired a motley assortment of cranks and crooks who crave vengeance
and power. Trump’s mercurial trade policies have heightened economic
uncertainty and hiked taxes on domestic consumers and companies while inducing
a range of responses from other countries, some retaliating with import taxes
of their own, others loosening restrictions on American exports in a bid to
curry Trump’s favor.
And there’s the rub. In their agitation for a more
energetic national government to tame the free market, today’s right-wing
populists have fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
By which I mean, truly, the Book. It chronicles our
fallen nature and the folly of centralizing power in human hands. “Put not your
trust in princes,” advised the Psalmist. “Your princes are rebels and
companions of thieves,” thundered Isaiah. “Everyone loves a bribe and runs
after gifts.” Centuries later, Tacitus reminded his readers that “the more
numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” James Madison, Edmund
Burke, Lord Acton, Friedrich Hayek — nearly every thinker revered by American
conservatives today has warned against giving rulers precisely the kind of
discretionary power now exercised by President Trump (and abused by previous
Democratic administrations).
It is certainly an outrage for Washington to supervise
the decisions of steel and auto companies, to demand “golden shares” in
rare-earth mining and computer-chip firms, to condition tariff exemptions or
presidential pardons on political loyalty, and otherwise to create pathways for
special interests to purchase government favors. But the corruption Acton and
the others had in mind wasn’t just of the financial variety.
It is also an outrage when political actors place their
hunger for power or vengeance above their moral commitments and social
responsibilities. It’s outrageous when prominent conservatives platform
conspiracy theorists or dabble in bigotry themselves while offering the
mealymouthed explanation that they are “only asking questions.” It’s outrageous
when leaders of any faction demean themselves with vulgarity or ridicule the
victims of political violence.
I freely admit that, as a freedom conservative, I support
fiscal restraint, tax cuts, deregulation, decentralization, and choice and
competition in public services in part because they tend to boost economic
growth and broaden economic opportunity. Contrary to the aspersions of our
critics, however, FreeCons are interested in more than just dollars and cents.
We champion the public policies and cultural norms we deem most likely to
promote happy families, healthy communities, and human fulfillment.
Earlier this year, FreeCon signatories decided to revise
our statement of principles to underline this point. “Neither individual
liberty nor human flourishing is sustainable,” we wrote, “outside a civil
society of strong institutions that inculcate virtue, deter corruption, foster
community, comfort the afflicted, and nourish the soul.” We also clarified that
liberty is not only indivisible — “political freedom cannot long exist without
economic freedom” — but also that it is a product of “the laws of nature and
nature’s God.”
In borrowing that phrase from the Declaration of
Independence, we grounded our project in the wisdom of the Founders while
welcoming into our fold conservatives of varying religious beliefs and
practices.
We reject the notion, held by some NatCons and their
allies, that the American experiment was flawed from the start, or that there
ought to be an integration of church and state. Whose church? Which state? This
is utter nonsense at best, dangerous at worst. But we do not reject —
indeed, we fully accept — the astute observation of John Adams that the checks
and balances of American government are a necessary but insufficient guard
against the abuse of power. We agree that our Constitution “was made only for a
moral and religious people” and “wholly inadequate to the government of any
other.”
We are freedom conservatives not because we believe
individual liberty to be the only political end worth pursuing but because
without it — without limiting the power of the state to tax and subsidize, to
reward and punish — all other worthwhile ends, including personal and civic
virtue, are placed in perpetual peril.
“There is danger from all men,” Adams explained. “The
only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power
to endanger the public liberty.” That’s why he and other Founders favored
separating the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the national
government and further separating the national from the state and local. They
also favored other precautions against corruption, ones undertaken not by
lawmakers or lawyers but by parents, publishers, and public leaders.
“Human nature with all its infirmities and depravation is
still capable of great things,” the future president wrote to his wife Abigail
in 1775. “Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature
has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be
trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and
astonishing. Newton and Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be
acquired by long habits of thinking and study.”
Education is the vocation of some FreeCons. They teach at
schools, colleges, and universities across the nation. To some extent, however,
we are all engaged in a continuous process of educating Americans, young and
old, in our nation’s founding ideals and their continuing relevance today.
Among the hundreds of signatories to the FreeCon statement of principles are
many who’ve served in elective office and sought, by word and deed, to remind
their fellow Americans what prudent government can (and cannot) accomplish.
Other FreeCons have worked on Capitol Hill, in
presidential or gubernatorial administrations, or in legislatures, counties,
cities, or school systems. Still others are journalists, authors, litigators,
donors, board members, or grassroots activists. What unites us is an abiding
conviction that American greatness is impossible without American freedom — and
that, yes, power tends to corrupt.
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