Having self-medicated the previous night, I approached the prospect of a full day of lectures on civic nationalism with some dread. I did myself a favor and skipped the first speaker, but I arrived in time to hear David Brog deliver a long sermon on the glories of immigration and how immigrants made America. It was 200 proof immigration romanticism spiced up with some personal anecdotes about his Jewish grandfather’s journey to America and how much he loved his adopted country.

Of course, he sprinkled his sermon with more reminders about how racism is the worst and there is no place for it in national conservatism. I suspect all speakers were told to do this, so that the media would record it. I counted fifty people at the media tables. Maybe the plan is to keep repeating the bit about racism until some of them will repeat it. Then again, this national conservative thing is shaping up to look like Mitt Romney style conservatism, so maybe these guys really believe this stuff…

The next speaker was a woman calling herself Mary Eberstadt. Her speech was garden variety civic nationalism. She made it clear that this new brand of nationalism is open to everyone. She did not throw a tantrum about racism, as has been the case with most of the speakers, but she made it clear that America is for everyone as long as they agree on the rules. The main difference between what we have now and what she proposes is the new thing is called nationalism…

The final speaker of the morning session was Yoram Hazony. It was an interesting performance to behold. He started out criticizing neoconservatives, making the absurd claim that the current crop of neocons are not the real neocons. They have strayed from the original into imperialism. Then he let it be known that one of the sponsors for this show was The Public Interest, a neocon quarterly founded by Irving Kristol. The fact that he said this without laughing was quite remarkable.

He then moved onto libertarianism. It’s interesting to hear these guys criticize libertarianism, because they don’t really know why they oppose it. They just associate it with the cultural decline, so they assume it is the cause. There’s also a reactionary vibe to their fight with the libertarians. These new nationalists don’t like the libertarians, because libertarians oppose nationalism. For their purposes, maybe that’s enough to dismiss the economic arguments against their brand of nationalism.

The third part of his speech was a trade about white nationalism. He fumbled around trying to say something about biological reality, but that made him sound like a nut from the flat earth society. Then he warned about the threat of white nationalism, especially among young people. Then he made the claim that there is no such thing as tribal loyalty, which is an odd thing, given that he claims a nation is a collection of tribes. As in his book, it’s clear he terrifies himself when he follows his logic to its conclusion.

I said to my minder after the speech that I enjoyed the speech much better when Paul Gottfried gave it in 1985. That’s really what this new nationalism is, when you clear away the wacky Christian Zionist stuff and the virtue signaling. This is just good old fashioned paleo-conservationism, stripped of its intellectual underpinnings. Instead of biology forming the foundation of nationalism, it is this magical connection between people that forms when people are in the same vicinity…

I nearly bust out laughing at one point in Harzony’s speech. He was flapping his arms about the evils of biological realism, talking about how evil race realists like me are dangerous because we know a lot about the human sciences. He made the claim that race realists were delusional. As proof he talked about how people love dogs and soldiers build strong bonds. At one point, I thought he was going to claim trench socialism was proof that kinship is an optical illusion. The whole thing was bonkers…

The keynote speaker for the lunchtime crowd was Tucker Carlson, who was treated like a rock star. He gave a fun talk that was not really a speech about anything, more like a string of loosely connected anecdotes and observations. Carlson claims he does not consume much of anything on-line, but he certainly sounds a like a guy familiar with what gets posted on dissident sites. He did a riff on the opposite rule of liberalism that sounded a lot like this post from years back. Maybe it is just a coincidence…

The funny thing about this event is not a single person has bothered to mention that conservatism, whether neocon or Buckley, managed to conserve nothing. Further, they don’t put any thought into why it failed. They just seem to think if they can go back and do it all over again, the results will be different somehow. Not only is that impossible, it fails to address the internal defects of conservatism. The reason we are at this place, is the so-called conservatives chose to embrace Progressive morality….

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