Carlson mocked what he described as the progressive obsession with supposed racism: “It’s such a boring subject,” he said. “It’s such a dead end. It can’t be fixed; it can’t be changed.” Somewhere in the audience, a man yelled “Hear! Hear!” Racism: This charge, more than any other, loomed awkwardly throughout the conference. The president, whose time in office has produced a long trail of racist remarks, spent the early part of this week tweeting about how four freshmen congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” even though they are all American citizens. The House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning his statements as racist.

Friedersdorf: Tucker Carlson has failed to assimilate

Hazony took pains to draw the boundary between nationalism and white nationalism, both before and after the conference. He barred the participation of Peter Brimelow, the editor of the white-supremacist website VDARE, and several others in Brimelow’s orbit, inviting a barrage of anti-Semitic criticism. During the conference’s first day, Hazony warned the group not to underestimate the appeal of white nationalism: “If you think it’s just a tiny periphery, you’re looking in the wrong place,” he said. Other speakers went so far as to censure the president. “We have to push back against Donald Trump when he does things to increase that breach between the right and African Americans,” said Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, during one session. “He’s got to avoid unforced and idiotic errors.” And yet the conference was relentlessly focused on immigration and assimilation, with repeated calls to protect the English language and, in at least one case, favor whites over nonwhites.

On its face, the gathering seemed to be an attempt to superimpose an intellectual framework onto the brute force of Trumpism and, to a certain extent, the populist rebellions that have swept countries from Italy to Poland to the United Kingdom. But at a deeper level, this event was about the future of conservatism at a time of deep fracture within the movement. According to those gathered, the conservative establishment in Washington has been revving in neutral ever since Trump was elected president, knowing they have to go with the moment but unwilling to truly question long-held conservative principles. The elite insurgents at the Ritz would like nothing more than to see the old marriage between hard-core libertarians and social conservatives permanently ended, and to build new institutional alliances around a positive, unifying vision of nationalism. “The right has been too economistic in its thinking for a long time, and too libertarian,” Yuval Levin, the policy wonk and author who was recently tapped to lead a new division at the American Enterprise Institute focused on family and civic life, told me. “I think it needs to be more concerned with social and cultural questions—not just two or three that we sort of call the social issues, but the foundations of a free society and family and community and civic life.”