The Problem with Nationalism

A presentation at the first annual “National Conservatism” conference created a firestorm. Let’s take a closer look.

Yoram Hazony knows that nationalism’s global aspirations, irony aside, cannot be realized apart from a vibrant intellectual culture to draw from. So when his newly-formed Edmund Burke Foundation gathered leading nationalist and nationalist-adjacent minds at the first annual National Conservatism Conference on July 14–16 in Washington, DC, the obvious question to pose to Hazony and the other organizers was: Why did it take this long?

The problem with populism is it does not spring from ideas but from yearnings. The causal order of ideological movements usually goes: ideas first, then the movement; the populist flips that on its head by riding into office on a wave of raw emotive power, and then, sometime later, maybe never, backfilling an intellectual program into place in a post hoc stupor of newfound civic obligation.

But we didn’t need to be in year three of Trump’s reign to realize we are living through the most unyieldingly anti-intellectual presidency to ever hit this country—we didn’t need to be in year one, or even day one. Donald Trump is not a man who reads, or inquires, or learns. The U.S. presidency is not an academic post, that’s fine, but…