At NatCon, Online Right Leads. Will Traditional Grassroots Follow?
This article was originally published at RealClearPolitics.
My trip to Miami last week wasn’t spent lying on a towel or boating to Key Biscayne. Instead, at the National Conservatism conference, a political and intellectual “New Right” gathering that continues to grow in popularity, I soaked in speeches instead of sunshine. In a three-day series of panels, thorny terms like “populist foreign policy” and “post-liberal nationalism” were interspersed with calls to dismantle the domestic security establishment and defund leftist power structures from certain federal agencies to teachers’ unions.
Progressive journalists moved quietly through the crowd, listening and scribbling notes. Anonymous Twitter celebrities moved even more quietly, laying plans with their mainstream allies. Hungarians from the Victor Orbán administration manned booths and touted cultural and political exchange programs for Americans. I was pulled into an impromptu interview by a camera-wielding ABC News correspondent who wanted to know if Ron DeSantis, who gave the conference keynote speech, should replace Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s leader – and whether the 2020 election was legitimate.
For those familiar with the New Right milieu, this was all run of the mill. But as a Pennsylvanian who maintains a close relationship with the local Republican grassroots, I couldn’t help but muse at how strange this conference would seem to normal GOP voters, most of whom could not locate Hungary on a map or distinguish between Sohrab Ahmari and Saurabh Sharma.
The dynamic of online versus traditional politics has been playing out in our elections since social media became our public square. This midterm cycle, it has become a major question whether a particular candidate who is popular online would achieve similar popularity at the ballot box. One “extremely online” candidate whose campaign I worked with – Joe Kent, in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District – achieved a primary victory because his team was committed to traditional campaigning tactics alongside digital ones. Another candidate I spoke to at NatCon, Anthony Sabatini in Florida’s 7th Congressional District, lost his primary to Cory Mills because, he said, his opponent’s more analog campaign tactics put Sabatini at an insurmountable fundraising disadvantage, despite his popularity online.
The ability to navigate this online-grassroots divide puts some politicians in a league of their own. That difference was clear among the politicians who spoke at NatCon. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, for example, did an impressive job of hitting the NatCon bullet points – the importance of using power for conservative ends, the lateness of the hour in the face of creeping totalitarianism, the need to rebuke woke corporate America. But sincere as they may be, their language felt tacked-together, copy-pasted from National Conservatism’s mission statement. It was clear to me that they are still adapting to the NatCon movement.
Blake Masters and Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, represent a new breed of candidate. Both can translate the ideas of National Conservatism into the language of the audience to whom they are speaking. Masters specializes in jousting with the liberal media and chiding them toward a better vision of America. DeSantis’ specialty is the language of his constituents: Every policy reference in his keynote was conveyed as an explanation to a mother, a small-business owner, a churchgoer. “DeSantis attacks the left extremely effectively without stirring up the ire of the average voter,” Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl told me. This effectiveness in communication is a direct result of the two candidates’ sophisticated engagement with ideas.
Pennsylvania’s statewide Republican candidates – Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano – are another matter. Their campaigns contain much of the fire of DeSantis or Masters, but their platforms and ideas are conveyed more simply. Mastriano, especially, maintains an uncompromising focus on what went wrong in the 2020 election, emphasizes protecting citizens from COVID restrictions and other forms of state and federal overreach, and promises to make structural changes that will make it harder for Democrats to wield power undemocratically. Yet he seems to have little interest in adapting NatCon language or engaging with the movement whose thinkers the conference represents.
I asked Chronicles magazine associate editor Pedro Gonzalez, who lives in neighboring Ohio, for his take on the influence of online politics. He told me: “Prominent candidates like Blake Masters and politicians like Ron DeSantis have teams that are tapped into the online discourse. I’ve also noticed this as a feature of the Texas grassroots scene. If politicos themselves aren’t tapped in, their younger staffers are. Personnel is policy and rhetoric. This isn’t true everywhere, but I do think what is being said online is actually influencing political reality … Remember, Tucker Carlson regularly pulls tweets and uses them for segments.”
Another attendee, Trent England of the election integrity organization Save Our States, reflected on the appeal of NatCon ideas in his home state of Oklahoma: “Voters here want policies that defend the family and national sovereignty, and while they believe in limited government and free markets, they understand that those things are means, not ends. Which is to say that voters in Oklahoma already seem to be ‘NatCon voters,’ whether they know it or not.” What is online in flavor is seen by some as simply the latest iteration of decades-old grassroots populism.
Despite National Conservatism’s online nature, it sometimes has trouble breaking through to young conservatives. I spoke with David Carlson of American Virtue, a youth outreach organization that endorses National Conservatism, about the popularity that NatCon ideas have among young people. He said: “Although [NatCon] events are filled with young activists and intellectuals, most conversations I have with people my age lead me to believe that they know very little about the National Conservative Project. The young Republican base thinks of this as an elite movement with little substance.”
If many successful Republican candidates and large swaths of young conservatives find it difficult to engage directly with NatCon’s ideas, what power can those ideas have? The answer, as Gonzalez pointed out, is a great deal. As someone who has been involved in both institutional conservatism and “dissident Right” circles for many years, I believe that NatCon offers something fundamentally unique. The conference is an open floor for debate on topics that have essentially been shelved for years by moneyed interests and dominant personalities in the conservative movement. Fraught though its execution may be, National Conservatism is building a home for the rich diversity of thought on the right.
It is this intellectual cache that allows the right to punch above its weight in partisan political struggles. Though the political grassroots and more “analog” campaigns in rural areas are not directly tuned in to NatCon and the online right, they are not untouched by its influence.
