Why So Many Conservatives Feel Like Losers
As I arrived for the first day of the National Conservatism Conference in London, a protester outside shouted directions to me: “Up the stairs—turn far right.”
That description, unsurprisingly, would have offended many of the speakers gathered this week at the Emmanuel Centre, a 10-minute walk from Big Ben. One of them, the journalist Melanie Phillips, published an article after the conference’s first day headlined: “National Conservatism is not a fascist plot.” Good to have that cleared up. Instead, according to the conference’s organizers, it is about a form of conservatism “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation … an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”
NatCon draws an international group of nationalists (I know) who have also organized events in the United States—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been a speaker—as well as in Brussels and Rome. Their favored politicians include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and their politics are socially conservative, anti-immigration, authoritarian, and heavily invested in an idealized version of “the West.” The most reliable applause line in London was to imply that the left has parted company with reality over gender, as in this quip by Home Secretary Suella Braverman: “100 percent of women do not have a penis.” (Hearty applause.)
The conference takes place at a piquant moment for Britain. The Conservative Party has been in power here since 2010, and seven years ago, the populist right surprised itself by winning the referendum on membership of the European Union. Brexit should have been a moment of great victory for members of this faction,
