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“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
—Henry Kissinger, July 2018
The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.
We’ve all heard before that Donald Trump is a pragmatist, a man of action and not ideas—he did not write a manifesto before coming to power or spend an exile in Vienna (or even Florida in the early 2020s) developing revolutionary theories. He spent his adult life developing buildings in New York City, then starring on a reality TV show that cast him as a merciless and instinct-driven businessman. Yet despite Trump’s lack of an explicit ideological project, or maybe because of it, his rise has coincided with a new energy in right-wing intellectual life. Not all of it is as new as it seems; some of the public intellectuals, opinion-shapers and radical bloggers who are now associated with Trumpism were writing about politics long before Trump, and have merely found in his success an opportunity to assert new ambitions. There is, however, a younger generation, who were children when Trump first ran for office, and whose political imaginations were ignited by his rise to power. They have no memories of belonging to—or being accepted by—any party or cultural milieu except Trump’s. And for them, Trump is not just a disruptor, an excuse, a historical symptom or an accident.
A few months before the 2024 election, Gen Z young men who were leaning toward Trump were described in the New York Times as “apolitical” and adrift; when their demographic achieved new prominence via exit polls, it was implied they had been manipulated into Trumpism by “bro whispering” podcasts. Maybe this was true for some. It was not true of the young, mostly male and intellectually curious Trump voters who I encountered this past summer during a reporting assignment to cover two overlapping conferences in July: first, the fourth installment of the National Conservatism conference (NatCon), and then the “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The young men I met at NatCon—and who I kept up with throughout the summer and fall—were far from apolitical, and they showed no signs of being easily manipulable. In describing how they had arrived at their political outlook, none of them cited podcasts.
I attended these conferences not as a professional journalist, but as a young person interested in ideas. I had no bias against liberals, or toward post-liberals and national conservatives. Raised just outside of the District by immigrants in liberal counties, and coming of age at the end of Obama’s liberal renaissance, I spent my college years—and Trump’s first term—on a progressive campus in California. Since graduating in 2020, I had worked at large government agencies and mainstream think tanks. But like many young people all over the country, I have been searching for thinking and meaning beyond the technocratic liberal consensus. Because of this, I became part of a politically mixed social scene in D.C. and had discovered, with at least a little discomfort, that despite the twentieth-century liberal occupying the White House, the intellectual vitalism in my generation was increasingly to be found in post-liberal or conservative spaces—in other words, on the right.
Even still, I expected to find something of a political sideshow at NatCon; instead, I found a movement, perhaps the only one I’d encountered during my time in D.C.
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There is no dress code at NatCon, but somehow everyone, young and old, is dressed to the nines. Many attendees look like extras in American Psycho; it’s a hot summer, but I see tailored wool and linen suits, tastefully patterned burgundy, ultramarine and violet silk ties, and pocket squares on twenty-year-old men. There are hundreds of young men here, and plenty more are turned away at the registration table; they try to sneak in anyway. Several ask me to help get them in: among these are foreign interns visiting over the summer for internships, young private-sector professionals, college students.
The first morning, I’m approached by a young man dressed in a nice gray suit, who has been hanging at my periphery as I talk to an editor for First Things. The newcomer offers a handshake, mentions he’s a student at an Ivy League school, and clumsily adds that it’ll be his first semester this fall. I realize that he must have graduated high school only weeks before. I had been surprised already to notice many men are easily younger than 25—I hadn’t anticipated meeting a teenager. He’s chosen to spend part of his last summer before college here, at this political conference at the Hilton.
He asks for my LinkedIn and I reach out to him in the fall, after the election. “I was ten when he first announced he was running for president, and he just captured my attention,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated by politics and history, obsessed with world leaders… I think that there’s a certain element of greatness in Trump’s personality.” And then: “I’ve always seen myself in him. That’s the first thing that drew me to him when I was ten. I’d always been admonished in school by my teachers…”
He pauses. “Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
Lucas,*1 born in 2005, was raised in a “typical” and “apolitical” family outside of Philadelphia. “I’ve never in my life remembered a time when the Democratic Party supported ambitious people,” he says. “I think their whole ideology is based off of oppressing those with ambition, who actually have the gumption to go out and do something and build something on their own. … The people who make humanity great, the innovators, the builders, the winners in society, they look at the winners and tell them, ‘You’re evil, and the only reason you’re at the position that you’re at is because you exploited other people.’ It’s antithetical to the way that a lot of young men work.”
But, I ask him, what do young men who aren’t aspiring to be “innovators, builders and winners” think of Trump?
“I went to public high school in a middle-class area,” he says. “A lot of the guys who I went to high school with weren’t particularly ambitious career-wise, but they do admire people who are. They all admire Trump for what he’s done.” He pauses. “Going to the gym, for example: it’s a way to improve yourself.” I immediately think of all the right-wing intellectual influencers on Twitter that post bodybuilding photos alongside their recommended reading lists. “All young men, even if they’re not actively trying to be great, still admire greatness,” he continues. “It’s really rare that you meet one that doesn’t have some respect for somebody who’s gone out and done something great.”
Trump, he explains, is a role model: “He wins against all odds. He gets impeached, he gets criminal trials thrown at him, shakes all that off. He gets shot. The fact alone that he got up and pumped his fist—that takes a lot of physical courage in itself. … He understands deep down that the U.S. has been rudderless since the Cold War. We haven’t had the best people.”
I ask Lucas if anyone else at NatCon, including Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance, the former of whom he got to meet, inspires him. “I really like them. They’re sharp guys; I like their policy. But I don’t really think there’s anybody else like Trump.” Trump proved to him that his dreams were possible, no matter the opposition. “Hopefully I can strike it big in the private sector,” he says, “and then if everything were to go right, I would like to be president someday.”
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Alex* is a lifelong conservative and a friend from university, and unlike Lucas, has no political or entrepreneurial ambitions whatsoever. We bonded when we first met over our shared interest in late antiquity; like nearly every conservative intellectual I know, I had never discussed Trump with Alex until I asked. We had plenty else to discuss. But I was with him in July, soon after the end of NatCon, on the day that Trump was almost assassinated.
We were at a party with a politically mixed (and at first politically disinterested) crowd: there is the liberal son of a prominent Democrat, the editor of a right-leaning policy journal, a think-tanker, a liberal libertarian—a small slice of the D.C. social scene that doesn’t mind being around different political persuasions. (These politically ecumenical events, revealingly, often skew right.)
We barely enjoy refreshments and cocktails before the news spreads: Donald Trump has been shot. One guest spends the rest of the party apparently comatose or on Twitter; others (young conservatives, too) continue as normal, trying to avoid the subject; a summer intern and Project 2025 aspirant begins filming his live response on his smartphone. I realize that I had underestimated the sincerity and intensity of the personal attachment of many young men to Trump. At the end of the night, Alex turns to me, and asks, “The party was fun, really. Really, it was nice… But why does no one care? They nearly killed him.”
I press him after the election to explain what he meant that night. “I personally identified with him … Well, no—the extent to which they were trying to stop him represented the extent to which people have tried to stop me.” By “me,” I think he means young men inside and outside of the academy, and in the broader culture, too. His formative educational and collegiate years were spent in the political fallout of Trump’s first presidency—cancellations, COVID, nationwide protests and political violence; his early academic career, now over, had been characterized largely by the proliferation of DEI and antiracism initiatives.
“When Trump became the Republican nominee, conservative people, especially conservative young people, found themselves in the position of our peers attacking him by proxy through attacking us. There’s a line Trump used—‘they’re not going after me—they’re going after you, I’m just in their way.’ Young men experienced that almost in reverse a lot of the time, when people who were our friends, who were our peers, would just relentlessly bully us, cancel us, harass us, physically assault us because of Trump.”
I think back to Lucas’s description of his fall 2024 semester, his very first on his Ivy League campus. Because he’s been outspoken about his support for Trump, he told me that “sometimes people will just look at me, give me the finger, and say, ‘oh, fuck you, fascist.’ Half these people who tell me to go fuck myself, I have no clue who they are.” Alex, who began his college career two terms ago in a culture also charged by Trump’s electoral success, continues: “And to see him almost get killed, and almost get killed in an astonishingly gruesome and public way, felt like extraordinary evil almost triumphed.”
He’s incredulous recalling the events of not just this past summer, but of the years that preceded it: “In human history, has there been, mathematically speaking, an assassination attempt that was so narrowly avoided? The sheer geometry of it—nothing like it has ever happened in the history of the world. And nothing like him has ever happened in the history of the world. Look at this well-known celebrity, who just says, ‘I’m going to become the most powerful man in the world.’ And then wins a democratic election. And in doing so faces the collective force of essentially the entire world and indeed his own government, faces criminal indictments in however many jurisdictions, absurd civil fines, attacks from all angles, and then is a quarter of an inch away from his head exploding, to then somehow winning again? That gives him a… I’m not going to say messianic, but anointed sense. We do not understand the goals of whatever or whoever decided that it would be so, but there is something happening here beyond our understanding.”
Alex grows somehow even more passionate, urging me to understand why he cared that night in July: “The fact that he’s a quarter of an inch from death in the digital age. The drama of how close he was to death and just his immediate response … You look at that and you think: How else can you explain that except by some supernatural means?”
I think I get it now; how upset he seemed; how odd, and surprisingly emotional, I found it at the time. I merely thought Trump was a big joke that indicated the failures of the previous consensus—not a phenomenon that was no laughing matter, let alone someone of, in Alex’s words, “quasi-religious significance.” Even for many of the older figures at the National Conservatism conference, Trump is thought of as a figurehead for a movement that may have happened anyway. “I was reacting to it the way people must have felt when they saw the careers of Bonaparte, Caesar, Alexander, Washington,” Alex finished explaining, in our shared language of historical theory. “Young men are primed to look at the great men of history, especially those young men who care about tradition (supposedly) and the past (supposedly), in terms of greatness and anointed-ness, and there is obviously no one else like him who has existed in our lifetime or will exist again.”
I think I’d taken the end of history for granted; I’d wanted peace as much as these young men want someone to defend them. I’m compelled by great men, too; I studied classics, and own a bust of Julius Caesar that I bought as my 25th birthday present to myself. But I tend to take great and small men alike on their merits. And I don’t envy those that live in times that need them. I never once conceived of Trump as a world-historical figure marked by greatness. I think, perhaps, we get the great men we deserve.
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Young men like Lucas and Alex make up about 90 percent of an informal group of conservative Hill staffers, think-tankers and young professionals who host debating parties around the city. Between NatCon and the election, I attend several of the debates. The young men give eloquent, sometimes sophomoric, but always earnest speeches, at whatever venue they can find, and they do it all for free—they even chip in to keep the parties going. The men wear tailored two- and three-piece wool suits and matching pocket squares, and the (few) women wear cocktail dresses; there’s apparently nowhere they’d rather be on a Saturday night.
These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the afterparties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives. They also impose strict rules, among them a complete prohibition against phones on the debate floor.
Outside their meetings, they’ll read whatever they think is honest, real and intellectually meaningful, no matter where it is published. They send Jacobin articles to each other when they find an interesting point of convergence; when I send them articles about the post-liberal right from mainstream outlets, they vigorously debate me on the merits of those criticisms, sometimes laughing at how out of touch and dated most of the analyses are. They ask to get off the waitlist for the debates and intellectual events I host for a think tank. I’ve been trying there to create broad-minded, politically mixed and philosophically vigorous discussions. These young men are a few of our most enthusiastic attendees, and give me qualitative feedback on the ideas and speakers at our events, regardless of whether our speakers lean right or left.
A couple members of this debating group even introduce me to an essay in The Point, about love: “Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God.” I’m touched by it, too—it’s the first essay I’ve read in a long time that treats love, and sex, as meaningful and sacred—and from a secular, liberal perspective. I cried several times when I read it. The friend, a young conservative man, who sent it to me tells me, “It was one of the best essays I’d ever read.” It speaks to his exact concerns: how to live a good life, find love, cultivate meaning, make life’s great choices.
At the last afterparty in mid-December, I meet a distinctly new kind of conservative. “I’ve done ayahuasca eleven times,” he tells me. He is close to thirty, I think, and has been introduced to me as a great scholar of the Bronze Age, or so I hear with excitement—it turns out he’s an expert on Bronze Age Pervert. “Each time I’ve gone to the ritual in the Amazon, I’ve brought Thus Spoke Zarathustra there and read it.”
“During?”
“No, not during,” he says, as though I ought to know how one typically reads Nietzsche’s tome at an Amazonian ayahuasca ritual. “Before and after. Chapters at a time.”
“The last time I did, it”—the ayahuasca, he means—“told me to never return. And I haven’t since.” He pauses and looks thoughtfully away from me; he sighs. “I came away from it certain that modernity must be destroyed.”
I don’t come for the debates themselves—which can be boring or ridiculous. But like these young men, I’ll go wherever people want to discuss ideas vigorously, however partisan or otherwise faulty. The casual conversations I have here are among the best I’ve had outside of academia. Here one needs no excuses or credentials to be part of grand discussions about history, philosophy and art. I often find a disarming honesty, and not just about politics or history: after a long verbal sparring match with a friend, I see a young man from California look away wistfully and say, “I just want a girlfriend.”
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The debate nights take me back to my own undergraduate days, and everything I looked for, and often failed to find, then. Raised in that technocratic, Obama-era culture, the directions I received always emerged out of each electoral cycle. In 2016 and 2017, this meant that the most urgent instructions scarcely added up to a philosophy: The future is female! Get an IUD before Mike Pence outlaws contraception!
In early 2017, I asked the “secular humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, where I studied, how I could set myself up for a good life in college and beyond. How could I be happy? How could I find a vocation or a calling? How could I be a good person? The chaplain told me to look around and identify the people who had lives I wanted to live, and ask myself what their values were. I quickly realized those moral exemplars were not in the secular student group I’d joined, which had become increasingly morally vacant, pseudo-rationalist and eccentric, drawn to effective altruism and convinced by Sam Harris that murder was merely a social construct. To say nothing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embracing polyamory as a way to grandfather in situationships or infidelities, while being told in special seminars that monogamy was a colonial construct and should be discarded anyway. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my primary concern was having models for healthy relationships—not resisting colonialism in my dating life. I had no interest in subverting things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education—that I’d never had or known in the first place. I wanted a serious boyfriend.
Other liberal students and professors, if they had accomplished some degree of personal success, whether wealth, erudition or relationship satisfaction, dared not talk about it, since it would put them at risk of being seen as trying to be better than others, or the worst thing you could be, morally prescriptive. Plus, after 2016, there was a fascist on the loose. Metaphysics, values—these were impossible in Trump’s America, and it was best not to betray one’s privilege by trying to discuss them.
In a course called “Diversity and the Classical Western Tradition” (at the time I had no clue “diversity” had a political valence), I was introduced to Hesiod, Euripides, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare and the Book of Genesis. For a public school student and child of immigrants, these canonical texts were revelatory. They were part of the history of the human condition; not once, as an Iranian American, did I find them distant or Eurocentric. My own parents would’ve given anything to study these texts and others, to enter these ancient dialogues about life; to this day, my father becomes emotional looking at the bookshelves of my college texts I’ve left behind at his home. But the day following the election in 2016, my professor didn’t lecture—he entered a room of three hundred students, sat down on the stage floor and put his graying head in his hands. I remember thinking he seemed childish, selfish. I did not want to be like him.
The authority figures on campus—the teachers, the chaplain—didn’t want to, or couldn’t, give guidance or even basic classroom instruction during Trump 1.0, so I turned away from the tyranny of the present political moment to the timeless classics: I chose to study ancient Greek. In my third semester, the professor frequently interrupted our close reading of the Iliad’s eighth-century Greek to try to relate the events of Troy to Trump’s latest political activities. I came away having read almost none of the Iliad; all I remember, truthfully, is forming half of a tiny audience for one male professor’s personal op-ed and therapy session.
I was begging to be given values, community, a purpose, a vocation—and found none. Instead my teachers repeated what they’d heard on the news. In due time, by forcefully pursuing what was left of a liberal arts education at a large research university, I met professors who were eager to teach me. My entire life I had been told that conservatives, religious people and men were monsters, idiots, abusers or dangerous bigots. The very first conservatives I’d ever met, it turned out, were among the few faculty at my university who took their disciplines seriously on their own terms, at least during Trump’s first term. Whether philosophy, literature or ancient languages, the few conservative, apolitical or moderate professors I worked with on campus never asked me where I stood, but how I thought. They saw a young woman, choosing to study the liberal arts on scholarships, and gave me an education.
The most serious poet, and poetry teacher, I met on campus was the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under a Republican president; other faculty criticized and dismissed him to me on this account. As the son of Mexican and Italian immigrants raised in working-class Los Angeles, he didn’t worry whether the canon he loved, and discovered by luck like me, was outdated or exclusive. We, both children of immigrants, were part of it, too. His happy half-century marriage was the first I’d ever seen up close; I definitely wanted to be like him. He told me how scores of young men who took his general-education course would come to his office hours looking for advice, how many of them didn’t have fathers, and how they felt marginalized and mocked by most of the campus culture. “Jordan Peterson realized this before anyone,” he quipped.
In my junior year I was selected to study at Cambridge for a research exchange; there I met James Orr, a newly hired professor of philosophy of religion. Like my other conservative professors, he was unfathomably well-read and generously shared what he knew; he had an admirable marriage and family life and, to the extent I could observe, was generous and welcoming to all his students. Though I only studied with him for a brief time, hardly anyone gave me more confidence in my intellectual potential. At the time, I knew less about his political activities, but it was indirectly through him that I first heard about the National Conservatism conference, of which, in 2024, he was the organizer.
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One young man I stand next to on a coffee break at NatCon exclaims, “Holy shit—that’s Curtis Yarvin,” starstruck by the popular right-wing blogger who advocates on his Substack for the United States to be run more like a monarchy. Seven U.S. senators are also at the conference, though I don’t hear any excitement about them. Except when raised explicitly, Trump, too, is not a main topic. Discussion is instead about Tocqueville, the Glorious Revolution, the Talmud, Metternich, Augustine, Silicon Valley, arts and culture, masculinity, the restoration of democracy in Iran, the Bharatiya Janata Party, industrial policy.
The breakout session with the greatest number of female panelists at the conference (alongside one on abortion after Dobbs) is “Big Tech and Big Porn,” about whether and how to ban pornography. The only three women I notice in the room (not including me) are on the panel; the audience may have been entirely male. I walk in late, in time for the Q&A, and hear a male panelist, who had just advocated pornography bans, say, “Look, the right has to be pro-male libido.” The audience laughs, particularly the young men, a little sheepishly, a little triumphantly.
On a tea break, a Mother Jones reporter I try to speak to is jarred and guarded. We have just emerged from the breakout “Surviving Late Liberalism,” where the extension of the franchise to women was discussed in a Q&A. Did early liberalism ever mean to involve such an extension? The Q&As here permit the crowd, not used to being able to say what they think among analog audiences, to probe provocative and long-forgotten lines of questioning, perhaps just to know that they can. Whether these interlocutors genuinely regret women’s suffrage, I don’t know. I doubt the reporter will tease that out in her report from the conference.
Not everything is only for the benefit of the young men; this is a political conference, after all. The stump speeches are at times a Spenglerian soapbox or instead a sound-bitten spectacle for the media, which contributes half the female presence at the conference. Senator Hawley’s Christian Nationalism speech is MSNBC made-to-order, using faith as an adjective (Christian this, Christian that) rather than a noun (Christianity, Christ). For all that rhetoric, I find something real in the audience beside me: their faces look hopeful, aspirational, searching. They have faith in this movement and long for evidence to justify it.
The conference ends with a captivating speech—not soon-to-be Vice President J.D. Vance’s “America is a Nation” speech, but “The National Conservative Vocation,” given by James Orr. I’m seated next to another person I know from Cambridge, and we’re both anxiously surprised to see him on stage. It’s remarkable to find the professor that advised my Theodor Adorno paper closing a major conference of American conservatism.
Orr begins by citing Joseph de Maistre, to laughter, applause and intrigue. Even for those who don’t know who de Maistre is, the reference to a counter-Enlightenment, counterrevolutionary critic of liberalism who informed nineteenth-century Romanticism is well-chosen. This is what the younger NatCons are: New Romantics. Young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong. They needed a role in a political future. Orr welcomed them in. “Everyone is conservative about what they love most,” he said:
It’s our common objects of love that stitch us together as a moral community. It’s that shared horizon of affection that will keep you writing those checks to the government without too much resentment for the neighbors benefitting from entitlements, welfare and largesse. That’s what made America great, it’s what made Britain great, it’s what made Israel great, and India great, and it’s what can make them all great again.
Every young man I recognize at the conference, and hundreds I don’t, are enraptured—the Yale summer intern, the aspiring law student, the millennial conservative think-tanker. The mention of “entitlements” and “welfare” would have stood out to young conservatives twenty years ago—but not to the young men born during the Clinton and Bush administrations. They rave to me afterward about the references to “history,” “love” and “greatness.”
Orr’s remarks end with a final calling: “What struck me in the Senate today,” he tells the young American audience, “was that your [American] revolution was not a revolution. … It’s a restoration, a restoration of the spirit of a people, its customs, its byways, its songs, its heritage, its history, its faith, its institutions: restoration, not revolution. … It’s restoration, my friends, that is our most urgent task. It’s the vocation to which every single one of you is summoned.”
Somehow, the National Conservatism conference—home to a movement emphasizing national loyalty, marriage, civic responsibility, religion—had tapped into energies that felt, to many, fresher, freer and wilder than the once-natural home of soulful young men and women—the left or liberalism. The NatCons addressed questions of the heart, recognizing that the young need ideals and aspirations—and most of all, a vocation.
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Just a day after the end of the NatCon and a mile down Massachusetts Avenue, and a day before the July assassination attempt, I attend a different conference: “Liberalism for the 21st Century.” Scheduled the same week as NatCon and promising to counter its “illiberal ideologies and authoritarian figures,” it is organized by an institution whose magazine is appropriately named The UnPopulist. Walking in, I see a sea of white hair. There are white heads shaking in disapproval on every other panel like parodies of nineteenth-century conservatives—staid, unaware, too furious at the incomprehensible incomprehension of the young toward their legitimate authority to understand their own decline. These are not people confident in what Francis Fukuyama later describes as the most humane system of governance in history. They are defiant, blind to even the most obvious of their blunders (take Max Boot’s contribution to a panel: “I don’t think that liberal internationalists have anything to apologize for!”), and all the same, clearly deflated.
Most attendees have professional reasons to be there: I recognize Matt Yglesias, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Rauch. During one of the first panels on Friday, the main auditorium is empty and quiet enough that I’m afraid, standing by the refreshments, to pour myself another glass of iced tea, should I draw too much attention. As I carefully put my glass down, Damon Linker gives me a warm smile, perhaps encouraged to see someone young and unknown there.
Early on, I attend a panel on how liberalism can respond to “postliberal critiques.” Mark Lilla, who I recognize from a book tour to my college campus in 2017, describes well the nature of the fever I’d noticed at NatCon: “historical dramaturgy,” the monolithic references to “modernity,” the indiscriminate attribution of life’s frustrations to “liberalism,” the searching for an end to the end of history. For decades Lilla has chronicled and criticized the philosophical challenges to liberalism with intellectual honesty, and I think of how much more compelling the conference would be if it had taken that writing more seriously.
As I wait in the mainstage room in an empty row of chairs, trying to arrange my notes from NatCon for an article that nine days later, once Kamala Harris is appointed party leader and declared “brat,” no editor wants to run, I look forward to seeing another intellectual role model I’d first discovered during college: Francis Fukuyama.
Then I notice Fukuyama a few feet behind me, as if he’d suddenly materialized in that empty room.
Unlike many of the Liberalism Conference’s “conclave” of liberal intellectuals, journalists and policymakers, Fukuyama studied classics and comparative literature before getting his Ph.D. in political science. The bipartisan critics of his end of history thesis have waited for three decades for a sign from the heavens or history, like algorithm-driven augurists, that his “end of history” is over; but, lacking his disciplinary scope, few if any have offered a sophisticated counter-theory of their own. Are any other essays still setting the terms of debate 36 years on?
He leaves the room as the guests return to their chairs. As I wait for his closing speech, and in the absence of normative prescriptions, I hope the other conference speakers will at least articulate the philosophical merits of their ideas, not just the material or procedural ones. But no one I hear discusses Locke or Tocqueville or Maritain or even a liberal internationalist like Charles Malik; the centuries of political activism inspired by liberalism’s focus on individual rights, equality and human are meaningfully addressed in only one breakout session. Speakers look instead to statistics while name-checking scapegoats like “misinformation.” After eight years of losing ground among a disenchanted global electorate, panel after panel discusses the sociological, electoral and material—but never the intellectual—causes of post-liberal politics. After his panel, I overhear David French telling a huddle of rapt listeners that social science could entirely explain post-liberalism: the science says the more isolated people are, the more likely they are to be attracted to illiberal ideas. His prescription for combating populism is “more thick friendships.”
After much describing and much decrying, it is finally Fukuyama’s turn to speak. “Many people read the title of my book, but they didn’t actually read the book,” Fukuyama says, referring to his The End of History and the Last Man. These nonreaders, he continues, ignore the cautionary tale of Nietzsche’s “last man”: “a human being that has no aspirations because their material needs are satisfied.” But, still, the “last man,” freed from struggle, wants more: “Human beings have a third part of their psychology, which the Greeks called thymos. This is pride, or spiritedness, or the desire to be recognized for outstanding virtue.”
Rather than adverting to facile social science, Fukuyama grounds his talk in a theory about who human beings are, and what they long for. I doubt Fukuyama thinks much about the National Conservatives, but as he speaks I remember the young men I had just met at NatCon, and Lucas, Alex and many others I met that summer. Trump’s movement and NatCon seem tailored to what they longed for: not to be the last men in politics, but rather the first men to participate in a political future worthy of their heroic aspirations.
The mood at the liberalism conference, and the position of those athwart post-liberal “progress,” is well summed by a young man, one of the few in attendance, seated directly in front of me as Fukuyama closes. As we applaud liberalism’s most robust defense, he jokes loudly to his friend, “Yeah! Woohoo! What are we going to do?!” The NatCons may not know exactly who they are—economic leftists who hate leftism, right-wing progressives who hate progress or moral traditionalists who praise the male libido—but they know what they’re doing. They have a vocation. Does anyone else?
Image credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr, CC / BY-SA 2.0)
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“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
—Henry Kissinger, July 2018
The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.
We’ve all heard before that Donald Trump is a pragmatist, a man of action and not ideas—he did not write a manifesto before coming to power or spend an exile in Vienna (or even Florida in the early 2020s) developing revolutionary theories. He spent his adult life developing buildings in New York City, then starring on a reality TV show that cast him as a merciless and instinct-driven businessman. Yet despite Trump’s lack of an explicit ideological project, or maybe because of it, his rise has coincided with a new energy in right-wing intellectual life. Not all of it is as new as it seems; some of the public intellectuals, opinion-shapers and radical bloggers who are now associated with Trumpism were writing about politics long before Trump, and have merely found in his success an opportunity to assert new ambitions. There is, however, a younger generation, who were children when Trump first ran for office, and whose political imaginations were ignited by his rise to power. They have no memories of belonging to—or being accepted by—any party or cultural milieu except Trump’s. And for them, Trump is not just a disruptor, an excuse, a historical symptom or an accident.
A few months before the 2024 election, Gen Z young men who were leaning toward Trump were described in the New York Times as “apolitical” and adrift; when their demographic achieved new prominence via exit polls, it was implied they had been manipulated into Trumpism by “bro whispering” podcasts. Maybe this was true for some. It was not true of the young, mostly male and intellectually curious Trump voters who I encountered this past summer during a reporting assignment to cover two overlapping conferences in July: first, the fourth installment of the National Conservatism conference (NatCon), and then the “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The young men I met at NatCon—and who I kept up with throughout the summer and fall—were far from apolitical, and they showed no signs of being easily manipulable. In describing how they had arrived at their political outlook, none of them cited podcasts.
I attended these conferences not as a professional journalist, but as a young person interested in ideas. I had no bias against liberals, or toward post-liberals and national conservatives. Raised just outside of the District by immigrants in liberal counties, and coming of age at the end of Obama’s liberal renaissance, I spent my college years—and Trump’s first term—on a progressive campus in California. Since graduating in 2020, I had worked at large government agencies and mainstream think tanks. But like many young people all over the country, I have been searching for thinking and meaning beyond the technocratic liberal consensus. Because of this, I became part of a politically mixed social scene in D.C. and had discovered, with at least a little discomfort, that despite the twentieth-century liberal occupying the White House, the intellectual vitalism in my generation was increasingly to be found in post-liberal or conservative spaces—in other words, on the right.
Even still, I expected to find something of a political sideshow at NatCon; instead, I found a movement, perhaps the only one I’d encountered during my time in D.C.
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There is no dress code at NatCon, but somehow everyone, young and old, is dressed to the nines. Many attendees look like extras in American Psycho; it’s a hot summer, but I see tailored wool and linen suits, tastefully patterned burgundy, ultramarine and violet silk ties, and pocket squares on twenty-year-old men. There are hundreds of young men here, and plenty more are turned away at the registration table; they try to sneak in anyway. Several ask me to help get them in: among these are foreign interns visiting over the summer for internships, young private-sector professionals, college students.
The first morning, I’m approached by a young man dressed in a nice gray suit, who has been hanging at my periphery as I talk to an editor for First Things. The newcomer offers a handshake, mentions he’s a student at an Ivy League school, and clumsily adds that it’ll be his first semester this fall. I realize that he must have graduated high school only weeks before. I had been surprised already to notice many men are easily younger than 25—I hadn’t anticipated meeting a teenager. He’s chosen to spend part of his last summer before college here, at this political conference at the Hilton.
He asks for my LinkedIn and I reach out to him in the fall, after the election. “I was ten when he first announced he was running for president, and he just captured my attention,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated by politics and history, obsessed with world leaders… I think that there’s a certain element of greatness in Trump’s personality.” And then: “I’ve always seen myself in him. That’s the first thing that drew me to him when I was ten. I’d always been admonished in school by my teachers…”
He pauses. “Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
Lucas,*11. Like all other asterisked names, Lucas’s name was changed for this article. born in 2005, was raised in a “typical” and “apolitical” family outside of Philadelphia. “I’ve never in my life remembered a time when the Democratic Party supported ambitious people,” he says. “I think their whole ideology is based off of oppressing those with ambition, who actually have the gumption to go out and do something and build something on their own. … The people who make humanity great, the innovators, the builders, the winners in society, they look at the winners and tell them, ‘You’re evil, and the only reason you’re at the position that you’re at is because you exploited other people.’ It’s antithetical to the way that a lot of young men work.”
But, I ask him, what do young men who aren’t aspiring to be “innovators, builders and winners” think of Trump?
“I went to public high school in a middle-class area,” he says. “A lot of the guys who I went to high school with weren’t particularly ambitious career-wise, but they do admire people who are. They all admire Trump for what he’s done.” He pauses. “Going to the gym, for example: it’s a way to improve yourself.” I immediately think of all the right-wing intellectual influencers on Twitter that post bodybuilding photos alongside their recommended reading lists. “All young men, even if they’re not actively trying to be great, still admire greatness,” he continues. “It’s really rare that you meet one that doesn’t have some respect for somebody who’s gone out and done something great.”
Trump, he explains, is a role model: “He wins against all odds. He gets impeached, he gets criminal trials thrown at him, shakes all that off. He gets shot. The fact alone that he got up and pumped his fist—that takes a lot of physical courage in itself. … He understands deep down that the U.S. has been rudderless since the Cold War. We haven’t had the best people.”
I ask Lucas if anyone else at NatCon, including Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance, the former of whom he got to meet, inspires him. “I really like them. They’re sharp guys; I like their policy. But I don’t really think there’s anybody else like Trump.” Trump proved to him that his dreams were possible, no matter the opposition. “Hopefully I can strike it big in the private sector,” he says, “and then if everything were to go right, I would like to be president someday.”
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Alex* is a lifelong conservative and a friend from university, and unlike Lucas, has no political or entrepreneurial ambitions whatsoever. We bonded when we first met over our shared interest in late antiquity; like nearly every conservative intellectual I know, I had never discussed Trump with Alex until I asked. We had plenty else to discuss. But I was with him in July, soon after the end of NatCon, on the day that Trump was almost assassinated.
We were at a party with a politically mixed (and at first politically disinterested) crowd: there is the liberal son of a prominent Democrat, the editor of a right-leaning policy journal, a think-tanker, a liberal libertarian—a small slice of the D.C. social scene that doesn’t mind being around different political persuasions. (These politically ecumenical events, revealingly, often skew right.)
We barely enjoy refreshments and cocktails before the news spreads: Donald Trump has been shot. One guest spends the rest of the party apparently comatose or on Twitter; others (young conservatives, too) continue as normal, trying to avoid the subject; a summer intern and Project 2025 aspirant begins filming his live response on his smartphone. I realize that I had underestimated the sincerity and intensity of the personal attachment of many young men to Trump. At the end of the night, Alex turns to me, and asks, “The party was fun, really. Really, it was nice… But why does no one care? They nearly killed him.”
I press him after the election to explain what he meant that night. “I personally identified with him … Well, no—the extent to which they were trying to stop him represented the extent to which people have tried to stop me.” By “me,” I think he means young men inside and outside of the academy, and in the broader culture, too. His formative educational and collegiate years were spent in the political fallout of Trump’s first presidency—cancellations, COVID, nationwide protests and political violence; his early academic career, now over, had been characterized largely by the proliferation of DEI and antiracism initiatives.
“When Trump became the Republican nominee, conservative people, especially conservative young people, found themselves in the position of our peers attacking him by proxy through attacking us. There’s a line Trump used—‘they’re not going after me—they’re going after you, I’m just in their way.’ Young men experienced that almost in reverse a lot of the time, when people who were our friends, who were our peers, would just relentlessly bully us, cancel us, harass us, physically assault us because of Trump.”
I think back to Lucas’s description of his fall 2024 semester, his very first on his Ivy League campus. Because he’s been outspoken about his support for Trump, he told me that “sometimes people will just look at me, give me the finger, and say, ‘oh, fuck you, fascist.’ Half these people who tell me to go fuck myself, I have no clue who they are.” Alex, who began his college career two terms ago in a culture also charged by Trump’s electoral success, continues: “And to see him almost get killed, and almost get killed in an astonishingly gruesome and public way, felt like extraordinary evil almost triumphed.”
He’s incredulous recalling the events of not just this past summer, but of the years that preceded it: “In human history, has there been, mathematically speaking, an assassination attempt that was so narrowly avoided? The sheer geometry of it—nothing like it has ever happened in the history of the world. And nothing like him has ever happened in the history of the world. Look at this well-known celebrity, who just says, ‘I’m going to become the most powerful man in the world.’ And then wins a democratic election. And in doing so faces the collective force of essentially the entire world and indeed his own government, faces criminal indictments in however many jurisdictions, absurd civil fines, attacks from all angles, and then is a quarter of an inch away from his head exploding, to then somehow winning again? That gives him a… I’m not going to say messianic, but anointed sense. We do not understand the goals of whatever or whoever decided that it would be so, but there is something happening here beyond our understanding.”
Alex grows somehow even more passionate, urging me to understand why he cared that night in July: “The fact that he’s a quarter of an inch from death in the digital age. The drama of how close he was to death and just his immediate response … You look at that and you think: How else can you explain that except by some supernatural means?”
I think I get it now; how upset he seemed; how odd, and surprisingly emotional, I found it at the time. I merely thought Trump was a big joke that indicated the failures of the previous consensus—not a phenomenon that was no laughing matter, let alone someone of, in Alex’s words, “quasi-religious significance.” Even for many of the older figures at the National Conservatism conference, Trump is thought of as a figurehead for a movement that may have happened anyway. “I was reacting to it the way people must have felt when they saw the careers of Bonaparte, Caesar, Alexander, Washington,” Alex finished explaining, in our shared language of historical theory. “Young men are primed to look at the great men of history, especially those young men who care about tradition (supposedly) and the past (supposedly), in terms of greatness and anointed-ness, and there is obviously no one else like him who has existed in our lifetime or will exist again.”
I think I’d taken the end of history for granted; I’d wanted peace as much as these young men want someone to defend them. I’m compelled by great men, too; I studied classics, and own a bust of Julius Caesar that I bought as my 25th birthday present to myself. But I tend to take great and small men alike on their merits. And I don’t envy those that live in times that need them. I never once conceived of Trump as a world-historical figure marked by greatness. I think, perhaps, we get the great men we deserve.
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Young men like Lucas and Alex make up about 90 percent of an informal group of conservative Hill staffers, think-tankers and young professionals who host debating parties around the city. Between NatCon and the election, I attend several of the debates. The young men give eloquent, sometimes sophomoric, but always earnest speeches, at whatever venue they can find, and they do it all for free—they even chip in to keep the parties going. The men wear tailored two- and three-piece wool suits and matching pocket squares, and the (few) women wear cocktail dresses; there’s apparently nowhere they’d rather be on a Saturday night.
These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the afterparties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives. They also impose strict rules, among them a complete prohibition against phones on the debate floor.
Outside their meetings, they’ll read whatever they think is honest, real and intellectually meaningful, no matter where it is published. They send Jacobin articles to each other when they find an interesting point of convergence; when I send them articles about the post-liberal right from mainstream outlets, they vigorously debate me on the merits of those criticisms, sometimes laughing at how out of touch and dated most of the analyses are. They ask to get off the waitlist for the debates and intellectual events I host for a think tank. I’ve been trying there to create broad-minded, politically mixed and philosophically vigorous discussions. These young men are a few of our most enthusiastic attendees, and give me qualitative feedback on the ideas and speakers at our events, regardless of whether our speakers lean right or left.
A couple members of this debating group even introduce me to an essay in The Point, about love: “Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God.” I’m touched by it, too—it’s the first essay I’ve read in a long time that treats love, and sex, as meaningful and sacred—and from a secular, liberal perspective. I cried several times when I read it. The friend, a young conservative man, who sent it to me tells me, “It was one of the best essays I’d ever read.” It speaks to his exact concerns: how to live a good life, find love, cultivate meaning, make life’s great choices.
At the last afterparty in mid-December, I meet a distinctly new kind of conservative. “I’ve done ayahuasca eleven times,” he tells me. He is close to thirty, I think, and has been introduced to me as a great scholar of the Bronze Age, or so I hear with excitement—it turns out he’s an expert on Bronze Age Pervert. “Each time I’ve gone to the ritual in the Amazon, I’ve brought Thus Spoke Zarathustra there and read it.”
“During?”
“No, not during,” he says, as though I ought to know how one typically reads Nietzsche’s tome at an Amazonian ayahuasca ritual. “Before and after. Chapters at a time.”
“The last time I did, it”—the ayahuasca, he means—“told me to never return. And I haven’t since.” He pauses and looks thoughtfully away from me; he sighs. “I came away from it certain that modernity must be destroyed.”
I don’t come for the debates themselves—which can be boring or ridiculous. But like these young men, I’ll go wherever people want to discuss ideas vigorously, however partisan or otherwise faulty. The casual conversations I have here are among the best I’ve had outside of academia. Here one needs no excuses or credentials to be part of grand discussions about history, philosophy and art. I often find a disarming honesty, and not just about politics or history: after a long verbal sparring match with a friend, I see a young man from California look away wistfully and say, “I just want a girlfriend.”
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The debate nights take me back to my own undergraduate days, and everything I looked for, and often failed to find, then. Raised in that technocratic, Obama-era culture, the directions I received always emerged out of each electoral cycle. In 2016 and 2017, this meant that the most urgent instructions scarcely added up to a philosophy: The future is female! Get an IUD before Mike Pence outlaws contraception!
In early 2017, I asked the “secular humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, where I studied, how I could set myself up for a good life in college and beyond. How could I be happy? How could I find a vocation or a calling? How could I be a good person? The chaplain told me to look around and identify the people who had lives I wanted to live, and ask myself what their values were. I quickly realized those moral exemplars were not in the secular student group I’d joined, which had become increasingly morally vacant, pseudo-rationalist and eccentric, drawn to effective altruism and convinced by Sam Harris that murder was merely a social construct. To say nothing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embracing polyamory as a way to grandfather in situationships or infidelities, while being told in special seminars that monogamy was a colonial construct and should be discarded anyway. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my primary concern was having models for healthy relationships—not resisting colonialism in my dating life. I had no interest in subverting things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education—that I’d never had or known in the first place. I wanted a serious boyfriend.
Other liberal students and professors, if they had accomplished some degree of personal success, whether wealth, erudition or relationship satisfaction, dared not talk about it, since it would put them at risk of being seen as trying to be better than others, or the worst thing you could be, morally prescriptive. Plus, after 2016, there was a fascist on the loose. Metaphysics, values—these were impossible in Trump’s America, and it was best not to betray one’s privilege by trying to discuss them.
In a course called “Diversity and the Classical Western Tradition” (at the time I had no clue “diversity” had a political valence), I was introduced to Hesiod, Euripides, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare and the Book of Genesis. For a public school student and child of immigrants, these canonical texts were revelatory. They were part of the history of the human condition; not once, as an Iranian American, did I find them distant or Eurocentric. My own parents would’ve given anything to study these texts and others, to enter these ancient dialogues about life; to this day, my father becomes emotional looking at the bookshelves of my college texts I’ve left behind at his home. But the day following the election in 2016, my professor didn’t lecture—he entered a room of three hundred students, sat down on the stage floor and put his graying head in his hands. I remember thinking he seemed childish, selfish. I did not want to be like him.
The authority figures on campus—the teachers, the chaplain—didn’t want to, or couldn’t, give guidance or even basic classroom instruction during Trump 1.0, so I turned away from the tyranny of the present political moment to the timeless classics: I chose to study ancient Greek. In my third semester, the professor frequently interrupted our close reading of the Iliad’s eighth-century Greek to try to relate the events of Troy to Trump’s latest political activities. I came away having read almost none of the Iliad; all I remember, truthfully, is forming half of a tiny audience for one male professor’s personal op-ed and therapy session.
I was begging to be given values, community, a purpose, a vocation—and found none. Instead my teachers repeated what they’d heard on the news. In due time, by forcefully pursuing what was left of a liberal arts education at a large research university, I met professors who were eager to teach me. My entire life I had been told that conservatives, religious people and men were monsters, idiots, abusers or dangerous bigots. The very first conservatives I’d ever met, it turned out, were among the few faculty at my university who took their disciplines seriously on their own terms, at least during Trump’s first term. Whether philosophy, literature or ancient languages, the few conservative, apolitical or moderate professors I worked with on campus never asked me where I stood, but how I thought. They saw a young woman, choosing to study the liberal arts on scholarships, and gave me an education.
The most serious poet, and poetry teacher, I met on campus was the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under a Republican president; other faculty criticized and dismissed him to me on this account. As the son of Mexican and Italian immigrants raised in working-class Los Angeles, he didn’t worry whether the canon he loved, and discovered by luck like me, was outdated or exclusive. We, both children of immigrants, were part of it, too. His happy half-century marriage was the first I’d ever seen up close; I definitely wanted to be like him. He told me how scores of young men who took his general-education course would come to his office hours looking for advice, how many of them didn’t have fathers, and how they felt marginalized and mocked by most of the campus culture. “Jordan Peterson realized this before anyone,” he quipped.
In my junior year I was selected to study at Cambridge for a research exchange; there I met James Orr, a newly hired professor of philosophy of religion. Like my other conservative professors, he was unfathomably well-read and generously shared what he knew; he had an admirable marriage and family life and, to the extent I could observe, was generous and welcoming to all his students. Though I only studied with him for a brief time, hardly anyone gave me more confidence in my intellectual potential. At the time, I knew less about his political activities, but it was indirectly through him that I first heard about the National Conservatism conference, of which, in 2024, he was the organizer.
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One young man I stand next to on a coffee break at NatCon exclaims, “Holy shit—that’s Curtis Yarvin,” starstruck by the popular right-wing blogger who advocates on his Substack for the United States to be run more like a monarchy. Seven U.S. senators are also at the conference, though I don’t hear any excitement about them. Except when raised explicitly, Trump, too, is not a main topic. Discussion is instead about Tocqueville, the Glorious Revolution, the Talmud, Metternich, Augustine, Silicon Valley, arts and culture, masculinity, the restoration of democracy in Iran, the Bharatiya Janata Party, industrial policy.
The breakout session with the greatest number of female panelists at the conference (alongside one on abortion after Dobbs) is “Big Tech and Big Porn,” about whether and how to ban pornography. The only three women I notice in the room (not including me) are on the panel; the audience may have been entirely male. I walk in late, in time for the Q&A, and hear a male panelist, who had just advocated pornography bans, say, “Look, the right has to be pro-male libido.” The audience laughs, particularly the young men, a little sheepishly, a little triumphantly.
On a tea break, a Mother Jones reporter I try to speak to is jarred and guarded. We have just emerged from the breakout “Surviving Late Liberalism,” where the extension of the franchise to women was discussed in a Q&A. Did early liberalism ever mean to involve such an extension? The Q&As here permit the crowd, not used to being able to say what they think among analog audiences, to probe provocative and long-forgotten lines of questioning, perhaps just to know that they can. Whether these interlocutors genuinely regret women’s suffrage, I don’t know. I doubt the reporter will tease that out in her report from the conference.
Not everything is only for the benefit of the young men; this is a political conference, after all. The stump speeches are at times a Spenglerian soapbox or instead a sound-bitten spectacle for the media, which contributes half the female presence at the conference. Senator Hawley’s Christian Nationalism speech is MSNBC made-to-order, using faith as an adjective (Christian this, Christian that) rather than a noun (Christianity, Christ). For all that rhetoric, I find something real in the audience beside me: their faces look hopeful, aspirational, searching. They have faith in this movement and long for evidence to justify it.
The conference ends with a captivating speech—not soon-to-be Vice President J.D. Vance’s “America is a Nation” speech, but “The National Conservative Vocation,” given by James Orr. I’m seated next to another person I know from Cambridge, and we’re both anxiously surprised to see him on stage. It’s remarkable to find the professor that advised my Theodor Adorno paper closing a major conference of American conservatism.
Orr begins by citing Joseph de Maistre, to laughter, applause and intrigue. Even for those who don’t know who de Maistre is, the reference to a counter-Enlightenment, counterrevolutionary critic of liberalism who informed nineteenth-century Romanticism is well-chosen. This is what the younger NatCons are: New Romantics. Young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong. They needed a role in a political future. Orr welcomed them in. “Everyone is conservative about what they love most,” he said:
Every young man I recognize at the conference, and hundreds I don’t, are enraptured—the Yale summer intern, the aspiring law student, the millennial conservative think-tanker. The mention of “entitlements” and “welfare” would have stood out to young conservatives twenty years ago—but not to the young men born during the Clinton and Bush administrations. They rave to me afterward about the references to “history,” “love” and “greatness.”
Orr’s remarks end with a final calling: “What struck me in the Senate today,” he tells the young American audience, “was that your [American] revolution was not a revolution. … It’s a restoration, a restoration of the spirit of a people, its customs, its byways, its songs, its heritage, its history, its faith, its institutions: restoration, not revolution. … It’s restoration, my friends, that is our most urgent task. It’s the vocation to which every single one of you is summoned.”
Somehow, the National Conservatism conference—home to a movement emphasizing national loyalty, marriage, civic responsibility, religion—had tapped into energies that felt, to many, fresher, freer and wilder than the once-natural home of soulful young men and women—the left or liberalism. The NatCons addressed questions of the heart, recognizing that the young need ideals and aspirations—and most of all, a vocation.
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Just a day after the end of the NatCon and a mile down Massachusetts Avenue, and a day before the July assassination attempt, I attend a different conference: “Liberalism for the 21st Century.” Scheduled the same week as NatCon and promising to counter its “illiberal ideologies and authoritarian figures,” it is organized by an institution whose magazine is appropriately named The UnPopulist. Walking in, I see a sea of white hair. There are white heads shaking in disapproval on every other panel like parodies of nineteenth-century conservatives—staid, unaware, too furious at the incomprehensible incomprehension of the young toward their legitimate authority to understand their own decline. These are not people confident in what Francis Fukuyama later describes as the most humane system of governance in history. They are defiant, blind to even the most obvious of their blunders (take Max Boot’s contribution to a panel: “I don’t think that liberal internationalists have anything to apologize for!”), and all the same, clearly deflated.
Most attendees have professional reasons to be there: I recognize Matt Yglesias, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Rauch. During one of the first panels on Friday, the main auditorium is empty and quiet enough that I’m afraid, standing by the refreshments, to pour myself another glass of iced tea, should I draw too much attention. As I carefully put my glass down, Damon Linker gives me a warm smile, perhaps encouraged to see someone young and unknown there.
Early on, I attend a panel on how liberalism can respond to “postliberal critiques.” Mark Lilla, who I recognize from a book tour to my college campus in 2017, describes well the nature of the fever I’d noticed at NatCon: “historical dramaturgy,” the monolithic references to “modernity,” the indiscriminate attribution of life’s frustrations to “liberalism,” the searching for an end to the end of history. For decades Lilla has chronicled and criticized the philosophical challenges to liberalism with intellectual honesty, and I think of how much more compelling the conference would be if it had taken that writing more seriously.
As I wait in the mainstage room in an empty row of chairs, trying to arrange my notes from NatCon for an article that nine days later, once Kamala Harris is appointed party leader and declared “brat,” no editor wants to run, I look forward to seeing another intellectual role model I’d first discovered during college: Francis Fukuyama.
Then I notice Fukuyama a few feet behind me, as if he’d suddenly materialized in that empty room.
Unlike many of the Liberalism Conference’s “conclave” of liberal intellectuals, journalists and policymakers, Fukuyama studied classics and comparative literature before getting his Ph.D. in political science. The bipartisan critics of his end of history thesis have waited for three decades for a sign from the heavens or history, like algorithm-driven augurists, that his “end of history” is over; but, lacking his disciplinary scope, few if any have offered a sophisticated counter-theory of their own. Are any other essays still setting the terms of debate 36 years on?
He leaves the room as the guests return to their chairs. As I wait for his closing speech, and in the absence of normative prescriptions, I hope the other conference speakers will at least articulate the philosophical merits of their ideas, not just the material or procedural ones. But no one I hear discusses Locke or Tocqueville or Maritain or even a liberal internationalist like Charles Malik; the centuries of political activism inspired by liberalism’s focus on individual rights, equality and human are meaningfully addressed in only one breakout session. Speakers look instead to statistics while name-checking scapegoats like “misinformation.” After eight years of losing ground among a disenchanted global electorate, panel after panel discusses the sociological, electoral and material—but never the intellectual—causes of post-liberal politics. After his panel, I overhear David French telling a huddle of rapt listeners that social science could entirely explain post-liberalism: the science says the more isolated people are, the more likely they are to be attracted to illiberal ideas. His prescription for combating populism is “more thick friendships.”
After much describing and much decrying, it is finally Fukuyama’s turn to speak. “Many people read the title of my book, but they didn’t actually read the book,” Fukuyama says, referring to his The End of History and the Last Man. These nonreaders, he continues, ignore the cautionary tale of Nietzsche’s “last man”: “a human being that has no aspirations because their material needs are satisfied.” But, still, the “last man,” freed from struggle, wants more: “Human beings have a third part of their psychology, which the Greeks called thymos. This is pride, or spiritedness, or the desire to be recognized for outstanding virtue.”
Rather than adverting to facile social science, Fukuyama grounds his talk in a theory about who human beings are, and what they long for. I doubt Fukuyama thinks much about the National Conservatives, but as he speaks I remember the young men I had just met at NatCon, and Lucas, Alex and many others I met that summer. Trump’s movement and NatCon seem tailored to what they longed for: not to be the last men in politics, but rather the first men to participate in a political future worthy of their heroic aspirations.
The mood at the liberalism conference, and the position of those athwart post-liberal “progress,” is well summed by a young man, one of the few in attendance, seated directly in front of me as Fukuyama closes. As we applaud liberalism’s most robust defense, he jokes loudly to his friend, “Yeah! Woohoo! What are we going to do?!” The NatCons may not know exactly who they are—economic leftists who hate leftism, right-wing progressives who hate progress or moral traditionalists who praise the male libido—but they know what they’re doing. They have a vocation. Does anyone else?
Image credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr, CC / BY-SA 2.0)
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