What I Saw at NatCon

Mary Imparato reports on the elephant in the room at the recent Burke Foundation conference on national conservatism

Mary Imparato is assistant professor and chair of the Politics Department at Belmont Abbey College. She holds a PhD in political science from Rutgers and an AB in government from Harvard. Professor Imparato’s work has focused on religious toleration in the Western tradition and Catholic social thought. She is a mother of three, living outside Charlotte, N.C. You can hear her on Belmont Abbey’s Conversatio podcast.

Reflections on National Conservatism

​I recently attended the third iteration of the National Conservatism conference in Miami, Fla., organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is headed by the chief proponent of national conservatism, Yoram Hazony. This year’s was the largest and most successful NatCon since the conferences began in 2019, with nine hundred attendees, and speeches from marquee conservative politicians like Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. I wanted to experience firsthand how well national conservatism represented the New Right, and inquire after the contours of a “new fusionism” that seems not so unlike the old one. I wanted to know: to what extent does national conservatism adopt the critiques of liberalism popularized by the prominent postliberals represented here at Postliberal Order, and further, is there any room in this big tent for Catholic integralists? Based on my experience at NatCon3, the answer to the former is “somewhat”—but the answer to the latter is that the most coherent Catholic postliberal political thinkers weren’t even there, and their absence tells the whole story.

What follows are some reflections on national conservatism’s self-definition, the place of the postliberal critique and integralism within this movement, the essential shared concerns of the New Right, and a possible path forward for this new coalition.