National conservatism is the revolt forgotten Americans need

National conservatism is an idea whose time has arrived. The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “right” and “left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.

For decades, many in power — not just here, but across the West — have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see it across Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations — and an increasingly totalitarian censorship state menaces all who object. America, too, is threatened by these elites, driven by the same interests and ambitions.

Settled, founded, and built by the most adventurous and courageous sons and daughters of the West, America realized the destiny of Western civilization.

They are the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere. National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class.

Revolt on the right

This revolt is from the right — but also within the right. For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They rewrote our trade policies in service of global capital. They supported amnesty and mass migration.

The Washington Consensus was a bipartisan affair. Until President Trump, the mainstream right quibbled over the left’s means but hardly ever challenged its ends. Conservatives cheered intervention after intervention — not to defend America’s national interests, but to pursue the Wilsonian fantasy of a “world safe for democracy.”

They backed the North American Free Trade Agreement and welcomed China into the World Trade Organization, not because it was good for American workers, but because it served the vision of a borderless marketplace. On immigration, the old conservative establishment may have opposed illegality on procedural grounds, but it took no issue with the substance. If the same end were achieved “legally,” many celebrated it.

At this point, it should be clear that the fact that the government sanctions something does not mean it’s good for our country.

Immigration and the American worker

For decades, we were told “high-skilled immigration” was an urgent necessity. The H-1B visa, for example, was sold as a way to keep America competitive. But programs like H-1B have imported a vast labor force not to fill jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, but to undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer industries into the hands of foreign lobbyists.

Millions of foreign nationals were funneled in to take the jobs and futures that should belong to our children — not because they were more talented, but because they were cheaper and more compliant. While trade agreements kneecapped blue-collar workers, abuse of H-1B is kneecapping white-collar workers before our eyes.

For tens of thousands of Americans forced to train their foreign replacements just to get severance, the fact it was “legal” is little comfort.

A nation, not just an idea

For decades, the left and the right alike seemed to accept the idea that America was merely an “idea.” President Bill Clinton said in 1998 that immigration proved America was “not so much a place as a promise.”

But America is not just a proposition. Our founding principles are rooted in a people and a way of life. Take a trip to rural Missouri, and you’ll see that the Second Amendment is not a theory. It’s who they are. If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan would not become America.

What makes America exceptional is not only our commitment to self-government, but also that we, as a people, are capable of living it. The left drained our principles of their substance, turning the American tradition into an ideological creed that demanded transformation of the nation itself. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains.

On the right, too many accepted this worldview. Neoconservatives spoke as if the whole world were Americans-in-waiting. America, they said, was “the first universal nation.”

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Donald Trump rejected this. He knew America was not just an idea but a nation and a people. His movement is the revolt of the real American nation — a pitchfork revolution, driven by millions of Americans who felt like strangers in their own country.

They were the forgotten men and women, mocked as “deplorables,” sneered at as “bitter clingers,” but still loyal to their nation. In Trump’s defiance, they heard their own. In 2016, they discovered millions more felt the same way.

It is their interests, their values, their lives that the American right must defend, without apology, if it wants a future.

Our birthright

The Pilgrims at Plymouth, the Continental Army soldiers at Valley Forge, the pioneers of Missouri — they did not fight for a proposition. They believed they were establishing a homeland. America is their gift to us. It belongs to us. It is our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.

If America is everything and everyone, it is nothing and no one. But America is real, distinctive, unique — the most essentially Western nation. Settled, founded, and built by the most adventurous and courageous sons and daughters of the West, America realized the destiny of Western civilization.

For decades, elites tried to turn our past into a repressed memory. But we are done being ashamed.

That spirit explains why Americans mapped the genome, invented the microchip, built the airplane, and planted footprints on the moon. We are the nation of explorers, builders, and pioneers.

Yet for some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed. The left says our curiosity and ambition were sins. But the American frontier was not a crime. It was an expression of our pioneer spirit — a spirit that raised cities, cured diseases, explored galaxies, and forged new worlds.

We’re not sorry. America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.

No more shame

On July 4, 2020, as riots raged, President Trump stood at Mount Rushmore and declared: “This monument will never be desecrated.” Mount Rushmore is who we are. Americans carved the faces of heroes into a mountain — not out of necessity, but because they could.

For decades, elites tried to turn our past into a repressed memory. They made shame our civic religion. But we are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.

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To transform a nation, you must transform the way it understands itself. That’s why the left tears down statues, rewrites language, and mocks traditions. It wants a new America with new myths. But America does not belong to the left. It belongs to us.

This fight is about whether our children will have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: the apex and vanguard of Western civilization.

A strong, sovereign nation — not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.

Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from a speech delivered on Tuesday, September 2, at the fifth National Conservatism Conference (NatCon 5) in Washington, D.C.