Straightening the Record

What officially binds NatConers together, according to the organization’s Statement of Principles, is viewing “the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the Sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.”

At the heart of its vision is a world of independent nations, dedicated to their unique heritages.

“We seek a world where it’s not weird to be a patriot, not weird to take responsibility for your family, to be able to live in a world where you’re not at odds with the people educating your children,” said Anna Wellisz, President of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts NatCon’s conferences.

An efficient road to clarifying NatCon’s outlook runs through what it is a rebellion against.

In the NatCon narrative, from the end of the Cold War until the first Trump presidency, the conservative movement was defined by hawkish defense policies looking to export western democracy and an uncritical dedication to free markets. Politicians of that world paid lip service to “family values,” but fired little political ammunition in culture wars. That camp was broadly defined as Neoconservatives or Neocons.

Their approach yielded the quagmires of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sacrifice of American industry in exchange for lower-priced foreign-made goods, and a total victory on social issues, first by liberals and more recently by the less tolerant woke progressives.

Trump’s 2016 campaign took clear aim at the globalist vision on both right and left. That, NatCon’s leaders felt, provided a rare opportunity to reorient what they felt had gone awry in their political camp.

Part and parcel of its promotion of “the nation” and its traditions are support for a restoration of Judeo-Christian religion in public life, secure borders, patriotism, distance from international organizations, and trade policy focused on strengthening domestic industry and communities.

“The first election of Donald Trump illustrated that there were some timeless values that resonated broadly with the American people,” said Ben Weingarten, a political commentator and a regular contributor to NatCon’s year-round podcast. “That allowed us to transcend the typical pieties among conservatives and get the basic common-sense things; having a respected and respectable country, G-d and family, and swinging back the pendulum from the progressive side of the world.”

A New Mainstream

Since 2016, even as elections have brough victories and losses, NatCon’s reorganization of the right has mostly been an upward trend. It held a series of conferences in America and Europe. Moreover, in America’s Republican Party it has become the rule rather than the exception for candidates to hew far closer to its vision than to the right.

Exhibit A is Vice President JD Vance, an authentic NatCon son. He has repeatedly cited Dr. Hazony’s work as an influence on his thinking and spoke at every US-based conference until this year.

Appearing at last year’s gathering less than two weeks before his nomination to the vice presidency, Mr. Vance declared, “America is not an idea… America is a nation, a group of people with a common history and a common future.”

His words drew much scorn from mainstream media who cast it as “blood and soil” rhetoric. Those familiar with the movement’s thinking saw the mainstreaming of NatCon’s vision for a political sphere focused on defending working-class ideas of connection to country and hometown.

“What started as a book by Yoram became a movement and now we are no longer a voice in the desert,” said Mrs. Wellisz.

Since retaking office, President Trump’s accomplishments largely read like a NatCon wish list. Secured borders, protectionist trade policies, a war against DEI and other woke constructs in education, an emphasis on patriotism in the military, all fit neatly into what would have sounded like fanciful discussions at NatCon panels only a year or two ago.

“The movement’s starting point was laying out what the ideal vision is and figuring out who are the constituencies for it,” said Mr. Weingarten. “Now, it’s about actually implementing that agenda.”

At Odds

NatCon’s ascendency has not gone unnoticed by those opposed to its vision.

A 2021 Atlantic profile was titled “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.” Last year, its conference was held in Brussels, where local police forcibly attempted to shut down its sessions, forcing organizers to smuggle speakers through back doors.

Now as well, it finds itself lampooned on all sides.

This year, a speech by Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt on, “What Is an American” drew similar media scorn to what was leveled at Mr. Vance last year.

“Trump’s movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country,” he said. “These Americans had come to realize that their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation but in the halls of their own government.”

Likewise, there was a good deal of negativity from rougher-edged corners of the MAGA camp who cast NatCon as too buttoned-down and still beholden to hawkish foreign policy posture.

Paul Gottfried, who has been instrumental in organizing traditionalist right-wing opposition to neocon politics for decades and written a great deal about what he sees as the authentic right, was one of the conference’s speakers and gave NatCon’s efforts high marks. He was particularly impressed that it facilitated an open debate over the appropriate place for American policy on Israel.

“It’s important to allow voices to be heard,” he said. “The neoconservatives crushed opposition and kicked people like me out for disagreeing with them on anything.”

Room for Disagreement

True to its goal to serve as a big tent for the nationalist-traditionalist right, NatCon did not shy away from what emerged as one of this year’s most divisive issues in all political camps, American policy on Israel. Fueled by the war in Gaza and recent campaigns against Iran, these conflicts sharpened different shades of how “America Firsters” view Israel.

The theme was addressed head-on in the only session billed as a “debate.” It pitted Max Abrahms, a professor specializing in the Middle East, with his presentation titled “Why the MAGA Isolationists were Wrong on Iran,” against Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine, who spoke on “Israel First or America First?”

Professor Abrahms reminded listeners of the doomsday scenarios skeptics warned of while the Trump administration was weighing its strike on Iran, including the risk of a drawn-out war and American deaths, and contrasted them with the reality of the aerial raid that drew minimal Iranian response. He argued that President Trump had successfully trodden a middle road between adventurous nation building and isolationism.

“I urge everyone to look toward President Trump, whose foreign policy stewardship in the Middle East has been strong precisely because he’s rejected so much of what both the neocons and MAGA isolationist-realists have to say,” said Professor Abrahms.

Mr. Mills argued that the administration’s posture toward Israel contradicts the ideological line it follows on other foreign conflicts.

“Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities?” he asked. “Why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First — asterisk Israel?”

Mr. Mills also said the Trump administration had betrayed its promise of increased political free speech by deporting “supporters of the Palestinian cause” and that Republicans have mimicked Democrats in shutting down debate on the topic by “accusing countless critics as anti-Semites, instead of engaging on the issue.”

Most core NatCon voices feel America’s Israel support is beneficial. Still, the fact that its brand takes a grim view of foreign entanglements and promotes national interest as its policy litmus test behooves a harder-nosed approach to demonstrating the benefit America derives from its diplomatic and financial investment in Israel.

Commentator Daniel Horowitz argued that the Iran strikes personified successful Trumpian low-risk toughness.

“Break their stuff and leave, that’s what America First means,” he said.

Victoria Coates, Vice President of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, strongly supported the Iran strikes and their limited nature, repudiating the type of maximalist goals set during the George W. Bush years.

“Democracy promotion by force has not been a success… Trump left that to the Iranian people,” she said.

The same session Mrs. Coates addressed also included an outspoken skeptic of America’s deep Israel ties, Arta Moeini, managing director of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He argued that US strikes on Iran were driven by “globalist illusions” which “saturate the very air of Washington,” and that they “serve the managerial class, not the republic.”

Even among the NatCon voices who take a highly positive view of the US–Israel relationship, some feel both nations would be better served if material support was scaled back.

“I think that Israel would be substantially better off if it had independent defense capacities, that it was not potentially reliant on the US for the tools that it needs to defend itself against our common enemies, because there will be another Barack Obama, there will be another Joe Biden. There will be infinitely worse than that down the road,” said Ben Weingarten, commentator and regular contributor to the NatCon squad podcast in an interview with Mishpacha.

He offered as an example the leverage the Obama administration was able to muster using Israel defense aid during its sealing of the Iran nuclear deal.

“That said, there is no greater ally in the world. They’re the ones dealing with threats we don’t want to deal with,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a client state relationship. It should be a genuine alliance and a genuine partnership.”

The Road Ahead

During the days of NatCon’s conference, signs of what its leaders have accomplished and the challenges they face abound in the capital city around them. Outside Union Station and around the town, uniformed National Guardsmen patrol as a result of President Trump’s efforts to end years of unabated violent crime in Washington. Only a few yards away from their position in front of the train terminal are a set of vulgar anti-Trump signs paired with placards that read “indict” and “impeach,” around a makeshift shack bedecked with a Palestinian flag — a small symbol that while NatCon might be rallying much of the right around its flag, there is no shortage of Americans who reject their vison.

Even as cultural and institutional hurdles abound, NatCon’s leaders give President Trump high scores.

“These changes don’t happen overnight, but what is happening is pretty amazing,” said Mrs. Wellisz. “The shock and awe of it reminds everybody how much can be accomplished. It gives us a lot of hope.”

Hard power victories, however come with daunting challenges. The 2024 election dealt a rebuke to woke culture and the Trump administration is working at high throttle to push back against decades of leftist dominance in federal agencies and higher education, but effecting deep change in America’s liberalized culture is far more difficult.

“It’s easier to win elections than to win the American mind,” said Mr. Weingarten. “We have to fight with what we have and competing in these institutions by starving them for oxygen of funding is at least a good starting point…. The other side understands the imperative to win the American mind. However, they’ve also gotten a bit decadent and overplayed their hand. They’ve had a monopoly on these institutions and consequently, competition really threatens them, because they haven’t had any.” —

Unlikely Man at the Top

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atCon is the largely the brainchild of Yoram Hazony, who founded the group and serves as its chairman. Dr. Hazony is perhaps an unlikely figure to lead a movement advocating for a more robustly patriotic America that unabashedly embraces Christianity as its standard for public morality.

His intellectual reservoir and credentials as a widely published political theorist make him eminently qualified to lead this group of intellectuals and policy experts. Yet as an Orthodox Jew who has lived for over 30 years in Israel, his biography is not what one conjures for the leading force behind efforts to renew a nationalist-oriented right in America and Western Europe.

Yet, it was the call of current events that landed him in this unique position.

After spending decades focused on Israeli political and scholarly affairs, in 2016 amid the Brexit vote and initial Trump campaign, a colleague saw a sea change brewing and urged him to pool his years of research on Anglo-American nationalism to help provide an updated intellectual foundation for the political movements afoot. Among the initial results were Dr. Hazony’s 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism and a modest conference on “Reclaiming and Rebuilding Conservatism” held a few months after President Trump’s 2016 victory.

Dr. Hazony felt that would be a one-off reengagement with the Anglosphere, before he turned his energies back to his birthplace and adopted homeland. Yet, life is full of surprises.

President Trump’s ascendance to the White House rallied nationalist thinkers and led them out of years in the wilderness to the center of western political life. That placed Dr. Hazony and his abilities to frame conservatism as a distinct worldview in high demand.

“The NatCon grouping is an attempt to return conservatism to where it should be after thirty years of being completely confused with liberalism,” he told me in a 2022 interview. “There were many people who called themselves conservatives, who were not interested in conserving anything, they were only interested in individual freedoms.”

The result was the formation of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which he cochaired with Christopher DeMuth, a former advisor to the Reagan administration and fellow at The Heritage Foundation and other prominent Washington think tanks. Beginning in 2019, their organization began hosting annual NatCon conferences on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2022, Dr. Hazony came out with Conservatism; A Rediscovery, a magnum opus organizing the fundamentals of Anglo-American conservatism rooted in nationhood and religious tradition. His thinking also labels those who are center-right, but focus chiefly on free markets and small government, as outside conservatism’s authentic borders.

Dr. Hazony’s book draws on Edmund Burke and others traditionally seen as the fathers of conservatism. Yet he added from earlier sources, mainly a group of 16th and 17th century English thinkers who drew from Tanach and even Talmudic sources in their attempt to define their nation’s vison of governance. Prominent among them was John Selden, who authored commentaries on the Seven Noahide Laws that non-Jews are obligated to observe and Maseches Sanhedrin. Selden’s writings were the subject of one of Dr. Hazony’s earlier works together with another Israel-based, NatCon connected scholar, Ofir Haivry.

The trajectory of Dr. Hazony’s life over the past few years came as a surprise, but drew on ample seeding from his younger years.

Born in Rechovot and raised in New Jersey, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. While there, he became a leader in a group of conservative students animated by the “Reagan Revolution.” He founded a campus publication, The Princeton Tory, which is published to this day.

While at Princeton, he was drawn to the school’s enclave of Orthodox Jews, gradually embracing a life of commitment to Torah observance. He also married Yael, a fellow student who traveled a similar path. After Dr. Hazony finished his doctoral work at Rutgers University, they moved to Israel where they raised their family and still live. The Hazonys have nine children.

Over the past few years, in NatCon addresses, interviews and writings, Dr. Hazony set high goals for his movement charting a path for a robust return of Judeo-Christian religion to public life. He also delivered a lot of stern warnings of how it could collapse from within. In a 2022 keynote address, he called on religious traditionalists not to be satisfied with opposing the worst excesses of wokeism, but to set maximalist goals for policy rooted in the morality of Biblical scripture. Last year, Dr. Hazony warned against infighting between factions on the right and criticized timidness over emerging state efforts to place images of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

This year, Dr. Hazony warned of another threat from within in a speech titled, “What winning looks like, and how we could lose.”

“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people,” he said,referring to online chatter by certain right-wing figures.

Dr. Hazony clarified that US policy toward Israel was fair debate and neither that nor general feelings about Christian-Jewish relations are central to NatCon’s principles. He cautioned, however, that making either into a litmus test could “destroy the coalition” and its chances for future success.

Even as challenges abound, the impact that the work of Dr. Hazony and his colleagues has had on American politics is remarkable. On an escalator ride down to the convention’s sessions, he had only one word to describe the fruits their efforts have borne: “Unbelievable.”

On Friendly Ground

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rthodox Jews’ support for the American right is neither new nor needs much explanation. Their role in electoral politics and lobbying has been ongoing for decades, but a presence in think tanks, policy papers, and hashing out fundamentals of conservative thought is in its early stages. The fact that NatCon 5 featured a robust minyan was an effective indicator that this too is changing.

One of the conference’s lunchtime breaks included a shiur by Rabbi Menachem Zupnik, who leads Passaic’s Bais Torah U’Tefilah. Its subject was shnayim she’asuhah, the concept of multiple participants in a mitzvah receiving credit for the act. Most of his remarks were a discussion of the idea drawing on standard sources, and closing with an encouraging lesson for the participants.

“Nobody here could have done this themselves,” he said referencing NatCon’s work in putting traditional morality at the front and center of conservative politics. “It’s everybody’s contribution and in the eyes of the Torah it’s as if each of us did the whole thing…. That should give us all the encouragement to continue the work you’re all doing to restore morality to our country.”

Rabbi Zupnik has been a presence at NatCon since 2019, delivering brief words of blessing on day one of the conference.

“It’s a humbling task, but Yoram and his colleagues deserve credit for choosing someone who does their best to carry the mesorah of the yeshivah world. The voice of Judaism they want is Torah as taught by the gedolei Yisrael,” said Rabbi Zupnik. “This was really part of Rabbi Moshe Sherer’s vison, that the Jews who represent us in the halls of power should be people who embody the ideals of the Torah world.”

How a prominent rav and marbitz Torah, a traditional product of the yeshivah world, became connected with the gathering is a story in itself. Decades ago, Rabbi Zupnik was invited to deliver shiurim to a group of students at Princeton University who were looking for someone to teach them Torah. Prominent among them was none other than Yoram Hazony, who maintained a close bond with the rabbi of his university years. Despite having no involvement or interest in politics, when NatCon launched its first conferences, Dr. Hazony persuaded Rabbi Zupnik to attend, stressing the value of an authentic voice of Torah values at its gatherings.

His five visits to NatCon and conversations with its leaders steadily reinforced that belief.

“When we read about 200 Reform ‘rabbis’ supporting some terrible abomination of morality, we either laugh, cry, or shrug our shoulders. We know they don’t speak for Judaism. But to the non-Jew living far from our communities, those are the Jews they see. That’s why its so important for frum Jews to stand up and say what Torah Jews stand for,” said Rabbi Zupnik. “The believing Christians here are the only ones who truly want the type of America where we can be open about what we believe. They’re the ones fighting for an America that will be a more hospitable place for religious people and it has become imperative for them to know that the authentic Torah Jews support their work and care deeply about the moral state of America.”

Dr. Hazony and other NatCon leaders have long wanted a larger contingent of Orthodox Jews involved in their activities. This year, Rav Aharon Dovid Goldberg, Rosh Yeshivah of Telshe, stressed the importance of a more visible Orthodox presence, telling Rabbi Zupnik in one conversation that the moral state of America “is our problem. We cannot help but be affected by the society at large.”

Most Orthodox Jews at NatCon were observers, but a few made presentations, like Daniel Horowitz, the Baltimore-based host of “Conservative Review” and senior editor at Blaze News, who spoke on a panel about defining America’s national interests in foreign policy.

Speaking directly to the cause of articulating Torah positions on moral topics was Rabbi Ilan Feldman of Atlanta’s Congregation Beth Jacob, who addressed a session on attempting to overturn Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision mandating all states to sanction deviant relationships as “marriage.”

“Marriage is not for us to redefine. It’s G-d’s plan for the world,” he stated in a speech, leaving no ambiguity for the Torah’s view on the matter.

The rabbanim and organizational leaders who have dialogued with NatCon were aware of the Torah world’s general hesitancy to be vocal on broad societal issues. However, given the realities of how moral decay practically threatens religious communities and the many amplified Jewish voices promoting progressive social values, they concluded that the times demand a more forthright approach.

“When the only voices coming from the Jewish world are in favor of things that are against the Torah and we are nowhere to be seen, I’m concerned that this can create a terrible chillul Hashem,” said Rabbi Feldman. “We need to speak out on our terms, but there’s too much at stake for us to remain silent.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1078)