It used to be that the annual CPAC conference was the gathering where all the right wing activists and conservative intellectuals would meet to compare notes and get on the same page. It was a raucous affair with lots of snarky panels and right wing celebrities but it also featured serious speeches and presentations by conservative politicians, writers and thinkers. While CPAC still exists it’s no longer the only game in town. Today it seems as if the movement has divided and the fun, entertaining activist types meet at the frequent youth oriented Turning Point USA confab while the serious thinkers come together at the much more staid National Conservatism Conference which was held last week in Washington D.C.
But if anyone thinks that the latter is less radical and extreme than the more exuberant Turning Point they need to think again. The NatCon folks are now in charge of the U.S. government and what they believe and are proposing for the future is downright chilling.
Joe Cappelletti of the AP reported that the conference featured panels on such topics as “The Bible and American Renewal” and “Overturn Obergefell” He described the movement’s vision of an America as “rooted in limited immigration, Christian identity and the preservation of what speakers called the nation’s traditional culture” which is a very mild way of putting it. It certainly doesn’t seem there was much talk of individual freedom, free markets or liberty of any kind and that is a big change from the conservative movement that has dominated Republican politics since the Reagan administration. (Apparently, they’re no longer interested in watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants since they have decided that the tyrants are the good guys.)
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Director Office of Management and Budget (and lead author of Project 2025) Russell Vought, border czar Tom Homan, and 2020 coup plotter John Eastman were among those in attendance representing some of the most extreme policy leaders in the Trump administration.
As the Congress wakes up from its self-imposed slumber to face another government shut down showdown, Vought’s comments have particular salience. According to the AP:
Vought declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist” after it said his latest effort to claw back funds already approved by Congress is illegal. On the broader push for the rollback of appropriated funds, or rescissions, he said, “If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively to protect the American people.”
There’s lots of talk about “protecting” the American people reflecting the paternalist Daddy state mentality. But according to most reports, Vought’s underlying message was reflected in a reckless refrain heard throughout the conference: “You can just do things!”
The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger attended the event and described the ethos this way:
The glue that binds the NatCon coalition is their contempt for the proceduralism of the conservatism that preceded them, their conviction that Republicans’ old focus on small government and personal liberty amounted to nothing more than unilateral disarmament against the teeming hordes of the left. Seizing and wielding federal political power, not restraining it, is the mission.
It would seem that the president isn’t the only one who is drunk with power.
Perhaps the most revealing moment was a viral speech by Missouri GOP Senator Eric Schmitt entitled “What is an American?” in which he made the claim that the country belongs to the descendants of white Europeans who took the land from the violent Native Americans fair and square because they were just plain superior. He said straight out:
“America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us … We can no longer apologize for who we are. Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean’s shores.”
There’s no mention anywhere of the Black Africans the white Christian conquerors abducted and brought over to be slaves. One must assume that means America doesn’t belong to them either. He continued:
Our ancestors would be astonished to learn that they were fighting for a “proposition.” They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. America belongs to us, and only us. If we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.
This is, of course, a nod to the Great Replacement Theory which holds that the immigrant invaders are trying to supplant the rightful owners of America — those “sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims.” You know, white people. Trump’s right hand man, Stephen Miller is a strong proponents of this idea as are such right wing luminaries as Tucker Carlson. This noxious concept is now mainstream in the GOP.
It’s never been mainstream in America however. In fact, they were fighting for “a proposition.” In fact, Schmitt just spit on the most revered Republican president (before Trump, of course) Abraham Lincoln who gave the most famous speech in our history. The first words of it go like this:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Yes, that was the proposition and it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence.
JohnGanz, the author of When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s noted in his Unpopular Front newsletter that Schmitt’s entire speech is nothing but warmed over paleoconservative dogma from 30 years ago, specifically the ideas of a writer named Samuel T. Francis. Ganz writes:
The basic notion of Franciscan ideology is that a revolutionary right must craft a new nationalist myth to replace both worn-out 19th-century conservatism and liberal, “managerial globalism” in order to mobilize “the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.”
He acknowledged that America never had a national myth of a glorious past but thought it was a good idea to invent one. As Ganz archly observes, “the word for the politics that makes a pastiche of past glories to create a new type of regime is “fascism.”
It’s tempting to write this off as a bunch of right-wing kooks indulging their little fever dream of creating a white, Christian, autocracy. But these are powerful people and if there’s any person in the government who is trying to create “a pastiche of past glories” (largely by erasing the true American past, both good and bad) is the most powerful one of all, Donald Trump who has certainly discovered that “you can just do things!”
Nobody paid attention to Project 2025 until it was too late and look where that got us. It would be foolish to make that same mistake again.
Salon
