A tale of two ballrooms
Last week’s National Conservatism and Abundance gatherings in Washington laid out two clashing visions of America’s future.
The first real speech of the 2025 National Conservatism Conference opened with a land acknowledgment.
“We are gathered here today on the traditional lands of the Republican establishment,” smirked Rachel Bovard, a vice president at the Conservative Partnership Institute, “[We] solemnly commit to never listening to them. About anything. Ever again.”
Though the humor might have been a tad dated, the twin shot at progressive pieties and the ever-endangered old-line GOP effectively set the tone for the event to come. NatCon, as it’s known, has become a premier event for the postliberal right, a movement to undo the American project and return to Old World ethnocentric nationalism.
Over the course of three days, speakers would rail against wokeness, Marxism, and mass immigration. Clips of the most extreme comments would go viral, including a speech by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., in which he went full blood-and-soil nationalist. A digital picture quickly formed of a dominating, ascendent far-right faction, intent on smashing its opponents, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
A few miles away, another conference was taking place: Abundance 2025, an amalgamation of pro-housing YIMBY advocates, energy wonks, and transit nerds. Unlike at NatCon, there were no senators clamoring to take the center stage, no C-SPAN cameras rolling, no grand speeches about what it means to be an American. The attendees this year were less focused on crushing competing political factions than finding common ground on dry but important topics like permitting reform. To their credit, and detriment.
The two events counterprogrammed each other, to my knowledge, only by accident. Yet ping-ponging between the two, it felt as if I was witnessing a dramatization in miniature of the core underlying choice the U.S. faces: liberalism or barbarism. The problem was that only one side — the NatCons — seemed to fully understand and accept who their primary enemy was. As Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, made quite clear in his speech: “liberalism or enlightenment rationalism or modernity, the name doesn’t matter.” Our current crisis, he argued, “has been centuries in the making.”
Almost as if my internal musings were written on my forehead as I walked slowly around the tabling conservatives, I was handed a copy of the Claremont Review of Books with William F. Buckley’s face staring out at me. Below him was listed the opening essay: “The Poverty of Abundance” by William Voegeli.
In which I paid $425 to hear some guys say "retarded"
As is often the case at contemporary conservative gatherings, the NatCon attendees seemed to be almost exclusively motivated by cultural battles. The first panel discussion I attended, on “The Threat of Islamism in America,” was buzzing by the time the speakers began. It featured Ryan Girdusky, a right-wing commentator best known for getting kicked off CNN after joking that Mehdi Hasan was a terrorist, who seems to still be working on his tight five:
“I come from a stock in [New York City] that helped build it, when Zohran Mamdani’s family was still trying to figure out basic electricity,” Girdusky quipped. He later estimated that 90% of the country was “mentally ill, obese, and retarded.” Several minutes later, during his prepared remarks, Wade Miller, the former political director for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., pointed at Girdusky and thanked him for breaking the seal as he referred to “woke” people as Islam’s “retarded allies.”
The strange thing was that, while virtually every moment of the conference was calibrated to trigger my lib sensibilities, I was largely bored out of my mind. Nor was I the only one. When panelists attempted to get wonky and technical about issues like American Asylum Law, I could see eyes in the crowd glaze over.
At many of the plenary speeches, maybe a couple hundred attendees gathered in a conference room with seating for approximately 1,000, (the hotel staff estimated for me as they stacked the chairs at the end of day three). Even the die-hard supporters who filled the front rows with me couldn’t hide their disinterest when the U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer came out to talk about their president’s signature economic policy — tariffs.
The event’s most-talked-about speech, in which Schmitt went mask-off nativist, was a largely placid affair in real life. The event felt vastly larger and more foreboding online than in person.
The IRL experience made it impossible to ignore many of the internal contradictions inherent in the national conservative movement. To put it bluntly, the funniest part of NatCon was that it was full of #girlbosses and foreigners.
Yes, the program was dominated by men, but prominent women like Bovard, President of the Edmund Burke Foundation Anna Wellisz, and conservative political commentator Helen Andrews regularly commanded attention. As if in defiant opposition to this intrusion, Titus Techera, a Romanian essayist, lambasted Bari Weiss rather incoherently, calling her “the enemy that we need now” and “the full completion of feminism in college. All women, only women, only for women, the women way.” So true, king.
The event’s themes also clashed with its conspicuous multiculturalism. Schmitt’s speech, titled “What is an American?” rejected the foundational proposition that we are a “new nation, conceived in liberty” and instead grounded his vision of the American nation in a blood-and-soil nationalism emergent on the postliberal right.
Yet as I walked through the hallway, I heard French, Hebrew, and English spoken in various non-American accents throughout the hallways. Even the chauvinistic Techera couldn’t help but use the word “we” in reference to Americans, prompting what I believe were some side-eyes from members of the audience.
I was a bit worried that my boredom was wishful thinking. But then, at the end of day two, three young men sitting next to me began complaining about the conference's tediousness: “They’re low energy,” one quipped, “I wouldn’t bet on these people.”
I’m not so sure.
What the NatCons may have lacked in live sparks and policy focus, they made up for in a relentless focus on their main goal of defeating the forces of liberalism and multiculturalism at all costs, as well as a willingness to accept some odd bedfellows in order to achieve it.
Chastising conservative critics of the Trump administration, Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American philosopher, argued that “Fixing the system requires compromise. It requires politics. It requires coalition building … so they brought in all of these, all of these liberals and these tech bros … some of them I don’t like at all, but it doesn’t make any difference. You can’t win elections without a coalition.”
As if to demonstrate his commitment to a big tent, Hazony provided the following anti-heuristic to excuse some of his fellow travelers: “Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon you have to love Jews. Go take a look at our statement of principles, it’s not a requirement.” (I checked, he’s right, no mention of loving Jews.)
Bovard, the land-acknowledgement-respecter, wrestled with the role of right-wing figures from the tech world who’ve thrown their support behind high-skilled immigration. Moments after comparing them to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Bovard offered a temporary olive branch: “None of this is to say we must rid tech bros or AI engineers out of the conservative coalition. No, we want them. We should want all of them. Politics is about addition.”
“Short-term alliances are necessary,” she added. “But conservatives, as you know, have just clawed our way out of one dead fusionism. We cannot be doe-eyed about entering another.”
An abundance of questions
Across town, the Abundance conference1 presented a mirror image – a pro-growth, positive-sum economic vision that must form the basis of any successful liberal opposition to the postliberal right. While the NatCons were united by cultural issues and breaking taboos like “don’t call 90% of the country retarded,” it was material issues that kept the Abundance audience glued together, even if they didn’t generate much social media buzz. People talked excitedly amongst themselves about housing finance, administrative law, and nuclear energy. Eli Dourado, head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, said he was accosted in the halls, not for being a right-leaning member of the Abundance movement, but because of his preference for supersonic airplanes and autonomous vehicles over investments in high-speed rail.
Molly Taft, a reporter at Wired, seemed to register some mild surprise on Bluesky after attending Abundance Con, and meeting “medium-to-mostly-offline people who have a very positive view of what they’re trying to accomplish (more housing, more transit, more clean energy, etc).”
Yet in the go-along-to-get-along world of Abundance, attendants were wrestling with their own contradictions as well. Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles had made a bit of a stir with his recently released “Varieties of Abundance,” which he presented at the conference. According to Teles’ taxonomy, Abundance includes everything from the socialist “Red Plenty” to what he calls “Dark Abundance,” a term that grew in popularity among some parts of the Trump-supporting tech-right that, to this author, sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism.
A panel on the first day of Abundance Con moderated by billionaire philanthropist John Arnold2 illustrated the tension. Two little-known House members, Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., found common ground on the topic of permitting reform. But Peters kept flipping between the dream of a Trump-inclusive abundance movement and his indignation over the Trump administration’s blatantly counterproductive policies, like its attempts to halt green energy. As Josh Barro put it in his write-up of the event:
“Every time Peters brought up one of these actions, he lost some equanimity, as though the looming presence of Trump were physically intruding on the conversation he was trying to have with the normal-enough Republican sitting next to him.” Real.
After sitting through NatCon, it’s also hard to see the dream of bringing the postliberal right into abundance as anything but fundamentally foolish.
Abundance correctly prides itself on its long-held bipartisanship, and for supporting liberal ideas that can be adopted by the left and right alike. That attitude has paid dividends: The libertarians at Mercatus Institute have done heroic work in helping state and local groups pass pro-housing legislation all over the country. In Arizona, Texas, and Montana, Democrats have stood hand in hand with pro-Trump Republicans to pass critical legislation. And groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation and Institute for Justice have fought in court valiantly against government overreach into the rights of property owners.
But those conservative efforts to expand housing have been rooted in classically liberal principles, like respect for property rights, individual liberty, and free markets. The hard right’s only cohesive goal is to shred liberal values, and the movements that flow from them. To ally with these groups is to court self-destruction.
And while Abundance supporters are still figuring out the boundaries of their movement, the National Conservatives know where the ball is going: “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’s between the nation and the forces that would erase it,” Schmitt read haltingly from the podium.
What does abundance stand for? Well, if it’s going to be the foil to the National Conservative vision for America, it better stand for liberalism.
Where I was invited as a speaker
Disclosure: Arnold Ventures is an investor in The Argument.
Gotta say I v much lean towards hsr, especially for demographics/geography in the NE and against autonomous vehicles.
Enjoyed the NatCon anecdotes too.
I really enjoyed this analysis.
Sure, most reasonable people want Abundance’s goals: more cheaper housing, better infrastructure.
But making your political identity based around it seems to be missing the moment. You’re debating the merits of high speed rail versus supersonic airplanes while the other movement is debating how to achieve your political destruction.