National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, and Americanism
07-11-2024
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 18, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington.
OVER 6,600,000 READERS June/july 2024 | VOLUME 53, NUMBER 6/7
National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, and Americanism
John Fonte
Hudson Institute
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 18, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington.
In the past two years, two competing groups of conservatives—National Conservatives or NatCons and Freedom Conservatives or FreeCons—have issued competing manifestos. These manifestos reflect a divergent understanding of the progressive challenge to the American way of life. This divergence can best be understood in the context of the history of modern American conservatism, which can be broken into three waves: the first wave, symbolized by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan, lasted from the mid-1950s to the end of the Cold War; the second wave, symbolized by Paul Ryan and the two Bush presidencies, ran from the 1990s to roughly the second decade of this century; and the third wave, symbolized by Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump, is ongoing.
John Fonte is a senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute. He received his B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. in world history from the University of Chicago. He has written for numerous publications, including Foreign Affairs, Commentary, National Review, The National Interest, and the Claremont Review of Books, and is the author of Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?
