Smart Conservatives Give Nationalism a Good Name, and a Bad One
A conference lays out an intelligent and benign “conservative nationalism,” then stupidly ignores Trump’s tweets.
All American colors.
Photographer: Dania Maxwell/Bloomberg
Publicity had gone about as well as could be hoped for an intellectual conference. In the days before the Edmund Burke Foundation put on a discussion of “national conservatism” in Washington, it had both been denounced as a front for Trump-loving bigots and criticized by white nationalists for excluding them. These were just the kinds of controversies that help attract reporters and attendees. The attacks also formed a backdrop against which the presenters could explain what they meant, and did not mean, in calling for a conservative nationalism.
But then, the day the conference began, the president tweeted. Trump alluded to four progressive members of Congress, all nonwhite women, saying they should go back to the crime-ridden countries they came from. Never mind that three of them were born in the U.S.