National conservatism’s ascent is a story often mistold: Once upon a time, there was Donald Trump, and Donald Trump changed everything.
The truth is more complicated, and more instructive. National conservatism did not simply descend a golden escalator in 2015. It was imported from the United Kingdom half a decade earlier. Getting the history right is essential to navigating the fast-approaching future of post-Trump conservatism.
The end of the aughts marked a changing of the political guard. In the United States, the Republican Party suffered a massive rejection in 2008 after nearly a decade in the White House. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party was on the rise under David Cameron, who would become prime minister in 2010.
As American conservatives reeled from defeat, many began searching for answers abroad. One such answer came from David Cameron’s speechwriter, Danny Kruger, whose 2007 book On Fraternity: Politics Beyond Liberty and Equality quickly became essential reading for conservative American thinkers.
Kruger argued that while the right championed liberty and the left championed equality, both neglected fraternity.
Fraternity—those bonds of obligation and responsibility that knit a society together—should have been conservatism’s natural concern. The institutions that sustain fraternity—families, churches, civic associations and the like—are precisely the structures conservatives have long sought to protect. Yet too often, Kruger argued, conservatives had “turned a blind eye to the steady erosion of the family and civil society by the cult of individual freedom.”
Still, Kruger remained optimistic about what he called the “Right dialectic,” or the constant renewal of the alliance between personal freedom and social obligations. If fraternity is to be restored, it must come from the party of liberty. The “Left dialectic,” by contrast, can only destroy fraternity, subsuming social responsibilities into the remit of the state. Fraternity, therefore, emerges from the right use of liberty.
Not everyone on the right agreed with Kruger’s diagnosis. In 2010, another Cameron ally, Phillip Blond, published Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. Where Kruger sought to restore “the ancient alliance of individual and society,” Blond blamed “naive market fundamentalism” for the crisis, pointing to the alleged ideological excesses of the Reagan-Thatcher era.
If Kruger offered encouragement toward reform, Blond delivered a sweeping critique of modern capitalism, one not altogether dissimilar from that of his doctoral advisor, John Milbank, the founder of Radical Orthodoxy. Indeed, after the first Trump administration, Blond, Milbank, and others indicted National Conservatism’s Statement of Principles for its affirmations, however qualified, of free enterprise and individual liberty. Writing in the European Conservative, these left and right critics of liberalism lambasted National Conservatism as “at odds with much of the European conservative tradition which has historically sought to limit the market and uphold a non-individualistic model of liberty.”
In stronger and weaker forms, these ideas began to gain ground with conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, kickstarting a renewed conversation about the social foundations of liberty, often described as “postliberalism” or “communitarianism.”
Still, it was a slow process. In 2011, the American Conservative noted that Rep. Jeff Fortenberry was one of only a few members of Congress to meet with Blond during his American tour promoting Red Tory. The magazine revisited the emerging trend in a 2013 essay by Daniel McCarthy that praised Red Toryism’s “willingness to address the failings of the state and the market . . . in a rather more positive and progressive fashion.”
Perhaps surprisingly, McCarthy’s American examples were “libertarian-minded Republicans”: Sen. Mike Lee’s growing emphasis on community—what would later become the Social Capital Project—and Rand Paul’s self-description as a “Crunchy Con” who wants to “conserve the environment.” McCarthy’s question whether “an American ‘Red Tory’ movement will be semi-libertarian” is still a contested suggestion today.
By 2014, Lee, Marco Rubio, and members in leadership like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor were part of a related project led by conservative thinkers Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru known as Reform Conservatism. As the New York Times described it at the time, Reform Conservatism “would recast the federal government as the facilitator and supporter of local institutions who are a function of, and a contributor to, a ‘civil society.’”
This American version of the debate leaned closer to Kruger than Blond. Its aim was not to abandon markets, but to harness them in service of building fraternity.
For those who lived through this period, the right was already grappling with the social consequences of economic and cultural upheaval well before 2016—even if Donald Trump gave voice to those concerns with unmatched force.
Conservatism after Trump cannot afford to forget the cause of fraternity. But neither should post-Trump conservatism forget what Kruger argued, and what Reform Conservatives who followed also believed: Fraternity ultimately depends on liberty.
The institutions that sustain fraternity cannot be engineered by the state. They grow from citizens who understand that liberty carries obligations as well as rights. If the conservative movement remembers that truth, it will find that the path forward is not a departure from its principles but a return to them.
