National conservatism

National conservatism holds that the independent nation-state, bound by a particular religious and cultural inheritance, is the proper unit of political life, and that supranational institutions and the unrestricted movement of goods and people erode the shared loyalties that self-government requires.

Its case, argued in Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), is that a world of independent nations is preferable to imperial or universalist orders — whether the old empires, the European Union, or a borderless global market — because independence permits genuine collective self-determination and checks the reach of any single power. Nationalism, so understood, is presented as a virtue rather than a pathology.

It names the intellectual project behind the populist-nationalist wave of the 2010s: Brexit, the Trump movement, Orbán's Hungary, and kindred parties across Europe, brought together in the 'National Conservatism' conferences from 2019. It seeks to give that wave a respectable doctrine rather than leaving it as mere grievance.

It departs from post-war fusionist conservatism by subordinating market liberalism to national cohesion — accepting tariffs, industrial policy, and an active state where these serve the nation's cultural and demographic continuity — while remaining firmly on the cultural right.

Its critics warn that 'the nation, bound by a particular inheritance' slides easily toward exclusion of minorities and immigrants, and that its self-described conservatism is in practice radical, willing to confront courts, universities, and constitutional norms rather than conserve them — the tension the vertical axis marks.

It is often treated as merely a rebranding of older nationalism, but its distinctive move is to fuse cultural traditionalism with economic heterodoxy, breaking the free-market consensus that had defined the mainstream right for a generation.