“They think that traditional fusionist conservatism and the American exceptionalism idea are not strong enough. Holmes said when conservatives lose confidence in the strength of their philosophy, it risks becoming an identity. As Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the think tank New America and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” told me, “Once upon a time, there was a consistent meaning, but now you can be a national security conservative, an economic conservative, a social conservative. I’m really quite conservative on most other issues.”
Joe Biden embraced the term during his first term in the US Senate, telling Kitty Kelley of the Washingtonian in 1974, “When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal but that’s it. Most of his policy proposals as president were focused on putting “America First.”įor Holmes, American identity is “based on a universal creed … grounded in America’s founding principles.” Holmes sees kindred spirits and a shared struggle with conservatives elsewhere in the world who might share those principles.Ĭonservativism as a concept wasn’t even partisan in the 20th century. Trump flipped that more open principle of conservatism around when he declared himself to be a “ nationalist” in 2018. Many conservatives bristle at being lumped in with the very idea of nationalism, even without add-ons like “Christian” or “White.” Their version of conservatism is irrespective of place.įormer Heritage Foundation Executive Vice President Kim Holmes argued in 2019 that “American conservatives have argued that one of the great things about America was that it was different from all other countries. Whether you throw all the way back to the philosopher Edmund Burke or start with former President Ronald Reagan, conservatism has typically meant a resistance to radical change and a faith in caution, especially when it comes to government’s role in a citizen’s life. In current US politics, we typically see that identity with Christian nationalism or White nationalism. That can be a place, an ethnicity or a religion. So what is a nationalist and what is a conservative? And does it matter if we use these terms interchangeably?įirst, a quick definition: When academics use “nationalism” by itself, it’s the concept that some kind of identity matters more than philosophy.
If you just woke up to American politics in the past 30 years, the two terms seem synonymous, but they haven’t always been. These moments, which seem unremarkable to a regular consumer of news, remind us that the Republican Party has been struggling for decades to reconcile its internal partnership of nationalists and conservatives. An up-and-coming congressional backbencher calls for the GOP to be “the party of nationalism.”.
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