MAGA Says America Isn’t About Its Ideals But Its Conquerors

Last year Missouri senator Josh Hawley gave the keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference, that great rhetorical playground for MAGA ideologues. His main theme was that Christian nationalism is the animating idea of America and, for that matter, of Western civilization. That intellectual and moral heritage, he argued heatedly, is under sustained attack by the left, which aims at “deliverance from tradition, from family, from biological sex — and of course, from God,” and also by the libertarian right, with its devotion to “Rand or Mill or Milton Friedman.”

But it’s Hawley’s junior Missouri colleague Eric Schmitt who is lighting up the 2025 NatCon conference. And in his pithy remarks , Schmitt went several steps beyond Hawley in defining a distinctive American conserva