The Long FreeCon

“A central element of the conference was a basic inability to come to grips with the political reality of the United States in 2025.”

“…Fusion Conservatism, the brainchild of National Review’s William F. Buckley and the canonical philosophy of the Reagan Revolution, is one of the many casualties of the Trumpian era of American politics. There is, as always, a remnant. A number of these banded together and, in 2023, issued a new manifesto, the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles, seeking a new lease on life for the “dead consensus.” These few, these unhappy few gathered Monday at the Freedom Conservative convention to rally the troops for retaking their place as the torchbearers nonpareil of True American Conservatism.

The atmosphere of FreeCon 2025 would have been familiar to anyone brought up—as I was—through the circuit of college conservative intellectual organizations, down to the seating arranged around circular tables and the many bowties—some 23, perhaps. Conversation was dominated by the trivialities common to the class, stuff that would make angel-counting schoolmen blush: a professor musing on the qualities of a local Catholic basilica, a think tanker and a government consultant discussing the philosophical grounds for school choice. A comfortable environment for the bookish and bespectacled, an orderly, stoop-shouldered affair far from the raucous populists at CPAC. My kind of gathering, really—but completely unfit for anything that might approach effective American political leadership in 2025…”