“National conservatism” is the latest in a long line of re-branded conservative groups which attempts to explain to the world how they are oh-so-very different from the conservatives who came before them. Back in in the 1990s, it was the paleoconservatives who claimed to be something new. Nowadays, the few remnants of the paleoconservatives movement, such as Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, spend their time telling us to vote Republican, or to trust the president and to generally just sign off on whatever the Republicans are doing.How is this any different from just standard GOP-centered conservatism? It’s not. Sure, the paleoconservatives have a slightly different vocabulary form the usual Washington-establishment conservative. The paleocons will throw in a few words about republican virtue, or the greatness of Edmund Burke, or maybe a few lines about “fusionism.” Paleocons like to slap a few big words on things to give it all a patina of high intellectualism. But in the end, their movement usually amounts to supporting the regime whenever Republicans are in office. With the sole exception of immigration issue, the actual policy prescriptions of the paleocons are virtually indistinguishable from any ordinary Republican in the tradition of Bob Dole or Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush. For example, the most long-established paleocon publication, Chronicles, with Gottfried at its helm, has come out in favor of Trump’s Iran war back in May:In the case of Trump’s use of military force in Iran, the jury is still out on its political outcome. From government reports, it seems that the military operation is expected to last about four weeks, and the Iranian people will then be left to establish a post-Khameini regime. Trump has assured us that he is not preparing for any kind of American ground war; so I’m waiting to see if that’s the case.It’s very important to trust the president, you see, and just go along with the administration. Although, in typical paleo fashion, Gottfried throws in a little meaningless hair-splitting in an attempt to distinguish himself from the policies of Pete Hegseth:I would also distinguish between enthusiastically backing the attack on Iran and giving the Trump administration, provisionally, the benefit of the doubt. I am taking the second course, since the threat represented by the now mostly overthrown Iranian regime may have been great enough to justify the use of force. The Iranian government has sponsored international terrorist activity consistently for the last 47 years. It was also working to build nuclear weapons to use against countries that Iran’s clericalist leadership marked for destruction.In other words, this paleocon publication is repeating the standard propaganda line of the Trump administration’s position on Iran, but that’s ok so long as you have some mild reservations about it all.Boy, those paleocons sure are opposed to business as usual in Washington!Now added to the mix are the “national conservatives.” This is the latest re-tread of ordinary conservatism but with an additional emphasis on supporting a strong central state in the name of national identity. They are generally indistinguishable from run-of-the-mill conservatives but are just a bit more pugnacious than the standard variety. Nonetheless, as with the paleoconservatives, they end up supporting all the usual policies we get from ordinary conservatives, with perhaps, a more restrictionist view on immigration. All the rest is essentially the usual conservative political positions.This was made abundantly clear at this year’s national conservatism conference. As Kelley Vlahos points out at Responsible Statecraft, national conservatism now appears just to be conservatism with special emphasis on supporting the Israeli state:The National Conservatism Conference certainly has come full circle.The project, launched in 2019 by an American-Israeli nationalist in Washington to herald the “New Right” movement in the United States, has increasingly become global in nature and is now, as critics charge, an unvarnished promotion of Israeli ethno-religious nationalism with American buy-in.In Jerusalem no less. And at a time when Americans, according to every available poll, are turning against Israel over its catastrophic war on Gaza, which has killed over 74,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and has buried its once congested cities in 61 million tons of rubble.If the national conservatives were simply standard Washington conservatives, would their policy agenda be any different? It’s hard to see how.In perhaps the least shocking development of recent years, it turns out the latest “principled” conservative “America first” splinter group amounts to little more than a coalition for pushing more taxpayer money to be shipped to Israel.When it comes to these conservative “dissenters”, there is rarely any difference, beyond some small variations, in emphasis and rhetoric. These groups almost totally ignore fiscal and monetary policy, of course, because these conservatives have no actual interest in shrinking the size of the central state. And when it comes to foreign policy, there is very little daylight between the policies of the usual foreign-policy blob, and the conservatives of whatever “paleo” or “national” variety happens to offering up timid critiques of regime policy. Ultimately, these groups call themselves loyal opposition, but they’re 95 percent “loyal” and five percent “opposition.”The post “National Conservatism” Turns Out to Be Just the Same Old Conservatism appeared first on LewRockwell.