MIAMI — "Welcome to America's citadel of freedom: the free state of Florida, proud to be a refuge of sanity in a world gone mad," said Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday night, in a keynote speech to the third U.S. National Conservatism Conference. The address felt a lot like a road test for potential themes of a 2024 presidential campaign, with DeSantis largely avoiding hot-button issues that appear to be damaging Republicans at the moment — such as abortion or threats to democracy — but fulsomely praising his own heavy-handed educational "reforms" and vowing to wage war on "woke" corporations and Big Tech "censorship."
Since 2019, the National Conservatism movement and its series of conferences have served as a highbrow meetup for right-wing intellectuals, writers and think-tank staff who largely agree that the old conservative coalition that fueled "mainstream" Republican politics until the mid-2000s is now defunct and a new coalition must take its place. Many NatCon adherents belong to a "post-liberal" school of thought which holds that classical liberalism — in the Adam Smith sense of that term, with its focus on free markets and individual rights — led directly to the "neo-Marxist" progressive movements they abhor, as well as to the unchecked power of corporations to enforce economic and cultural hegemony.
