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In the wake of the October 1929 stock market crash, conservatives formed an array of organizations and publications that aimed to resist the nation’s steady embrace of New Deal liberalism. Crucial to their opposition was a group of “nationalist conservatives” whose most prominent member was the operative and propagandist Merwin K. Hart. Hart’s worldview, which embraced nativism, antisemitism, anti-interventionism, and economic libertarianism, was shared by a range of figures on the right whose contributions to the emergence of the postwar conservative movement have not been studied. Hart’s organization, the New York State Economic Council (later renamed the National Economic Council), played a critical function in propagating conservative ideas throughout the years of liberal political hegemony. Scholarship on conservatism has generally cast the early opponents of the New Deal as principled libertarians, unsullied by bigotry and nativism; this article challenges that picture, arguing that the nationalist conservatives were critical in shaping the ideology of the postwar right.

The rapid decline of global biodiversity has engendered renewed debate about the social, economic, and political factors contributing to it. Specifically, there is little understanding of the role that political ideology within a country (e.g., nationalism, conservatism, socialism) plays in determining biodiversity outcomes. We used negative binomial generalized linear models to investigate the importance of national regime ideology in predicting threatened animal species and protected area establishment compared with other factors that affect biodiversity outcomes, such as gross domestic product, inequality, and democracy. For threatened animals, the model with the highest Akaike weight suggested adverse biodiversity outcomes arose from larger gross domestic product (β = 0.120, p < 0.001). However, nationalism (β = 0.371, p < 0.01) and socialism (β = 0.293, p < 0.05) were also significantly associated with increased proportions of threatened species. For protected areas, the model with the highest Akaike weight suggested increases in democracy (β = 0.880, p < 0.001) led to a rise in relative protected area estate. Conservative regime ideology was also associated with greater protected area estate, although this did not increase the weight of evidence in support of the best models. These findings highlight the relevance of political ideology for predicting biodiversity outcomes at a national scale and illustrate opportunities to tailor policies and advocacy to promote biodiversity conservation more effectively. By targeting appropriate messaging and political advocacy, conservationists can improve the likelihood that politicians and their nations will participate in positive biodiversity actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous concerns about new democracies, as in the wake of the Arab Spring, have now been turned inside Western liberal democracies. These appear under siege because of populist movements which give vent to harsh economic and national identity claims. Among all liberal democracies the EU needs a re-elaboration of its core principles to gain more support from its peoples. I propose to examine a conservative view that preserves the core of liberal-democratic principles, while relying on an idea of 'Transnational European Civic Ethos' (TECE) that crosses national boundaries. TECE can overcome the lack of a common European demos, limiting its claims to segments of the European population that have something in common and can fruitfully deliberate together. TECE can defuse part of the populist threats that I take as expressing conservative attitudes without a response in contemporary liberal democracy. Final normative considerations from the model of the 'reasonable citizen' come to support the TECE proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late eighteenth century German conservatism – conveyed primarily by Prussians – was imbued with certain reactionary ideas, but at the same time did not deny the importance of changes in state and society. Conservatives recognized the irreversibility of the Reform Era that followed the defeat by Napoleon, and the need to accommodate changes required for the survival and development of a unified German state. One of the major challenges they had to face in this context was the rising concept of nationalism and the efforts to establish a German nation-state. This article argues, however, that until the 1848 Revolution, conservatives formulated a political theology which aimed to respond to the growing German national movement and the gradual spread of popular national sentiment. Such a response was neither anti-modern nor an outright denial of nationalism. Rather, many of the conservatives, who were associated with the reemergence of Christian Pietism, namely neo-Pietists, sought to accommodate nationalism by forging a religious-national synthesis that invested the people with the task of representing the essence and true spirit of the ‚Deutsche Nation' For these Christian devotees, the Volk had an organic identity that defined the national state. And while according to the conservative theory the people were not to be entrusted with full sovereignty, in fact they formed a German nation that eventually – especially during the 1848 Revolution – won certain political rights. The conservative religious-national synthesis, which advocated confessional reconciliation within German Christianity, introduced a specific democratic concept of the nation based on the people's identity and solidarity as the core of the nation. It was embedded in the ideal of the ‚Christlicher Staaf'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As factionalism becomes increasingly prominent within the Conservative Party, understanding the worldviews of the respective groupings has become key to understanding the party itself. This is especially true regarding the one nation group which is the most numerous in Parliament. From the Cameron era, the term 'one nation' expressed leaders' attempts to modernise the party, reckon with the Thatcherite social legacy, and carve out a distinct centre‐right identity which contained both socially liberal and distinctly conservative elements. However, reconciling 'modern' and 'conservative' views has been singularly difficult. Whilst bridging the two rhetorically and intellectually has been possible, leaders have struggled to translate such a synthesis into a viable governmental agenda that unites the party. Underlying this difficulty is fierce disagreement on immigration, sovereignty, nationhood and cosmopolitanism, resulting in one nation conservatism becoming a signal of intra‐party disagreement rather than unifying leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is an edited transcript of a panel held on February 21 at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House on the forthcoming book World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press). The discussion, moderated by Sam Adler-Bell, features three of the book's co-authors—Rita Abrahamsen, Srdjan Vucetic, and Michael C. Williams—and concludes with questions from the audience at the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"From Culturalist Nationalism to Conservatism: Origins and Diversification of Conservative Ideas in Republican China" by Aymeric Xu is an intellectual-political study that explores Chinese conservative thought from the late Qing dynasty to the Republican period. The author challenges the notion that conservatism did not exist in China, arguing that Chinese conservatism is a polysemic term that attributes different values and judgments to liberalism, capitalism, industrialization, statism, social hierarchy, democracy, and Westernization. Xu identifies four typologies of Chinese conservatism: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarianism. The book highlights the importance of the culture-politics nexus in modern China and examines the diverse perspectives within the conservative movement. While conservatism ultimately failed in Republican China, there has been a revival of New Confucianism in recent years. However, the book suggests that conservatism is unlikely to become an adequate political strategy in China. Overall, this well-researched book contributes to the understanding of modern Chinese thought and intellectual history. [Extracted from the article]

While we are paying a lot of attention to U.S. conservatives this election year, it is also an auspicious time to publish a special section on the global right. Just under a decade ago, we passed through a "populist moment," so-called because of Brexit, Trump's election, and the rise of Marine Le Pen as a serious contender for the French presidency, all in rapid succession. It seemed like the beginning of a new era of politics, one emerging from the dashed hopes and profound failings of the neoliberal order—and in many ways it has been. T he terrain on which political struggle now takes place has been deeply altered by the right, with less educated voters, many of them from the working class, leaving their ancestral political parties and supporting the forces of reaction over issues like immigration, national identity, and "law and order." But in electoral terms, the right's record has been hit or miss, and it's worth learning from their failures as well as their successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the crises of neoliberal globalisation since the 2000s have given rise to a new transnational political family that we call ‘national-conservatism’. Through a critical examination of the literature on the Global Right and the role of the state under globalisation, we contend that national-conservatism acts as an innovative model for acquiring and exerting power from the right today, characterised by an endorsement of the state’s economic role, an emphasis on traditional values and hierarchies such as religion, and a proactive, occasionally confrontational stance in foreign policy. Consequently, the paradigm of national-conservatism prompts the division of transnational neoliberalism into discrete national domains. These domains function as havens where the neoliberal elite is shielded both from foreign competitive pressures and radical demands of respective national societies. Crucially, national-conservatism garners legitimacy for this new order through its commitment to revitalising traditional, hierarchical models of national sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]