“National Conservatives” from the Edmund Burke Foundation published on June 15 a “Statement of Principles” which proclaims:

”We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown. We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.”

The blueprint, with 72 signatories, was drafted by Will Chamberlain of the Internet Accountability Project; Christopher DeMuth, Hudson Institute; Rod Dreher, American Conservative; Yoram Hazony, Edmund Burke Foundation, Israel; Daniel McCarthy, Intercollegiate Studies Institute; Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown University; N.S. Lyons, Upheaval; John O’Sullivan, Danube Institute, Britain; and R.R. Reno, First Things.

It focuses on issues such as “National

Independence,” “Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism,” “National Government,” “God and Public Religion,” “The Rule of Law,” “Free Enterprise,” “Public Research,” “Family and Children,” “Immigration” and “Race.”

On “Race,” the National Conservatives condemn “the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race.” That, of course, fits into the vicious campaign against critical race theory, discussion of slavery and continuing racism.

On “God and Religion,” they declare: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” In other words, Christianity should be the preferred religion of the United States, which is 65 percent Christian.

On “The Rule of Law,” they state: “Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.”

On “Family and Children,” they promote the “traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children” as “the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization.” They denounce “ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life.” This is an obvious attack on gay rights.

On “Immigration,” they argue that Western nations should have “much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the will to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies” and add, “Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.”

The signatories, affiliated with 55 organizations, are mostly Americans but also include a smattering of people from Austria, Britain, Canada, Italy, Israel, Poland and Portugal. Five of them stand out: Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and deputy Homeland Security secretary, now with the Election Transparency Initiative; Jim DeMint, former South Carolina senator and president of the Heritage Foundation and now with the Conservative Partnership Institute; Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA; Mark Meadows, formerly President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, now with the Conservative Partnership Institute; and Peter Thiel, the German-American billionaire founder of Pay Pal.

It is obvious that these men and women are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and they want to change course. How much that can happen depends on the hold which Trump will continue to have on the Republican Party, because that is the political vehicle to take them to their proposed utopia.

But it would be a utopia not for everyone. “It is tempting to point out that this supposedly new statement … has an awful lot in common with fascism,” The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle commented. “But it is perhaps more useful to note that self-named National Conservatives are building their house on sand, as the Bible might put it. There are as many views of the Christian mission on Earth as there are readings of the U.S. Constitution. The idea that a more overtly Christian nation would be a more harmonious nation – or even a more peaceful nation – has zero support from the bloody and contentious history of the past 2,000 years. Tolerance, open-mindedness and compromise, on the other hand, have an impressive track record on those too-rare occasions when people give them a chance.”

Indeed, this attempt at “trying to graft an actual philosophy onto Trump’s raging id,” as Von Drehle put it, is an exercise in futility. The party’s financial backers have always had a two-fold goal: to maintain the aristocracy of wealth and to suppress rising multiracial political power. They are succeeding in both, with a gradual political takeover that has produced a judicial junta answerable to no one and which has already started to affirm both goals and which, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump noted, is “empowering Christianity as the United States becomes less religious,” while “blurring the line between church and state as Republican officials advocate for religion to play more of a role in politics.”

Buttressing all of this are the unscrupulous Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Trump, of course, a “useful idiot,” as his National Security Advisor John Bolton and others have called him, whose philosophy, as he stated in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is this: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves but they can get very excited by those who do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular.” Of course, it does not hurt to have “Q” helping to promote the fantasies, lots of hyperbole and an alternate universe.

The Nationalist Conservatives could have saved themselves the trouble of performing linguistic gymnastics by simply reviving New York’s Eugenics Records Office of years gone by and ignoring Adam Rutherford’s book, “Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.” That way, they could establish racial purity as Charles Davenport sought to do way back in 1910 to counter the perceived threat even then of “replacement.”