National conservatism

Peak influence 2016–

Core claim

The nation is the largest unit within which solidarity is actually felt, and a governing class that treats it as replaceable has forfeited its mandate.

What it wants the state to do

Wants industrial policy, tariffs and family subsidy used deliberately for national ends; restrictive migration; and cultural institutions — schools, broadcasters, universities — brought back under democratic rather than professional control.

Historical success case

Its advocates point to post-1990s East Asian industrial policy and to Poland's family transfer programme as evidence that a state willing to act on national rather than efficiency criteria can deliver on both.

Historical failure mode

Where the same programme has been carried furthest, in Hungary since 2010, media ownership, court composition and electoral boundaries were reshaped by the incumbent — the standard evidence that this tradition has no reliable stopping rule short of entrenchment.

Nearby traditions

Burkean conservatism, which it invokes and departs from on pace; right-populism, from which it differs mainly in preferring elite institution-building to plebiscitary confrontation.

Common mix-up

It is not simply fascism at lower volume. It contests elections it can lose, retains private property and pluralism in principle, and its own theorists spend considerable effort on where that line sits — which is a real difference, and also a line that its critics argue has been crossed in specific cases.

Coordinates