Amid the high-profile debates over foreign policy at this week’s National Conservatism conference in Washington, a quieter but no less intense struggle unfolded over technology. As their movement matures, the national conservatives will need to develop an approach to tech that is genuinely human-centred.

For years, attacks on “Big Tech” were a staple of the populist Right. However, the 2024 presidential campaign witnessed an astonishing rebalancing of the uppermost reaches of the Republican coalition, when Silicon Valley allied with the Trump restoration. Suddenly, the biggest of “Big Tech” was now inside the GOP tent, and digital tycoons (from Altman to Zuckerberg) lined up at the President’s inauguration. Indeed, both were present at the White House this week.

Both tech critics and evangelists took the stage at NatCon. In a plenary on the conference’s final day, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley launched a full-throttle attack on what he called a tech-driven “post-humanist agenda”. Meanwhile, in a breakout session, one audience member argued that AI posed a bigger threat to national conservatism than the Chinese Communist Party. Yet the roster also included Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who hailed the digital disruption reshaping the tech sector.

These two sides speak to different imperatives of a populist realignment. The tech-dynamism faction emphasises the power of technological innovation to reshape the material world. Harnessing that technological might is an essential component of the New Right’s reindustrialisation project. On the other hand, populist preservationists focus instead on the concern that tech could undermine human dignity and centralise power in the hands of technocrats.

Both dynamists and preservationists invoke the idea of independence, but they see different routes to that independence. Dynamists see tech advancement as promoting national sovereignty (by competing with China at the highest levels of industry) and empowering humans to control their position in the natural world. Preservationists, however, warn that new innovations in tech could undercut our psychological independence by drowning us in digital distraction and undermine our personal independence by empowering the mandarins of Silicon Valley.

A balance between dynamism and preservation is essential for any durable political order, and there are political and policy reasons why the Republican Party cannot afford to turn its back on the project of dynamic growth. That said, a hubristic dynamism could fall into the Icarus trap: flying too close to the sun, it could create a human catastrophe.

A NatCon panel on AI and the family offered some suggestions about how to strike that very challenging balance. Limiting the exposure of children to networked tech seemed a relatively broad area of agreement: age-verification laws for pornography, phone-free schools, and limits on minors’ access to addictive AI “companions” could get traction not only on the Right but also within the broader public. Indeed, dozens of states already have passed such verification laws, and many communities have also begun restricting the use of phones in public schools.

Beyond politics, the preservationist tradition offers a deeper lesson. Josh Hawley opened his remarks with a discussion of The epic of Gilgamesh, and one of the great teachings of so much ancient literature is how trying to escape the human condition can lead to tragedy. A child vulnerable to the false promises of technological emancipation, Icarus thought he could master the heavens. A national conservatism that fails to preserve the vulnerable core of humanity will meet a similar fate.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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