EVENT: 16 October 2019
Washington, D.C.
Tucker Carlson confirmed as keynote.
Free, registration required see below.
Sovereignty or submission? Whither the West? And more specifically, which way America? Will citizenship mean something distinctive and important and will the country be run for the benefit of its citizens or not? That’s the question that’s at the heart of this political moment and it’s the question that will be answered at the upcoming conference of the same name.
Will Americans be sovereign in their own country or will they be forced into servile submission? This conference will frame the 2020 election, but more than that. It will frame the fundamental question of our times.
The populist phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was the symbol both predated his candidacy and achieved independent fulfillment in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Brazil.
At the center of the populist challenge, we believe, are two questions. The first revolves around the question of sovereignty: who governs a country? This question is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives and has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has come to be called the administration state has intruded more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies.
The second key question, one related to the issue of sovereignty, concerns what Lincoln called “public sentiment”: the widespread, almost taken-for-granted yet nonetheless palpable affirmation by a people of their national identity. The erosion of national sovereignty to which populism is a response has been accompanied by an erosion of that shared national consensus. Increasingly, the traditional pillars of this consensus—the binding forces of family, religion, civic duty, and patriotic filiation—have faltered before the blandishments of transnational progressivism.
The debate sparked by these problems has turned on a number of high-profile issues which the Sovereignty or Submission conference seeks to address, including immigration, free trade, foreign policy, religious freedom, and the question of citizenship.
The conference is hosted hosted by The Center for American Greatness and The New Criterion. It will take place on October 16, 2019 in Washington, D.C.
Registration is free, but seating is limited. Please register here.
Phi Beta Iota: Not being covered is #UNRIG and how citizens actually take back the power. On balance the line-up is promising and focused on values.
