Their agenda is much more ambitious than President Nixon's 1971 imposition of wage and price controls, which were temporary fiascos. Their agenda is even more ambitious than the New Deal's cartelization of industries, which had the temporary (and unachieved) purpose of curing unemployment. What national conservatives propose is government fine-tuning the economy's composition and making sure resources are "well" distributed, as the government (i.e., the political class) decides, forever.

What socialists are so fond of saying, national conservatives are now saying: This time will be different. It never is, because government's economic planning always involves the fatal conceit that government can aggregate, and act on, information more intelligently and nimbly than markets can.

National conservatives preen as defenders of the dignity of the rural and small-town -- mostly white and non-college educated -- working class. However, these defenders nullify the members' dignity by discounting their agency. National conservatives regard the objects of their compassion as inert victims, who are as passive as brown paper parcels, awaiting government rescue from circumstances. In contrast, there was dignity in the Joad family (of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"), who, when the Depression and Dust Bowl battered Oklahoma, went west seeking work.

Right-wing anti-capitalism has a long pedigree as a largely aristocratic regret, symbolized by railroads -- the noise, the soot, the lower orders not staying where they belong -- that despoiled the Edenic tranquility of Europe's landed aristocracy. The aristocrats were not wrong in seeing their supremacy going up in the smoke from industrialism's smokestacks: Market forces powered by mass preferences do not defer to inherited status.

Although the national conservatives' anti-capitalism purports to be populist, it would further empower the administrative state's faux aristocracy of administrators who would decide which communities and economic sectors should receive "well"-allocated resources. Furthermore, national conservatism is paternalistic populism. This might seem oxymoronic, but so did "Elizabeth Warren conservatives" until national conservatives emerged as such. The paternalists say to today's Joads: Stay put. We know what is best for you and will give it to you through government.