According to the publication, it exists to promote a form of conservatism that opposes unchecked power in government and business, supports "vibrant markets and free people", and embraces "realism and restraint" in foreign policy.

[7] In the first issue, dated 7 October 2002, the editorial by Buchanan and Taki stated that the new publication aimed "to ignite the conversations that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn't."

It continued that much of what then passed for conservatism was "wedded to a kind of radicalism – fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world's peoples, a hyperglobal economy.

[16] In April 2020, Johnny Burtka, executive director and acting editor of The American Conservative, said that the publication's ambition is to "become The Atlantic of the right" and said its online page views had "grown significantly" under the Trump administration.

[19] Largely reviled by many American conservatives following its founding due to its pacifist and iconoclastic positions, the magazine spent its early history, according to The Washington Post, as "an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion".

Vance gave an interview to the The American Conservative about his book Hillbilly Elegy, which was later credited by the New York Times' Jennifer Senior with launching the volume's success and putting it "on the map".

[23] In 2004, Peter Carlson wrote in The Washington Post that for scathing attacks on Bush and the invasion of Iraq, The American Conservative might have the edge over The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Progressive.