Yoram Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, established Hazony as one of the leading proponents of a new kind of “national conservatism.” His new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, has set off a passionate debate among intellectuals on the Right to determine what “national conservatism” actually means and why conservatism needs to be rediscovered. We put those questions and many more to Hazony in this interview.
Recorded on May 17, 2022
To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
Peter Robinson: Even before it was published, the new book, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," had proven controversial, and many of the sharpest attacks were coming from conservatives. Yoram Hazony, the author of "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," is about to explain himself. "Uncommon Knowledge" now. Welcome to "Uncommon Knowledge." I'm Peter Robinson. Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute, Yoram Hazony received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his doctorate in political philosophy. Not, I notice, political science but political philosophy from Rutgers. With the publication of his 2018 book, "The Virtue of Nationalism," Dr. Hazony became one of the leading proponents of a new kind of conservatism, national conservatism. Yoram Hazony's newest book published, as it happens, this very day. You may now order this book on Amazon. No more pre-order, order. Yoram Hazony has Amazon's latest book, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery." What is national conservatism? Why does conservatism need to be rediscovered? We're about to find out. Yoram, welcome.
Yoram Hazony: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Peter Robinson: I'm about to produce two quite complicated sentences from your book, Yoram. "To the extent that Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for just this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all. Indeed, in our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path," close quote. Okay, let's start with some definitions, and treat me like a slow student. And let's begin with liberalism. As you are well aware, doctorate in political philosophy, liberalism is tricky. There's 18th century and earlier liberalism, which is centered on notions of individual liberty, and by at least the mid-20th century, liberalism starts to emphasize state control and has now morphed into wokeness, progressivism, and so forth. How are you using the term liberalism when you argue that conservatism has become confused with liberalism?
Yoram Hazony: Okay, well, I usually I'm referring to a particular kind of liberalism. It's enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism that is descended from rationalist thinkers of the 18th century. And the reason that that's important to us today is because after the Second World War, enlightenment liberalism was embraced by elites, Washington elites. We can say American elites, British elites and across Europe as an alternative model for how we should think about politics in Western nations. Prior to that, there had been what you could call Christian democracy. FDR was still calling America "God-fearing democracy" on the eve of World War II.
Peter Robinson: He used the term Christian civilization as well.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: So Yoram, but this is where, again, I'm a slow student. William F. Buckley Jr. used to say that it is the job. Well, he said many things, of course. He had a long career and he was very prolific, but one of the points he made a number of times was that it is the job of conservatism to conserve the founding principles. And those founders, were talking about John Locke. That's also a form of liberalism, classical liberalism, the kind of liberalism Margaret Thatcher always used to say she was a classical liberal. That's what you disapprove of, or are there two different kinds of liberalisms that we really must disentangle right from the start?
Yoram Hazony: Let me go back to your first question, which is defining liberalism.
Peter Robinson: Sure, all right. All right, go ahead.
Yoram Hazony: As I write in the book, when I speak of liberalism, I'm talking about a principal political position that regards politics as beginning with the freedom and equality of quality of the individual person in nature. That's an assumed first principle, a second principle that the individual takes upon himself or herself political obligations by consent, in general, that consent is the engine that drives political obligation. And a third principle is that reason, that human reason is sufficiently powerful so that men and women at all times and places can come to these first principles and, on the basis of these first principles, deduce the appropriate, the universally appropriate form of government, and this kind of liberalism was embraced post World War II as a kind of a solution to the horrors of the two world wars and the Holocaust in the United States and Britain and elsewhere.
Peter Robinson: What you're describing is French. It's enlightenment. It's Rousseau. That's not Locke. It's certainly not Burke. So that liberalism that you just described is not the liberalism of the founders, correct?
Yoram Hazony: Every one of those axioms appears in the first few pages of Locke's "Second Treatise of Government." You're absolutely right that Rousseau then takes these axioms and imports them into France. But the French, when they were importing it, they believed that they were importing John Locke, and I think there's actually a good reason to think that they were right about that. But look, for the sake of liberalism conservatism, let's understand that whether we agree that Locke is a conservative or not, for the purpose of this conversation, the question is whether the conservatives, by the conservatives, I mean the English common law tradition, Selden, Blackstone, Burke. You can throw in Montesquieu into that. Whether they, when they looked at this kind of liberalism, did they see that as something that they thought was a sufficient description of the political world? My argument is that they did not consider it to be a sufficient description of the political world, and that those empiricist thinkers who looked at this liberal tradition and said, "Holy smokes, if you adopt that alone as your description of politics, you won't understand anything, and if you try to implement it, you'll destroy the political world." Those thinkers ended up being called conservatives, and their worldview begins from a completely different place. It begins not with the free and equal individual. It begins with the nation as a bearer of political and religious traditions, which people then receive. Now in the case of Britain and the United States, the inherited tradition also includes all sorts of freedoms. Nevertheless, the starting place for a conservative is what do we need to do in order for our nation to be able to persist through time? What do we need to do in order to be able to make sure that ideas, behaviors, and institutions propagate themselves from one generation to the next? And those are two very different ways of looking at politics.
Peter Robinson: All right, now, we'll come back to the founders. I'll put that one aside for a moment so we can keep going here. So what goes wrong? We have conservatism. Let's go to mid century, and the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. is, with certain qualifications, conservatism of which you approve. Why, and then what has gone wrong with conservatism really in our lifetimes? You're younger than I am, but in your lifetime, something's gone wrong,
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: which is why conservatism needs to be rediscovered.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: All right. Where does mid-century American conservatism fit in this? It's not yet confused, I think, correct?
Yoram Hazony: Confused as a very strong way of putting it.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: Let's say that it has its good points and its bad points, and by the way, as you know from the book, I entered the conservative movement as a college activist founding a student magazine. I read about it in-
Peter Robinson: Very explicitly inspired by Ronald Reagan at the time.
Yoram Hazony: Very explicitly. I had Ronald Reagan, "Let's Make America Great Again" on my wall. That poster was on my wall in high school, and I've never deviated from my love of Reagan. And so a certain part of this book is trying to explain what's the relationship between national conservatives and Reagan, but we'll get to that. So the question about the 1960s is this. William Buckley founds a magazine in 1955 called "National Review," and his conception was that this is a coalition endeavor. He's gathering together all the forces that are going to be willing to join together to fight rampant communism abroad and rising socialism at home, and to do that, he had to bring together in particular two different approaches. One ended up being called libertarian, or you could say classical liberalism or true liberalism, in general, the view that I've already described that says the liberty inequality of the individual is the foundation of all politics. So that's individual writers such as Frank Meyer, and at the same time, he also brings into this coalition people like Russell Kirk, who build on the Burkean common law tradition, the British inheritance, and say, "Look, the key to the strength and continuity of the nation is its traditions, its religious and political traditions."
Peter Robinson: May I sum that up to make sure I'm following you? One, you have the libertarian position, which says we start with the freedom of the individual, and then you have Russell Kirk, who's a Burkean, saying, "Yes, but what makes the individual? What gives the individual judgment, the ability to make political choices?" And the answer to that is the nation or the society. This is the Aristotelian point. Man is a political animal, right? That we are this notion that man is born free and everywhere is in chains is nonsense. It requires society to establish what we recognize as conditions of freedom. Have I got that?
Yoram Hazony: Exactly right.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: Perfect.
Peter Robinson: Thank you, professor.
Yoram Hazony: So-
Peter Robinson: I'll take my grade now.
Yoram Hazony: So fusionism is, first of all, a necessary alliance.
Peter Robinson: Fusionism is putting these two together.
Yoram Hazony: Right. By the mid 1960s, Buckley's coalition, bringing together liberals and conservatives to fight Marxism and socialism, that is given the name of fusionism, okay? Or you can call it cold war conservatism. Fusionism is the nickname that a lot of people use. Is it successful? You're darn right it's successful. That's the movement that ultimately brings about the Reagan-Thatcher years, the defeat of the Soviet Union, and the defeat of socialist ideology for an entire generation in America, Britain, and beyond. So in that sense, a very admirable movement and very difficult to find anything wrong with it. What went wrong is that after the Berlin Wall falls, after Reagan and Thatcher leave the stage, what comes after that? Now, people who I think had their finger on the pulse of Reagan conservatism, let's say Irving Kristol was a personal teacher of mine, someone who I greatly admired, he understood political conservatism, Anglo-American conservatism to be founded on three things, religion, nationalism, and economic growth, where he put the emphasis on religion, that religion and nationalism are required in order to provide the framework, the guardrails that prevent the pursuit of economic growth from turning into licentiousness and undermining the capacity of the nation to continue to exist. Reagan understood this very well. Thatcher understood this very well. The question is what happens after they leave?
Peter Robinson: We get economic growth and nothing but economic growth.
Yoram Hazony: Right, and as-
Peter Robinson: The total focus of conservatism.
Yoram Hazony: That is exactly
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: as I understand it. The nationalism and religion drop out of the mix, and what is called conservatism then becomes all liberty all the time.
Peter Robinson: Okay. All right, Yoram. Are you happy with that phrase? National conservatism is-
Yoram Hazony: Am I happy with the phrase? I'm happy-
Peter Robinson: Are you at least stuck with it? May I use the phrase.
Yoram Hazony: No, no, no. I'm happy with the phrase. I'm sorry that it was necessary because as far as I'm concerned, Anglo-American conservatism has always had the nation at the center.
Peter Robinson: All right. And so it's a redundant phrase to say national conservative-
Yoram Hazony: When what you mean is conservatism properly understood.
Peter Robinson: Yes, exactly so.
Yoram Hazony: All right. It's necessary today for a simple reason that the post-Berlin Wall international movement, the project of taking liberalism, the politics understood through the lens of the freedom of inequality of individual alone and turning that into a world order, into a single rule of law that's going to embrace the entire globe, as George HW Bush put it wonderfully and memorably. That project, which then ends up being called the conservative project, is, in many respects, the opposite of a-
Peter Robinson: Conservative is modest, it's about neighborhood, and in the American case, it's this nation. We should worry about our borders, freedom at home, trade with other nation, correct?
Yoram Hazony: Yeah. You could take Irving Kristol and Jean Kirkpatrick in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their vision was the war is over. Let's bring the boys home. We need to deal with social decay at home.
Peter Robinson: Now this is not in my notes. I'm just remembering this, but I bet you'll remember it as well. I think it was the early 90s, but I know for sure he wrote two or three columns in the "Wall Street Journal," arguing that we ought to reconsider NATO.
Yoram Hazony: Absolutely.
Peter Robinson: That it was in our interest for the Europeans to defend themselves, but it was also in the interest of the Europeans.
Yoram Hazony: Absolutely.
Peter Robinson: All right. So Yoram, let me attempt to place national conservatism in the current intellectual environment. All right, Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame wrote a book, "Why Liberalism Failed," and he's talking about the liberal, as I understand it, he's talking about the liberalism of the founders, the old classical liberalism, a term that you clearly don't quite care for because you think even that confuses a couple of strands. Still, here's Deneen. "A political philosophy put into effect that the birth of the United States has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power." He wants to refound the country. He believes that the founding principles were flawed at the moment of inception. Against that, I think to myself Bill Buckley saying, "If conservatism is conserving anything, it's conserving the founding." Well, no, wait a moment. Well here, I'm quoting you. "The Federalist party's George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton," I'm quoting from your book, "were not only conservatives but American nationalists."
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: So you approve of at least some of the founders. "the Federalists Jeffersonian opponents were not only enlightenment liberals but anti-nationalists,"
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: close quote. Okay, so here's what I wanna know from you just really squarely. Do you approve of the founding of the United States of America?
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Well, what a relief, I have to say. Okay, so what do you say-
Yoram Hazony: No, but-
Peter Robinson: Go ahead. Go ahead.
Yoram Hazony: Well, absolutely. I think the American Constitution is marvelous. I think it's a wonderful inheritance, certainly among the best political constitutions that the world has ever seen, but there's an argument about why is it so good, and the view of John Adams or Hamilton or the members of their party is that what's so good about the American Constitution is that it fundamentally is the continuation of the British Constitution, which Adam says is the best constitution that there ever was in the world.
Peter Robinson: The American revolution properly understood was a conservative revolution. They wanted to reassert their rights as Englishmen.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: The radical departure was taking place in the north government under George III.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: They were not as distinct from the French revolution, which was trying to reinvent the world.
Yoram Hazony: Absolutely.
Peter Robinson: The founders wanted their rights back. Correct?
Yoram Hazony: Yes. Yes.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: That's exactly so. The one twist that I would put into this is that the Constitution, what we call the Constitution, the Constitution of 1787 is the second American Constitution. Before that, there was a failed Constitution in 1777, that we call the Articles of the Confederation, and that 1777 Constitution created something that was untraditional, that was unlike the British experience of what government is. It was so weak that it was incapable of doing things like raising an army, paying for an army, imposing on the states the conditions of a treaty duly agreed with foreign government. Already during the revolution, George Washington and many of his officers came to see the first American Constitution, the one that was freedom, freedom, freedom all the time, that was sought maximal freedom, as a disaster that would lead America to collapse, and they began to push the idea of a united national Constitution that would be modeled on the British model.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: That's where the Constitution comes from. Most of the people at the American-
Peter Robinson: A conservative revolution within the revolution.
Yoram Hazony: Yes, we conservatives call it a restoration,
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: That the shackles of the British Constitution were, in fact, broken in 1776 and 1777. They tried that for 10 or 11 years, and then there was a restoration led by Washington to bring back the most important principles of the British Constitution.
Peter Robinson: This is all so far tremendously reassuring, and I'm following you, but now I'm bracing myself because I have to ask about Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. I will engage in a preemptive capitulation, and I'm going to grant you that after the French Revolution, after 1789, Jefferson really does fall in love with that revolution too much. He falls for the whole enlightenment notion of recreating, that's not good. But we're talking about Jefferson in 1776, and we've got that high flown but glorious preamble, but then we've got those specific charges against George III, which ground the Declaration in the, they're attaching the Declaration to the notions of English common law, of specificity, of the empirical tradition. So do you approve of that Thomas Jefferson and that document?
Yoram Hazony: Look, the American Declaration of Independence was not intended to be read as a philosophical treatise. It's a political document which is written beautifully and achieves various aims very well. The problem is not in Jefferson's language. The problem is in later interpreters, especially after the Second World War, who take the American Declaration of Independence as being the foundation of an alternate religious framework instead of the conservative Christian nationalist inheritance that the United States had had up until then. Now we're going to take the Declaration of Independence or one paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, use it to replace the Bible as our scripture and to replace George Washington as the father of our country
Peter Robinson: I see.
Yoram Hazony: with Thomas Jefferson, and then things go badly.
Peter Robinson: Okay, we're coming right back to the current current moment, but I still, on the Declaration, what about Lincoln? He reveres the Declaration. He reads that into his understanding in the Gettysburg Address certainly. Are you comfortable with Lincoln, or is he anticipating the-
Yoram Hazony: I don't feel that it's my place to judge all the great men in American history.
Peter Robinson: No, but it's my place to use them to judge you. That's what's going on. I wanna know to the extent to which-
Yoram Hazony: Am I comfortable? Lincoln is a great man because-
Peter Robinson: Yeah. I'm sorry.
Yoram Hazony: And among his achievements is that he is capable of producing a rhetoric that fuses Jefferson's liberal rationalist language with a return to old Testament biblicism, and that combination is good for America at that time. The 1940s, 50s, and 60s-
Peter Robinson: You can hear the Bible in every sentence Lincoln speaks.
Yoram Hazony: He is a conservative nationalist like the Federalists were. There are definitely turns of phrase that I don't like, but it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. What matters is that in the 1960s, people look back and say, "You know what? We love Lincoln's, his rationalist universalist liberalism, and we don't need his biblicism. We don't need his Old Testament." And they twist and turn him into what they need at the time, which is an enlightenment liberal.
Peter Robinson: Okay, so another attempt to place national conservatism that you're rediscovering here in the current framework. Your friend, my friend, Christopher DeMuth, your friend and collaborator, actually, wrote recently in the "Wall Street Journal," quote, "When the American left was liberal and reformist, conservatives played our customary role as moderators of change, but today's woke progressivism isn't reformist. It seeks to turn the world upside down. When the leftward party in a two party system is seized by such radicalism, the conservative instinct for moderation, moderation is futile. National conservatives recognize that, in today's politics, the excesses are the essence. We must shift to opposing revolution," close quote. Okay, so Christ DeMuth doesn't want to refound the country. He's happy with conservatism, but in the present moment, conservatism is conservatism, but from now on, no more Mr. Nice Guy. The point I'm trying to make is that it comes pretty close to being a question of temperament, of attitude, of pugnacity. You are saying more than that, though, are you not?
Yoram Hazony: I like what Chris is saying. What I would add is that the temperament of pugnacity and fighting is necessary in a time when you need a restoration, right? There is no single thing that is the political practice of conservation and transmission. Everything decays. Everything winds down. Every good thing in time goes through a kind of a process of weakening and growing faint, and to save it to, which is here, we're talking about saving a nation, to save it, what's necessary is for people in a time of decay to contemplate the appropriate means for what's called restoration, and restoration is, look, it's not a counterrevolution because our goal is not to destroy and start over. A restoration seeks to adjust the course. Maybe that adjustment needs to be very powerful, and that adjustment is based on things that used to work. And you read about this in Selden and his great student Burke that the conservative is not trying to say, "Whatever we have at any given moment is good." That would be absurd. That's brainless. The conservative, according to the Anglo-American conservative tradition, is looking to say, "In a period where things have wound down, where they are decaying, what needs to be done in order to achieve a restoration, a reconstruction that will bring back some of the things that used to work and that made our country great?"
Peter Robinson: Right. Conservatism in the Bible, two quotations. I should also say this is not a book of political philosophy, although that's what I keep hammering you on. It is a book of political philosophy. It's a work of history, and it's also a personal narrative. You describe your own search, your own life as a conservative. So I commend the book as many books in one, and the correct title is "Conservatism: A Rediscovery." Quote, "A conservative approach to politics and morals cannot be made to work without the God of scripture," close quote. George Washington, "Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are the indispensable supports," close quote. Now, are you saying just exactly what Washington said, or does Washington sound a little too instrumental to you? We need religion because our real aim is a certain kind of political prosperity, and the religion is instrumentally useful to achieving that end. Are you saying exactly what Washington is saying, or are you saying something more?
Yoram Hazony: Well, I'd like to take both. I definitely think that this old view, that you need tradition for the sake of order, you need religion for the sake of order, for the sake of morals, for the sake of the society being virtuous and prosperous, I believe all of those things. I do, in this book, try to go beyond that, and the argument has to do with the theory of knowledge. The idea of being a God-fearing person, which comes from scripture, it's not a concept that's about being quaking in your boots all the time. It's a concept that relates in the Bible to the existence of boundaries. A God-fearing person is someone who reaches a certain boundary and feels that he or she must not, cannot go further because beyond there, there is destruction. If you go too far beyond a certain boundary, you personally will be punished. You'll be hurt and so will everybody around you. That's what it is to be God fearing. So we find in the Bible biblical figures enter a city, and they say, "There's no God in this place," right? There's no fear of God in this place, and what they're talking about is this feeling that people are so reckless, that they've gone so far away from a decency that the city is going to fall, that it will simply be destroyed. Now you could also say that that's instrumental if you like, but the message of scripture at a very basic level is there are boundaries. Today, they call them guardrails. There are boundaries beyond which men and women must not go, and if they do go beyond those boundaries, they and their culture, they and their civilization, they will, in fact, fall. They will, in fact, be ruined. And that is something that I think Washington and his Federalist party, I think that they were very much aware of this, and even later generations, I quoted FDR using this expression, "the God-fearing nations." FDR saw the World War II as a struggle between God-fearing democracies and those authoritarian regimes that did not fear God. The entire framing is is a biblical framing saying, "We're not just about freedom. We're about knowing where the boundaries are that a righteous person will not cross." So I think that was present for certain in the American founding, and it continues up until the 1940s, 50s, 60s, when we, for the first time, encounter a new kind of American, the kind of American who says, "I sit on the Supreme Court, and I think that God and scripture need to be removed from all the schools in the United States because they're a violation of somebody's rights." That's a new kind of American.
Peter Robinson: All right. Again, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery." "In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life." You knew when you wrote that that was going to be trouble, Yoram. "Provisions should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their traditions and way of life are not encumbered, but the liberal doctrine requiring a 'wall of separation between church and state,'" quoting from a letter that Jefferson wrote, "is a product of the post-Second World War period. It should be discarded," close quote. Okay. So there are two pieces to that. Jefferson did write the letter.
Yoram Hazony: Right.
Peter Robinson: It's in his mind.
Yoram Hazony: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: But how does he understand it? How do Americans at the time understand it? When and how does the principle get distorted and elevated to a kind of sacrament in itself?
Yoram Hazony: Well, the American Constitution does not have any provision, any provision whatsoever for the disestablishment of Christianity in those states that have religious establishments. At the time, all of New England still has official state religions, and most of the rest of the 13th states have all sorts of religious provisions in their laws.
Peter Robinson: Anglicanism in Virginia, congregationalist Protestant church in Connecticut, I forget the others, but these received state recognition and to some extent or other state support. They were established in that legal sense.
Yoram Hazony: Right, and the original American Constitution, look, it reminds us as in many other ways of the British Constitution. The British, they have a single monarch, but there's a church of England in England, and there's a church of Scotland in Scotland, and there's a church of Ireland in Ireland, and each of these has its own kind of autonomy and independence, according to the ways of the locals. And what the American founders have in mind is something like that where each state is going to be able to figure out exactly how it sees the relationship between church and state, and the assumption at the time is that there is some kind of encouragement for Christianity and religion in the states.
Peter Robinson: So the clause in the Constitution forbidding the establishment of religion means that the federal government will not choose a church.
Yoram Hazony: The federal government will not interfere in the freedom of the states to establish religions according to their understanding.
Peter Robinson: Got it.
Yoram Hazony: That's the founding concept, and it becomes, well, it doesn't become, it is overthrown in 1947 in the Everson decision that is right after World War II when the Supreme Court, for the first time, argues that separation of church and state is the theory of the 1st Amendment and then applies through the 14th Amendment, imposes it on all of the states in the United States. That should sound familiar because that's the template that then is used to dismantle American federalism in case after case,
Peter Robinson: Over and over again.
Yoram Hazony: over and over again.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Yoram Hazony: But it all begins with the Supreme Court looking at things like in the McCollum case in 1948. We're talking about Chicago public schools have a program that allows Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, and rabbis to come into the schools and to teach religion in the school system where the kids get to choose whether they wanna study with a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew. And that to me seems like a very, very reasonable accommodation to different kinds of religion. That gets struck down as unconstitutional in 1948 on the theory that America's for separation of church and state when-
Peter Robinson: Which is historically inaccurate.
Yoram Hazony: Which is historically inaccurate. But we have to understand what's happening. What's happening is that there is, in fact, a new political theory, which later gets to be called liberal democracy, a democracy whose ideology is liberalism, and that new ideology is it is that we're arguing about. Whether there wasn't something valuable, wise, and important that was thrown out, which has then led us to our current impasse where we're worried for the future of the country.
Peter Robinson: All right. Now, when you say Christianity is the basis for public life, all kinds of things, well, what this means. Prayer in school. How would the country look different if Christianity were returned, were restored as the basis for public life? And of course, I begin thinking, "Well, wait a minute, Christianity has itself a Christian consensus, Christian moral consensus has fallen apart in the last at least quarter century or so." I drove past an Episcopal church this morning that was flying the rainbow flag. Some Christian churches support gay marriage. Others oppose it. Some say, "Abortion, it's up to you. Figure it out in your own." Others say, "No, it's wrong in almost all." So you get the point.
Yoram Hazony: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: The obvious point that you're going to raise, you're gonna get an almost allergic reaction from the secularists when you say Christianity should be the basis of public life, but even for a sympathetic Christian. I'm thinking, "What quite does Yoram mean here?"
Yoram Hazony: Well, look, I can't tell you precisely what is involved because America's a federal republic, and the theory on which it was founded is that important issues should be decided through representative government at the level of the states and the step that I'm proposing, I'm not-
Peter Robinson: This is not a political agenda exactly. It's an intellectual-
Yoram Hazony: Right. But I do hope that it becomes-
Peter Robinson: It's not a party manifesto.
Yoram Hazony: Right, it's certainly not a party manifesto. It's a theoretical framework that I hope then can be turned into various political agendas, and they will be different from one state to another and just as they're from one country to another. The principle that I'm arguing for is that every nation, every people, every place where there's some kind of loyalty and community among people always has a public philosophy. It always has a public religion. Sometimes it's explicitly written out, and sometimes it's implicit and you have to tease it out, but every human community has such a thing. And when we stand today post 2020 and we've seen the post-war liberal consensus, the hegemony of liberal ideas destroyed so that we have this woke neo-Marxism, which is pushing forward and attempting to establish itself as the new political philosophy, the new framework, many have called it a religion. The new religion of the United States is going to be this woke neo-Marxism. And I look at this, and I think, as do many others, look at this, and I say, "The only way to beat this is with something strong that is an alternative." What is that alternative going to be? There are a few enlightenment liberals left. Some of them are good friends, and they say, "No, we just need to roll back the clock 10 or 15 years. It was fine then." And that's nice, but 10 or 15 years ago, the liberal democracy that America was 10 or 15 years ago is what gave birth to woke neo-Marxism. You can't say that's gonna solve the problem. What we need to look for and what I'm proposing is a countervailing force that can be strong enough to stand up to that, and that means defeating one proposed public philosophy or public religion with another. In practice, what I'm saying is in those regions, in those states where there is still a sufficiently strong Christian inheritance, where there are enough people who could look at something like this and say, "You know what? The old Christian framework was better than what's coming to save ourselves to return ourselves to sanity." What we're going to do is we are going to restore something of the old Christian framework. What does that mean? Well, look, clear examples. And I think many other examples could and will be invented, and I don't mean that I endorse all of them, but the kinds of things that I see Americans in certain states doing is first of all, yes, ending the ban on Bible and God in the school system. In the end, that's the heart of what's happened, and people who wanna try to restore-
Peter Robinson: I dismissed that almost as if it was trivial. It's basic.
Yoram Hazony: It is basic. The new American Constitution post World War II is a Constitution that says, "Look, we're a Christian country. We can eliminate God scripture from the schools, and the kids can go every day to a school where no one thinks that a God or the Bible's important enough to even mention, and everything's gonna be fine," and everything wasn't fine. Two generations later, people are having trouble distinguishing between a man and a woman. So I'm trying to put a tool in the hands of those Christians and others, Orthodox Jews, other traditionalists, who are looking for what can be strong enough to fight this? And what can be strong enough is a platform that says, by the way, as William Rehnquist wrote in a famous dissent in 1985, that separation of church and state in Everson was a wrong turn. It was misjudged, misguided. It's the wrong term in American constitutional history. The thing to do now is to put it back in the states and allow those states that have Christian majorities to establish some kind of Christianity. Now, we talked about the possibility of God and scripture returning to the schools. I think that this has implications for all sorts of other things. It could be pornography. What? What did I do? So no, no, I'm thinking that every parent knows. We don't talk about it anymore, because what... Every parent knows that the internet is a wonderful thing. It's also like having a sewer pipe pouring into your house, and we're not allowed to do anything about it because censorship is bad. Well, so Yoram Hazony says, "Oh, yeah? Wasn't that long ago when people were able to pull themselves together and say, 'That we won't permit,'" right?
Peter Robinson: Right. Look, Irving Kristol, my mentor-
Yoram Hazony: Friend, mentor, hero, right.
Peter Robinson: My friend and mentor and hero. Irving Kristol, one of the most famous and best essays that he ever wrote was supporting censorship of obscenity, what used to be called public decency laws. And I write about him in the book, and he goes very far in this. He says explicitly that a government that is incapable of restraining the public from becoming debased and degraded in this way is a government that doesn't deserve our support. That's a very, very radical statement. Now he certainly valued the freedom of the market and freedom of speech, but he believed that there needed to be limits, and where he reaches the limit, where you get to see Irving Kristol as a thinker who clearly sees that there is a biblical and Christian foundation to America, you get to it at that point where he says that there is no issue. He says, "There's no problem with pornography. It must be censored."
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Okay, so I can see-
Yoram Hazony: Let me take you-
Peter Robinson: Go ahead.
Yoram Hazony: No, this is frustrating because we've got a great big book here and a great big mind there, and this is television. We've gotta compress things.
Peter Robinson: Okay. You've touched on the way the country would be different if we had this kind of restoration. Immigration. Let me ask you about two more, and I'll just state them both right now so that you can give us succinct because I wanna move on to one or two other topics. Immigration and foreign policy, in particular Ukraine, and Yoram Hazony says, "Now, wait a moment. If you're a nation, for sure you get to control your borders." So that's just obvious, right or wrong?
Yoram Hazony: Well, it's obvious to me. It's obvious to nationalists. The problem is that if you think in liberal terms, I mean exclusively liberal terms, and you say, "Look, all human beings are equal, all human beings are perfectly free and perfectly equal," so on the basis-
Peter Robinson: What right have you got to keep them out of Texas?
Yoram Hazony: What right do you have to establish a border at all, much less to use violence in order to prevent them from crossing? The problem with the liberal tradition is that it is too simplistic. It doesn't give you the tools to be able to say things like, "A nation has a certain character. It has a certain cohesiveness." Immigration can be extremely useful but only under circumstances in which the immigrant population is willing to assimilate, wants to be a part of the country and is small enough so that in practice, that's possible. So immigration can be very good, and immigration has to be regulated. There has to be a border. Where does that come from? it can't come from liberal axioms. They don't speak to the idea of a nation, its cohesion, its inherited traditions. For that, you need conservatism.
Peter Robinson: All right. JD Vance, who is now the Republican nominee for the Senate in Ohio, this is JD Vance speaking in February. This is in the course of an interview. "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another. I'm sick of Joe Biden's focusing on the border of a country I don't care about while he lets the border of his own country become a war zone," close quote. Okay, so what does Yoram say to JD Vance? All kinds of ways, the United States has played quite a specific role as the great power, the protector of a, the term gets used routinely, liberal order, since the Second World War. There's that. It won the Cold War. NATO played a part in that. We were the big brother in NATO. That sounds as like something worthy of respect. On the other hand, we have this peace going through Congress right now that doesn't seem to make any sense. I've seen various estimates, but it costs maybe 10 to $20 billion to complete the border wall. We can't afford that, but we're about to give $40 billion to Ukraine. Okay, so what does Yoram say about this?
Yoram Hazony: Well, first of all, I like JD, and I think that's a good piece of campaign rhetoric, and-
Peter Robinson: He has a job right now and that's to win the election.
Yoram Hazony: His job is to win the win the election, and I think that's fine. I think that at the level of principle, the United States has, in fact, engaged in a great many unnecessary adventures over last decades, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia to-
Peter Robinson: Post fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: You're not talking about the Cold War.
Yoram Hazony: No, I'm not talking about the Cold War- which you argue was just and necessary and-
Peter Robinson: Ronald Reagan succeeded in winning the Cold War without invading anything bigger than Grenada, right?
Yoram Hazony: Grenada, right.
Peter Robinson: So Reagan's policy was a nationalist policy. He was willing to help the Polish nationalists, the solidarity movement. He cared deeply about them, identified with them, and he was willing to help them, but he didn't invade Poland in order to help them. He cared about Thatcher's Britain. He wanted to see a British revival, a resurrection of Britain as a serious power and an ally, and so he supported Thatcher's Falklands War. He supported British nationalism in that case, and he did a lot to help, but he didn't himself go and invade Argentina. Right, so there is a concept of America as perpetually involved militarily as the world's policeman in every corner of the planet in trying to impose liberal ideas in liberal order. That concept is post Reagan. It's post Thatcher. It's destructive. It's destructive, first of all, because America has other problems, and it can't, look, people have this fantastic vision. They think that government can think about, that the president of the United States and his colleagues can think about 30 different major issues at a time. It's not true. It's not true. The human mind doesn't work that way. Even if you're the president and even if you have a good mind, it doesn't work that way. You have to focus. You have to strategically focus on what's important, and what is important in America right now, in my opinion, is two things. Number one is taking those steps that are necessary to heal a fragmenting and disintegrating society, a society that is on the road to dissolution and God forbid even civil war because internal hatred and division justified by all sorts of important things is a real threat to the country, and the second thing that American presidents should be thinking about is the threat from China, and China is a real rival. It's a real adversary, and all of us are gonna be very sorry if China ends up running the world for the next century. Focusing on China means that the United States has to tell its European allies, and this is the same thing that I said in Brussels at the European National Conservatism Conference a few weeks ago. The Americans have to tell the Europeans, "You have to deal with the security of Europe, its eastern border, its Russia problem." It's a real problem. It's something that needs to be dealt with, but it needs to be dealt with by Europeans. They have to re-arm and take responsibility So here's a simple statement.
Yoram Hazony: for it.
Peter Robinson: Europe is more populous than the United States. You put together the GDP of Europe as a unit, include Britain, and you get a bigger GDP than the United States, and the $40 billion that the Biden administration is proposing to give to Ukraine is three times the amount of all the various European proposals for aid to Ukraine. So you get on the phone and say, "Sorry, we're out. It's your neighborhood, you figure it out, and you step up and give them the aid that they need." Now I'm sounding like Donald Trump, but roughly speaking, that's correct.
Yoram Hazony: Roughly speaking, that's correct.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: I'm not saying there's nothing whatsoever that America's allowed to do to help a country that's been invaded by any aggressive neighbor, but at the level of strategy, America has one problem, and that problem is China, and China is 10 times the problem that Russia is. And the Europeans, they're wealthy countries, and they have been infantalized
Peter Robinson: Yes, they have.
Yoram Hazony: by decades of America taking care of their security problems since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this has to stop. It's not good for them, and it's not good for America, and it's completely unsustainable.
Peter Robinson: All right. Yoram, this is frustrating because I'm ready to continue this little seminar, this personal seminar you're giving me. Yoram Hazony and his critics. I said at the top of the program that some of the sharpest criticism of the book, everybody's reading advanced copies because the pub date is today,
Yoram Hazony: Today, yeah.
Peter Robinson: has come from conservatives. Barton Swaim reviewed your book in the "Wall Street Journal," and he attacked your portrayal of post-war American conservatism. "Mr. Hazony acknowledges that Russell Kirk," whom you've mentioned, "did draw on the Anglo-American tradition." William F. Buckley of "National Review" magazine, "Mr. Hazony generously allows operated," he quotes you, "within the Anglo-American conservative tradition. So did Ronald Reagan," and then Barton Swaim says, "So what is the criticism exactly?"
Yoram Hazony: Look, I like Barton a lot. I follow his writings. I don't think that he read chapter six of my book very closely because I think the argument is stated explicitly, and I don't think it's that complicated. The argument of that chapter is that 1960s fusionism is constructed out of an alliance of liberals and conservatives. The terms of that alliance are bad terms. Why? Because fusionism is a public liberalism fused to a private conservatism. It's a theory that says how should public life be governed? The liberals are right. The government should stay out of everything to the extent that it's humanly possible, and as far as transmission and conservation of the nation to future generations, passing the inheritance along, that's a matter for private citizens to think about. And we tried that. We did it for two generations, and it doesn't work. It failed. That fusionism is, in fact, what cleared the boards to allow woke neo-Marxism to demolish the liberal institutions of the United States and Britain, and so we have to reconsider the terms of the alliance between conservatives and liberals, and I think it's very clear. The new terms have to be a public conservatism, a public traditionalism in those states, in those places where there's a majority that will support it. The public sphere has to support parents and congregations in the work of transmissions.
Peter Robinson: By the way, apart from anything else, you've said it several times here, but I just wanna highlight it. This means a very explicit reassertion of federalism.
Yoram Hazony: Yes.
Peter Robinson: You want the states to take a much bigger role.
Yoram Hazony: Yes, and that's because I want to reinvigorate democracy because the idea that the bureaucracy plus the Supreme Court, that they are the rulers determining the character of the United States, it's been tried. It doesn't work. All right. One of your other conservative critics, although he's also a friend of yours, Matt Continenti, writing again in the "Wall Street Journal," He's referring to your 2021 conference in Orlando. "At the recent conference, speakers proposed a government-directed industrial policy and held up Hungary as some sort of model for America. I'll take my conservatism without modification, constitutionalist, market oriented, and unapologetically American," close quote. I included that because one of the big attacks, Matt's, a friend of yours. I'm sure we can stipulate all of that right now.
Peter Robinson: Right, right, right. Nobody's sharping a dagger to go after Matt.
Yoram Hazony: No, definitely not.
Peter Robinson: But he tosses in there, "He held up Hungary at the conference. "Hungary was held up as some sort of model," and this is one of the principle avenues of attack on you, on national conservatism, and it's just starting on "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" that you are trying to sneak into the sunny, distinctively American conservatism a much darker, much more state-centric European conservatism.
Yoram Hazony: Look, I don't know exactly what Matt was referring to, but the broader claim that national conservatism is European in character, I think it just makes no sense. Edmund Burke and the common law tradition is not European. It's English. It is a central part of the British inheritance of America, and it's true that conservative common law tradition is not the only part of the British inheritance. There's also Hobbs and Locke and Paine and the rationalist liberal tradition. Both of those things exist side by side in tension with one another in the American inheritance. But I'm sorry. I think it's just frankly preposterous to claim that if somebody is relying on Burke or Selden or any of these great English thinkers, that that's European whereas relying on John Locke is not European because Locke somehow is the consummate American whereas Burke is not. This is just rhetoric. It's hot air. It's not real. There's a real argument between the traditionalists and the rationalist liberals. Let's have the argument instead of all this in innuendo.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Couple of final questions here. Again, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" is not a book, excuse me, it's not just a book of political philosophy, and there's a very moving, fascinating and moving personal narrative here about, among other things, your time as an undergraduate at Princeton and how you were inspired by the example of Ronald Reagan. I would like to play a clip of Reagan and hear which bits you approve of, which bits. Let's play this, and I want your commentary. This is a couple of minutes.
Yoram Hazony: In a speech I gave 25 years ago, I told a story that I think bears repeating. Two friends of mine were talking to a refugee from communist Cuba. He had escaped from Castro, and as he told his story of his horrible experiences, one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had some place to escape to." Well, no, America's freedom does not belong to just one nation. We're custodians of freedom for the world, and since this is the last speech that I will give as president, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said, "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American." Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors."
Peter Robinson: Okay. There, you've got this internationalist strain. "We are custodians of freedom for the world." But at the same time, he's grounding it "in a compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors." Do you approve of this?
Yoram Hazony: I think I should say again, there are things that are appropriate for the Civil War, for Lincoln to say in the midst of the Civil War, and there are things that are appropriate to say in the midst of the struggle against the Soviet Union. And those things, they contain truth, but they don't contain the entire truth.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: Right? And for sure. I remember growing up then. I remember the context of America and its European allies leading an actual struggle, being fought all over the globe in order to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing its tyranny on the world. Today, we look at Russia. Russia doesn't seem like that kind of a threat, and we don't remember what it was like. We don't remember what that struggle was like and what it was about, and I simply have no words, no feelings of dissent from Reagan or Thatcher leading that struggle and ending it and bringing it to a conclusion.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Yoram Hazony: What I do think is that the simplistic post-Reagan view that says, "Oh, Reagan was speaking about being custodians of the world. Therefore, we-
Peter Robinson: We owe $40 billion to Ukraine.
Yoram Hazony: Right. We the world's policemen. People, literally friends of ours, literally spoke in terms of the United States should garrison its soldiers all over the world, and the Europeans can decide for what the right ideas are, and then the Americans will implement it with the muscle. That entire post-Reagan picture is a distortion, and I reject it.
Peter Robinson: Right. Yoram, last question. You live in Israel now. Why do you care so intensely about conservatism here? Why does the United States of America matter?
Yoram Hazony: Well, first of all, there's a biographical question in there, which is that when my wife and I and our friends were in college and we we put out this Reagan magazine, but we were going to get married, and we had to decide where we were gonna make our stand. And at the time, we thought America looked strong and sturdy and Europe looked like it was maybe a little bit less to our liking but just fine, and we felt like Israel was the cutting edge. It was sitting on the absolute edge of the volcano, and the place to make our lives would be right there at the edge of the volcano, and we're happy with the decision. We've raised a large family, and now we've grandchildren, and I served in the Israeli military, and my children have served, and we're very happy there, and we're very happy with that decision. It was the right decision for us, but somewhere around, not somewhere, it was the spring of 2016, I got a phone call from a friend and mentor, an American professor who called me and said, "Yoram, set aside everything that you're doing. Drop what you're writing and gather together all of the research and material you have on nationalism and put out the nationalism book now. We need it." And I pulled my head out of the sand, and I looked at what was happening with the Trump movement in America and what was happening with Brexit in Britain, and I felt then and now I certainly feel that America and Britain and Europe were sliding into severe internal contention and disorder and that if people in America and Europe thought that I could be of help to them with my writing by presenting these ideas, I decided that I would do it. And I don't go anywhere where I'm not wanted, where I'm not invited, but since 2016, I've had invitations across America and Europe and beyond, and that means people find the ideas helpful. So I guess I'm a little bit like in the tradition of Tom Paine and Jefferson in this one way, that they did feel that their ideas were relevant to other nations and they were invited, and they traveled to other nations in order to be of use, and that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to be of use. America is not going to fall without taking all the other democracies with it, and so what happens in America cannot only be of importance to Americans. I'm an American citizen, but I think that others who are not, we all have a very, very great stake in the health and wellbeing of the United States, and I'm glad to be able to assist in some way.
Peter Robinson: Yoram Hazony, author of "Conservatism: A Rediscovery," thank you. For "Uncommon Knowledge," the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
