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Dec. 1, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:07:23
Yoram Hazony | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 79
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Look, I live in a socialist country.
No one dislikes socialism as much as I do.
It's totally intolerable.
I don't want anybody to live like that.
I don't want Americans to live like that.
I'm not on that side.
But if they're going to tell me that economics, which is the science of the choosing free consenting individual, can answer the basic problems America has today, that's false.
Hey, hey, and welcome to the show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
I'm excited to welcome this week Yoram Hazony.
He's president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.
He currently serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, and he's the author of the brand new and fantastic book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
Yoram, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thanks for having me.
So first of all, we violated the taboo on only one Yarmulke per show, so we can start off with the fact that I believe you're the first Orthodox Jew who is not me who's been on this show, so.
I think there's more of us coming.
Well, why don't we start with the kind of basic premise of the book.
So nationalism obviously has come under significant assault from some on the right, mostly on the left.
The idea of nationalism being seen as something inherently bad, particularly since President Trump has picked up the mantle of nationalism and used that sort of language.
So how do you define nationalism?
I don't actually think that this is because of Trump.
I mean, the assault by communists, by liberals on nationalism is already in full swing after World War II.
So we've already seen a few generations of people just trying to hang every political evil in the world on nationalism.
The nationalism I grew up with is a principled stance that says that the world is governed best when Many different nations are able to chart their own course independently without interference, meaning cultivating their own traditions, their own laws, they're pursuing their own interests.
And for three, four hundred years, that was a mainstay of certainly of the Anglo-American tradition, but more generally of the way that Europe understood the political order, was that nations should be independent from one another.
And it's really after World War II that you start to see a vicious attack on nationalism, first in Europe, where the argument is World War I and World War II, those were caused by nationalism, where the argument is World War I and World War By having independent nations, what's the answer?
Well, European Union.
Let's eliminate independent nations.
Let's eliminate borders.
And that's supposed to be the answer.
More surprising is that Americans have picked it up.
And I would say Reagan was still a nationalist, Thatcher was still a nationalist in the way that I'm defining it, but by the time you get to the fall of the Berlin Wall, George H.W.
Bush talking about The New World Order, where the New World Order means a single rule of a single law that's going to be imposed by force if necessary on the whole world.
That's already a post-national situation.
Between Reagan and Trump, all the American presidents and almost every significant political leader in Europe were post-nationalist.
So in a second, I'm going to ask you about how we define a nation in order to define the basis for nationalism.
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All right, so let's talk about what it means to be a nation.
So obviously there's been a lot of controversy in the recent past about what constitutes a nation, what doesn't constitute a nation.
Conflicts over the territorial boundaries of nations have obviously sparked wars in the past with, for example, during World War II, Germany claiming that German ethnics who were living in areas that were not specifically German actually were part of the German nation and therefore justifying territorial broadening.
In order to do that, you've seen the Russians do this in Crimea most recently.
So how do you define a nation?
A nation is a group of tribes that share some kind of a heritage that usually includes a religion, often includes a language, and a history of joining together in common cause against mutual enemies.
So, the word nation, that's where we get the Greek word ethnos, ethnic.
So, the Greeks, even though they lived as city-states, they never had a nation-state, they never united as a nation in antiquity, but the Greeks knew that there was such a thing as a Greek ethnos.
They spoke the same language, they had the same culture, even though they were at war with one another.
So, that's kind of a natural thing that you find throughout human history.
The question of whether the world should consist of national states, of unifying the nations under a single heading.
It really becomes an important question and political thought with the Hebrew Bible, because the Hebrew Bible knows a world in which there's all these empires that try to conquer the whole world, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, their gods tell them, let's bring peace and prosperity to the world by Going out and conquering all the nations of the earth and suppressing needless conflict.
That's actually not an unreasonable argument.
But the prophets know about these conflicting imperial aspirations to conquer the world.
They know about tribesmen.
Abraham goes to live as a tribesman.
They know about tribes and clans.
And they put this new idea on the table.
God says to Abraham, I'll make of you a great nation.
He gives Moses borders and forbids Israel from going out and conquering the neighbors.
As far as we know, that's the first time that any God in human history has given borders to his own nation and says, no, I gave the lands to the other peoples too, so you don't cross your borders.
That's where the original vision of a world of independent nations starts.
And the modern sensibility of self-determination, that there's a kind of justice and a kind of freedom that attaches to this kind of world, that actually enters the modern age with the return to the Old Testament by peoples like the English, the Scots, the Dutch, the French to an extent.
So, this is an example of where we actually have Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, shaping the modern world in a decisive and crucial way.
So how do we define nation to avoid some of the pitfalls of, for example, the ethno-nationalist right, the alt-right, as they call themselves, the idea that there should be a white America or people who claim that what nation really is, is pure ethnicity or pure race.
How do How do we organize people so that, in our own minds, in terms of defining a nation, it allows for multi-ethnic Well, the traditional idea of a nation going back all the way to the Bible is not constructed on race.
This is a crucial difference.
I mean, you know that throughout the Bible we see people joining the Jewish people.
Most famously, Ruth the Moabite, who's a Moabite, and she comes over and she says, your people will be my people and your God will be my God.
Now, she's able to convert, not simply because she adopts the Israelite God, but also because she says there's an existing people with an existing heritage, and I'm going to join that.
I'm going to take up the characteristics of that heritage.
There's lots of other examples.
The Israelites leave Egypt, and Egyptians come with them, and they get absorbed into the Jewish people, or Moses inviting his father-in-law, Jethro, to join the Jewish people.
There's all sorts of examples.
A view of what a nation is, which is based on inheritance, right?
So partly it has to do with birth, you know, with who your mother is and who your father is.
But adoption is always possible on this view that a family can adopt and a tribe can adopt and nations can adopt.
So it's much, much more flexible.
than this caricature that you get, both from the left and the right, which claims that nationalism is about some kind of racial homogeneity.
And there is no homogeneity.
I mean, every nation is internally diverse.
The question, if you're a nationalist, is how can I strengthen the commonality so that the bonds of mutual loyalty will be firmer so that the nation doesn't disintegrate into civil war?
Now, these guys on the alt-right that you're talking about, they don't have the slightest interest either in, you know, what the biblical idea of a nation is or even what the traditional Anglo-American idea of a nation is.
They think that you can get, you can determine, you know, what kind of, what they call nationality.
They think you can get it out of a test tube.
You know, like you go take a blood test and that determines what nation you're from.
There's never been anything like that in the history of Judaism and Christianity.
And it's crucial, I think, for us to fight this idea, which is gaining strength, and it's kind of horrifying to see it gain strength.
Because you'll notice that as soon as you judge people on the basis of, well, they say it's not skin color, it's DNA, but it doesn't make any difference.
As soon as you judge people like that, then ideas are out the window.
Then the heritage is out the window.
It doesn't matter if you're a Hebrew speaker, if you know the Bible, if you respect the rabbinic tradition.
All that stuff goes out the window, and it all comes down to this ghastly, simplistic argument over, you know, they think the Jews are a race.
When I get into arguments with these people, I try to explain to them that we have Jews of every possible racial background in my Orthodox community in Jerusalem.
And they say, no, that can't possibly be true.
You're lying.
It's not true.
This is a terrible, terrible direction for America and for the West to be going.
And by the way, the whole idea of a white nation is itself kind of wacko.
When was there ever a white nation?
I mean, there was a French nation, there was an English nation, there's German nation, American nation.
There's never any white nation.
I mean, this is like an artificial construct that they've come up with.
Imitating, obviously, racialist politics from Europe before World War II.
And we know how that ends.
And if we don't want to see that, then we're going to have to take this head-on.
And the way to take it head-on is to say, you don't know what a nation is.
You don't understand what a nation is.
Let's talk about historically what a nation has been in Western civilization.
And then maybe, you know, maybe you'll know something about it.
From a different angle, one of the attacks on nationalism has been that basically nations should be defined purely by creed.
It's purely a creedal phenomenon, particularly in the United States.
The United States was founded under the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and carried forward through the institutions of the Constitution of the United States.
So what is wrong with the idea of a purely creedal nation as opposed to a more holistic view of what nation constitutes?
Well, it's like going to the opposite extreme.
I mean, what are you going to do?
If someone doesn't accept—let's say somebody's like a Burkean and doesn't accept the Declaration of Independence as capturing the essence of America.
So they're a Burkean.
So what?
They're not good American?
I think you can be a good American.
You can love the Constitution.
You can love the people.
You can love the heritage.
You can want to fight for it and not be a Lockean.
I mean, look, America is just not a religion, right?
It's not a replacement for Christianity.
So, sometimes I get the feeling with some of my colleagues who want to say that America is a creed, that really what they're doing is they're saying, I want to replace Christianity with something like Christianity, but let's say without Jesus.
America is liberalism.
And I think this is, it's historically incorrect, but it's also, are you sure that that's something that you would want?
I mean, the beauty of a nation is that it allows internal pluralism.
I said before that all nations are internally diverse.
And the moment that you start, you know, trying to figure out what the creed is that everybody has to sign on to, well, you're in church territory.
A nation has to be able to have a much greater flexibility for different kinds of people.
All nations do.
And certainly America does.
So I just think that's a mistake.
I mean, I understand why they're trying to do it, but I think they're also denying an important part of America's history, which is that the American people, the American nation, actually, for most of its history, had a content.
Now, when I say content, I don't mean every single person was signed up for it, but I mean a dominant culture.
That culture was an Old Testament culture.
It was a Protestant culture.
It was a common law culture and, of course, spoke the English language.
And And only if you understand that up until World War II, for most of America's history, that that was America's common heritage that held the nation together.
Only if you understand that can you explain historical phenomena like why is it that the United States never allowed a state into the Union until there was a majority, a Christian English-speaking population that would You know, that would follow the common law.
Why didn't they?
They could have.
There were many opportunities to have states that were Spanish speaking or Polynesian speaking in Hawaii, but they didn't do it.
And so the far right, the alt right, they want to tell us, oh, it's because they're race conscious.
I think that's a bunch of baloney.
It had nothing to do with race.
It had to do with the fact that there was such a thing as an American heritage that held the country together, that people could assimilate into if they were from some other kind of background.
And that's something that America really has lost since World War II.
It's becoming radically more diverse, not just because of immigration, but also because of multiculturalism, also because of this ideology that America is different from every other nation in the world and doesn't have a cultural heritage that people can be assimilated into.
Now, America has such a cultural heritage.
The question is, America is fraying right now.
I mean, it's actually flying apart.
Are Americans going to be willing to turn back to their own heritage and to reconnect to it?
I think that's the question of this generation.
So in just a second I want to ask you about self-determination and whether every nation deserves to have its own space or whether there is in fact a moral minimum to which nations have to aspire in order to achieve sort of a moral worth of having self-determination.
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All right, so let's talk about a moral minimum with regard to nations.
So obviously there are plenty of different peoples all around the world who identify as nations, and many of them have used the sort of Woodrow Wilson justification of self-determination in order to claim that they ought to be given territory.
And we've seen that many of these things have ended in tears for even the people who want self-determination.
Is there sort of a baseline of human rights or philosophy that has to be attained by a nation in order for them, in your view, to attain a claim for self-determination.
I try real hard in the book to emphasize that I'm not a utopian.
And you can create a utopian, you know, a utopian nationalist theory that's going to try to answer these kinds of questions mathematically.
I think it's actually impossible to do.
And the baseline is what John Stuart Mill called national cohesion or fellow feeling.
The baseline is In order for a nation to be independent, let's say that we accept this principle that the world is governed best when there are many independent nations.
Now, in order to get into the club, you're going to have to be able to do things that are very practical.
Let's take the Kurds as an example.
I've said many times that I think the Kurds deserve an independent national state.
This is 30 million people suffered endless persecution.
They have a history going back to the Medes, their own language.
They deserve a state in some kind of an abstract sense, and I support that.
But in practice, if a nation is not capable of mustering the military and economic strength to be able to hold together and to fight off the neighbors who are going to try to prevent them, then there's not going to be a nation.
You can say they have a right to a nation if you think expressing it that way would be helpful.
But in practice, you can't have a right to national independence if you can't actually secure it.
And so everywhere you look, you have to make these kinds of decisions and considerations.
The Navajo, certainly the Navajo Nation have all the characteristics of a nation, but they're not strong enough to be able to stand independently under current circumstances.
So at this time in history, they're not going to be an independent nation.
I remember visiting Scotland a few years ago.
You know, I saw Braveheart and I was like, yeah, Scottish independence, that's, you know, I actually think a lot of people in Scotland also saw Braveheart.
And they're, you know, so it's really stirring and everything, but I spent a few weeks, you know, just talking to everybody I could, you know, from professors to restaurant owners, asking them about this.
And is it really worth Taking apart the United Kingdom after a few hundred years of brilliant collaboration between English and Scots under a single state.
I was not convinced.
I mean, lots of people said they wanted independence, and then they said, we want independence, but we want to be part of the European Union.
So that sounds to me like an argument that just doesn't make any much sense.
You have to have a real good reason to take apart your country.
I mean, I'm understating it.
A really, really good reason.
And it doesn't seem to me that they do.
I'm opening to hearing other arguments.
But basically, the view of a world of national states is not a view in which every group of people that says, oh, you know, we have a different culture.
I mean, think of India.
India has, you know, 1,500 peoples in India with their own languages.
And many of these are millions and millions of people.
But the question will always come down to, are you strong enough?
Are you cohesive enough to actually be able to take independence?
And is it worth the bloodshed?
Is it worth the incredible suffering that a war of independence is going to bring on?
Those are prudential, practical considerations which, you know, reasonable people can argue about them in different cases.
So how do national interests balance out on the world stage?
So what folks who are anti-nationalism would say is that you'll have brief periods of balance of power where people tend to deter each other to a certain extent and then you get the chaos of World War I, for example, or you get the chaos of World War II.
And why is the EU not a solution to that, for example?
We haven't had any, except for Yugoslavia, we haven't had any internecine European warfare Since World War II.
So why exactly is internationalism or the subsummation of nation states under a broader rubric of an international institution, why isn't that a better solution than nationalism itself?
This is a great question, but notice that it is the imperialist question.
For 4,000 years, imperialists have been saying, if you allow tribes to have their independence, or nations to have their independence, they'll kill one another and they'll create wars, and that's not what we want.
What we want is to impose peace on the whole world.
And that's not an unreasonable argument, it's just that they're never willing to be honest about the cost.
The cost is, if you're the Roman Empire or the Assyrian Empire or the European Union for that matter, if you're going to suppress war across a continent, but the cost is going to be that there's going to be a central power Almost always dominated by a specific nation, in this particular case, Germany.
And it's their culture that's going to make the decisions.
They're going to draw the boundaries.
They're going to make the decisions about what's allowed and what's not allowed.
So let's say you're an Italian.
So today to be an Italian under what's effectively a German imperial rule, it's not exactly imperial rule because it's actually American force that's holding the thing in place, not German armed forces.
But in terms of who's making the decisions, well, look, if the Italians, they had a recent election, which the Germans don't like the finance minister that the Italian people want to appoint.
And so the Germans say they veto it, but they impose a finance minister.
The Germans don't like the Italians' budget, the national budget.
So the Germans will make a decision about what the limits of the Italian budget are.
And of course it always turns out that this is somehow for the best for Germany.
Now, if you are and Italian, and this doesn't upset you.
Like, you don't feel that your own personal freedom and self-personal freedom is being impinged upon by having the Germans making decisions about who your government is.
So realistically, you're not going to have an independent country, and you're going to be part of some kind of German empire.
And I'm not going to tell you, you know, that's the end of the world.
But I think when we're talking about the level of principle, the level of principle, I think that the prophets had it right, that having diverse nations with different kinds of laws, each one taking responsibility for their own faith.
That means they'll decide how to appoint their own officials, they'll decide how to set their own budget, and of course they're going to screw it up, right?
I mean, we're human, right?
Of course, sometimes you screw things up.
But the Italian people or the Polish people or the English people or the British are better off Being self-reliant, developing the ability to make decisions for themselves, taking the lumps when they get it wrong, and finding a way to come back.
It's that competition among independent nations with different traditions, by trial and error, trying to figure out what the best way to live.
That is what gave us almost everything in the modern world that we love.
Modern science, people forget this, was the result of this kind of competition between Newton hated French science.
He hated Cartesian science.
It was a nationalist motivation by English scientists that gave us a lot of the physics and the worldview that we know.
And you can say the same thing about the development of democracy, the development of the stock exchange in the Netherlands was the result of competition among nations.
And you can just keep going.
Competition among nations gives you laboratories in which you can experiment and try different things out.
And empire means that all that competition is going to be suppressed.
It's going to be suppressed and homogenized.
And the bigger it is, the more oppressive it is.
This is also a John Stuart Mill argument.
There is no way that you can have one government that is over dozens and dozens of nations without many, many of them ending up being oppressed and suppressed.
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So, is there any cause for nations intervening in the internal affairs of other nations?
So, for example, you know, if the idea is that nations are best when, that the world is best when nations are self-governing, what would be the cause for, for example, intervening in a Rwandan genocide or intervening in the midst of a Holocaust by Germany, even if, let's say that they had stayed in their borders and they had just decided to murder all the Jews in their borders?
Or let's say in the United States where black slaves were being held in the southern half of the United States and the Union declared basically that this was going to stop or it was eventually going to stop and the South seceded.
Why was the South wrong in that particular case?
They say we have our own culture, we have our own sort of philosophy that we have and it's none of your business whether we decide to enslave Africans who we have imported here.
Well, let's distinguish two things.
I mean, this is obviously an absolutely crucial question.
First of all, realistically, nations do interfere in one another's business.
And when I say I'm a nationalist, and I argue that you should be a nationalist, What I'm saying is actually that the constant interference in one another's business, that there should be some kind of principle that actually puts a stop to that, because if you don't, then everybody is, you know, the English spent A hundred years trying to conquer France during the Middle Ages.
Five generations of Englishmen dying trying to conquer France.
The idea is that the most natural thing is everybody interferes in everybody else's business.
And we're looking for a principle that people could agree on that would allow some of this to stop.
All right.
So in other words, we're trying to set up a situation where we minimize the natural tendency to just bully everybody and to try to take over everything and interfere in one another's business all the time.
So this can be successful to a certain degree, and hopefully enough of a degree so that we can create this world of free nations that I'm talking about.
But I don't, in the book or anywhere else, think that that means that we stop being human beings, we stop having moral obligations.
I mean, if you have the power to get into Rwanda or Cambodia, You know, when millions of people, hundreds of thousands, millions of people are being killed, do you have the power to get in there, put a stop to it, and pull out without ending up, you know, governing the place for the next hundred years?
Then I'd say you do have a moral obligation to do it.
I don't think there's any question that that is an obligation if you have that kind of ability.
Here's what the issue is.
I think the actual issue is Um, is, uh, Americans, for example, who say, we're the world's policemen.
We have a moral obligation to impose a law on the entire planet.
We have a moral obligation to, uh, to, to ramp up service in the American military to the degree that, that basically Americans are just like beat cops on every corner, everywhere in the world.
And so when people start doing something wrong, all right?
We start bombing because we're the policemen.
We're in charge.
We use force.
And then you get Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya.
I mean, there's no end to it.
Panama.
Like, why not just invade everything?
Because the imperial principle is we Americans know the answer.
We have the truth.
We know the answer.
We know how to run the world.
We have a moral obligation to just run it, to impose our will on everyone.
And I'm saying no.
First of all, you know, much as I love American-Americans, they're not as smart as they sometimes think they are, and they don't actually know how to run Iraq.
They don't actually know how to run Libya.
They don't.
They don't actually know the answer to that question.
I think a crucial thing that Americans actually need to get out of the story of their history in the last generation or two is the humility to understand, no, not everybody in the world wants America running their country.
And if America tries to do it, America doesn't necessarily know how to do it.
I want to make a big draw, a big distinction between the most extreme cases where you have the power to intervene to stop what really is a genocide.
You could get in, get out and stop it.
And most political cases where, okay, so, you know, Iraq is a brutal regime and they do terrible things and they violate, you know, human rights in the worst ways.
That's for sure.
But the question is, so America intervenes.
Did fewer people die because America intervened?
I don't think so.
I mean, I actually, I don't know the actual numbers because they're not publicized, but I would say that in the Middle East, in the last generation, maybe a million people have died as a consequence of American intervention and the domino effects that came from it.
You know, that's not easy to justify, tearing apart foreign societies because you have an idea of how you think that they should be run.
So in a second, I want to ask you about when U.S.
intervention is necessary in order to check ambitions of other nations, because we've talked about when it would be necessary in terms of sort of humane interventions and when it would not be necessary when the United States is going in on bad pretexts, for example.
But I want to ask about countering the other potential hegemons who want to get involved in world affairs.
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Okay, so let's talk for a second about what the U.S.' 's role in terms of foreign policy is in countering the ambitions of other nations.
So to take a couple of obvious examples, Russia invades Crimea, and the United States says, you ought not do that.
Or Russia invades Georgia, and the United States says, you ought not do that, but Russia just sort of stays there, which is what they've done in both places effectively.
They're sort of half in Georgia and half not, but Crimea they've fully internalized into Russia it seems.
When is the United States justified in getting involved in something like that?
And that has some historic ramifications too because obviously World War II begins under these pretenses.
I mean it proceeds on the pretext of the West, meaning Great Britain effectively, guaranteeing the sovereignty of Poland, and the Germans saying, we just want to take this little slice right here, and Britain saying, well, you've taken enough slices.
The answer is no.
Couldn't the same argument be made with regard to, you know, would more people have died if they just allowed the Germans to take Danzig, for example?
I think the German example is, I mean, you know it's overused, and I want to try to refine it just a little bit.
If you read Mein Kampf, and it's not like something I'm recommending to your audience, go read Mein Kampf, but if you do read it, It's really hard to miss the fact that Hitler sees the fate of Germany, of the German nation, as being lord of the earth and mistress of the globe.
This is a book about world's domination, and there is a difference, and I admit that politics is hard, you can't always figure it out exactly, but there is a difference between a nation which is We're trying to unify the ethnic group.
Let's call it a border dispute, okay?
One of the real problems, and this is a genuine problem with nationalism as a form of political order, is that there are always border disputes.
There always are.
You can never get everybody who's supposed to be theoretically on one side of the border onto the other.
You can never perfect it.
And what that means is that as opposed to imperialism where you just conquer everything in a nationalist world order.
There's always going to be points of friction.
So, India and Pakistan have, you know, long-standing border dispute.
In Kashmir, Israel and the Arabs, right, the Jews and the Arabs have a border dispute in Judea and Samaria.
The English and the Irish have a border dispute, which is back, it's back again in business over North Ireland.
And those things are natural, and sometimes they do cause wars.
What I want to do is I want to try to distinguish, and in the book I make this argument at greater length, between the basically inevitable tensions and frictions which sometimes erupt into these local wars, and obviously they can do lots of damage, but they don't create world wars.
I mean, there are these sort of stock world wars that haunt the imagination of Western people.
The Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War.
Those are the stock wars that everybody's always saying, well, if you have Serb nationalism, then boom, World War I. I think this is a bunch of baloney.
I don't buy the sleepwalker's thesis.
I think that when you go into any of these cases, what you will find Is there has to be, in order to start to bring about the deaths of tens of millions of people, like these horrific wars, there has to be some imperial power which has some ideology which says, We rule by right, right?
It can be Catholicism, which is the Thirty Years' War.
We're going to rule all of Europe and from the world.
Or it can be the Napoleonic Wars, where it's some kind of revolutionary liberalism that Napoleon is trying to force down on the throats of everybody in Europe.
And as a consequence, five million people died.
These are not border disputes.
Take a biography of Napoleon and just see what he does.
He conquers one country and then another and then another and then another.
That's an imperialist mindset.
And my argument is that what we, if we want a decent world, it's not a utopian world, but it's one that's not going to have these kinds of demolition derby wars that set out to simply reconstruct all of civilization.
Look for the imperialism.
Look for the ideology that's driving one nation to say, we're going to be mistress of the globe.
We're going to conquer the entire world.
That's the decisive question.
So in that context, how would you rate the threats of, for example, Russia and China, respectively?
I think both of them are hard cases.
Both decisions.
Both Russia and China have long imperial traditions.
We're not talking about, you know, a Poland or an Ireland where we'd be kind of surprised if they set out to try to take over the whole world.
Russia has many centuries and China millennia of imperial traditions.
And we're not going to change that.
I don't have any reason to think that that's going to change in our lifetimes.
So the question for Americans then is, that's a real challenge and it's a real threat.
It's not a pretend threat.
What's the best way of going about stopping it?
Now, I sort of came into my awareness of politics during the Reagan-Thatcher years.
When I was in college, I was a Reagan revolutionary, and I founded the Princeton-Torrey, which is still there 35 years later, incredibly.
And I remember those days, I think, really quite clearly.
Reagan was not about invading other countries so that we could govern them.
I mean, the only thing that Reagan ever invaded was Grenada.
And we're talking about a week-long intervention.
servicemen lost their lives.
I mean, that was it.
That was, you know, Reagan fought the entire end of the Cold War, opposing a real empire that was a real threat to the world, opposing them without America invading other countries.
Now, the way I see it, this is a continuation of American policy during World War II, where America's view, Roosevelt's view was, we, the God-fearing democracies, we have an alliance of independent countries, we're coming to we have an alliance of independent countries, we're coming to liberate conquered countries in Europe.
That's our goal, is to free and to give back their self-determination and their independence to countries that have been occupied by one of these two empires.
So that's Reagan nationalism.
That's Thatcher's nationalism.
It's not our business to be policing everything in the world.
We have to find a way to create an alliance of nations and political movements that have a mutual interest in trying to fight the Soviet Union.
That's not the same as Pax Americana, America's in charge here for all eternity.
It's something completely different.
And that's what I think we should be trying to recapture.
So, to change the topic, I want to talk a little bit about American domestic politics and philosophy.
So, you've talked in the past about your objections to classical liberalism.
Now, I have a friend, Dave Rubin, who constantly cites himself as sort of a classical liberal, which seems to sort of cross over in broad strokes with libertarianism, just the basic non-aggression principle, and that the government has no job regulating anything that is consensual activity.
You've been critical, to a certain extent, of classical liberalism.
How do you distinguish between conservatism and classical liberalism?
First of all, all these terms, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, it's important to be aware all these terms are 19th century terms.
So, when we trace their histories, I mean, these ideas really are much older than 19th century, but when we trace their histories, it's always a little bit anachronistic.
So, let's take someone who's sort of, everybody kind of agrees is the, you know, the conservative is Edmund Burke.
Burke was not the first conservative because he himself stands for an Anglo tradition that goes back many centuries, and that's the way he saw it.
But since everybody agrees that he's a conservative, so let's take him.
Edmund Burke spent his career arguing a version.
He didn't explicitly oppose the British Empire.
He wasn't trying to overthrow it.
But all of his major fights were to help in the self-determination of the American people, the Irish people, India, which was controlled by the British at the time.
is a very, very strong sense that the British cannot sit in London and make decisions for all these other countries in the world.
That's simply not possible.
It can't be just and it can't lead to freedom.
That's kind of fundamental.
Now, Burke sees the world in terms of nations just like the Bible does.
He inherits a common law tradition, you know, of thinkers like Selden and Fortescue and Koch, Hale.
These thinkers all see the world in terms of nations the way that the Bible does.
And what holds these nations together is a love of an inheritance, a tradition.
I already said it's not homogenous, every nation is internally diverse, but there is some kind of a tradition.
Burke thinks the English tradition is simply the best tradition of government that there has ever been, the freest.
And he's talking about English Christianity and the common law and obviously the English language.
Now, putting the nation and its traditions in the center is extremely different from what later comes to be called liberalism.
Liberalism grows out of that tradition, but what troubles me when I talk to my classical liberal friends is that They think that Enlightenment rationalism, that at some point in the 1700s, some really, really smart people figured out a bunch of rights which simply are the answer to, you know, the way everybody in the world should live.
And I think this is historically, you know, Utterly false.
What actually happened is that over a thousand years of commenting on the Bible and developing their common law, the English developed almost all of the rights that are in the American Bill of Rights, and the Americans sort of copied and pasted it along with most of the structure of the American Constitution.
Understanding that that's what happened, first of all, it makes you a little bit more humble.
Because it means that you don't sit around thinking, oh, my brain is so smart.
I know universal truth.
I know the answers for all countries for all time because I have universal reason.
I think that universal reason is unbelievably dangerous.
I think it leads to imperialism.
I think it leads to all sorts of terrible wars.
And internally, it can also lead to oppression.
Burke's conservatism is much more moderate because it's realistic.
He knows that nations are internally diverse, that they consist of different tribes, and he's looking to try to figure out how can we hold our nation together.
Where can we draw the borders so that they are safest?
How can we deploy our resources so that our country goes on for many, many more centuries?
And I feel that, you know, Americans actually had a lot of that Burkean common sense conservatism back a generation ago, before the New World Order.
And I miss it.
I mean, when I was sort of inducted into the conservative movement in the 1980s, you know, we were always talking about, you know, how do you synthesize Edmund Burke and Adam Smith?
And I thought that was a pretty reasonable place to be.
That's a pro-religion, pro-nationalist view of freedom and free markets as leading to economic growth.
I thought that was a great place to be.
And somewhere along the line in the last 30 years, the American and English, British conservatives dropped religion and dropped nationalism, and they're just on free markets.
And okay, I also believe in free markets, but they're so far gone they can't tell what a border is for.
And this is really important to understand.
Classical liberalism does not in and of itself have the resources to tell you about borders, for example.
If all you do is study liberal thinkers, when I say liberal thinker, I mean any thinker who thinks that politics can basically be reduced to free and equal individuals coming together On the basis of consent.
If you think politics can be reduced to that, and you don't understand that there's mutual loyalties that pull tribes together, and that pull nations together, and that any statesman worth anything has to care about those things, well, so you're not going to understand.
So what's the problem of open immigration?
Let's just flood the country with people of a different national tradition than we do.
What's wrong with it?
If you're a classical liberal, you can't answer that question.
And that's disturbing to me, that Americans can't answer that question anymore.
So in a second, I want to provide a basic defense to that question.
I also want to ask you about whether the kickback to classical liberalism is coming not in the form of conservatism, but in the form of government interventionism.
I'm going to ask about that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's talk for a second about the answer to that question.
Let's pick up the classical liberal mantle for a second and argue in favor of the idea that the argument about borders is that classical liberalism still has the requirement to protect its own values.
Meaning if you don't agree with classical liberalism, you don't get to come in.
So it would be a completely ideologically based border argument.
That classical liberalism says, you know, yes, free and equal individuals who are coming together on the basis of consent, but we don't consent, so you can't come in.
Why couldn't you pace a border policy on that?
Well, my first problem with it, before we even get to the border, my first problem with it is that I just think it's an extremely weak political theory.
All right, now I'm speaking just, you know, from the perspective of, you know, science or from, you know, political theory.
We want to simplify the political world because simplifying it makes it easier for us to understand things.
So our minds need simplification.
I'm not against that.
But there's a difference between really powerful and useful simplification and really dumb simplification.
So to me, dumb simplification is when you take human beings whose fundamental political characteristic is that they're sticky, that they develop these mutual loyalties to one another, that a family is an incredibly strong that a family is an incredibly strong thing.
And a tribe is an incredibly strong thing.
I mean the reason that a small nation or tribe can stand up to world empires is because of its cohesion, because of the fact that the mutual loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for one another.
That is something that makes these human groupings unbelievably strong.
So my first objection is to the way we learn political theory.
In every Introduction to Political Theory course, where the central characteristic of human beings that makes political order is completely ignored.
And then you can't understand what's going on.
That's my major problem.
Then if we take the specific example of the border, The reason that human societies have borders is because of this clustering.
Jordan Peterson does a really good job of convincing young people that actually human beings are hierarchical in nature, that we only feel good if we join into a community You know, which has leaders, which has elders, which passes down a tradition.
And I think that that's simply true.
So now if you take a map of, you know, a geographical map and you look at where the different tribes are and you try to figure out, you know, who's loyal to who.
So, you'll be able to draw rough borders.
I already said they'll never be perfect, right?
You'll never get them exactly right.
But you'll be able to draw rough borders and you say, okay, within this territory, that particular tradition is going to get to determine what the law is and what the norms are.
And some other territory, the other tribe, which has a different tradition, different norms, they're going to be able to.
That's the reason for federalism.
I mean, the whole concept of federalism comes from an awareness that human beings are fundamentally tribal.
If you want to have any kind of freedom and even a little bit of peace, you need to let them to work out their own stuff.
All right, so I think that's where borders come from.
And I'm not saying that consent is not important in politics.
I never said that.
But it's so much less important in just describing the reality than this, that children are born into families.
And they develop loyalties.
Not every child is going to be loyal to what they were taught.
But in general, children are born into families.
And it's those families that teach them what tribe and what nation and what tradition to be loyal to.
And even, you know, I have plenty of teenagers and they rebel, they're programmed to rebel, you know, they resist and they push the boundaries.
But they're always pushing the boundaries outward from The traditions that they inherited from their family and their community.
So even if they rebel and they move over, they're still, they've moved over from a baseline that comes from where their children.
That is not based on consent.
Consent plays a role.
But fundamentally, it's about something else.
That human diversity, human ingenuity creates these different societies with different ways of living.
And if you want there to be a chance at peace between them, You have to have good borders.
Good borders make good neighbors.
That's the biblical idea, even though it wasn't said quite like that by Moses.
And I don't want people pretending that, you know, that it's about consent, because then they'll start to say, well, if we could get the Iraqis to consent to American government, then the Americans should be running Iraq, right?
No, no, no, you can't do that.
You can't get there from here.
The Americans should just not be running Iraq, period.
So I want to ask about the thinning out of conservatism.
So you mentioned that before, conservatism that included the biblical tradition, included religion, included common bonds and certain social fabric being thinned out toward basically just free markets.
And I agree that that's happened.
One of the things that troubles me is that the kickback has not been in favor of the rebuilding of social fabric in a lot of areas.
the kickback has been in favor of an anti-free market tendency, which is to say, well, free markets ought to be overthrown in favor of the so-called common good.
And you hear language used like, well, shouldn't the market work for us?
And I just keep thinking that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what free markets represent.
I mean, in the end, free markets represent the idea that I'm capable of alienating my own labor.
They don't represent something that you hitch to the wagon of family, and then we all get to combine together and then figure out how to invade each other's rights in order to benefit the common good, especially in the violation of some.
You can just steal some rich guy's money and now you've benefited a bunch of families.
So it seems to me that the kickback to a thinned out conservatism, a sort of libertarian minded conservatism with regard to government that stretched out into the societal realm where it went too far has been in the wrong area.
The pushback actually should be a real reinculcation of a lot of the same values that were lost, not a pushback against the free market.
I think that's a fair objection.
I mean, you know that I've been involved in the last couple of years in organizing in America and Europe what hopefully is going to turn out to be a thoughtful national conservatism, which my hope is that it's going to be an appropriate response to this sort of rampant libertarianism and or neoconservatism on the one hand, and then the
The rising white identity politics on the right, both of which I oppose.
And I see exactly what you're saying.
I mean, I actually think that there's, what's happened is that the conservative movement, as it turned to economics as kind of the sole issue that people really need in order to understand politics, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not too much.
And so, as it moves in that direction, what happens is that this impoverished understanding of what politics is about leads people who feel that libertarianism has gone too far, they feel the Republican Party has gone too far in the direction of Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick or Milton Friedman.
And I think that they're seeing things that are real problems.
I mean, like the issue of to what extent did America's unwillingness to take China seriously as a rival and to say, OK, America's companies are going to move to China.
Well, it's a free market.
There's nothing you can do about it.
That is a serious problem and a serious question.
But I completely agree with you that That the debate is along this more government intervention in the economy, less government intervention in the economy axis.
Nobody talks about, and this is, I mean almost nobody, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but in general, conservative politics in America and in the UK and in Europe is all about economics and about where, how much government interventions there are going to be.
As soon as you start talking about these other things, then religion and nationalism, then people come back and they say, they start giving you economic answers.
Like, there's an opioid addiction problem, so we need an economic, we need an economic answer to that.
God and Scripture are disappearing, not even from just liberal communities, but even Christian communities are having trouble keeping their kids within the tradition.
And the answer is charter schools, which is an economic answer.
And I'm not against charter schools.
But the problem is economics will not solve these problems.
We need a political theory that takes human beings as they are, which means that we have to recognize that there is such a thing as cohesion.
We have to figure out what family cohesion is about, tribal and national cohesion.
We have to figure out what we actually need to do to encourage those things.
Now, if you're Hayek, then you may very well say to me that Every single thing that I come up with is like a government intervention, and so I'm a fascist.
Like, let's say, I want Bible in the schools.
I mean, at this point I'm not talking about, like, forcing people to be religious.
I'm just talking about the total ignorance of Americans about their own past, which is never going to stop if we can't put Bible back in the schools.
The answer to that is to understand what the American nation is, to understand that it's not a race, but to understand that it does have traditions, to figure out what are the most important things in those traditions, and to say it's a priority to teach those things.
Now, if you can do it, through charter schools.
So, I'm with you.
But if you can't do it through charter schools, and I've been hearing, I'm not against them, but I've been hearing about this, my whole life I've been hearing about how charter schools are going to solve this problem.
I want a discussion about why Americans simply, beginning in the 1940s, they wiped Christianity and Bible and the entire heritage, the entire set of ideas out of the school systems and created a country the entire set of ideas out of the school systems and created a country in which every school is a safe space in which you'll never, ever get to hear about God or scripture or what That's totally nuts if you want the country to have a future.
If you want it to have a future, it has to have a past.
I'm happy to—look, I live in a socialist country.
No one dislikes socialism as much as I do.
I mean, I pay roughly 50 percent income tax, 17 percent value-added tax, another 20 percent payroll tax, plus import taxes.
It's totally intolerable.
I don't want anybody to live like that.
I don't want Americans to live like that.
I'm not on that side.
But if they're going to tell me that That economics, which is the science of the choosing free, consenting individual, can answer the basic problems America has today, that's false.
So in the remaining moments that we have left, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a question about the socialist country from which you come, the state of Israel.
So a lot of Americans on the right, obviously, are very supportive of the state of Israel.
They see commonality, cultural commonality, religious commonality in many cases.
Increasingly, on the left, Israel has become extraordinarily unpopular.
It's becoming more unpopular in areas of the alt-right, particularly, or the more isolationist right, paleo-conservative right.
What do you make of Israel's sort of place in America right now, where Israel stands with the American people?
I want to distinguish between the alt-right and the paleo.
I mean, these labels are a little bit squishy and fluid, but there's a line you can draw between the rising white identity movement, which is I've paid careful attention to it in the last couple of years.
I'm very sorry to report that it is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic.
And they detest Israel.
I mean, sometimes they will facetiously say that they like Israel because they think that Israel is a racist state like they want America to be.
I've looked at it carefully.
Most of them really detest Jews in Israel.
I want to distinguish between that and the old paleoconservative right which had lots of problems with Israel and saw Israel as kind of hostile to their worldview when what they were doing was fighting Universal liberalism, right?
When universal liberalism, the New World Order, when that took over the Republican Party, they felt they had to fight it, and they saw Israel being sold as, look, it's a liberal democracy like America, it's part of the liberal empire, and they resisted it.
I think I see a big change taking place in those circles now, where Israel's nationalism is being taken, and I'm talking by people who are not racists, And they're looking to Israel as nationalists all across Europe and in other countries are looking to Israel as a model of a successful national state.
And not only are they sympathetic, but they ask, are there lessons that we can learn from Israel that can help us with the disintegration of the United States?
I mean, Israel has had plenty of problems in my lifetime, but at the moment, it's probably the strongest it's ever been.
It's economically the strongest, but it also is the only country in the world where, I mean, the Jewish fertility rate is almost double what it is in...what the fertility rate in most Western countries is, and it continues to rise.
In other words, it's a very special place where the feeling of national Mutual loyalty.
Unites the left and the right, the religious and the non-religious.
Of course, there's tensions and fights, but Israel is a very cohesive country.
And the nationalists in the United States now, they look at Israel.
Israel has border walls.
Israel has very restrictive immigration policies.
Israel has a burgeoning free market sector, but it also has a willingness to intervene too much.
I've already said way too much.
These are things that allow the American nationalist right to rethink Israel and think of it in terms of an alliance.
And the more anti-Israel the left becomes, the more the nationalist American right seems to be moving in this direction of re-identifying And I say re-identifying because, of course, the ancestors of Anglo-Americans or Dutch-Americans or Scottish-Americans, their ancestors saw biblical Israel as a model for them.
And some of that is beginning to come back, seeing Israel as a helpful model for what America might someday be.
Okay, so in a second I'm going to ask you the final question, which is, what do you see the future of America as, and what do you see the future of Israel as in the next few years?
But, if you want to hear Yoram Hazony's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
So, to subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Yoram Hazony, the book is The Virtue of Nationalism.
Thanks so much for stopping by.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.
Associate producer, Colton Haas.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
Editing by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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