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July 31, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:23

Yoram Hazony | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 129

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	An actual human family is built of multiple generations, and those generations pass down constraints.
	Everybody pressures everybody else.
	And it's good that people pressure other people, because if you don't have those pressures, then you don't get the benefit of the wisdom of older people who have more experience, which you get from the pressures.
	To be free, but within limits, within limits that can help you.
	Returning to the shows that dissect many of the developments in conservative thought the past few years is philosopher and scholar Yoram Hazony.
	What actually defines our country?
	And what can create unity?
	In very large part, the Trump presidency provoked necessary debate on the right about this question.
	One arena where you can see that debate is at NatCon, an ongoing series of worldwide national conservatism conferences.
	These events emerged in 2019 from the Edmund Burke Foundation, where Yoram is chairman.
	They're a part of the movement on the right to recognize the importance of nationalism to conservatism.
	Right now, the Union is fraying, military enlistment is plummeting, child-rearing is falling apart, Marxism is on the rise, and animus is rampant between left and right.
	Yoram says we've been incorrectly redefining the right for most of modern history, and it's why our national identity is fractured.
	He says the incorrect definition of the right is what is perpetuating our current climate of disarray.
	Yoram's work is vigorously discussed around both liberal and conservative media.
	Most recently, all of that conversation is in response to his new book, Conservatism, A Rediscovery, where he writes of the new right and America's only way forward.
	Join me and Yoram Hazony as we discuss our future, the gravest and immediate threats to the country, the case for limitations on free market, and other vital subjects to rediscover.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	Just a reminder, we'll have a member-exclusive segment only for our Daily Wire members.
	We're going to go an additional 30 minutes for this episode with Yoram at the end.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday.
	You can click that link in the episode description, use code Ben, you get 25% off, and you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Yoram Hazony, thanks so much for being here.
	Really appreciate it.
	Great.
	Thank you for having me.
	So let's just jump right in.
	You've become a very controversial figure on the right because of your distinction that I think has been elided for a long time on the right between conservatism and classical liberalism.
	There are a lot of people on the right who have thought that conservatism was actually either a form of classical liberalism or in some ways identical to classical liberalism.
	So let me start by distinguishing the two in your thought.
	Sure.
	Look, liberalism, I think people have a pretty good idea of what it is.
	If your politics begins with human beings are free and equal, you know, created free and created equal by nature, and the purpose of government is to defend that freedom and equality, and you don't receive, you don't take on any political obligations that you didn't consent to, if you're in that ballpark, then you're a liberal.
	Conservatives certainly do cherish freedom, but conservatives begin their politics from a different place.
	A conservative begins by saying, all right, we've got this nation or this tribe, and what do we need to do in order to be able to conserve it?
	What do we need to do to make sure that it's going to be around you know, five or six generations from now.
	And when you begin from that spot, then you need to start asking questions like, what holds this society together?
	Is it blowing apart, or does it need to become more cohesive and coherent?
	Or, what exactly is it that holds us together?
	I would say, most conservatives would say that it's the religious and national traditions of a particular nation that hold it together.
	So then you need to ask, well, what do we need to do in order to make sure that those transitions are being transmitted?
	Are they being transmitted?
	In America now, and the answer is basically no, and look what you've got.
	So I think it's really important that people understand what conservatism is, and that both in their individual lives and in the national life, that we open up the possibility of a life of conservation and transmission.
	So let's talk for, there's a lot there.
	So let's talk about the, the unit of importance.
	So in, in sort of classical liberal tradition and in the United States in particular, the, the idea has been that the individual is, is the locus of all politics and the locus of all thoughts.
	So individual rights are predominant.
	Those rights are supposed to be protected by government.
	You delegate your powers to the government in order to protect those rights.
	So far as the government invades those rights, then it has, it has defeated its reason for being.
	I mean, this is the, Sort of basic language of the Declaration of Independence that we're all trained on.
	And so when we speak of freedom and liberty, that's what Americans tend to think of almost instinctively.
	You were using in that statement the nation or the state as sort of the locus or the tribe as the locus of importance.
	Which do you think is the level of abstraction that we should be aiming at conserving?
	Is it the individual?
	Is it the family?
	Is it the nation?
	Is it the tribe?
	Which level of abstraction is the most important here?
	Look, I think if you pick one and insist on it, then you end up being kind of like an idolater.
	An idolater of the individual, meaning somebody who just puts way too much emphasis on the individual.
	Or if you pick the nation, it's very easy for that to turn into something that is oppressive.
	I think that if you look at the American founding, There actually was a balance between Jeffersonians and thinkers like Tom Paine, who basically were the left, and they had this liberal view.
	But there was another party, the party of Washington and Hamilton, John Adams, Governor Morris, who basically was the draftsman of the Constitution.
	They were much more conservative, and they did focus on... All you need to do is read the preamble to the American Constitution.
	The first thing that they think that they're doing is a more perfect union.
	That's a nationalist aim.
	It's not an individual aim.
	It's an aim of, we as millions of people, we have a problem that our union is insufficiently strong.
	And of course, the blessings of liberty is there, but it's one of seven aims.
	It's not the only aim.
	And I think that's fundamentally what Americans at this stage need to rediscover.
	They've got the individual liberty thing.
	It does bring blessings.
	But at this point, I think it's run out of control.
	If you're so far down the individual liberty path, that you can't understand why pornography should not be on the smartphone of every 12-year-old kid.
	If you can't understand that, then you're just so deep into the individual liberty thing that you just don't think there are any other values.
	And that's what we're looking for, is to rebalance along with those other values.
	That's a conservative way of approaching these problems.
	So when you look at the Declaration, the Constitution, the way that Lincoln framed it, of course, is he suggested that the Declaration was the apple of gold and the Constitution was the frame of silver surrounding the apple of gold.
	And the basic idea is that they shouldn't be read in opposition.
	They should be read in tandem, meaning that the ideals of the Declaration are protected by the Constitution, which is, of course, why structurally the Constitution actually grants fairly limited powers to the federal government.
	It grants extraordinary powers to the state.
	States themselves had their own constitutions that allowed them to exercise police powers to do things like banning pornography.
	There'd be no idea of federal government in 1791 banning pornography nationwide.
	It would have been absurdity if the federal government didn't have either the capacity or the power to do that sort of thing.
	But the idea of reading them directly in opposition, do you think that you're moving too far when you read them in direct opposition?
	Or how far in opposition are you reading those two documents?
	I don't think I read them in direct opposition.
	I don't think that there's anything wrong with the American Declaration of Independence.
	I think what's wrong is a post-World War II liberal tradition.
	which tries to turn the American Declaration of Independence into a kind of scripture.
	In other words, and by the way, it's not even the whole declaration.
	There's lots of interesting things in the declaration.
	Its first sentences are about the Americans being a single people that's cutting its ties with another people.
	I mean, the declaration has lots of good things in it.
	The main problem with post-war liberalism in the United States is its campaign to turn those two lines of Jefferson's in the Declaration to turn them into like a kind of sole scripture for, you know, the only computer program for the United States.
	And that's just not historically what it was.
	Of course, you know, of course, Lincoln and lots of other statesmen, Lincoln and Grant, made important use of Jefferson's Rhetoric during the Civil War and afterwards to try to create equality for Blacks in the United States, it's an unbelievably moving and important story, and I think it's just fine.
	I only fault the 20th century, which says, look, We're going to be only liberals.
	We're going to take Enlightenment liberalism as our sole basis for understanding politics.
	That means no religious traditions.
	That means no national traditions.
	The American Constitution is fundamentally a restoration of English national traditions.
	And so the Federalist Party, which wrote and lobbied and gave us that Constitution, they were nothing like looking for an exclusive ruining of America in those few lines of Jefferson.
	So, it's all about balance.
	That's clearly true.
	When you look at Washington, we look at Adams, we look at the battles that took place immediately in the aftermath of the Constitution in the United States over whether the French Revolution ought to be backed.
	And the people you mentioned, Jefferson and Paine, Paine particularly, was very warm toward the French Revolution.
	Adams was extraordinarily against the French Revolution.
	Washington was an opponent of the French Revolution.
	There's a difference in kind to them between a revolution that sought to overturn all established order in the name of I think people don't understand how radical Jefferson really was.
	I mean, we've got plenty of his letters where he repeatedly says things like, the relationship of each generation to the preceding generation is like a foreign nation, like a foreign land.
	And it's not a one-off for him.
	He really didn't think that national and religious traditions of Americans were the basis for the continuity of the United States going forward.
	And the Federalists thought the opposite.
	They really thought that without Anglo-American traditions and without Christianity, the whole thing was going to fall apart.
	So basically, we have an experiment Post-World War II, the trauma of the world wars brings Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, brings the American elite leadership to do this experiment.
	By the way, they were doing the same thing in Europe and in England.
	This experiment of only liberalism.
	Liberalism will be the sole basis of our society.
	And look where we've ended up.
	I mean, I don't know if people quite understand.
	2020 was the year that that hegemony of liberal ideas, post-World War II, That hegemony of liberal ideas in 2020 collapsed, and it's now being replaced by this woke neo-Marxism.
	And we have to ask ourselves, this catastrophe of woke neo-Marxism taking over the main liberal institutions across the United States and Britain and into Europe and in all the democratic countries.
	We have to ask ourselves, how did this happen?
	What caused it?
	In my book, I argue that what caused it is when you stripped away the Christian traditions, the religious traditions, the biblical traditions, the national constitutional traditions, you stripped that away and just had all human beings are perfectly free and equal and they don't receive responsibility except by consent.
	When you just had that, you opened the door for collapse and it collapsed.
	So let's talk for a second.
	There's so many different directions I want to go with you here.
	So let's start with the national traditions that ought to be conserved.
	So I think when a lot of people hear that, they hear sort of a Russell Kirk-ian attitude, and it's the attitude that's conservative.
	It's not what's being conserved that matters, it's the conservation of the thing that matters.
	So how do you determine what ought to be conserved and what ought not be conserved?
	Both inside a nation, because obviously things change over time in many ways for the better.
	I mean, slavery was a part of American life up until the Civil War.
	Women couldn't vote until the early 20th century in the United States, all of that.
	These are changes that occur that are inherently progressive if you believe that conservatism is about maintaining what was there.
	And then there's, so within nations, there's obviously movements.
	So how do you determine what's good and what's bad there?
	And then secondly, how do you determine differences between nations?
	Is there sort of a baseline legitimacy that a ruler that you can use to determine the legitimacy of a nation that is worth conserving or national rules that are worth conserving?
	I think you've turned to moral minimum that nations have to actually fulfill in order for them to have any claim to nationhood that ought to be conserved.
	For sure.
	I mean, Jews and Christians have, at this point, our 3,000-year tradition sets a moral minimum for the legitimacy of governments.
	And that moral minimum is, you can say it's summarized by the Ten Commandments, you can Phrase it a little bit differently, but roughly I think you'll get it right if you say the Ten Commandments and each individual being made in the image of God, the idea of a national covenant between a people and God, which involves them maintaining this moral minimum.
	All of these things are cornerstone, bedrock aspects of Christian national traditions in Europe and in America.
	The English and the Americans took this as seriously as any other people, maybe more seriously.
	And it used to be that when English or Americans or Scots, when they read the Old Testament, and they read about Israel in the Old Testament, they were able to recognize themselves.
	They were able to say, that's what we're trying to do.
	What we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure society is fundamentally just, that our nation is independent, That we have self-rule and a direct relationship with God, and that like ancient Israel, that we're going to be a people that is going to be in that kind of covenant, that kind of relationship with God.
	That's hundreds of years of English and American tradition.
	And the experiment that we're trying to deal with now is, if you just set all of that aside and only do free and equal, then is that going to work?
	Now, you asked me about other countries.
	So, look, other countries do have other traditions.
	Look, it's not only George Washington who, when he became president, gave his famous Thanksgiving address in which he said that Americans want the good of all governments and all nations.
	You know, it's like, in other words, Americans are not trying to run a revolution to to overthrow all the powers in the world.
	But what Americans are interested, according to Washington, is that every nation should pursue its own course.
	Now, if you ask him, well, do you think that nations should oppress their peoples?
	He would say, of course not.
	The question is, what is America's role in this?
	And what Americans get from the Hebrew Bible is the idea of being a light unto nations, a city on a hill, a beacon that shows the world how you can actually do things in a way that's better, and other nations should copy it.
	But that's not where we are today.
	Today we have so many people who call themselves conservatives, who are basically Jeffersonian revolutionaries, and they say, you know, the American way of doing things is the only way of doing things.
	And if the nations of the world don't want to accept it, then we can impose it by force.
	I mean, Ben, this is a crazy way of thinking, and it's brought America to a terrible, terrible place.
	Instead of taking care of itself, it's trying to take care of the world, and it's failing at both.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the sort of meltdown from liberalism and virtue, which was sort of the bargain of the founding, to the post-World War II liberalism, and how it is that an ideology that's supposedly founded on individual liberty seems to routinely collapse into something more approaching tyranny.
	It seems like it should be counterintuitive.
	We'll get to that in just a moment first.
	Let's talk about how you shave.
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	All because we dared to suggest that boys were boys and girls were girls and boys can't become girls and all the rest.
	Well, Harry's condemned our show and all of our listeners, too.
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	We launched Jeremy's Razors.
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	Conservatives are being canceled left and right by woke companies who don't care if they have your business.
	In fact, they don't want your business.
	Well, Jeremy's Razors wants your business.
	We align with your values, too.
	We're not going to lecture you about how toxic masculinity is ruining America.
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	Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
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	Okay, so let's talk about the slide from liberalism into tyranny or liberalism to collectivism.
	So the things that you describe liberalism as before, you know, fundamentals that are based in the idea of individual liberty and individual equality, some of the sentiments mentioned at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, how does that slide into what we see now, which is overarching, overweening government power?
	So the woke culture, are they related?
	And if so, how?
	They are related.
	I mean, they're clearly not the same thing.
	You know, like, I would never say that, you know, liberalism is woke neo-Marxism or progressive.
	I mean, they're clearly two different things.
	But in the book, I try to figure out what the relationship is.
	And my proposal is that what happens when you say, only liberalism, only freedom, only choice, only consent.
	In other words, I'm going to make the decisions about, you know, about everything that there is about about my life according to my own reasoning, my own thinking.
	So look, that sounds beautiful, and there's a lot that's positive about it.
	But take a society, a whole society, in which the children are being raised from kindergarten.
	They're being told, Look, you make your own decisions.
	You think this through for yourself.
	Don't listen to us, the parents, the teachers.
	Free to be you and me.
	Every one of you is going to be your own specific, particular thing that you're going to decide for yourself.
	It's almost like this Nietzschean, you know, make yourself, form yourself.
	So what happens to a society when you tell the kids that?
	Well, what happens is that there's no place in that description for tradition.
	There's no place for honoring the past, for learning to honor the past, which means that then you become capable of learning for the past.
	I mean, traditional society is the key to a traditional society.
	is that the children are taught to honor the past, and because they're taught to honor the past, they're able to learn from the past and make it a part of them.
	And America has cut that off at the roots by telling children, just think for yourself.
	Just think for yourself.
	You'll figure it out.
	And in the end, the assumption here is, this is also an Enlightenment liberal assumption, the assumption is that if everybody's reasoning for themselves, then there'll be this kind of convergence on the one true ideology, the one true religion, the one true philosophy, the one true political theory.
	So it's really important to understand, I think, that that part of Enlightenment rationalism is completely false.
	Empirically, we now know this, if you tell everyone, just be free of all restraint, of all tradition, just reason for yourself, figure it out, just think for yourself, there is no convergence on liberalism.
	The opposite, when you tell kids, think for yourself, which I'm not telling you not to say that, but when you tell them, think for yourself, they are just as likely to end up being woke neo-Marxists Or some kind of, you know, seriously, some kind of fascist, you know, Bronze Age pervert thing that's happening on the American far right.
	Those things are just as likely to come out of an individual reasoning by himself as them becoming liberals or religious Christians or Jews or anything else.
	One of the things that comes up in the context of some of the things that you've been talking about, people throw around words like fascist and theocrat really easily in this context.
	When they talk about, you know, accepted tradition and the traditions that ought to be respected and maintaining those traditions and they think, okay, well, you know, in the past we had theocratic states or we had monarchies.
	In which liberty was completely subsumed.
	So, how do you balance the need for liberty and the conservative tradition?
	Because, you know, pre the American Revolution or pre the Glorious Revolution, liberty was not a particularly important thing in the way that most people thought politically.
	It was really a secondary concern.
	And so, how do you tell people we're not looking to go back to, you know, 1300s Italy here?
	Well, look, the first thing that I tell people, I mean, this is the beginning of my book.
	The first thing I tell people is that their view of the relationship between traditional society and liberty is mistaken.
	Okay?
	And it's actually very easy to get out of thinking that way.
	There's a book by John Fortescue written around 1470, which is called In Praise of the Laws of England.
	This is 300 years before Montesquieu, okay?
	It's 300 years before the American Revolution.
	And John Fortescue, he's the leading common lawyer of his age, and he writes this book in which he explains why the laws of England are are the best system for providing liberty that has ever been devised by mankind.
	Now, he doesn't think liberty is the only thing, but he certainly thinks that the glory of England is that there's a balance of powers between the king and the parliament, that the parliament is responsible for legislation and taxation.
	I mean, these things should be familiar.
	This is the Anglo-American heritage.
	But he also says that the English tradition descended from the biblical tradition, the English tradition makes property so strong that the king of England can't even, this is Foresky talking, the king of England can't even enter the home of the lowliest farmer without his permission, much less take anything away from him.
	So the argument of these common lawyers in the 1400s, and they think that they're talking about like an ancient tradition, their argument is, look, Our traditions of property, our traditions of balance of power, our traditions of limited government, these make the people of England wealthier and healthier and freer than any people in Europe.
	When you read this and you realize who you're reading and when you're reading it from, I think you have to begin to think, look, we've just been kind of brainwashed about where this love of freedom comes from.
	The love of freedom is not an Enlightenment invention from the 1700s.
	The love of freedom is already in Hebrew scripture, and it's developed by the English for a thousand years.
	Now, you're right.
	I'm not saying, let's go back to 1400.
	Every conservative thinker who's serious understands things change and things have to be repaired, and you also make mistakes.
	Burke or Selden reading these people is reading a discussion about what happens when the tradition has mistakes in it and you have to repair it.
	The entire American Constitution is a repair of a mistake that was made with the Articles of the Confederation.
	I mean, all American kids learn that.
	They just aren't told.
	Wait a second.
	There was a first American constitution, but it was a mistake.
	It failed.
	And so there was a second American constitution in 1787.
	What were they doing?
	Washington and his people were saying, we need to go back.
	We need to restore what was good about the English constitution because as conservatives, we need to be able to fix mistakes.
	So without reverting into a sort of Hegelian take on how change occurs and deciding which change is good, sort of in retrospect, and we can tell that it was good because it already happened.
	Here and now, somebody comes up with an idea that they want to change a fundamental institution in a certain way.
	How do conservatives decide whether that change is good, whether it ought to be tried, whether the change is too radical?
	I understand that people of the left believe that no change is too radical, and that everything has to be reason tabula rasa.
	But what are the factors that ought to go into a conservative consideration of whether a policy change is appropriate or not?
	Look, when Seldin and Burke are talking about change, they constantly use the expression trial and error.
	Burke actually literally compares statesmanship to a series of experiments, scientific experiments.
	And his idea is, first of all, you take what exists and you admit that all things run down, that all things, even if they were good before, they begin to fail.
	And so repair has to happen.
	And then he says, okay, so now you need to make a repair.
	I think a good example would be, the English did not have slavery.
	You know, I mean, for many, many centuries, there was no slavery in England.
	When England began to become an international commercial power, they didn't have laws that could do things like explain how insurance was supposed to work or how contracts were supposed to work.
	So they imported what's called the mercantile law.
	It was the law of the merchants in Holland and in Italy.
	They imported it into the common law.
	They said, we're going to bring it into English law.
	It's studied and implemented in common law courts.
	It'll become part of our laws.
	So that immediately had certain good effects.
	It allowed a tremendous explosion of commerce in England.
	It allowed the development of a modern industrial economy.
	But at the same time, the mercantile law allowed slavery.
	That's how it actually got into England.
	They adopted these laws in the early 1700s, and by the middle of the 1700s, they're already saying our free constitution has become corrupted.
	People are bringing slaves to England for the first time.
	Now we have slaves in England, and the Courts in England, Lord Mansfield was the Chief Justice, the courts in England had to push back and say, this mercantile law, it did some good things, but it's bringing us to disaster because it's undermining the traditional freedoms of Englishmen.
	And so they literally declared the laws of England incapable of supporting this new institution of slavery, and they banned it on traditional grounds.
	The English re-ban slavery on the basis of saying, this does not fit our traditional institutions.
	The Americans actually could have done that.
	They could have said this just doesn't fit in the common law.
	And so what's the problem?
	The problem, Burke says, is if you make a repair that is too broad for the purpose, you're saying like, let's say you do something like the Civil Rights Act, okay?
	I mean, this isn't Burke, this is me, but it's the 1960s, and you know that you have to find a way to make blacks and whites equal in America.
	You see the damage, you see that the persecution is evil, it's unjust, You haven't found a way to stop it.
	Okay, so let's say that you're going to put all the power you can behind ending discrimination against, persecution of blacks, discrimination against them.
	Okay, so Burke would say as follows.
	Okay, that is a just end, but what you want is to make it as narrow as possible so you don't overthrow your entire constitution in order to achieve this particular thing.
	What did the Americans do?
	The Americans said, not only are we going to make blacks equal to whites, but at the same moment, we're going to make women equal to men, we're going to make Christians equal to Jews, equal to atheists, and in fact, we're going to leave this open-ended question about what liberty and equality mean.
	And what's happened in the last 70 years is that people say, okay, so what about discrimination on the basis of ageism?
	What about discrimination on the basis of gender orientation?
	What about discrimination on the basis of abilities?
	There is no way logically, once you've said every human being is equal to every other human being, There's no way to stop it from turning into a perpetual revolution with people constantly coming up with new inequalities and applying the force of government to destroying it.
	There's no way to do it unless you're a traditionalist like Burke.
	Then you would say, look, we have one thing we're trying to do here.
	One.
	And that's to end persecution of blacks in America.
	We're not trying to create utopia.
	We're not trying to solve all the problems in the history of the world.
	We have one job to do and that's it.
	And we're going to try a narrow fix that's going to end persecution of blacks.
	Let's give that 20 years, 30 years, two generations.
	Let's see if that can be done.
	And then you go on to the next thing that looks broken.
	But what we don't understand is that the 1960s, I'm not talking about the Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell.
	I'm talking about the older generation that replaced the traditional American constitution with a non-traditionalist formula of everybody should be equal and non-discrimination.
	And look, it's wrecked America.
	It's completely wrecked America.
	I'm not saying that there weren't some good things that came out of it, but if you look at where America is today, it's collapsing into Marxism.
	Why is it collapsing into Marxism?
	Because there are no longer any traditions to tell you when you talk about equality between human beings.
	What do you mean?
	What are the limits?
	Who is equal to who?
	What categories are you talking about?
	There are no traditions.
	And so every single argument that the Marxists bring up is, ah, you liberals, you think that you're in favor of liberty and equality, but look at the inequalities that you're creating.
	And the liberals go, darn, you're right, there are inequalities.
	And then they start on another revolution.
	So in a second, I want to ask you, given the fact that we have seen this wide scale collapse in societal capital, in social fabric in the United States, what's the best way to restore that?
	We'll get into that in just one second.
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	So I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who's been watching that the social fabric of the United States has utterly collapsed.
	The decline of religion obviously plays a huge role in that.
	The rise of Radical sexual individualism, particularly as a core value among Americans in the 1960s, is a huge thing.
	And we can go through these various factors, but I kind of want to start with what we should do to sort of reinstate and restore social fabric.
	How do we do that?
	So there are a couple of theories.
	One theory has been that this has to effectively be done bottom up, that there's no substitute for the recreation of social capital and social fabric at the bottom up level, which means that what we really should be focused on as conservatives when it comes to governing is reducing power to the local level.
	Instead of trying to worry about what the federal government can do, we should be worried about the federal government is already doing, try to grant states and localities the power to make their own way.
	And if that means that San Francisco is going to be San Francisco, which we don't like, Well, at least it means that where I live in Florida is also going to be where I live Whereas if we maximize power at the top level, then that is a sword that has been typically wielded in the opposite direction.
	The alternative point of view has been presented by some people in the national conservative movement, which is the sort of use power where you can get it.
	So if you can get power at the federal level, you exercise it.
	Even if that power ends up creating more of a backlash to the power over the short term, you're changing culture at the top level.
	So where do you think conservatives should come down on this?
	Look, this is a key question and it's a complicated question.
	I mean, the answer is not simple.
	It's true that there has to be a national center, a central national government, which is strong enough to to be able to defend the country, but also strong enough to be able to take steps to impose unity in cases like slavery.
	Maybe there could have been some other solution, but I can't see it as wrong that Lincoln and Grant decided that they had to end slavery and the persecution of Blacks in America.
	And they used the power of the central government to try to do that.
	Another familiar example is the end of polygamy in Utah, which was federally imposed by a government that was still fundamentally, in a lot of ways, a Christian government.
	And they said, our national tradition is not going to include polygamy.
	Now, there are cases like that, and sometimes that's necessary.
	On the other hand, I think that the system of federalism is a brilliant and necessary system.
	It's brilliant and necessary both because of the fact that, look, ultimately, if the center is constantly imposing decisions on sensitive things on everybody, it becomes a tyranny.
	And I actually think, I mean, I think a lot of Americans actually feel that.
	In the 1940s, the Supreme Court decided to start banning religion from public places.
	By the 1960s, banning God and prayer and Bible from the schools.
	I think plenty of people in America see that as tyrannical.
	the only answer we have to the extremely varied moral and religious and philosophical communities that we have in the United States.
	to try to keep the woke in the same country with traditional Christians and Jews.
	The only possible way to do that is through federalism.
	And I think right now, I tell my NatCon friends, if you
	If you are telling me that in response to 70 years of catastrophic Supreme Court decisions uprooting America's national traditions, that your answer to this is going to be that the Supreme Court should turn around and impose nationwide, impose traditions, impose way of life that people don't necessarily want, I mean, that's crazy.
	You're just going to destroy the country.
	I mean, you're going to bring civil war.
	So I think now especially is a time to say the mistake in the 1940s was imposing an anti-Christian liberalism on the entire United States.
	And the way to deal with that is to allow the states at this point, you know, just like Different countries.
	Each one is going to experiment.
	Each one is going to come up with its own way of trying to restore tradition.
	Some of them are going to be very conservative, and some of them are going to be less conservative, and some of them are going to be super liberal, and some of them are going to be woke.
	That is the only way that we can actually run the experiment and find out which of these, you know, because our opponents are saying you're going to create the Ayatollahs' Iran in Alabama.
	Is that true?
	Look, I have no idea.
	I don't believe it's true, but let's try it.
	I mean, for God's sake, let the people of Alabama try to restore a Christian public life to their state, and very quickly we'll find out whether it's a terrible idea or not.
	I think it's the only way through.
	I think the other roads lead to civil war.
	So speaking of civil war, I mean a lot of people on both now the fairly radical left and the fairly radical right have proposed almost precisely that.
	They've said we no longer have enough in common to maintain a cohesive nation.
	That you can't have a nation that includes both the woke And social conservatives, fiscal liberals, you can't have that nation.
	It doesn't exist.
	It's never existed.
	There has to at least be a common base of values.
	And in the absence of restoration of that base of values, maybe it's better if we all go our separate ways.
	Now, I mean, frankly, I think that sounds wildly optimistic about what would happen if you actually have the breakdown of a country that has 330 million people.
	one giant federal military with nuclear weapons. That seems like a pretty optimistic vision that everybody just kind of puts down their weapons and walks away. But when does a nation become so non-coherent and non-cohesive that it's no longer a nation?
	Well, you've just described very well when it happens.
	I mean, it's happening right now.
	What's happening is that in order to maintain the cohesion of a nation or, you know, the same thing is true in a family, any group of human beings that stays cohesive, that stays solid, I mean, that under pressure, internal and external pressure, they pull together instead of blowing apart,
	In every human loyalty group, what's necessary is that the leadership consciously, purposely gives honor to the different competing tribes.
	Every nation is diverse.
	There's no such thing as a homogenous nation.
	Every nation is made up of tribes, of subsectors.
	Sometimes they hate each other, and sometimes there's a risk of their going to war.
	The job of the central The central leadership, the job of the top leadership in the nation, is to make sure that there's a balance, that honor is being given to the different tribes.
	And what's happened in America is that at least since Donald Trump, I mean, the same thing happened in England with Brexit, so it's not localized to America, but at least since Donald Trump, and probably a lot longer than that, the idea of I should see the other side as a part of my nation.
	I give them honor, they give me honor, has just been completely lost.
	Anybody wants to just immediately know what I'm talking about, go back and look at presidential debates, you know, from the 1960s or the 1980s, and you see the Democrats and Republicans and, you know, they probably in their heart, they probably hate each other.
	But what they say is, my honorable opponent, I'm sure that, you know, if he's elected, then Then things aren't going to be so terrible.
	They soft-pedal the whole argument.
	They try to leave a basis so that if the other side wins, they can cooperate on things that they agree on, and then they'll win the next time.
	What do we have in the United States now?
	We've had at least two consecutive presidential elections where 40%?
	50%?
	I don't know.
	Huge, huge numbers of people think that the election was stolen by the other side.
	I'm not going to get into the question, you know, was it really stolen by the other side?
	We're asking about unity.
	The only way that you can get to unity is if Democrats and Republicans, regardless of what their differences are, if they come up with an agreement for how to determine the outcomes of elections, if they work on a bipartisan basis, and doing that requires them to say, even if they can't stand each other right now, it requires them to say, you know, I yield the floor to my honorable colleague from the other party, and all of these, you know,
	seemingly hypocritical things.
	Well, I'll tell you the truth.
	Sometimes when you're married, and you want your marriage to last a lifetime instead of having your marriage break up every 10 years and you get married to someone else, sometimes when you're married, you don't say the absolute truth 100% of the time.
	Sometimes it's just time to say, You know, you're just the greatest, dear.
	Let me explain to you why.
	Okay?
	I mean, people understand that that's the way you keep a family together.
	That's the way you keep a country together.
	And look, that means that at the national level, we conservatives, A, we have to understand that the way the president talks affects the entire culture.
	I mean, this is even more important.
	This goes back to the question of, like, you know, does the central government have a role?
	Sure it has a role.
	Look at the way that Trump changed the way that all of us talk and think.
	Look at the way that Barack Obama changed the way that all of us talk and think.
	The President and his people, his family, they have a huge, huge impact on the culture.
	And what we're looking for is not somebody who's going to just give up on religious and national traditions, but we are looking for somebody who's capable of saying, look, You're part of my country, and we have to find a way to compromise, and we have to find a way to make this work, and in the end we will find a way to make this work.
	What's the compromise?
	The compromise is federalism.
	Is it going to prevent the country from blowing apart?
	I don't know.
	I only know that it's the only way forward now.
	So one of the factors that I think militates in favor of national unity, and you see it, we're recording this in Israel.
	One of the things that has helped Israel in a sort of perverse way is the fact that it has enemies on literally all borders.
	And so it's a state that's in a perpetual state of existential threat.
	And so what that does is it draws the population together.
	And you see that in the United States throughout its history.
	During periods where the United States feels itself under existential threat, suddenly there's social fabric again, suddenly there's a certain level of social cohesion.
	It might only last a very short time.
	After 9-11, it seemed to last about five minutes.
	But there is this sense that it's going to bring the country together.
	In the aftermath of the Cold War, it seems like the next thing that happened was there was a happy moment where the United States was in its ascendancy, and then pretty quickly things turned into, well, if Russia isn't the real problem here, then my neighbor is probably the real problem here.
	So, one of the things that is obviously rising on a lot of Americans' radar right now is the rising threat of China.
	Do you think that the threat of China as an economic threat, as a hard power threat actually in places like the South China Sea or Taiwan or around Australia, that that is a factor that could help connect Americans again?
	At least Republicans and Democrats could look and say, this is something we need to oppose and we need to figure out a way to become more cohesive in order to oppose that.
	Well, Americans have got to.
	I mean, look, I think during 2020, two things became clear.
	One of them was the collapse of the liberal consensus that we talked about, and the other was suddenly Americans, during the pandemic, suddenly Americans woke up.
	for about five minutes and were able to recognize that China is a hostile power.
	I mean, the 30 years of Americans and Europeans working to build up China, you know, in the belief that it was going to become a liberal democracy, that entire policy had failed. And in fact, for 30 years, Americans and Europeans created the strongest opponent that any of us have seen, you know, in a century.
	an immensely powerful rival.
	It's a very, very important thing.
	It kind of ripped its mask off and said, ha ha, look, you think we're going to help you with the pandemic?
	We're not going to help you.
	We're going to do everything that we can to humiliate you and reduce you because you've ruled the world long enough and now it's our time.
	Now we're going to rule the world.
	So Americans saw that clearly for, I don't know, a few months, and then they started thinking about other things.
	And I would say, if you're an American leader in either party, Then you have to see the coming economic and political dominance of China, first in Asia and then through that, God forbid, over the whole globe.
	I think you have to see that as the major threat.
	I mean, there's just no other significant threat.
	I mean, I understand why people are talking about Ukraine.
	There's all sorts of very good reasons for people to think about it, but it's just that it's totally out of proportion.
	America only has one strategic rival, and that's China.
	America's only threatened by one country, and that's China.
	And if Americans want to be able to keep their crumbling country.
	I mean, you're right that when there's an external enemy that's seen clearly, it brings people together.
	But I would take it further than that.
	The Chinese are doing everything that they can to destroy America's internal fabric.
	We don't know what all the things are that they're doing.
	I'm not going to start making a list, but I can promise you that they're deeply involved in the United States.
	They're deeply involved in Washington.
	They're deeply involved in all sorts of places, trying to, uh, trying to, uh, corrupt Americans, trying to turn them into like, like, uh, um, collaborators with, with, uh, with the Chinese government.
	Most of the people are affected by this.
	Don't even understand that that's what's happening.
	And the only way That America is going to survive this.
	Look, I don't know.
	There could be a miracle.
	It could be, you know, maybe China will sink into the ocean.
	But if we're talking about realistic scenarios, the only way that America is going to pull out of this is if Democrats and Republicans were capable of seeing the Chinese threat for what it is, if they unite in order to stand against it.
	Now, I don't know how many people like that there are.
	I was in Washington recently.
	One of the heads of a research institute in Washington told me that he can only count 11 Republicans that he can count on to vote against China because the rest are compromised in one way or another.
	But we got to look this straight in the face.
	That has to end.
	Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear that the question when it comes to China is what exactly are people willing to do?
	And so far, the threat does not seem to be grave enough that most Americans are willing to do much.
	I'm not here talking about the voting body.
	I'm talking about the legislators.
	Legislators, I mean, we've been redirecting our military toward social engineering and recruiting on the basis of gender identity.
	And shockingly, nobody's actually signing up for a military that's up for woke values in the face of a of a looming Chinese threat. You mentioned Ukraine and Russia. Obviously, there's been a lot of sort of infighting on the right about what the proper perspective is on Ukraine and Russia, what exactly is happening over there. There's been a wide variety of opinion ranging from the very hawkish opinion that Russia needs to be weakened as a global power and whatever we have to do, we should do in order to do that, to the significantly more dovish opinion that perhaps, as articulated by
	some, Russia is some sort of ally of the West that we are somehow overlooking, that actually there are a country that is in favor of certain Christian principles.
	That seems to be a more radical argument from some areas of the right.
	So what do you make of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
	Look, I don't think Russia is an ally of the United States.
	I do think that the United States needs allies against China and is not looking for them seriously enough.
	The number one potential ally against China is India.
	And if you get it into your head that China is the number one rival, then it's just not that hard to figure out that there's another country in Asia which shares the same interests of containing China, and the United States should be knocking itself out to build that alliance.
	It happens that I think that the Americans are largely responsible for the inability to build an alliance with India, because America loves its relationship with Pakistan.
	It loves its relationship with this crazy Chinese proxy.
	And America continues to fund and build up and work with this Chinese proxy instead of trying to get their enemies, the Indians, to come into alliance with America.
	So if you ask me about Russia, Russia's no ally of the United States.
	It's also not a major threat to the United States.
	But if you want to arrange the globe in a way that is capable of protecting America, the first thing you need is an alliance with India.
	And India has its own ties with Russia, and maybe someday in 30 years or something like that, in a situation that we can't even understand, Russia could become an ally.
	At this moment, that's ridiculous.
	It's totally pointless to talk about it, and it's also ridiculous to see Russia as a Christian ally.
	Come on, it's a thuggish regime, it's a murderous regime, it's explicitly imperialist.
	I mean, Putin doesn't think that he's creating a Russian nation-state.
	He doesn't talk about that.
	He's explicitly imperialist.
	No, we don't have almost anything in common with Russia at this point.
	But America sending troops into Europe now to strengthen Europe against Russia, that's crazy.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	Don't tell me that the Americans can think about two things at the same time.
	I've been to Washington.
	I've talked to them.
	They can't think about two things at the same time.
	They can only think about one thing.
	And every minute that they're spending thinking about Ukraine, every person in one of those think tanks who's sitting around thinking about Ukraine is somebody who should be thinking about China.
	should be thinking about China.
	What we need is what are the top five fundamental changes that America needs to make in order to be able to have a hope of competing against China.
	So these are going to be things like we're going to close all of our institutions to all of these Chinese young people that we don't seem to understand that we're strengthening China and that a lot of them are actually spies.
	Come on!
	Number two, the Chinese produce, you know, what, five times, ten times as many doctorates in the sciences and in math as America does?
	How long do you think that that can possibly continue?
	So, America has to focus, it has to think like Sputnik.
	It has to think like, after Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, laser-focused on American military abilities, American technological abilities, manufacturing, education, and, of course, the moonshot.
	It's like this broad program for turning America into a country that could defeat Russia.
	Who's talking about this?
	You know, maybe two guys.
	I mean, they'll be at NatCon, but the American government has to shift to thinking, we have to defeat this.
	And I'd basically say to any American that there's two challenges right now.
	Challenge number one, China.
	Challenge number two, woke neo-Marxism.
	If you're focused on something else, you're wrong.
	So let's talk for a second about sort of the economic take of national conservatism.
	So one of the more unifying areas in the conservative movement over the past 50, 60, 70 years has been the economic liberalism.
	Forget about the classical liberalism that's directed toward the individual, but economic liberalism in the sense that the government really has very little to say about what you do with your property, what you do.
	With your money and that has resulted in extraordinary GDP growth for the United States.
	Free trade has contrary to popular opinion and quite good for for a lot of Americans, particularly because we are both producers and consumers.
	There's no question on the consumption side that people are living.
	A better life because of the products and services they have available to them.
	The argument that's made by a lot of national conservatives is that the middle class has been hollowed out by globalization, by free trade, that essentially elites have taken their priorities and placed those over the American people and that the government really ought to step in more and quote unquote shore up the middle class.
	What do you make of that argument?
	What is the role of economic liberalism and private property rights and free markets in the sort of national conservative vision?
	Pretty much everybody on the American right grew up on Milton Friedman, you know, on Hayek.
	I don't know many people in the national conservative movement who don't believe that the free market is the best engine for innovation and growth.
	There is a very big difference between national conservatives who see fundamental property rights as, you know, an ancient Anglo-American tradition and crucial for the country.
	There's a difference between most NatCons and people that you find sort of on the Uh, rightist fringe, uh, who the kind of people who are sort of like actually think dictatorship might not be such a bad idea.
	Um, and you know, they're, they're just not interested in, in, in the question of, uh, economic liberties too much.
	They just want to solve problems by redistributing.
	Um, so NatCons are mostly not like that, but at the same time, I think that, uh, you're right that there, there has been a very big shift.
	in the direction of conservatives identifying limits of the free market.
	And by the way, in the 1980s, people like Irving Kristol, who was my teacher, I mean, he wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism.
	And that slogan, that Two Cheers for Capitalism, what it was about was saying, We need the free market, and we need to limit the free market.
	And the second part, the we need to limit the free market, kind of got lost after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
	The limits on the free market kind of ceased to be part of conservatism, or what was called conservatism.
	So where do those limits need to appear?
	I mean, the first place that I think there's conservative consensus is on issues like pornography.
	I mean, you just can't create major industries whose purpose is to wreck family life in America.
	You just can't.
	There's a place where you've got to say stop.
	By the way, Irving Kristol, I quote him in the book on this, he says explicitly with regard to censorship, what used to be called public decency laws, he says that democracy is self-government.
	But you can only have self-government if the self is worthy of governing.
	If the self is incapable of governing, then you don't have any choice.
	You have to find something else.
	So, here's Irving Kristol, the leading Reaganite theoretician of the 1980s, telling you that the legitimacy of government It evaporates if you can't restrain pornography.
	So look, I think that's one area where a lot of conservatives can easily agree.
	I think the interference of major corporations in the political life of the country, manipulating elections, I think that's something that basically conservatives can agree on.
	We don't like it when government gets too invasive.
	We don't like it when it has too much control.
	That makes sense.
	But we should also see that if there are private corporations which have become a monopoly, a cartel, and that cartel is capable of swinging elections by suppressing free speech in the United States, then they're hostile to American political traditions.
	We used to know that kind of thing.
	And I think with regard to With regard to the middle class, there's more disagreement, but I think that national conservatives are open to hearing proposals.
	a thousand different proposals of why government should just control everything, but targeted, specific, limited proposals which could make it possible for families to have an easier time forming so that, you know, the kinds of things that people are talking about is much greater subsidies for people who are married and staying married and having children.
	I don't know if that's the best way to do it, but I think most conservatives at this point in America are open to specific targeted programs that just make it easier to get married, stay married, have your own children, raise them, and raise them in ways that are moral and descended from Christian and Jewish tradition rather than woke neo-Marxism.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the value of liberty.
	It's been a lot of time talking about here how liberty has sort of outstripped its boundaries, has run amok.
	But I want to talk about what you think about liberty is useful, because that really is an open question in order to really kind of balance the two.
	What's good about liberty?
	What do we need from liberty?
	First, if you'd like to hear this conversation continue with Yoram Pozzoni for an additional 30 minutes, become a DailyWire member today.
	Go to dailywire.com slash sunday.
	You can click that link in the description right now.
	Use code Ben for 25% off your full conversation Well, everybody, make sure to go out and get a copy of Yoram's new book, Conservatism Rediscovery.
	Yoram, thanks so much for joining the show.
	It's great to have you.
	you. Sure. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Weber.
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