RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Yankee Go Home!

Jan. 23, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

19:07

Yankee Go Home!

The panel discusses Yoram Hazony's latest attempt to Americanize European nationalism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Final issue, Yankee Go Home.
	The panel discusses Yoram Hazzoni and his attempt to Americanize European nationalism.
	Hazzoni!
	All right, we'll just jump right into it.
	February 4th, Rome, Italy.
	There is a major conference on national conservatism.
	I guess my first question is, I mean, certainly...
	We will be invited.
	I mean, we're some of the major nationalist thinkers on the scene.
	I mean, perhaps even Ed Dutton is guest of honor.
	No, psych, nothing like that is happening.
	This is the latest attempt by a man named Yoram Harzoni, who actually recently published a book on in defense of nationalism.
	And he had a major event in Washington, D.C., at the Ritz-Carlton, in which, among others, John Bolton and Tucker Carlson and some collected paleoconservatives.
	attended, and now he is going on the tour of Europe, and none less than Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini from Italy, who I guess is out of power now, but will be in attendance.
	I'll just mention this.
	I'm sure we would be expelled if we got within 10 feet of the conference.
	As many of you will remember, and I don't want to make this all about me, but I do think this is significant.
	In 2014, I actually co-organized a conference in Budapest, Hungary.
	And it was a kind of pan-European event.
	There were many nationalists and identitarians who were invited, some interesting controversial figures as well who were all meeting in Budapest.
	Everything was going well, and about a week before the event, it became a big thing in the press in Hungary.
	And Victor Orban denounced it.
	We had all these things canceled.
	We went through with it, and so most of the attendees were actually there.
	And I ended up spending a weekend in a Hungarian prison.
	It was...
	Quite an ordeal.
	The prison life was interesting.
	I'm glad I went through with it.
	But it was a real, genuine attempt to have...
	It wasn't even a rally.
	It was an academic conference.
	It was obviously peaceful and lawful.
	We were not...
	We were tourists in a foreign land, but it was cracked down upon hard.
	And by Victor Orban, who is viewed by many as a savior of Europe, now he is the guest of honor at this kind of conference that it's the conference that would or should have been our event.
	And now he's speaking at a conference that is hosted by this...
	I'm an Israeli Hebraic scholar and seems to me to be an attempt at Americanization.
	The subtitle of the conference is God, Honor, Country, President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations.
	It is an attempt to basically integrate European nationalism within an American context.
	And I have to be honest, I find it all rather sad.
	So, Tyler, you've talked a lot about Hazoni.
	What do you think about this event?
	Yeah, well, I've got two points to make.
	The first point is that Hazoni has explicitly stated that his project is to claim nationalism from the distant right and put out a deracialized version of it.
	Now, if you read the book The Virtue of Nationalism that he put out, He contains extended arguments for the interests of Israel and expansionism, as well as arguments that could be interpreted in favor of the American unilateral order.
	And so while he argues in the book that I'm trying to overthrow a global liberalism in which everything is the same, he still argues that in order to have a nationalism, and he doesn't say it this way, of course, but it's still a global order of nation-states that needs to be enforced.
	Some nation might not be quite ready to be nationalist, so we're going to have to give him that little push.
	And so he inserts within his political realism a certain amount of intervention that could be justified and taken to be an American internationalist line, right?
	And the second point I would make is that when it comes to this conference, I saw you had a...
	It was yesterday about this conference, and it was about whether or not Hezoni is being successful.
	And the point came up, well, his book is not outselling, say, Bronze Age Pervert.
	But the fact of the matter is, it doesn't matter.
	the reason it doesn't matter is because he is clearly speaking to elites and people actually make the decisions in these countries, and he's pushing a petty divide-and-conquer little nation-state model, which is not going to be an effective bulwark against American power.
	It's dividing Europe further into these little nation states that are not going to be able to uphold any defense against that system.
	And in fact, if you don't deal with the American problem first, any nationalism you're going to put is either going to be subservient to America, or if you don't want to go along with American imperial interests, then you're going to get destroyed, probably economically.
	So it's peace.
	He's clearly successful.
	He's speaking to elites.
	It doesn't matter how famous or well-known he is in the media or how his books are doing, but he is speaking to the people that make decisions and the people that we want to incentivize.
	He's pushing us out of the discourse.
	Yes, we have been deplatformed.
	I mean, MPI hosted three or four, I guess, four major conferences in Washington, D.C. We had, you know, Guillaume Fay, Alain de Benoit, myself, you know, all these other people speaking at these events that were actually quite hoity-toity or fairly expensive.
	We were in the nation's capital, suit and tie, really serious events.
	You know, I attempted a pan-European.
	And the person who is doing...
	I mean, again, I'm speaking from jealousy.
	You could say doing what I should be doing is having some level of success.
	And so there are two ways of dealing with the dissident right.
	The first is the hard way, and that is we deplatform them.
	We call them all.
	We, you know, basically try to demoralize them and just erase them from the sphere.
	Hazoni is taking a much more insidious, but you could also say brilliant tactic, and that is that we become them, and we integrate them into what we've always wanted to do.
	So, I mean, at that conference, you had Tucker Carlson, and Tucker Carlson...
	To his credit, has been against the Iran escapade, has said some powerful stuff on demographics and so on.
	I'm more critical of Tucker than most, but he's been good, and he's at the very least been interesting.
	He's standing there alongside John Bolton.
	He's standing there alongside some of these kind of...
	Palatable paleo-conservatives, my old colleague Dan McCarthy and those people, people like Paul Gottfried, maybe a little too edgy, was not invited.
	But it's this ability to absorb those paleo-energies, which were present, the Buchananism, were present in the Donald Trump campaign, and basically integrate them into what they've always wanted to do, which is neoconservative foreign policy, attacking states.
	You know, this is Mussolini and Franco and Hitler on the rise again.
	Or do you say...
	Actually, they are not nearly that radical and potentially destabilizing.
	We can kind of absorb them.
	As opposed to doing the religious right stuff in America, we'll do the Catholic traditionalist stuff in Europe.
	We'll just kind of put a gloss on it.
	But we will basically promote Americanism in Europe.
	We'll just call it nationalism.
	And the fact that they even mention Ronald Reagan, I mean, it's just like...
	I don't know.
	If someone came to the United States and created the Conrad Adenauer Society, it's kind of like, get out of town.
	Even if I might have some admiration for him, that's not what we're about.
	And this is going to be a movement, ultimately, that calls itself nationalist, that makes evocations of Catholicism or whatever, but is ultimately about the flat tax.
	And supporting American foreign policy.
	I mean, it's a cynical move on his part, but it's actually quite brilliant.
	But what they will not integrate is a...
	A nation that has, say, nuclear capabilities or serious military capabilities that is in opposition to the American order.
	So you can be your happy little homeland somewhere so long as you are under the American umbrella and to a large extent the military nuclear umbrella.
	The second you start messing with that, the second you are a threat to America and potentially support states that are threats to Israel, You are, again, literally Hitler and a Nazi, and Hazoni will not invite you to a conference.
	So, I mean, this is what's happening.
	As I said, I'm jealous to some degree in the sense that these are the kind of pan-European events that we should be having.
	But I also see through it.
	And I think it's also, like, look at these people.
	There's a lot of fanboying of Victor Orban and other people like that among the dissident right.
	I think we should start to view these people much more skeptically.
	And this is just a sign that that is in order.
	Yes, I think that Salvini and particularly Victor Orban have got a difficult tightrope to walk because they've got the good of their country's economies and therefore their own political interests.
	They've got to come across as reasonably cooperative with the, well, frankly, the left, but whatever, let's call it the paleo-conservatives, whatever.
	But on the other hand, I think there's a degree in which they know what they want.
	And that balance was struck as well with your conference.
	I'm not too concerned about that.
	I think maybe someone like Auburn thinks it's good optics to go to something like that.
	As for this guy, What's his name?
	So I was looking at his book, and he clearly explicitly states that nationalism is about what he calls a tribe.
	Well, a tribe is inherently a genetic thing.
	A tribe is a bunch of clans.
	And then, of course, since then, because it doesn't look very good to say that, he's kind of gone back on that.
	And now he talks about this concept of civic nationalism and even Israel not being an ethno state.
	Right.
	Bunch of clans.
	rather than conversion.
	They don't accept conversion to converts to come and live in the state of Israel.
	So that's nonsense.
	So again, this whole phrase again, having a cake and eating it, whatever you want to say, that he obviously supports Israel to be an ethno-state, but all other countries to be a civic nationalist state.
	And it goes a little bit further, because one interesting thing in his book, and I don't completely disagree with him, but an interesting thing in this book is that he...
	Promotes the concept of nationalism as Judaic, as emanating from the Old Testament and being opposed to Babel, which is an empire.
	And I actually don't even fully disagree, but the move he's making is to place that little meme in the mind of any nationalist.
	Don't get out of hand.
	Remember...
	Everything that you're doing is Judaic.
	It's biblical.
	It's Judeo-Christian.
	And that you can't have a coherent nationalism without recognizing that because we Jews invented it.
	We invented the left.
	We also invented the right.
	We invented the center.
	We invented the margin.
	Kind of way of saying that, you know, you're being Jewish by being a nationalist, and you have something at stake in Israel by being a nationalist.
	So it's this thing that's actually not new.
	It's this kind of Judeo-Christian right, the anti-Islam right that we saw throughout the Bush administration.
	It's being kind of, you know, reinvented here.
	But I would just, you know, point this out.
	One thing that I gained from reading his book is that To be frank, we've got to get away from just pure tribalism, and we need to become Babel, and Empire is good, and the way you affect geopolitics is that you are a bigger group, a powerful state that can be badass and force your will on the world, and that's not going to happen.
	Through little nation states without military capabilities of a couple million people.
	I'm sorry, it's not going to happen.
	He's pointing out a threat, which is very interesting.
	He's pointing out the threat and attempting to neutralize it.
	And I think we can kind of learn from our enemies in this sense.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	The other thing is, them calling themselves nationalists is like one of these researchers, like Gardner, saying everyone has a different kind of intelligence.
	It just means the concept of intelligence becomes meaningless and another word is found.
	It's the same with nationalists.
	For them to call themselves nationalists, I was looking into one of the groups that's involved in organising this is a group called the Beau Group.
	And this is a group that's based on the left of the Conservative Party.
	So former chairmen include Leon Britton, who was Home Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, on the left of the Conservative Party, Christopher Brockelbant Fowler, who defected from the Conservative Party to the Social Democrats, which was a Labour breakaway group, Sam Guima, who was a Conservative MP who then defected to the Liberal Democrats last year or a couple of years ago.
	So this is the left of the Conservative Party, not just the right of the Conservative Party, it's the left of the Conservative Party.
	So there's nothing nationalistic about this.
	This is just conservatism dressed up in a word that might possibly be attractive.
	Right.
	And they'll come up with another word in 10 years.
	Identitarian.
	They might even take identitarianism.
	I mean, it's just putting...
	It's like these debates with...
	There was this debate between Bret Stephens and Harzoni, and it's...
	They're both just fighting for Israel.
	They're just, like, using different words.
	You know, for, like, what's good for Israel?
	It's not much of a debate, in fact.
	It's just a debate about language.
	People will see through it, I think.
	Yeah, I was just going to say, the arguments in the book are fairly weak.
	I mean, I know, for example, he talks about the tribe, and Ed said, okay, well, there's a genetic basis there.
	But in the same book, he actually says he doesn't mean race.
	He explicitly states that.
	He says, okay, but you can also allow outsiders in, and they can become integrated into the tribe.
	So he does make that argument.
	In many ways, there's parts of the book that are exceptionally weak, but as Richard was saying, there's also parts of the book...
	Where what he doesn't say ends up making a stronger argument, for example, in favor of empire.
	I mean, he's arguing for an order of nation-states.
	At the end of the day, that is still an imperial order that's coming from somewhere.
	And when you start getting into the realistic aspects of actually enforcing that, which he does get into at the end of the book, then it starts looking more like an empire.
	You know, you could have all these nation states, but at some point, there's going to be that exceptional actor who enforces the borders of the nation.
	So, you know, in order for there to be a League of Nations, there has to be a superpower that can prevent, you know, border disputes and, you know, wars and etc.
	And, you know, who is that going to be?
	So, at the end of the day, Hezoni is just reinforcing the American order.
	And there's going to be a...
	Big kahuna on the planet, which is going to be Washington or, you know, in competition with the Soviet Union, now Washington alone.
	And you can have all these little nation states in the Big Kahuna's shadow.
	And that is what he's won.
	That is what he ultimately wants, even though he's not willing to say it.
	Yeah, I was gonna say there's a symmetry here between what we were talking about earlier with the woke left versus the Bernie crowd and now that they adopt a similar language and they're fighting over what that struggle actually is.
	Well, that's the same thing we're in here with national conservatism is they're adopting our language, but then they're moving kicking us out of our spaces and taking the attention and so there needs to be I think a stronger critical effort on our part to actually Write books and combat this and hold conferences and combat this.
	There's no way that you can combat this without entering into the arena and challenging it directly on our own terms.
	Well, maybe we should hold a big conference in Jerusalem.
	That'd be interesting.
	They might actually let us do it.
	We'll see.
	But yeah, I think that would be the analog to what he's doing, holding it in Rome.
	I think the Rome aspect is utterly shocking.

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