April 24, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, the director of the John Templeton Foundation's Project in Jewish Philosophical Theology, and the author of several books, including The Virtue of Nationalism. | ||
| Yoram Hazony, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| I am glad to have you here, because as I said to you in the green room just a moment ago, you're one of about 12 people that I see on Twitter that doesn't completely enrage me. | ||
| You actually make a little bit of sense on that Twitter machine. | ||
| That's the highest compliment I can possibly pay anyone. | ||
| That's a pretty serious compliment, and I don't know how many people would agree with you, but... | ||
| I'm glad finally to meet with that background. | ||
| That's wonderful. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, so okay, so before we get into the book, and it's called The Virtue of Nationalism, and just even just saying the word nationalism sort of sets bells off for a lot of people, so we're gonna kind of quantify and qualify what that word actually means. | ||
| You were born in Israel. | ||
| You live in Jerusalem now. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your background. | ||
| Well, in between being born in Israel and living in Jerusalem, you can hear that my accent is not the fully Israeli accent. | ||
| I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey and went to school there, met my wife there, did a doctorate at Rutgers nearby in political theory, and then Julie and I I moved to Israel. | ||
| I worked for a while for Netanyahu for a few years, quite a while ago already, and then set up a conservative think tank called the Shalem Center, which did about 20 years of work trying to figure out what Israeli and Jewish conservatism would be like. | ||
| We have nine kids, which is probably the The biggest achievement. | ||
| And I've been kind of pulled back, you've noticed in the last few years, pulled back into American and European issues because for most of my life I felt like Israel was the front lines and that's where I was really needed. | ||
| And these days, for the first time in my life, I feel that America and Europe are actually kind of in worse shape than Israel is. | ||
| Yeah, what do you mean by that? | ||
| How was Israel at the front lines where that's now shifted? | ||
| Well, Israel used to be a—I mean, it still is to an extent—a strong—I'm sorry, a small and struggling country, in a sense, like the edge between the order of the Western world and kind of chaotic bedlam, and needed a little—needed a lot of help in order to strengthen itself. | ||
| America looked fine for most of that. | ||
| Time and today I think the situation is almost flipped where Israel is the strongest that it's ever been and in a lot of ways has defeated many of its of the problems the dog did in the last generation. | ||
| And America is fraying, and the UK is fraying. | ||
| I don't have to tell you, it's not like Israel is going to do well if the entire West disintegrates. | ||
| So I've spent the last few years, and that's how we know each other, through Twitter and writings that are directed in trying to help America and the UK and other Western countries with the issues that I think are facing them now. | ||
| Yeah, so we're gonna spend most of the interview obviously talking about those issues, but nine kids living in Jerusalem. | ||
| What's living in Jerusalem like? | ||
| I feel like it's probably Maybe not probably, maybe exactly the most misunderstood place on planet Earth, for good reason. | ||
| Oh gosh, I mean, in some ways it's just a dream. | ||
| I walk on Friday night with my twin ten-year-olds and I walk with them to synagogue. | ||
| We walk down the hill to synagogue and you can see the whole city from from where we are, because it's kind of on a hill. | ||
| And for a Jew, it's really kind of a miracle that after a couple of thousand years in which my ancestors were praying, please God, bring us back so that one day we'll be able to see the Jews return to Jerusalem. | ||
| And we actually get to see it. | ||
| So it's incredibly moving, and it never loses its magic. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's also a very real place in a very real political location. | ||
| And today, everything is basically quiet and peaceful in Jerusalem pretty much all the time. | ||
| But if you go back just to the mid-2000s, We had a period where there were literally bombs going off in the cafes and the buses of the city every day. | ||
| And when Israel invaded Bethlehem to put an end to this, my wife and I then, we were living on the southern part of the city, and we walked hand in hand up to a hill from which we could see the Israeli I mean, it's like what you see on television, except we just sat there and watched it with our own eyes. | ||
| So, you know, we had six months at that time in which we had helicopters patrolling over our house every night. | ||
| And so it's both things. | ||
| It's both the front lines of civilization and you can feel the fragility of what we've built. | ||
| You can feel that it's fragile and know that nothing is certain about what's going to happen next. | ||
| On the one hand. | ||
| On the other hand, on a daily basis, you're connecting to a history of thousands of years and to biblical hopes and aspirations that for people in America, it's mostly school books, but for the things that you learn as a kid in school or in Sunday school or someplace, or you hear from your grandparents, but here we're really doing it. | ||
| Do you think in a weird way that the threat of bombings or terrorism or whatever else is going on or the general seemingly existential threat because it's such a small country actually helps the ingenuity that comes at Israel because I remember I was there a few years ago during the stabbing sprees and I went right into the old city of Jerusalem and you know my mom was texting me you know you don't have to go there and I just went right in and I remember there was a certain tension you know it was kind of looking around but I went into the Arab quarter | ||
| and I walked through the gate and somebody had just been stabbed there the day before | ||
| and I thought you just have to keep going. | ||
| If people can live like this, I can certainly do it for one day of my life | ||
| or a couple hours of my life. | ||
| Yeah, first of all, I'm real pleased that you did that. | ||
| You know, a lot of people just get scared. | ||
| And, you know, seeing something on television, seeing some violence, and then deciding you're going to live your life, you're going to decide where you're going to go and what you're going to do and what you're going to say because you saw something on TV and got scared. | ||
| I mean, I understand it, but I don't think it's the best way to live. | ||
| Well, you can also see that these people live on top of each other. | ||
| These quarters are right on top of each other, and I had Kanafeh in the Arab quarter, and I had Falafel in the Jewish quarter, and everyone's existing and not killing each other. | ||
| I mean, that's the truth. | ||
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Right, they do. | |
| But our Our future depends on countless little acts of bravery like that. | ||
| Like, I'm not going to be deterred. | ||
| I'm going to go eat that falafel. | ||
| I'm going to lead a normal life here. | ||
| That's what builds the normal life, is people like you saying that. | ||
| So there really is a daily effort which is built on countless small acts of bravery and there's a Talmudic There's a famous Talmudic saying, that the land is only won through hardship. | ||
| And these are little tiny hardships that, you know, something scared you, something feels uncomfortable, but you're going to do the right thing anyway. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It's good to live that way. | ||
| It's good to live not afraid. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about nationalism, because as I said, if you just say the word nationalism, or if you say I'm a nationalist or anything like that, the connotations or the implications are that you're somehow racist, you're xenophobic, all of these things. | ||
| So first off, can you just define, at least in your view, what nationalism is? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I actually grew up in a nationalist house, meaning like many Israelis do, and it's not just Israelis. | ||
| People in India, people in Ireland, there's a lot of countries in the world where people still remember that a national movement is a struggle against empire, and so it's a struggle for freedom, and it still has good connotations. | ||
| So in those kinds of traditions, Which I draw on in my book, nationalism is understood to be a principled standpoint that sees the world as governed best when it consists of many independent nations. | ||
| So each nation will have its own laws, its own traditions, its own This is basically how we've viewed the world for the last hundred years or so, right? | ||
| independently without being forced to live a certain way by other nations. | ||
| This is basically how we've viewed the world for the last hundred years or so. I mean most relatively sane people | ||
| that there are countries and they have borders and they're different. | ||
| They can negotiate together? | ||
| Right, but it's not... This way of viewing the world is about three or four hundred years old in its current version. | ||
| In the book, I actually argue that this is a biblical ideal. | ||
| You don't find the Greeks or the Romans Painting a picture of a world of independent nations that that vision of a world of independent nations is a is something that inherits I'm sorry that that enters our inheritance from from Hebrew Bible, and then it appears throughout you know throughout Western history in various forms in in in various parts of Christian Christian history so in its current form that the feeling of a | ||
| A just world, a free world, is one of competition among independent peoples. | ||
| It's about, depending on how you count, it's about three or four hundred years old. | ||
| The first country in Europe to explicitly declare independence is England in 1534. | ||
| is England in 1534. Henry VIII says we're not even formally going to be part of the | ||
| Holy Roman Empire anymore. | ||
| We're just independent. | ||
| We're doing our own thing. | ||
| And that model was picked up by the Dutch, by the Scots, by the Swiss, by the French, by various others, and then becomes kind of the basis for an ordering of the world, where this became more and more the intuition. | ||
| Of course, there were plenty of empires during those times, and lots of injustice, and And I don't want to turn it into some kind of utopia or something. | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| But slowly, the idea that there's something good about allowing nations to go their own way and to be free, that did become the common sense view and still was up until World War II. | ||
| I think it was really only in the 1960s. | ||
| That academics and intellectuals really turned against this idea and began arguing that nationalism is just an evil. | ||
| Right, so what shifted then in the 1960s? | ||
| Because when you talk about nations with borders that can decide what they do within their borders and that people can have a nationalism that they can be proud of that isn't xenophobic or racist or the rest of it, I think that makes sense to most people. | ||
| It is, you said common sense, it strikes me As common sense. | ||
| So what happened in the 60s? | ||
| Was that sort of a latent period after World War II that these ideas bubbled up through academia? | ||
| It's all about the trauma of World War I and World War II. | ||
| It's all about that. | ||
| And the beginning immediately after World War II, there were Marxists and there were liberals who said, look, Hitler is a nationalist. | ||
| And it's true that Hitler called himself nationalist. I mean Hitler called himself a nationalist but | ||
| he's actually an imperialist because from the very beginning his goal was | ||
| not for Germany to you know to be independent. His goal was for Germany to | ||
| become as he said Lord of the Earth, Mistress of the Globe. So Hitler's not | ||
| not you know our traditional idea of a nationalist. | ||
| Right, so that's a misunderstanding of nationalism right there, right? | ||
| Because just if he had been a nationalist by the strict definition, then he wouldn't have wanted to do anything outside of the force. | ||
| Right, so he would have been terrible for Germany, but not necessarily starting world war with France and England and Russia and everybody else. | ||
| He would have been terrible for Germany anyway, but you can't call him a nationalist According to my tradition, if his dream, his aspiration, is not the freedom of his people, his dream, you know, among other people's, his aspiration is to rule the globe. | ||
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Right. | |
| It was expanding. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| So, imperialism versus nationalism, that's, for people who are nationalists, instead of critics of nationalism, for people who are nationalists, that's the big divide. | ||
| Are you willing to give the respect of self-determination to many nations like your own, or are you really just looking to conquer the world? | ||
| So after World War II, various anti-nationalist theories that hadn't succeeded in getting traction up until then Got a huge boost from the fact that Hitler was a national socialist, and that when he spoke about imperialism, he used the word nationalism. | ||
| And the academic intellectual culture Let's say it was still producing defense of nationalism against imperialism still through the 1950s, but by the time you get to the 1960s, you get Elie Kadouri, a famous pro-imperialist scholar who wrote a book called Nationalism, which is kind of an anti-nationalist manifesto that blames nationalism | ||
| for both world wars and says it's unworkable. | ||
| All of the arguments that are familiar to people today are already in Qadouri's work, that the divisions among peoples by creating independent states, you create borders, borders are always something people argue about, that itself produces wars and triggers wars, And then the thinking that your country is great, right? | ||
| Making your nation great again, that kind of stuff. | ||
| The argument is that that kind of nationalism necessarily produces hatred. | ||
| Hatred, violence, war, intolerance. | ||
| It kind of takes all of the worst things of recent centuries in the past and pins it on this one word and this one idea. | ||
| So if that's not the case, how did these ideas then pick up? | ||
| Is this just sort of where we see this now in academia where they just sort of pick ideas that they sort of all agree on are true and then it just runs throughout the universities and then eventually trickles up to the media? | ||
| Yes, and then it gets broadcast. | ||
| The universities are a hothouse for the development of ideas, which is, you know, | ||
| in principle is a really wonderful thing. | ||
| But because academia is overwhelmingly, I mean, you know, it consists of a debate between kind of neo-Marxists who want to, you know, whose aim is to achieve justice by undermining pretty much all inherited ideas one after another. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| And then there's the great majority of academics who are who are liberals and don't necessarily agree with the neo-marxism, | ||
| but it turns out that they're not very good at resisting it. | ||
| So academia ends up being a fight between two universalist visions, | ||
| and they're both utopian. | ||
| One is a neo-Marxist universalist vision, which is utopian, and the other is a liberal universalist vision, which is utopian. | ||
| And ideas that are like nationalism, that are particularist, that are arguing for the goodness of the justice of defending your own people, looking out for their interests, their tradition, their culture. | ||
| That kind of thing violates the universalism of both the Marxists and the liberals. | ||
| Right, so have we watched sort of the failure of liberalism here? | ||
| So if the neo-Marxists and the postmodernists, even if they're a smaller percentage at the universities than the liberals, that the liberals somehow, I mean this is what I've been trying to noodle through for the last couple of years now, that the liberals somehow didn't have enough to stand on to stop the bad ideas of the neo-Marxists. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And you can actually see why, because the agenda evolves and it develops, but it's always very clear, picking out of ideas that need to be destroyed and uprooted, picking out of institutions that need to be destroyed and uprooted, They're constantly saying to get justice then you know we | ||
| need to overthrow this that and the other thing and the liberals their response is | ||
| no everybody just should be free to do whatever they want and you know | ||
| of course I'm very sympathetic to that but but what you say it's not enough it's | ||
| not enough When that's the contest, one side is saying, here's a really clear agenda for what we got to do in order to fix the problems in the world. | ||
| And the liberals are always one form or another of saying, well, no, let's just everybody should do whatever they want. | ||
| And that's not good enough. | ||
| If you're fighting a strong vision of what would be right, you need to counter it with a strong vision or you'll lose. | ||
| And that's what happens. | ||
| I mean, that's what I'm seeing right now with the liberals in the United States. | ||
| It's like this ever-dissipating group of people that are sort of standing on quicksand because the left, the neo-Marxists, have sort of taken over the Democratic Party and all the apparatus of the left. | ||
| And then you have liberals who now mostly secretly agree with conservatives in a lot of ways, but they can't, but they're afraid to say that, and then we're just watching them whittle away. | ||
| It's sad to me, in many ways, for the ideas that I care most about. | ||
| Don't get too sad. | ||
| We're really bad at predicting what's going to happen. | ||
| People are just bad at it. | ||
| We've got to figure out what's worth fighting for. | ||
| We may win, we may lose, but it's a mistake to think that we know how it's all going to turn out. | ||
| We just don't. | ||
| Well, if we knew, I wouldn't be doing this. | ||
| Nobody predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, or almost nobody, and nobody predicted the rise of Brexit and Trump and nationalism now, or the housing bubble. | ||
| We're terrible at seeing the future. | ||
| What we've got to do is we've got to think strategically about what kinds of ideas are out there and what's needed, and we need to work to build up An alternative framework that's going to be more conservative and more attractive and capable of rallying people, which I think liberalism is less and less capable of doing these days. | ||
| So, and I've seen you do some Twitter threads on this sort of thought, so I obviously want to talk about Trump and Brexit and how they fit into this conversation, but so if liberalism has a certain fault here, what are the answers that conservatism has that The word conservatism refers to different political movements which are tradition-based. | ||
| The word conservatism refers to different political movements which are tradition-based, | ||
| they're traditionalist. | ||
| So conservatism is not a universal theory. | ||
| It's not like Marxism or liberalism, where you take a Marxist or a liberal and they'll tell you how the whole world should think, in all times, in all ages, every place in the world. | ||
| Conservatism is not like that, because being a traditionalist means, you know, I may respect more or less the traditions of the Russians or the Chinese or the Indians or the Germans, but each one of them is different, right? | ||
| So some of them I like more and some of them I like less. | ||
| American context, or let's say the Anglo-American context, to be a conservative means a specific thing. | ||
| It means to believe that the Anglo-American political traditions, political and religious traditions, are an extraordinary achievement. | ||
| They are one of the greatest, if not the greatest, one of the greatest traditions that have ever been developed in mankind's history, and that most of | ||
| what we value in what we love about the modern world, whether it's the idea of | ||
| limited government or individual liberties or the kind of science that grows out of Newton | ||
| or the kind of culture that grows out of a common sense skepticism. | ||
| All of these things, they're part of The Anglo-American inheritance of an empiricist attitude towards knowledge, a common law tradition which is not based on universal rights, but which pioneered freedom of speech and freedom of expression. | ||
| of property. In fact, most of what's in the American Bill of Rights is these traditional | ||
| English rights, which were not developed by liberals. They were developed by conservatives | ||
| fighting against the authoritarianism of, let's say, the stewards. | ||
| So when we talk about conservatism, we're not talking about there's one set of ideas | ||
| that are eternally always true. | ||
| We're talking about a tradition of a certain nation or group of nations, which by trial and error So it's empirical, right? | ||
| By trial and error over centuries, over thousands of years in fact, have succeeded in developing and stumbling upon things that are just spectacular and that are kind of a gift to the rest of mankind. | ||
| And today what we're seeing is that the educational institutions, rather than saying, "Look, let's take a look at the traditions of this | ||
| nation and, you know, the thousands of years of development, going all the way back to the | ||
| Bible. | ||
| Let's see how it contributed to the things that we care about." | ||
| That's what a conservative would do, would say, "What contributed to the things we care | ||
| about and how can we strengthen those strands in the tradition, both nationally and also | ||
| in our personal lives. | ||
| How can we live as conservative people who raise children to respect the things that should be respected? | ||
| That's what conservatives focus on and so they're playing, conservatives are always playing a completely different game from liberals. Liberals are trying to tell you some | ||
| abstract set of rules that if everybody were to follow them, then everything would be great. And | ||
| conservatives say there is no such abstract set of rules that if everybody followed them, | ||
| everything would be great. | ||
| What there is is nations handing down a way of life, which have some good things about | ||
| them, some bad things about them, but everything that's good about them is coming down from | ||
| that tradition. So we need to be working on strengthening it and improving it. | ||
| So as we're watching what I would say is sort of the collapse of liberalism on the left, and now there's sort of all of these refugees, many of whom have been in this very studio and who watch this show. | ||
| There are refugees that I think are moving to something that is center right, which I see is rich with ideas and debate and all of these things. | ||
| I think a lot of people have some fear. | ||
| If you've come from the left, they have some fear that there's some sort of religious connotation attached to conservatism. | ||
| Now you just explained a little bit of the history of that. | ||
| But do you think there's room for a secular conservatism? | ||
| Can that fit within there? | ||
| Look, it's a great question and there's no simple answer to it. | ||
| Let me say one thing that's really simple. | ||
| You don't have to become an Orthodox Christian or an Orthodox Jew in order to take part in this great inheritance, which is your inheritance. | ||
| It's a different question to say, is it actually possible to sanitize it of all religious aspects? | ||
| That I'm more doubtful. | ||
| So let's take an example that's related to this book. | ||
| I mentioned earlier that the idea of national independence is a biblical idea. | ||
| The Romans didn't believe in national independence. | ||
| The Greeks didn't believe in national independence. | ||
| I mean, it has a source and its source is in this tradition that says that, you know, God of Israel, God creator of heaven and earth, is speaking to Moses. | ||
| And unlike all the other gods of the ancient Middle East, this particular god does not order his people to go out and conquer the four corners of the earth, which is what the gods of the Assyrians and the Babylonians were doing. | ||
| That's a pretty big sea change from what was happening before that. | ||
| It's an incredible... I mean, at a certain level, that's what the Hebrew Bible is about. | ||
| It's about, is there some alternative to living these little tribes that are constantly at war with each other, or bringing peace and prosperity by having the Babylonians conquer the entire world, the four corners of the earth, as they used to say. | ||
| And so here the God of Israel speaks to Moses, and even though he's the creator of heaven and earth and he's the God of everything, he doesn't tell Abraham, he doesn't tell Moses, go out and conquer the whole world. | ||
| He gives them borders. | ||
| The first, as far as we know, the first borders any god ever gave his people. | ||
| He says, here are your borders and you're not allowed to cross them. | ||
| You're not allowed to go trouble the neighbors because they have their own land and their own promise and their own way. | ||
| This is a huge Revolution in political thought, but at the same time also in theology, that there could be a God that cares about all humanity, but what He wants is each different nation to have its own freedom. | ||
| Now, take that as an example. | ||
| That's something that I think it's very difficult to to have an Anglo-American conservatism that uproots that | ||
| biblical heritage. Okay, now that that doesn't dictate, you know, what you believe on every | ||
| subject just because you're conservative. | ||
| Right. But if you don't have some kind of, if you don't have a sense that there's something | ||
| incredibly important that needs to be honored and handed down in that tradition, then it's going to | ||
| be real hard for you to be a conservative. | ||
| So how do you make room then? | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| So on a macro level, you're saying you need those underpinnings. | ||
| On the micro level, for the individual that comes across that maybe that either isn't religious or for gay people or anyone that's sort of the outsider, how can they say, all right, well, I can fit into this conservative idea? | ||
| In different times, different periods of history, there were tighter and looser, more inclusive and less inclusive versions of the traditions that we're talking about. | ||
| I think there's an important, very common misconception about conservatism, is that often people who are not conservatives assume that the traditions are monolithic, that they dictate one answer on every question. | ||
| You know, the tradition is this authoritarian thing. | ||
| It's always been the same. | ||
| It has a catechism, and you just have to believe and do whatever you're told, and if you don't, then you're out. | ||
| I think that's a completely It's almost a propagandistic view of the way traditions actually work. | ||
| The way traditions actually work is that, of course, a strong tradition does seek to inculcate norms. | ||
| When I say norms, I mean the thing that it would be best to do, or the thing that it would be best to be. | ||
| But being The fact that tradition hands down certain norms, first of all, there's huge arguments within the tradition about what those norms are, right? | ||
| I mean, the traditions themselves are very often very pluralistic internally. | ||
| And then even if you're not part of that pluralism, there's additional layers. | ||
| There's the things that are strongly encouraged and then things that are slightly | ||
| encouraged and the things that are tolerated and then there are things that are | ||
| considered problematic but you leave them alone for now and then there are | ||
| things that the tradition you know goes after and tries to say look that's | ||
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really going to ruin us. | |
| Murdering people is a bit much. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that the more conservative you become and the more you study what conservatism really is, as opposed to the cartoon version of it that we get in most academic courses on the subject, let's say, or on television, When you study it, of course you'll find things in the past that you'll see as terrible. | ||
| Nobody's pretending that's not the case. | ||
| But a tradition is something that is always internally pluralistic. | ||
| It has different levels of space that it makes for different kinds of dissidents. | ||
| For example, the English tradition is often accused of being anti-Catholic. | ||
| And you'll notice that its relationship with Judaism is not the same as its relationship with Catholicism. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the periods that we're talking about are periods in which Catholicism was the official ideology of a world empire that was trying to conquer Conquer the English and prevent them from being independent. | ||
| And I'm not saying everything that was done in the name of defending against this was perfectly well executed. | ||
| But you have to, I think, use some common sense. | ||
| A nation that's facing a world empire, that has a certain religion, that's its formal ideology. | ||
| Well, of course they're not going to treat Catholics the same way that they're going to treat other dissidents. | ||
| But I think people are always looking at the past to see, oh, gotcha, look, they persecuted this and that and the other thing. | ||
| And usually it's true. | ||
| But they're not looking at the way in which dissidents did, in fact, flourish increasingly over the millennia under these different kinds of regimes. | ||
| I mean, the fact is we Jews are still here. | ||
| I mean, there was plenty of persecution, there's plenty to complain about, but the fact is that we're still here and that means that there were times and places throughout the history of Christianity and Islam where the Jews had more or less status, more or less tolerance, more or less contribution in society. | ||
| I would say that with regard to conservatism today, We're in any case in a period where what we're trying to do is we're trying to salvage what we can. | ||
| I don't know if it's going to succeed, but as a conservative, the map that I face today is Virtually every major idea or concept or ideal that was handed down from the past has been savagely attacked and maybe overthrown in the last few generations. | ||
| So I'm talking about the idea of the nation, the idea of the family, the ideas of man and woman, of God and scripture, of holiness, I mean, you could just keep going and going. | ||
| I mean, anything that I think created the things that are good in our world today, that really worked, is now being savaged and destroyed. | ||
| And I'm looking for allies. | ||
| I'm not looking for enemies. | ||
| I have enough. | ||
| The people who are, and it's many, the ones who are actively purposely destroying these things and the ones who are just going along with it. | ||
| That's most of our culture. | ||
| You know, I would be real grateful for a willingness to have conversation with anybody who's willing to try to work out a contemporary conservatism that could do some good and that would be as inclusive as possible. | ||
| All right then, so let's take this conversation into the modern world. | ||
| There's a couple things happening right now that sort of fit. | ||
| Well, that you talk about in the book, but that fit perfectly for this conversation. | ||
| So let's talk about Trump first. | ||
| People describe him as a nationalist. | ||
| He talks about America first. | ||
| As far as I can tell, he doesn't want to nation-build all over the world and expand American empire everywhere. | ||
| That's sort of your kind of nationalism, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| I think on nationalism, Trump is excellent. | ||
| I mean, he's not just looking for ways, you know, and this is, you know, whether you think that he's finding the right ways or proposing the right ways, his theme is he's looking for ways to try to think about America as a nation rather than as a world Empire. | ||
| We need to come back to that in a second. | ||
| But then he goes and he speaks in front of the United Nations. | ||
| And he says, look, I'm not just saying that my job is America first. | ||
| I'm talking to all the nations. | ||
| I'm saying, look, each of you, you're elected by a certain public or you represent a certain public. | ||
| And your job is to take care of those people. | ||
| And I think that's exactly the kind of nationalism we should be thinking about. | ||
| Does that right there show you how crazy things have gotten at the academic level? | ||
| Because even when he says that, that we should just think about ourselves first, That somehow is thought of as xenophobic or racist or something like that. | ||
| Anyone, if you really sat in it and thought about it for a second, or maybe if you remove Trump's personality or whatever it is, but if you thought about just what he's saying, that Americans should care about America first and what happens within our borders first, it's sensible. | ||
| I mean, as you said at the beginning, it's common sense. | ||
| It's sensible. | ||
| People in the United States are convinced that they have some kind of uniquely crazy thing going on because of who Trump is. | ||
| I actually, I think this is actually just not true. | ||
| I mean, if you go, just go look at the UK, right? | ||
| They don't have Donald Trump. | ||
| You think that things are any less crazy in the UK than they are in the United States? | ||
| We'll get to Brexit in a minute. | ||
| Look at a sister democracy with, in a lot of ways, a very similar culture, and the elites—I'm talking about the universities, the media, a lot of the career politicians and bureaucrats—there's this layer of people who are just as crazy against Any kind of indications of nationalism and national independence in the UK as they are in America. | ||
| So it's not... Trump didn't cause this craziness. | ||
| Trump is actually more of an effect than he is a cause. | ||
| The craziness predates him. | ||
| The craziness begins with... I mean, it has a long history, but let's say roughly. | ||
| The craziness begins roughly in 1989 When the Soviet Union falls, the Berlin Wall falls, and America, which had spent most of its, not all, but most of its | ||
| Two centuries of independence, arguing for the virtue of independent nations, being mostly on that side of things. | ||
| When the Americans were broadcasting their radio broadcasts into Europe during World War II, what were they broadcasting? | ||
| You've been conquered by the evil empire, and we're coming to free the nations of Europe so that then they will be able to live independently. | ||
| We're not coming to make our little satellite nations. | ||
| Right, we're not coming to be, you know, a better empire to conquer you and rule you. | ||
| So at the time it was clear and I think most... People probably don't realize how incredibly unique that is, right? | ||
| That a country would go halfway across the world to do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a very special thing. | ||
| This goes back to your religion point. | ||
| When FDR, on the eve of World War II, in January 1939, he has a State of the Union address where he can already see that America is going to go to war against the fascists and maybe the communists too. | ||
| And he describes what it is that we Americans are fighting for. | ||
| What are we going to be fighting for? | ||
| And he says, first of all, for our religion. | ||
| And then from our religion comes our democracy and our willingness to have comedy among nations. | ||
| But he says, first and foremost, religion. | ||
| In fact, he calls the allied nations, he calls them the God-fearing democracies. | ||
| Today, nobody would say that. | ||
| Nobody would understand that FDR and the people then thought they were fighting for God-fearing countries against atheist totalitarians. | ||
| Nobody thinks like that anymore. | ||
| But that's what it was. | ||
| So if we go back to... | ||
| Where does this willingness to allow other nations their freedom come from? | ||
| FDR at least knows that it comes from Christianity, that it comes from Judaism and Christianity. | ||
| But to go back to the current crisis, we've got elites that, after 1989, And it doesn't matter if they call themselves liberal or conservative. | ||
| I mean, almost all of them. | ||
| Democrats, Republicans, Labour, Conservative in the UK and almost all the parties in Europe went after this utopian dream of one law to cover the entire earth. | ||
| George H.W. | ||
| Bush called it the New World Order. | ||
| Like, if you're a nationalist, you hear this kind of thing. | ||
| It just sends a chill down your spine. | ||
| Right, the bells go off. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's why America won the Cold War, was to impose order on the entire planet and now America's going to decide? | ||
| I mean, that was really kind of a kooky moment. | ||
| And not only that, but Bush's, that One World Order speech, I mean, he had a few of them, but the particular One World Order speech, I mean, he says explicitly, For a thousand generations, mankind has been struggling to reach this moment. | ||
| It's like this utopian thing. | ||
| A thousand generations we've been struggling to reach this moment, but all the previous generations have failed, and now we're going to succeed. | ||
| What are we going to succeed in? | ||
| He says, we're going to eliminate the law of the jungle and replace it by the rule of law. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's like this, you know, John Lennon stuff, like the entire planet is going to be this borderless thing under a single law. | ||
| And we'll all somehow automatically love each other, and we won't war with each other, and we're gonna have... | ||
| Because the whole past was based on ignorance and darkness and illusion. | ||
| There was nothing good back there. | ||
| He didn't explicitly say that, but that's the clear implication. | ||
| But it's funny that it's a very neo-Marxist idea coming out of George H.W. | ||
| Bush. | ||
| Nobody would really think that. | ||
| It absolutely is. | ||
| Sometimes you hear conservatives like me say, it's all just liberalism. | ||
| It doesn't matter what label they put on it, because the fact is that all the elites at the top of all of these academic institutions and political parties, they had all these disagreements among one another. | ||
| They disagreed, they fought, they had election campaigns, but they weren't disagreeing about the fundamentals. | ||
| The fundamental was We liberals in the West, we know how to run the world. | ||
| We've got the answer. | ||
| All you need to do is take the way America runs, or Germany, or whatever you want, and apply it to every country in the world, to every nation in the world. | ||
| But if necessary, by force, we'll dictate the rules. | ||
| There's going to be rules for the whole planet. | ||
| And if somebody does something wrong, then we start bombing them. | ||
| It's simplistic, but that's roughly a description of an entire generation of American and European political thought. | ||
| So that would be like the neoconservatives, basically? | ||
| Well, they're just one strand. | ||
| I mean, you'll notice that the neoconservatives may have been arguing, right, for, let's say, invade Iraq and Afghanistan, whereas liberals in Europe might have been saying, no, don't invade Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| So there's substantive disagreements, but what they're not disagreeing about is that | ||
| the European ideal of eliminate all the borders, right? | ||
| The European Union, founded in 1992 in its current form, meaning right after the Berlin | ||
| Wall fell, the idea we're going to take down all the borders, we're not going to have restrictions | ||
| on immigration or trade or anything. | ||
| Everybody's going to be free to be part of one thing. | ||
| And Europe itself has no borders, right? | ||
| Europe didn't know and still doesn't know to this day how many countries on earth it's going to expand to embrace. | ||
| And its entire project of the European elites is creating world courts and world economic bodies to regulate everything on earth and get everybody on one page doing one thing. | ||
| So there's an argument between the Europeans and the Americans. | ||
| Should the Americans be invading Iraq? | ||
| But there's no argument about what the project is. | ||
| There's no argument about the idea that we don't actually need diversity among nations. | ||
| We don't need independent nations. | ||
| We need one central thing that's going to govern everything. | ||
| So is the simplest way to encapsulate their argument is that's, like, I get the, there's this dystopian idea or sort of that by freeing everybody or something that, you know, we'll just ignore thousands of years of history and we're all gonna love each other or something like that. | ||
| But with the more nefarious version of this is that, well, one world government, now you can absolutely control everybody. | ||
| I mean, would you say that's really the heart of this? | ||
| It's really about control, not freeing everybody. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| They say they're freeing everybody, but their idea of freedom is... Let me take just a small example from being an Orthodox Jew. | ||
| I think this applies to everybody. | ||
| They have an idea of what human rights is, and they're sure that their idea of human rights is true for everybody on earth, never mind the fact that every five or ten years the content of it actually moves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But at any given moment, they think that they know what the absolute, what Reason, with a capital R, what it dictates is the true setup for rights for everybody on earth. | ||
| So, as an Orthodox Jew, I immediately run into problems with this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we have a tradition going back thousands of years of circumcising our male children. | ||
| And it's a central symbol of of the hardship of joining the Jewish people and going into covenant with God. | ||
| That's our tradition. | ||
| You don't have to like it or not like it. | ||
| That's the way we do things. | ||
| It's incredibly important to us. | ||
| Now the universal reason people, they come and say, well, look, you're violating the rights of the child. | ||
| And so you're not allowed to do that anymore. | ||
| We're going to ban it. | ||
| Or we have a method of slaughtering animals for food that goes back thousands of years, kosher slaughter. | ||
| And from our traditional understanding, this is humanitarian, right? | ||
| The Jewish kosher slaughter, its aim is to eliminate, among other things, to eliminate things like hunting and tearing animals apart and doing all sorts of other horrible things. | ||
| No, there's only certain animals you're allowed to slaughter and you have to slaughter them in a certain way, which traditionally we thought that's the most painless way. | ||
| But now the universal human rights people, or in this case the universal rights people, they come and say, no, you can't slaughter your way, because we know the answer of the best way to slaughter an animal, and so you're going to do it our way. | ||
| I mean, look, basically what they're saying is, You're not allowed to be a Jew. | ||
| You're not allowed to be a traditional Jew, because we figured out the answers. | ||
| We figured out the answers for everybody, and if you want to do your traditions, then we'll shut you down. | ||
| That same argument is true that I just gave for Orthodox Judaism. | ||
| It's true for everybody. | ||
| It's true for every tradition. | ||
| There's no such thing as some professors in Germany sit and figure out the universal human rights for all time, and then we impose it on everybody without oppressing All the other people have their own traditions of how to do things. | ||
| It's so interesting to me because as you know I came from the left and I was a progressive and I saw this and then when I started waking up to it that's sort of when people started caring about what I was thinking. | ||
| But I remember thinking that even when the gay rights movement was happening in America that there was this very odd thing that if you didn't get to exactly where they were on gay rights or gay marriage the day they got there That you were automatically a bigot. | ||
| And it's like, what a crazy way of viewing the world, because Barack Obama, who nobody in their right mind would think is anti-gay, he ran against gay marriage. | ||
| He was not for gay marriage the first time he went around. | ||
| So history, if these people win the long game, history will be not too kind to Barack Obama, and I guess we're gonna have to take down his library, which is being constructed right now, I think. | ||
| They're gonna have to take that down, because he was against the human rights that are going to be very obvious to them | ||
| in the 20, 30 years. | ||
| This is such an important point. I mean, the only way that you can keep, | ||
| the only way that you can preserve a certain way of doing things or a certain idea is through | ||
| traditions that pass down an attitude of sacredness and giving honor to that way of doing things. | ||
| And, you know, of course, nothing human is permanent. | ||
| Everything changes a little bit from generation to generation. But we see in | ||
| You know, by looking at the Jews or in India or in China, we see that there are some things that can actually be handed down over thousands of years. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| But this idea that our reason is just going to figure out the right thing and never mind the past, That's just, all it's doing is creating a permanent revolution where every single generation, even every ten years, | ||
| It already devours and rejects and destroys the thing that it created just a few moments ago. | ||
| So, there are some people who, in theory, they find that attractive. | ||
| Well, young people usually, right, find that very attractive. | ||
| Like, everything before us was awful, and we know. | ||
| It's part of being, apparently part of being human is that a lot of adolescents feel during their adolescence that really nothing is important other than the fact that I'm free and I decide to do what I want. | ||
| And, you know, it's not true of all adolescents, but it's true of a lot of adolescents. | ||
| It's a very, very common thing and it's part of being human. | ||
| But when you're grown up, you have to take responsibility for questions like, Is my nation, is my religion, are my traditions actually good? | ||
| If I believe that they're good, if I believe they're contributing good to the world, then there are things I need to do in order to hand them down. | ||
| It's not a few things, it's a lot of things. | ||
| Human beings, if they don't work really hard to maintain the honoring of the traditions, the traditions get thrown out of the window and you're gonna have nothing left. | ||
| Let's take something like free speech, because I know you talk about it a lot. | ||
| And free speech is, people think about free speech as though, I mean, it's the standard thing to say. | ||
| It's a right. | ||
| It's a human right. | ||
| It's in the Constitution. | ||
| But people rarely, way too rarely, focus on the fact that the actual implementation of a regime of free speech is a tradition. | ||
| It's a tradition. | ||
| You need to work hard to raise your children to not tell the other one to shut up. | ||
| You need to train them over years. | ||
| It makes you angry that your brother is saying that? | ||
| That your sister is saying that? | ||
| That makes you angry? | ||
| They're constantly ready to go to war. | ||
| That's the way kids are. | ||
| And you have to train them and work on them and work on them to civilize them. | ||
| Allow the other one to speak. | ||
| I know that it's making you angry, but allow them to speak. | ||
| Let them talk. | ||
| Then you'll get your turn. | ||
| Now, that little family vignette, it's actually true of the entire civilization. | ||
| The fact that you can have a country where most people are willing to allow someone else to say what they think, even though they disagree, that's an incredibly difficult tradition to inculcate, to raise people to do that. | ||
| That's a fight that you have to refight. | ||
| In the education of the entire country and every generation, there's no point in asserting it because it's reasonable. | ||
| It's not about whether it's reasonable. | ||
| It's about what are you willing to do to make these traditions channel people in such a way that, guess what? | ||
| They're not free. | ||
| Someone says something you don't like, then you're not free to just start cursing them out like people do on Twitter. | ||
| You're not free to do that because self-restraint Self-constraint is the only way that freedom of speech is going to exist in your country. | ||
| That means that we need to focus on the constraint part, on how do you get people to not do whatever they want. | ||
| That's the only way that free speech can continue to exist. | ||
| Even the things that seem to be the most valuable freedoms, they exist because they are Anglo-American traditions. | ||
| And if you're running a revolution where you're overthrowing one tradition after another after another, nothing is going to be left of the things that we value, including the freedoms. | ||
| All right, so that being said, and that could have been the ending right there, because that's how you cap a show, right? | ||
| But if everything you said is true, right there, Then how concerned are you for the future? | ||
| Because it does seem that the forces that you're fighting against in this book are getting stronger. | ||
| Yeah, it's very frightening. | ||
| On the free speech thing, you know, a generation ago I was at university and I started the Princeton Toriots. | ||
| It was the pro-Reagan publication on the university campus. | ||
| Of course, lots of people didn't like it. | ||
| Conservatives were a minority. | ||
| People called me names. | ||
| There was all sorts of nastiness, but nobody ever thought it was illegitimate. | ||
| It's a different era. | ||
| I mean, we had friends who were liberals and we had friends who were progressives. | ||
| Nobody thought that our publication, that our pro-Reagan, that our conservative publication, that it was illegitimate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They didn't think, no, you're not allowed to say that. | ||
| And this is where someone like Ben Shapiro, who often is just saying the things that Reagan said that were thought of as legit 20 years ago. | ||
| And today, there's lots of things. | ||
| So in those days, I would just say whatever I thought. | ||
| I would write whatever I wanted. | ||
| That's how I grew up. | ||
| But I tell my children, and I'm ashamed of this, but it's true, I tell my children, There's things you believe that you're not allowed to say anymore. | ||
| And I wish it weren't like that. | ||
| I'd like to see it change. | ||
| But right now, there's no point in throwing away your capacity to earn a living and to do good on all sorts of fronts because you insist on just saying whatever you want to say. | ||
| I can't stand it, but that's the reality. | ||
| The zone for freedom of speech is rapidly closing. | ||
| It's getting narrower and narrower. | ||
| And that's just one example of the things that we've lost. | ||
| I think it's a very frightening period. | ||
| But let me just say one positive thing. | ||
| Look, I can easily plot a trajectory where America doesn't make it through this. | ||
| But let me look at the other possibility. | ||
| This is also A moment of great opportunity. | ||
| Because there's a tradition among diplomats that you read sometimes in history books, kind of a legend, that the world is like an ice cap, the political world is like an ice cap, and every once in a while it unfreezes and it breaks up and it rearranges itself. | ||
| So like every 50 years or every 75 or every 100 years. | ||
| And we really do seem to be in a period like that where all the bets really are off. | ||
| And that will hopefully draw to the front creative, strong people who have something important to offer to the re-freezing, reconstruction of the world that's coming. This | ||
| reconstruction, it can be something absolutely horrendous and we shouldn't kid ourselves. We're really | ||
| moving in a bad direction. But the reason that I find the nationalist movements | ||
| encouraging in America, in the UK and other countries, is not because I support everything that every | ||
| one of these people say or do. | ||
| I actually have absolutely no idea what most of them are going to do and a lot of them are new to politics and we don't actually know what they're going to do. | ||
| But I do see the opportunity. | ||
| I don't know if it's going to turn out well, but I do see clearly the opportunity. | ||
| Right, because the national movements could take a turn for the worse, right? | ||
| They could turn to things that are about race and ethno-nationalism and those types of things. | ||
| They certainly could, and that is actually One of the things that I say when I go around giving talks is I've noticed that many conservatives dismiss the racist right. | ||
| A lot of conservatives, they're looking at, you know, how strong is the Nazi Party or the KKK? | ||
| And they are. | ||
| They're trivial. | ||
| I mean, they're absolutely trivial. | ||
| And it's completely unfair to associate conservatism with that. | ||
| And so it's reasonable, in a sense, that they dismiss it. | ||
| But looking at the level of ideas of who's thinking, who's trying to actually come up with a worldview that could a few years from now become something important, I think it's a mistake to dismiss the far right. | ||
| Not that I'm sympathetic to them, but the quality of the arguments, the work that's being done by People to justify a kind of a neo-Darwinian kind of racism, like a white identity politics. | ||
| They're actually doing quite a bit of work to get this idea into shape. | ||
| Now, I detest it. | ||
| I hope it's soundly defeated. | ||
| But it's really quite Attractive to lots of people in their 20s and their 30s who are looking at, you know, the old liberal order and saying, oh my gosh, that doesn't work. | ||
| So where do we go? | ||
| And it means that, yeah, those of us who are inclined to a national conservatism that has nothing to do with race, that those of us who think the color of your skin really should make absolutely zero difference in the way that we order society. | ||
| There's so many important issues. | ||
| Why the color of your skin? | ||
| So those of us who are I'm inclined to a national conservatism which will believe in the nation and its heritage but have no interest in the genetic population that you supposedly came from. | ||
| We have a lot of work to do to create something that's going to be sufficiently powerful. | ||
| I'm talking about an idea that's sufficiently coherent and powerful and attractive so that it will actually be able to be politically effective. | ||
| Before these other guys. | ||
| Right, fight the forces. | ||
| Right, before these other guys, you know, before they win. | ||
| I mean, right now they're not winning, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I think all bets are off. | ||
| We don't know where this is going. | ||
| And so there are dangers, but there's an opportunity to create a much more traditionalist, conservative, a decent, moderate, common sense, Traditionalist conservatism, which will be national, which will be nationalist, which will believe in the traditions of nations and seek to maintain their independence. | ||
| There's a space to do that. | ||
| It's exciting to be able to do that because that space hasn't existed. | ||
| For the last generation, no one wanted to hear it. | ||
| Well, that's a conservative space that a good old-fashioned liberal could be okay with. | ||
| You know, we've barely scratched the surface here, but we gotta wrap for now, so we should definitely do this again. | ||
| Okay, I'd love to. | ||
| Can I get you back here to the United States to do this again? | ||
| Or maybe we'll do it in Israel, we'll do it in Jerusalem. | ||
| I'll do it either way. | ||
| I'll buy you a steak next to the Old City walls if you come to Jerusalem. | ||
| Done and done. |
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