Yoram Hazony is a philosopher, author, and philosopher-in-chief of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative think tank, and a leading voice on the right. He is the author of the new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and is a frequent contributor to conservative media outlets such as The Weekly Standard and National Review. In this episode, Ben and Yoram discuss what it means to be a conservative, and why it s important to understand the differences between conservatism and classical liberal ideas, and how they can work together to create a coherent conservative vision of the future of the country. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Daily Wire podcast, "The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special," which examines the intersection of culture, politics, economics, and culture in American society. His work is widely read and widely discussed in both liberal and conservative media, and he is a regular contributor to publications such as Salon, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications. He is also a frequent guest on conservative radio shows such as SiriusXM, NPR, NPR and NPR Radio, and hosts the conservative radio show, "Conservatory of Conservative Thought," where he discusses the importance of nationalism and the role of the right in American identity. and the need for a conservative vision in our society. His work has been widely read in conservative media and has been featured in conservative publications. The Daily Wire, and his work is frequently quoted in conservative outlets like The Atlantic, The Hill, and the conservative journal National Review, among many other publications, including Playboy, The Atlantic and The National Post. . and The Daily Beast, and is widely discussed by conservative publications, such as the National Post, among others. The Daily Mail, The Economist, The National Review and the New York Review of American History, and Playboy. , among other outlets. In an interview with Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro talks about his new book The New Right . and his book, Conservatism, a rediscovering the new right? and why the right is the only way forward. in America s future is not in decline, and what it needs to be conserved, not saved, and preserved, not built, and that we need to become more coherent, not more cohesive, not less coherent, in order to survive in the 21st century, and more cohesive and more like a more like our ancestors the New Republic.
00:00:07.000And 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.
00:00:19.000To be free, but within limits, within limits that can help you.
00:00:26.000Returning to the shows that dissect many of the developments in conservative thought the past few years is philosopher and scholar Yoram Hazony.
00:00:36.000In very large part, the Trump presidency provoked necessary debate on the right about this question.
00:00:41.000One arena where you can see that debate is at NatCon, an ongoing series of worldwide national conservatism conferences.
00:00:47.000These events emerged in 2019 from the Edmund Burke Foundation, where Yoram is chairman.
00:00:51.000They're a part of the movement on the right to recognize the importance of nationalism to conservatism.
00:00:56.000Right 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.
00:01:06.000Yoram says we've been incorrectly redefining the right for most of modern history, and it's why our national identity is fractured.
00:01:12.000He says the incorrect definition of the right is what is perpetuating our current climate of disarray.
00:01:18.000Yoram's work is vigorously discussed around both liberal and conservative media.
00:01:22.000Most 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.
00:01:30.000Join 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.
00:01:50.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
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00:02:12.000Yoram Hazony, thanks so much for being here.
00:02:18.000You'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.
00:02:26.000There 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.
00:02:33.000So let me start by distinguishing the two in your thought.
00:02:37.000Look, liberalism, I think people have a pretty good idea of what it is.
00:02:42.000If 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.
00:03:03.000Conservatives certainly do cherish freedom, but conservatives begin their politics from a different place.
00:03:11.000A 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?
00:03:21.000What do we need to do to make sure that it's going to be around you know, five or six generations from now.
00:03:28.000And when you begin from that spot, then you need to start asking questions like, what holds this society together?
00:03:36.000Is it blowing apart, or does it need to become more cohesive and coherent?
00:03:42.000Or, what exactly is it that holds us together?
00:03:46.000I would say, most conservatives would say that it's the religious and national traditions of a particular nation that hold it together.
00:03:55.000So then you need to ask, well, what do we need to do in order to make sure that those transitions are being transmitted?
00:04:01.000In America now, and the answer is basically no, and look what you've got.
00:04:04.000So 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.
00:04:19.000So let's talk for, there's a lot there.
00:04:21.000So let's talk about the, the unit of importance.
00:04:24.000So 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.
00:05:07.000Which level of abstraction is the most important here?
00:05:09.000Look, I think if you pick one and insist on it, then you end up being kind of like an idolater.
00:05:15.000An idolater of the individual, meaning somebody who just puts way too much emphasis on the individual.
00:05:20.000Or if you pick the nation, it's very easy for that to turn into something that is oppressive.
00:05:28.000I 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.
00:05:40.000But there was another party, the party of Washington and Hamilton, John Adams, Governor Morris, who basically was the draftsman of the Constitution.
00:05:51.000They were much more conservative, and they did focus on... All you need to do is read the preamble to the American Constitution.
00:06:02.000The first thing that they think that they're doing is a more perfect union.
00:06:37.000But at this point, I think it's run out of control.
00:06:41.000If 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.
00:06:55.000If 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.
00:07:02.000And that's what we're looking for, is to rebalance along with those other values.
00:07:07.000That's a conservative way of approaching these problems.
00:07:09.000So 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.
00:07:19.000And the basic idea is that they shouldn't be read in opposition.
00:07:21.000They 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.
00:07:29.000It grants extraordinary powers to the state.
00:07:31.000States themselves had their own constitutions that allowed them to exercise police powers to do things like banning pornography.
00:07:36.000There'd be no idea of federal government in 1791 banning pornography nationwide.
00:07:41.000It would have been absurdity if the federal government didn't have either the capacity or the power to do that sort of thing.
00:07:46.000But the idea of reading them directly in opposition, do you think that you're moving too far when you read them in direct opposition?
00:07:52.000Or how far in opposition are you reading those two documents?
00:07:55.000I don't think I read them in direct opposition.
00:07:59.000I don't think that there's anything wrong with the American Declaration of Independence.
00:08:04.000I think what's wrong is a post-World War II liberal tradition.
00:08:10.000which tries to turn the American Declaration of Independence into a kind of scripture.
00:08:14.000In other words, and by the way, it's not even the whole declaration.
00:08:17.000There's lots of interesting things in the declaration.
00:08:20.000Its first sentences are about the Americans being a single people that's cutting its ties with another people.
00:08:25.000I mean, the declaration has lots of good things in it.
00:08:28.000The 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.
00:08:47.000And that's just not historically what it was.
00:08:49.000Of 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.
00:09:12.000I only fault the 20th century, which says, look, We're going to be only liberals.
00:09:20.000We're going to take Enlightenment liberalism as our sole basis for understanding politics.
00:09:28.000The American Constitution is fundamentally a restoration of English national traditions.
00:09:36.000And 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.
00:09:57.000When 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.
00:10:05.000And the people you mentioned, Jefferson and Paine, Paine particularly, was very warm toward the French Revolution.
00:10:09.000Adams was extraordinarily against the French Revolution.
00:10:12.000Washington was an opponent of the French Revolution.
00:10:14.000There'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.
00:10:31.000I 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.
00:10:46.000He really didn't think that national and religious traditions of Americans were the basis for the continuity of the United States going forward.
00:10:58.000And the Federalists thought the opposite.
00:11:00.000They really thought that without Anglo-American traditions and without Christianity, the whole thing was going to fall apart.
00:11:07.000So 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.
00:11:20.000By the way, they were doing the same thing in Europe and in England.
00:11:29.000I mean, I don't know if people quite understand.
00:11:32.0002020 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.
00:11:44.000And 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.
00:11:58.000We have to ask ourselves, how did this happen?
00:12:02.000In 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.
00:12:21.000When you just had that, you opened the door for collapse and it collapsed.
00:12:27.000There's so many different directions I want to go with you here.
00:12:29.000So let's start with the national traditions that ought to be conserved.
00:12:33.000So 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.
00:12:39.000It's not what's being conserved that matters, it's the conservation of the thing that matters.
00:12:42.000So how do you determine what ought to be conserved and what ought not be conserved?
00:12:45.000Both inside a nation, because obviously things change over time in many ways for the better.
00:12:50.000I mean, slavery was a part of American life up until the Civil War.
00:12:53.000Women couldn't vote until the early 20th century in the United States, all of that.
00:12:56.000These are changes that occur that are inherently progressive if you believe that conservatism is about maintaining what was there.
00:13:03.000And then there's, so within nations, there's obviously movements.
00:13:06.000So how do you determine what's good and what's bad there?
00:13:09.000And then secondly, how do you determine differences between nations?
00:13:14.000Is 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?
00:13:25.000I 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.
00:13:33.000I mean, Jews and Christians have, at this point, our 3,000-year tradition sets a moral minimum for the legitimacy of governments.
00:13:45.000And 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.
00:14:14.000All of these things are cornerstone, bedrock aspects of Christian national traditions in Europe and in America.
00:14:23.000The English and the Americans took this as seriously as any other people, maybe more seriously.
00:14:29.000And 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.
00:14:42.000They were able to say, that's what we're trying to do.
00:14:45.000What 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.
00:15:04.000That's hundreds of years of English and American tradition.
00:15:09.000And 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?
00:15:21.000Now, you asked me about other countries.
00:15:23.000So, look, other countries do have other traditions.
00:15:27.000Look, 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.
00:15:43.000You know, it's like, in other words, Americans are not trying to run a revolution to to overthrow all the powers in the world.
00:15:51.000But what Americans are interested, according to Washington, is that every nation should pursue its own course.
00:15:58.000Now, if you ask him, well, do you think that nations should oppress their peoples?
00:16:06.000The question is, what is America's role in this?
00:16:09.000And 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.
00:16:30.000Today 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.
00:16:41.000And if the nations of the world don't want to accept it, then we can impose it by force.
00:16:47.000I mean, Ben, this is a crazy way of thinking, and it's brought America to a terrible, terrible place.
00:16:52.000Instead of taking care of itself, it's trying to take care of the world, and it's failing at both.
00:16:58.000So 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.
00:17:17.000It seems like it should be counterintuitive.
00:17:19.000We'll get to that in just a moment first.
00:17:56.000We're not going to lecture you about how toxic masculinity is ruining America.
00:18:00.000We're not going to cut ads about how your daughter should shave her beard and you should teach her how to do it, like some other of the big razor companies that I won't mention.
00:18:07.000Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
00:18:16.000Okay, so let's talk about the slide from liberalism into tyranny or liberalism to collectivism.
00:18:22.000So 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?
00:18:39.000So the woke culture, are they related?
00:18:45.000I mean, they're clearly not the same thing.
00:18:47.000You know, like, I would never say that, you know, liberalism is woke neo-Marxism or progressive.
00:18:54.000I mean, they're clearly two different things.
00:18:57.000But in the book, I try to figure out what the relationship is.
00:19:00.000And my proposal is that what happens when you say, only liberalism, only freedom, only choice, only consent.
00:19:09.000In 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.
00:19:17.000So look, that sounds beautiful, and there's a lot that's positive about it.
00:19:22.000But take a society, a whole society, in which the children are being raised from kindergarten.
00:19:29.000They're being told, Look, you make your own decisions.
00:19:39.000Every one of you is going to be your own specific, particular thing that you're going to decide for yourself.
00:19:46.000It's almost like this Nietzschean, you know, make yourself, form yourself.
00:19:50.000So what happens to a society when you tell the kids that?
00:19:53.000Well, what happens is that there's no place in that description for tradition.
00:19:59.000There'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.
00:20:07.000I mean, traditional society is the key to a traditional society.
00:20:11.000is 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.
00:20:20.000And America has cut that off at the roots by telling children, just think for yourself.
00:20:29.000And 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.
00:20:45.000So it's really important to understand, I think, that that part of Enlightenment rationalism is completely false.
00:20:53.000Empirically, 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.
00:21:06.000The 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.
00:21:24.000Those 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.
00:21:35.000One 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.
00:21:43.000When 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.
00:21:53.000In which liberty was completely subsumed.
00:21:55.000So, how do you balance the need for liberty and the conservative tradition?
00:21:58.000Because, 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.
00:22:35.000There's a book by John Fortescue written around 1470, which is called In Praise of the Laws of England.
00:22:43.000This is 300 years before Montesquieu, okay?
00:22:46.000It's 300 years before the American Revolution.
00:22:49.000And 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.
00:23:06.000Now, 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.
00:23:21.000I mean, these things should be familiar.
00:23:26.000But 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.
00:23:48.000So 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.
00:24:11.000When 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.
00:24:23.000The love of freedom is not an Enlightenment invention from the 1700s.
00:24:27.000The love of freedom is already in Hebrew scripture, and it's developed by the English for a thousand years.
00:24:35.000I'm not saying, let's go back to 1400.
00:24:38.000Every conservative thinker who's serious understands things change and things have to be repaired, and you also make mistakes.
00:24:45.000Burke 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.
00:24:53.000The entire American Constitution is a repair of a mistake that was made with the Articles of the Confederation.
00:25:13.000Washington and his people were saying, we need to go back.
00:25:15.000We need to restore what was good about the English constitution because as conservatives, we need to be able to fix mistakes.
00:25:22.000So 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.
00:25:35.000Here and now, somebody comes up with an idea that they want to change a fundamental institution in a certain way.
00:25:40.000How do conservatives decide whether that change is good, whether it ought to be tried, whether the change is too radical?
00:25:47.000I understand that people of the left believe that no change is too radical, and that everything has to be reason tabula rasa.
00:25:52.000But what are the factors that ought to go into a conservative consideration of whether a policy change is appropriate or not?
00:25:58.000Look, when Seldin and Burke are talking about change, they constantly use the expression trial and error.
00:26:07.000Burke actually literally compares statesmanship to a series of experiments, scientific experiments.
00:26:16.000And 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.
00:26:33.000And then he says, okay, so now you need to make a repair.
00:26:39.000I think a good example would be, the English did not have slavery.
00:26:44.000You know, I mean, for many, many centuries, there was no slavery in England.
00:26:47.000When 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.
00:26:59.000So they imported what's called the mercantile law.
00:27:01.000It was the law of the merchants in Holland and in Italy.
00:27:17.000So that immediately had certain good effects.
00:27:21.000It allowed a tremendous explosion of commerce in England.
00:27:27.000It allowed the development of a modern industrial economy.
00:27:35.000But at the same time, the mercantile law allowed slavery.
00:27:39.000That's how it actually got into England.
00:27:43.000They adopted these laws in the early 1700s, and by the middle of the 1700s, they're already saying our free constitution has become corrupted.
00:27:52.000People are bringing slaves to England for the first time.
00:27:55.000Now 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.
00:28:17.000And so they literally declared the laws of England incapable of supporting this new institution of slavery, and they banned it on traditional grounds.
00:28:31.000The English re-ban slavery on the basis of saying, this does not fit our traditional institutions.
00:28:39.000The Americans actually could have done that.
00:28:41.000They could have said this just doesn't fit in the common law.
00:28:45.000The 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?
00:28:57.000I 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.
00:29:08.000You see the damage, you see that the persecution is evil, it's unjust, You haven't found a way to stop it.
00:29:15.000Okay, 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.
00:29:28.000Okay, 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.
00:29:41.000The 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.
00:30:00.000And what's happened in the last 70 years is that people say, okay, so what about discrimination on the basis of ageism?
00:30:06.000What about discrimination on the basis of gender orientation?
00:30:08.000What about discrimination on the basis of abilities?
00:30:12.000There 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.
00:30:28.000There's no way to do it unless you're a traditionalist like Burke.
00:30:32.000Then you would say, look, we have one thing we're trying to do here.
00:30:57.000And then you go on to the next thing that looks broken.
00:30:59.000But what we don't understand is that the 1960s, I'm not talking about the Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell.
00:31:06.000I'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.
00:31:24.000I'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.
00:31:46.000And 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.
00:31:54.000And the liberals go, darn, you're right, there are inequalities.
00:31:57.000And then they start on another revolution.
00:32:00.000So 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?
00:32:12.000We'll get into that in just one second.
00:32:14.000First, let's talk about all the brand new stuff we have here over at Daily Wire+.
00:32:18.000Recently, we here at DailyWirePlus, we've hit a lot of milestones.
00:32:22.0007 billion page views, more than 900,000 active subscribers, and we are closing in on 1 million right now.
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00:33:21.000So I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who's been watching that the social fabric of the United States has utterly collapsed.
00:33:28.000The decline of religion obviously plays a huge role in that.
00:33:30.000The rise of Radical sexual individualism, particularly as a core value among Americans in the 1960s, is a huge thing.
00:33:40.000And 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.
00:33:48.000One 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.
00:34:02.000Instead 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.
00:34:11.000And 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.
00:34:26.000The 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.
00:34:33.000So if you can get power at the federal level, you exercise it.
00:34:36.000Even 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.
00:34:42.000So where do you think conservatives should come down on this?
00:34:47.000Look, this is a key question and it's a complicated question.
00:34:53.000It'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.
00:35:18.000Maybe 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.
00:35:30.000And they used the power of the central government to try to do that.
00:35:35.000Another 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.
00:35:50.000And they said, our national tradition is not going to include polygamy.
00:35:55.000Now, there are cases like that, and sometimes that's necessary.
00:36:00.000On the other hand, I think that the system of federalism is a brilliant and necessary system.
00:36:09.000It'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.
00:36:22.000And I actually think, I mean, I think a lot of Americans actually feel that.
00:36:28.000In the 1940s, the Supreme Court decided to start banning religion from public places.
00:36:36.000By the 1960s, banning God and prayer and Bible from the schools.
00:36:41.000I think plenty of people in America see that as tyrannical.
00:36:50.000the only answer we have to the extremely varied moral and religious and philosophical communities that we have in the United States.
00:37:04.000to try to keep the woke in the same country with traditional Christians and Jews.
00:37:09.000The only possible way to do that is through federalism.
00:37:14.000And I think right now, I tell my NatCon friends, if you
00:37:21.000If 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.
00:37:47.000You're just going to destroy the country.
00:37:49.000I mean, you're going to bring civil war.
00:37:51.000So 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.
00:38:04.000And the way to deal with that is to allow the states at this point, you know, just like Different countries.
00:38:14.000Each one is going to come up with its own way of trying to restore tradition.
00:38:20.000Some 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.
00:38:28.000That 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.
00:38:40.000I don't believe it's true, but let's try it.
00:38:44.000I 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.
00:38:59.000I think the other roads lead to civil war.
00:39:03.000So 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.
00:39:11.000They've said we no longer have enough in common to maintain a cohesive nation.
00:39:15.000That you can't have a nation that includes both the woke And social conservatives, fiscal liberals, you can't have that nation.
00:39:23.000There has to at least be a common base of values.
00:39:26.000And in the absence of restoration of that base of values, maybe it's better if we all go our separate ways.
00:39:31.000Now, 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.
00:39:38.000one 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?
00:39:53.000Well, you've just described very well when it happens.
00:40:01.000What'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,
00:40:23.000In every human loyalty group, what's necessary is that the leadership consciously, purposely gives honor to the different competing tribes.
00:40:42.000There's no such thing as a homogenous nation.
00:40:44.000Every nation is made up of tribes, of subsectors.
00:40:48.000Sometimes they hate each other, and sometimes there's a risk of their going to war.
00:40:52.000The 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.
00:41:07.000And 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.
00:41:29.000I give them honor, they give me honor, has just been completely lost.
00:41:33.000Anybody 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.
00:41:45.000But 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.
00:41:58.000They 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.
00:42:06.000What do we have in the United States now?
00:42:08.000We've had at least two consecutive presidential elections where 40%?
00:42:26.000The 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,
00:43:01.000Sometimes 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.
00:43:16.000Sometimes it's just time to say, You know, you're just the greatest, dear.
00:43:23.000I mean, people understand that that's the way you keep a family together.
00:43:27.000That's the way you keep a country together.
00:43:30.000And 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.
00:43:51.000Look at the way that Trump changed the way that all of us talk and think.
00:43:55.000Look at the way that Barack Obama changed the way that all of us talk and think.
00:44:00.000The President and his people, his family, they have a huge, huge impact on the culture.
00:44:06.000And 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.
00:44:36.000I only know that it's the only way forward now.
00:44:39.000So one of the factors that I think militates in favor of national unity, and you see it, we're recording this in Israel.
00:44:44.000One of the things that has helped Israel in a sort of perverse way is the fact that it has enemies on literally all borders.
00:44:49.000And so it's a state that's in a perpetual state of existential threat.
00:44:54.000And so what that does is it draws the population together.
00:44:56.000And you see that in the United States throughout its history.
00:44:58.000During 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.
00:45:06.000After 9-11, it seemed to last about five minutes.
00:45:09.000But there is this sense that it's going to bring the country together.
00:45:11.000In 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.
00:45:25.000So, one of the things that is obviously rising on a lot of Americans' radar right now is the rising threat of China.
00:45:31.000Do 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?
00:45:43.000At 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.
00:45:54.000I mean, look, I think during 2020, two things became clear.
00:46:00.000One 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.
00:46:09.000for about five minutes and were able to recognize that China is a hostile power.
00:46:13.000I 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.
00:46:58.000So Americans saw that clearly for, I don't know, a few months, and then they started thinking about other things.
00:47:05.000And 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.
00:47:29.000I think you have to see that as the major threat.
00:47:34.000I mean, there's just no other significant threat.
00:47:37.000I mean, I understand why people are talking about Ukraine.
00:47:43.000There's all sorts of very good reasons for people to think about it, but it's just that it's totally out of proportion.
00:47:49.000America only has one strategic rival, and that's China.
00:47:52.000America's only threatened by one country, and that's China.
00:47:55.000And if Americans want to be able to keep their crumbling country.
00:48:02.000I mean, you're right that when there's an external enemy that's seen clearly, it brings people together.
00:48:07.000But I would take it further than that.
00:48:09.000The Chinese are doing everything that they can to destroy America's internal fabric.
00:48:15.000We don't know what all the things are that they're doing.
00:48:18.000I'm not going to start making a list, but I can promise you that they're deeply involved in the United States.
00:48:28.000They're deeply involved in Washington.
00:48:30.000They'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.
00:48:42.000Most of the people are affected by this.
00:48:44.000Don't even understand that that's what's happening.
00:48:47.000And the only way That America is going to survive this.
00:48:52.000It could be, you know, maybe China will sink into the ocean.
00:48:55.000But 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.
00:49:12.000Now, I don't know how many people like that there are.
00:49:17.000One 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.
00:49:33.000But we got to look this straight in the face.
00:49:50.000Legislators, I mean, we've been redirecting our military toward social engineering and recruiting on the basis of gender identity.
00:49:57.000And 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
00:50:25.000some, 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.
00:50:34.000That seems to be a more radical argument from some areas of the right.
00:50:36.000So what do you make of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
00:50:40.000Look, I don't think Russia is an ally of the United States.
00:50:44.000I do think that the United States needs allies against China and is not looking for them seriously enough.
00:50:53.000The number one potential ally against China is India.
00:50:57.000And 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.
00:51:16.000It 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.
00:51:27.000It loves its relationship with this crazy Chinese proxy.
00:51:34.000And 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.
00:51:44.000So if you ask me about Russia, Russia's no ally of the United States.
00:51:48.000It's also not a major threat to the United States.
00:51:51.000But 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.
00:52:02.000And 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.
00:53:06.000And 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.
00:53:17.000What 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.
00:53:28.000So 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.
00:53:45.000Number two, the Chinese produce, you know, what, five times, ten times as many doctorates in the sciences and in math as America does?
00:53:55.000How long do you think that that can possibly continue?
00:54:00.000So, America has to focus, it has to think like Sputnik.
00:54:05.000It 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.
00:54:25.000It's like this broad program for turning America into a country that could defeat Russia.
00:54:50.000Challenge number two, woke neo-Marxism.
00:54:55.000If you're focused on something else, you're wrong.
00:54:57.000So let's talk for a second about sort of the economic take of national conservatism.
00:55:02.000So one of the more unifying areas in the conservative movement over the past 50, 60, 70 years has been the economic liberalism.
00:55:09.000Forget 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.
00:55:17.000With your money and that has resulted in extraordinary GDP growth for the United States.
00:55:23.000Free trade has contrary to popular opinion and quite good for for a lot of Americans, particularly because we are both producers and consumers.
00:55:30.000There's no question on the consumption side that people are living.
00:55:34.000A better life because of the products and services they have available to them.
00:55:37.000The 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.
00:55:55.000What is the role of economic liberalism and private property rights and free markets in the sort of national conservative vision?
00:56:03.000Pretty much everybody on the American right grew up on Milton Friedman, you know, on Hayek.
00:56:12.000I 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.
00:56:27.000There 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.
00:56:42.000There'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.
00:56:57.000Um, and you know, they're, they're just not interested in, in, in the question of, uh, economic liberties too much.
00:57:04.000They just want to solve problems by redistributing.
00:57:08.000Um, 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.
00:57:16.000in the direction of conservatives identifying limits of the free market.
00:57:24.000And 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.
00:57:36.000And 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.
00:57:46.000And the second part, the we need to limit the free market, kind of got lost after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:57:56.000The limits on the free market kind of ceased to be part of conservatism, or what was called conservatism.
00:58:03.000So where do those limits need to appear?
00:58:06.000I mean, the first place that I think there's conservative consensus is on issues like pornography.
00:58:15.000I mean, you just can't create major industries whose purpose is to wreck family life in America.
00:58:28.000There's a place where you've got to say stop.
00:58:30.000By 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.
00:58:47.000But you can only have self-government if the self is worthy of governing.
00:58:51.000If the self is incapable of governing, then you don't have any choice.
00:58:57.000So, 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.
00:59:12.000So look, I think that's one area where a lot of conservatives can easily agree.
00:59:17.000I 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.
00:59:32.000We don't like it when government gets too invasive.
00:59:35.000We don't like it when it has too much control.
00:59:38.000But 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.
00:59:58.000And 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.
01:00:19.000a 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.
01:00:43.000I 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.
01:01:12.000So in a second, I want to ask you about the value of liberty.
01:01:16.000It's been a lot of time talking about here how liberty has sort of outstripped its boundaries, has run amok.
01:01:21.000But 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.
01:01:37.000You can click that link in the description right now.
01:01:40.000Use 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.
01:01:47.000Yoram, thanks so much for joining the show.