Yoram Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and the Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of the new book, The Virtue of Nationalism: How to Lead a Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In this Sunday Special, he talks about why nationalism has been attacked by some on the right and the left, and why Americans have picked up the mantle of nationalism. He also talks about how a nation can be a nation, and what it really means to be a nationalist. Ben Shapiro is a writer, speaker, and podcast host. His work has been featured on CNN, CBS Radio, NPR, and other media outlets. He is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and the Forward, and is the founder and chairman of The Burke Foundation, a leading conservative think tank. Ben is an avid reader and supporter of many conservative causes, including the anti-racist and anti-Marxist movement, and has been a long-time friend of President Donald Trump. You can find him on social media at and on . and on The Huffington Post, where he also writes for The Daily Wire, and The Daily Beast, where you can find Ben Shapiro on all of the major news outlets, including The Daily Mail, The Hill, The Atlantic, The New York Post, and the Weekly Standard, and many other publications. Thanks for stopping by calling in to The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special! ! Thank you for listening, Ben Shapiro - we really appreciate it. - your support is greatly appreciated - Ben Shapiro's words are much appreciated thank you, Ben's words really mean a lot to me, too! - Your support is so much more than you can be heard on the show, and I'm looking forward to hearing back from you, too, Ben on the airwaves, and we'll be looking out for you in the next episode of the show next week, next week on the podcast next week! on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Saturday, November 15th, November 17th, and next Monday, November 18th, so you'll get a chance to hear from me on the other side of the podcast, too. Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro, the next day, right here at The Atlantic?
00:00:12.000But if they're going to tell me that economics, which is the science of the choosing free consenting individual, can answer the basic problems America has today, that's false.
00:00:32.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
00:00:34.000I'm excited to welcome this week Yoram Hazony.
00:00:36.000He's president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.
00:00:39.000He currently serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington, and he's the author of the brand new and fantastic book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
00:00:46.000Yoram, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:00:48.000So first of all, we violated the taboo on only one Yarmulke per show, so we can start off with the fact that I believe you're the first Orthodox Jew who is not me who's been on this show, so.
00:00:59.000Well, why don't we start with the kind of basic premise of the book.
00:01:02.000So nationalism obviously has come under significant assault from some on the right, mostly on the left.
00:01:08.000The idea of nationalism being seen as something inherently bad, particularly since President Trump has picked up the mantle of nationalism and used that sort of language.
00:01:17.000I don't actually think that this is because of Trump.
00:01:19.000I mean, the assault by communists, by liberals on nationalism is already in full swing after World War II.
00:01:31.000So we've already seen a few generations of people just trying to hang every political evil in the world on nationalism.
00:01:38.000The nationalism I grew up with is a principled stance that says that the world is governed best when Many different nations are able to chart their own course independently without interference, meaning cultivating their own traditions, their own laws, they're pursuing their own interests.
00:01:56.000And for three, four hundred years, that was a mainstay of certainly of the Anglo-American tradition, but more generally of the way that Europe understood the political order, was that nations should be independent from one another.
00:02:15.000And it's really after World War II that you start to see a vicious attack on nationalism, first in Europe, where the argument is World War I and World War II, those were caused by nationalism, where the argument is World War I and World War By having independent nations, what's the answer?
00:02:42.000More surprising is that Americans have picked it up.
00:02:45.000And I would say Reagan was still a nationalist, Thatcher was still a nationalist in the way that I'm defining it, but by the time you get to the fall of the Berlin Wall, George H.W.
00:02:58.000Bush talking about The New World Order, where the New World Order means a single rule of a single law that's going to be imposed by force if necessary on the whole world.
00:03:10.000That's already a post-national situation.
00:03:13.000Between Reagan and Trump, all the American presidents and almost every significant political leader in Europe were post-nationalist.
00:03:22.000So in a second, I'm going to ask you about how we define a nation in order to define the basis for nationalism.
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00:04:29.000All right, so let's talk about what it means to be a nation.
00:04:32.000So obviously there's been a lot of controversy in the recent past about what constitutes a nation, what doesn't constitute a nation.
00:04:38.000Conflicts over the territorial boundaries of nations have obviously sparked wars in the past with, for example, during World War II, Germany claiming that German ethnics who were living in areas that were not specifically German actually were part of the German nation and therefore justifying territorial broadening.
00:04:53.000In order to do that, you've seen the Russians do this in Crimea most recently.
00:04:59.000A nation is a group of tribes that share some kind of a heritage that usually includes a religion, often includes a language, and a history of joining together in common cause against mutual enemies.
00:05:16.000So, the word nation, that's where we get the Greek word ethnos, ethnic.
00:05:22.000So, the Greeks, even though they lived as city-states, they never had a nation-state, they never united as a nation in antiquity, but the Greeks knew that there was such a thing as a Greek ethnos.
00:05:34.000They spoke the same language, they had the same culture, even though they were at war with one another.
00:05:39.000So, that's kind of a natural thing that you find throughout human history.
00:05:44.000The question of whether the world should consist of national states, of unifying the nations under a single heading.
00:05:56.000It really becomes an important question and political thought with the Hebrew Bible, because the Hebrew Bible knows a world in which there's all these empires that try to conquer the whole world, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, their gods tell them, let's bring peace and prosperity to the world by Going out and conquering all the nations of the earth and suppressing needless conflict.
00:06:23.000That's actually not an unreasonable argument.
00:06:26.000But the prophets know about these conflicting imperial aspirations to conquer the world.
00:06:40.000And they put this new idea on the table.
00:06:44.000God says to Abraham, I'll make of you a great nation.
00:06:46.000He gives Moses borders and forbids Israel from going out and conquering the neighbors.
00:06:53.000As far as we know, that's the first time that any God in human history has given borders to his own nation and says, no, I gave the lands to the other peoples too, so you don't cross your borders.
00:07:02.000That's where the original vision of a world of independent nations starts.
00:07:06.000And the modern sensibility of self-determination, that there's a kind of justice and a kind of freedom that attaches to this kind of world, that actually enters the modern age with the return to the Old Testament by peoples like the English, the Scots, the Dutch, the French to an extent.
00:07:27.000So, this is an example of where we actually have Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, shaping the modern world in a decisive and crucial way.
00:07:38.000So how do we define nation to avoid some of the pitfalls of, for example, the ethno-nationalist right, the alt-right, as they call themselves, the idea that there should be a white America or people who claim that what nation really is, is pure ethnicity or pure race.
00:07:54.000How do How do we organize people so that, in our own minds, in terms of defining a nation, it allows for multi-ethnic Well, the traditional idea of a nation going back all the way to the Bible is not constructed on race.
00:08:14.000I mean, you know that throughout the Bible we see people joining the Jewish people.
00:08:23.000Most famously, Ruth the Moabite, who's a Moabite, and she comes over and she says, your people will be my people and your God will be my God.
00:08:31.000Now, she's able to convert, not simply because she adopts the Israelite God, but also because she says there's an existing people with an existing heritage, and I'm going to join that.
00:08:41.000I'm going to take up the characteristics of that heritage.
00:08:48.000The Israelites leave Egypt, and Egyptians come with them, and they get absorbed into the Jewish people, or Moses inviting his father-in-law, Jethro, to join the Jewish people.
00:09:25.000than this caricature that you get, both from the left and the right, which claims that nationalism is about some kind of racial homogeneity.
00:09:34.000I mean, every nation is internally diverse.
00:09:37.000The question, if you're a nationalist, is how can I strengthen the commonality so that the bonds of mutual loyalty will be firmer so that the nation doesn't disintegrate into civil war?
00:09:51.000Now, these guys on the alt-right that you're talking about, they don't have the slightest interest either in, you know, what the biblical idea of a nation is or even what the traditional Anglo-American idea of a nation is.
00:10:04.000They think that you can get, you can determine, you know, what kind of, what they call nationality.
00:10:10.000They think you can get it out of a test tube.
00:10:12.000You know, like you go take a blood test and that determines what nation you're from.
00:10:17.000There's never been anything like that in the history of Judaism and Christianity.
00:10:23.000And it's crucial, I think, for us to fight this idea, which is gaining strength, and it's kind of horrifying to see it gain strength.
00:10:32.000Because you'll notice that as soon as you judge people on the basis of, well, they say it's not skin color, it's DNA, but it doesn't make any difference.
00:10:41.000As soon as you judge people like that, then ideas are out the window.
00:10:46.000It doesn't matter if you're a Hebrew speaker, if you know the Bible, if you respect the rabbinic tradition.
00:10:52.000All that stuff goes out the window, and it all comes down to this ghastly, simplistic argument over, you know, they think the Jews are a race.
00:11:04.000When I get into arguments with these people, I try to explain to them that we have Jews of every possible racial background in my Orthodox community in Jerusalem.
00:11:16.000And they say, no, that can't possibly be true.
00:11:57.000And if we don't want to see that, then we're going to have to take this head-on.
00:12:02.000And the way to take it head-on is to say, you don't know what a nation is.
00:12:06.000You don't understand what a nation is.
00:12:07.000Let's talk about historically what a nation has been in Western civilization.
00:12:11.000And then maybe, you know, maybe you'll know something about it.
00:12:15.000From a different angle, one of the attacks on nationalism has been that basically nations should be defined purely by creed.
00:12:20.000It's purely a creedal phenomenon, particularly in the United States.
00:12:23.000The United States was founded under the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and carried forward through the institutions of the Constitution of the United States.
00:12:30.000So what is wrong with the idea of a purely creedal nation as opposed to a more holistic view of what nation constitutes?
00:12:40.000Well, it's like going to the opposite extreme.
00:12:44.000If someone doesn't accept—let's say somebody's like a Burkean and doesn't accept the Declaration of Independence as capturing the essence of America.
00:13:02.000You can want to fight for it and not be a Lockean.
00:13:05.000I mean, look, America is just not a religion, right?
00:13:08.000It's not a replacement for Christianity.
00:13:11.000So, sometimes I get the feeling with some of my colleagues who want to say that America is a creed, that really what they're doing is they're saying, I want to replace Christianity with something like Christianity, but let's say without Jesus.
00:13:30.000And I think this is, it's historically incorrect, but it's also, are you sure that that's something that you would want?
00:13:38.000I mean, the beauty of a nation is that it allows internal pluralism.
00:13:42.000I said before that all nations are internally diverse.
00:13:46.000And the moment that you start, you know, trying to figure out what the creed is that everybody has to sign on to, well, you're in church territory.
00:13:55.000A nation has to be able to have a much greater flexibility for different kinds of people.
00:14:06.000I mean, I understand why they're trying to do it, but I think they're also denying an important part of America's history, which is that the American people, the American nation, actually, for most of its history, had a content.
00:14:21.000Now, when I say content, I don't mean every single person was signed up for it, but I mean a dominant culture.
00:14:27.000That culture was an Old Testament culture.
00:14:32.000It was a common law culture and, of course, spoke the English language.
00:14:38.000And And only if you understand that up until World War II, for most of America's history, that that was America's common heritage that held the nation together.
00:14:49.000Only if you understand that can you explain historical phenomena like why is it that the United States never allowed a state into the Union until there was a majority, a Christian English-speaking population that would You know, that would follow the common law.
00:15:25.000It had to do with the fact that there was such a thing as an American heritage that held the country together, that people could assimilate into if they were from some other kind of background.
00:15:35.000And that's something that America really has lost since World War II.
00:15:41.000It's becoming radically more diverse, not just because of immigration, but also because of multiculturalism, also because of this ideology that America is different from every other nation in the world and doesn't have a cultural heritage that people can be assimilated into.
00:15:58.000Now, America has such a cultural heritage.
00:16:00.000The question is, America is fraying right now.
00:16:06.000Are Americans going to be willing to turn back to their own heritage and to reconnect to it?
00:16:12.000I think that's the question of this generation.
00:16:15.000So in just a second I want to ask you about self-determination and whether every nation deserves to have its own space or whether there is in fact a moral minimum to which nations have to aspire in order to achieve sort of a moral worth of having self-determination.
00:16:29.000But first, let's talk about your internet security.
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00:16:46.000Which is why I use ExpressVPN to make sure they never get hold of my data.
00:16:50.000As we speak, right now there's actually a huge fight going on in Congress where ISPs are lobbying against encrypted DNS in browsers.
00:17:43.000To learn more and once more, expressvpn.com slash ben.
00:17:46.000All right, so let's talk about a moral minimum with regard to nations.
00:17:49.000So obviously there are plenty of different peoples all around the world who identify as nations, and many of them have used the sort of Woodrow Wilson justification of self-determination in order to claim that they ought to be given territory.
00:18:02.000And we've seen that many of these things have ended in tears for even the people who want self-determination.
00:18:07.000Is there sort of a baseline of human rights or philosophy that has to be attained by a nation in order for them, in your view, to attain a claim for self-determination.
00:18:17.000I try real hard in the book to emphasize that I'm not a utopian.
00:18:22.000And you can create a utopian, you know, a utopian nationalist theory that's going to try to answer these kinds of questions mathematically.
00:18:31.000I think it's actually impossible to do.
00:18:34.000And the baseline is what John Stuart Mill called national cohesion or fellow feeling.
00:18:42.000The baseline is In order for a nation to be independent, let's say that we accept this principle that the world is governed best when there are many independent nations.
00:18:53.000Now, in order to get into the club, you're going to have to be able to do things that are very practical.
00:19:04.000I've said many times that I think the Kurds deserve an independent national state.
00:19:10.000This is 30 million people suffered endless persecution.
00:19:13.000They have a history going back to the Medes, their own language.
00:19:18.000They deserve a state in some kind of an abstract sense, and I support that.
00:19:24.000But in practice, if a nation is not capable of mustering the military and economic strength to be able to hold together and to fight off the neighbors who are going to try to prevent them, then there's not going to be a nation.
00:19:41.000You can say they have a right to a nation if you think expressing it that way would be helpful.
00:19:47.000But in practice, you can't have a right to national independence if you can't actually secure it.
00:19:55.000And so everywhere you look, you have to make these kinds of decisions and considerations.
00:20:03.000The Navajo, certainly the Navajo Nation have all the characteristics of a nation, but they're not strong enough to be able to stand independently under current circumstances.
00:20:18.000So at this time in history, they're not going to be an independent nation.
00:20:23.000I remember visiting Scotland a few years ago.
00:20:26.000You know, I saw Braveheart and I was like, yeah, Scottish independence, that's, you know, I actually think a lot of people in Scotland also saw Braveheart.
00:20:33.000And they're, you know, so it's really stirring and everything, but I spent a few weeks, you know, just talking to everybody I could, you know, from professors to restaurant owners, asking them about this.
00:20:46.000And is it really worth Taking apart the United Kingdom after a few hundred years of brilliant collaboration between English and Scots under a single state.
00:21:01.000I mean, lots of people said they wanted independence, and then they said, we want independence, but we want to be part of the European Union.
00:21:06.000So that sounds to me like an argument that just doesn't make any much sense.
00:21:14.000You have to have a real good reason to take apart your country.
00:21:22.000And it doesn't seem to me that they do.
00:21:24.000I'm opening to hearing other arguments.
00:21:27.000But basically, the view of a world of national states is not a view in which every group of people that says, oh, you know, we have a different culture.
00:21:59.000Is it worth the incredible suffering that a war of independence is going to bring on?
00:22:06.000Those are prudential, practical considerations which, you know, reasonable people can argue about them in different cases.
00:22:13.000So how do national interests balance out on the world stage?
00:22:15.000So what folks who are anti-nationalism would say is that you'll have brief periods of balance of power where people tend to deter each other to a certain extent and then you get the chaos of World War I, for example, or you get the chaos of World War II.
00:22:28.000And why is the EU not a solution to that, for example?
00:22:31.000We haven't had any, except for Yugoslavia, we haven't had any internecine European warfare Since World War II.
00:22:38.000So why exactly is internationalism or the subsummation of nation states under a broader rubric of an international institution, why isn't that a better solution than nationalism itself?
00:22:50.000This is a great question, but notice that it is the imperialist question.
00:22:57.000For 4,000 years, imperialists have been saying, if you allow tribes to have their independence, or nations to have their independence, they'll kill one another and they'll create wars, and that's not what we want.
00:23:08.000What we want is to impose peace on the whole world.
00:23:11.000And that's not an unreasonable argument, it's just that they're never willing to be honest about the cost.
00:23:18.000The cost is, if you're the Roman Empire or the Assyrian Empire or the European Union for that matter, if you're going to suppress war across a continent, but the cost is going to be that there's going to be a central power Almost always dominated by a specific nation, in this particular case, Germany.
00:23:40.000And it's their culture that's going to make the decisions.
00:23:49.000So today to be an Italian under what's effectively a German imperial rule, it's not exactly imperial rule because it's actually American force that's holding the thing in place, not German armed forces.
00:24:02.000But in terms of who's making the decisions, well, look, if the Italians, they had a recent election, which the Germans don't like the finance minister that the Italian people want to appoint.
00:24:15.000And so the Germans say they veto it, but they impose a finance minister.
00:24:19.000The Germans don't like the Italians' budget, the national budget.
00:24:23.000So the Germans will make a decision about what the limits of the Italian budget are.
00:24:26.000And of course it always turns out that this is somehow for the best for Germany.
00:24:30.000Now, if you are and Italian, and this doesn't upset you.
00:24:35.000Like, you don't feel that your own personal freedom and self-personal freedom is being impinged upon by having the Germans making decisions about who your government is.
00:24:46.000So realistically, you're not going to have an independent country, and you're going to be part of some kind of German empire.
00:24:51.000And I'm not going to tell you, you know, that's the end of the world.
00:24:55.000But I think when we're talking about the level of principle, the level of principle, I think that the prophets had it right, that having diverse nations with different kinds of laws, each one taking responsibility for their own faith.
00:25:09.000That means they'll decide how to appoint their own officials, they'll decide how to set their own budget, and of course they're going to screw it up, right?
00:25:19.000Of course, sometimes you screw things up.
00:25:22.000But the Italian people or the Polish people or the English people or the British are better off Being self-reliant, developing the ability to make decisions for themselves, taking the lumps when they get it wrong, and finding a way to come back.
00:25:40.000It's that competition among independent nations with different traditions, by trial and error, trying to figure out what the best way to live.
00:25:47.000That is what gave us almost everything in the modern world that we love.
00:25:53.000Modern science, people forget this, was the result of this kind of competition between Newton hated French science.
00:26:03.000It was a nationalist motivation by English scientists that gave us a lot of the physics and the worldview that we know.
00:26:13.000And you can say the same thing about the development of democracy, the development of the stock exchange in the Netherlands was the result of competition among nations.
00:26:25.000Competition among nations gives you laboratories in which you can experiment and try different things out.
00:26:32.000And empire means that all that competition is going to be suppressed.
00:26:37.000It's going to be suppressed and homogenized.
00:26:39.000And the bigger it is, the more oppressive it is.
00:26:42.000This is also a John Stuart Mill argument.
00:26:45.000There is no way that you can have one government that is over dozens and dozens of nations without many, many of them ending up being oppressed and suppressed.
00:26:56.000We'll jump back in with the next question in just a moment, but before we do, I wanted to let our listeners know we have a special offer for you this weekend and this weekend only.
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00:27:47.000So, is there any cause for nations intervening in the internal affairs of other nations?
00:27:52.000So, for example, you know, if the idea is that nations are best when, that the world is best when nations are self-governing, what would be the cause for, for example, intervening in a Rwandan genocide or intervening in the midst of a Holocaust by Germany, even if, let's say that they had stayed in their borders and they had just decided to murder all the Jews in their borders?
00:28:10.000Or let's say in the United States where black slaves were being held in the southern half of the United States and the Union declared basically that this was going to stop or it was eventually going to stop and the South seceded.
00:28:21.000Why was the South wrong in that particular case?
00:28:23.000They say we have our own culture, we have our own sort of philosophy that we have and it's none of your business whether we decide to enslave Africans who we have imported here.
00:28:34.000I mean, this is obviously an absolutely crucial question.
00:28:39.000First of all, realistically, nations do interfere in one another's business.
00:28:44.000And when I say I'm a nationalist, and I argue that you should be a nationalist, What I'm saying is actually that the constant interference in one another's business, that there should be some kind of principle that actually puts a stop to that, because if you don't, then everybody is, you know, the English spent A hundred years trying to conquer France during the Middle Ages.
00:29:11.000Five generations of Englishmen dying trying to conquer France.
00:29:15.000The idea is that the most natural thing is everybody interferes in everybody else's business.
00:29:21.000And we're looking for a principle that people could agree on that would allow some of this to stop.
00:29:27.000So in other words, we're trying to set up a situation where we minimize the natural tendency to just bully everybody and to try to take over everything and interfere in one another's business all the time.
00:29:38.000So this can be successful to a certain degree, and hopefully enough of a degree so that we can create this world of free nations that I'm talking about.
00:29:49.000But I don't, in the book or anywhere else, think that that means that we stop being human beings, we stop having moral obligations.
00:29:58.000I mean, if you have the power to get into Rwanda or Cambodia, You know, when millions of people, hundreds of thousands, millions of people are being killed, do you have the power to get in there, put a stop to it, and pull out without ending up, you know, governing the place for the next hundred years?
00:30:14.000Then I'd say you do have a moral obligation to do it.
00:30:17.000I don't think there's any question that that is an obligation if you have that kind of ability.
00:30:24.000I think the actual issue is Um, is, uh, Americans, for example, who say, we're the world's policemen.
00:30:32.000We have a moral obligation to impose a law on the entire planet.
00:30:37.000We have a moral obligation to, uh, to, to ramp up service in the American military to the degree that, that basically Americans are just like beat cops on every corner, everywhere in the world.
00:30:48.000And so when people start doing something wrong, all right?
00:30:53.000We start bombing because we're the policemen.
00:31:27.000First of all, you know, much as I love American-Americans, they're not as smart as they sometimes think they are, and they don't actually know how to run Iraq.
00:31:36.000They don't actually know how to run Libya.
00:31:39.000They don't actually know the answer to that question.
00:31:45.000I think a crucial thing that Americans actually need to get out of the story of their history in the last generation or two is the humility to understand, no, not everybody in the world wants America running their country.
00:31:58.000And if America tries to do it, America doesn't necessarily know how to do it.
00:32:03.000I want to make a big draw, a big distinction between the most extreme cases where you have the power to intervene to stop what really is a genocide.
00:32:17.000You could get in, get out and stop it.
00:32:19.000And most political cases where, okay, so, you know, Iraq is a brutal regime and they do terrible things and they violate, you know, human rights in the worst ways.
00:32:42.000I mean, I actually, I don't know the actual numbers because they're not publicized, but I would say that in the Middle East, in the last generation, maybe a million people have died as a consequence of American intervention and the domino effects that came from it.
00:32:57.000You know, that's not easy to justify, tearing apart foreign societies because you have an idea of how you think that they should be run.
00:33:04.000So in a second, I want to ask you about when U.S.
00:33:07.000intervention is necessary in order to check ambitions of other nations, because we've talked about when it would be necessary in terms of sort of humane interventions and when it would not be necessary when the United States is going in on bad pretexts, for example.
00:33:21.000But I want to ask about countering the other potential hegemons who want to get involved in world affairs.
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00:34:20.000Okay, so let's talk for a second about what the U.S.' 's role in terms of foreign policy is in countering the ambitions of other nations.
00:34:34.000So to take a couple of obvious examples, Russia invades Crimea, and the United States says, you ought not do that.
00:34:41.000Or Russia invades Georgia, and the United States says, you ought not do that, but Russia just sort of stays there, which is what they've done in both places effectively.
00:34:47.000They're sort of half in Georgia and half not, but Crimea they've fully internalized into Russia it seems.
00:34:53.000When is the United States justified in getting involved in something like that?
00:34:56.000And that has some historic ramifications too because obviously World War II begins under these pretenses.
00:35:01.000I mean it proceeds on the pretext of the West, meaning Great Britain effectively, guaranteeing the sovereignty of Poland, and the Germans saying, we just want to take this little slice right here, and Britain saying, well, you've taken enough slices.
00:35:15.000Couldn't the same argument be made with regard to, you know, would more people have died if they just allowed the Germans to take Danzig, for example?
00:35:25.000I think the German example is, I mean, you know it's overused, and I want to try to refine it just a little bit.
00:35:36.000If you read Mein Kampf, and it's not like something I'm recommending to your audience, go read Mein Kampf, but if you do read it, It's really hard to miss the fact that Hitler sees the fate of Germany, of the German nation, as being lord of the earth and mistress of the globe.
00:35:56.000This is a book about world's domination, and there is a difference, and I admit that politics is hard, you can't always figure it out exactly, but there is a difference between a nation which is We're trying to unify the ethnic group.
00:36:23.000One of the real problems, and this is a genuine problem with nationalism as a form of political order, is that there are always border disputes.
00:36:32.000You can never get everybody who's supposed to be theoretically on one side of the border onto the other.
00:36:41.000And what that means is that as opposed to imperialism where you just conquer everything in a nationalist world order.
00:36:50.000There's always going to be points of friction.
00:36:53.000So, India and Pakistan have, you know, long-standing border dispute.
00:36:59.000In Kashmir, Israel and the Arabs, right, the Jews and the Arabs have a border dispute in Judea and Samaria.
00:37:06.000The English and the Irish have a border dispute, which is back, it's back again in business over North Ireland.
00:37:14.000And those things are natural, and sometimes they do cause wars.
00:37:19.000What I want to do is I want to try to distinguish, and in the book I make this argument at greater length, between the basically inevitable tensions and frictions which sometimes erupt into these local wars, and obviously they can do lots of damage, but they don't create world wars.
00:37:37.000I mean, there are these sort of stock world wars that haunt the imagination of Western people.
00:37:44.000The Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War.
00:37:48.000Those are the stock wars that everybody's always saying, well, if you have Serb nationalism, then boom, World War I. I think this is a bunch of baloney.
00:37:59.000I think that when you go into any of these cases, what you will find Is there has to be, in order to start to bring about the deaths of tens of millions of people, like these horrific wars, there has to be some imperial power which has some ideology which says, We rule by right, right?
00:38:22.000It can be Catholicism, which is the Thirty Years' War.
00:38:25.000We're going to rule all of Europe and from the world.
00:38:29.000Or it can be the Napoleonic Wars, where it's some kind of revolutionary liberalism that Napoleon is trying to force down on the throats of everybody in Europe.
00:38:37.000And as a consequence, five million people died.
00:38:51.000And my argument is that what we, if we want a decent world, it's not a utopian world, but it's one that's not going to have these kinds of demolition derby wars that set out to simply reconstruct all of civilization.
00:39:34.000Both Russia and China have long imperial traditions.
00:39:40.000We're not talking about, you know, a Poland or an Ireland where we'd be kind of surprised if they set out to try to take over the whole world.
00:39:48.000Russia has many centuries and China millennia of imperial traditions.
00:40:59.000That was, you know, Reagan fought the entire end of the Cold War, opposing a real empire that was a real threat to the world, opposing them without America invading other countries.
00:41:10.000Now, the way I see it, this is a continuation of American policy during World War II, where America's view, Roosevelt's view was, we, the God-fearing democracies, we have an alliance of independent countries, we're coming to we have an alliance of independent countries, we're coming to liberate conquered countries in Europe.
00:41:30.000That's our goal, is to free and to give back their self-determination and their independence to countries that have been occupied by one of these two empires.
00:41:46.000It's not our business to be policing everything in the world.
00:41:48.000We have to find a way to create an alliance of nations and political movements that have a mutual interest in trying to fight the Soviet Union.
00:41:59.000That's not the same as Pax Americana, America's in charge here for all eternity.
00:42:07.000And that's what I think we should be trying to recapture.
00:42:10.000So, to change the topic, I want to talk a little bit about American domestic politics and philosophy.
00:42:14.000So, you've talked in the past about your objections to classical liberalism.
00:42:18.000Now, I have a friend, Dave Rubin, who constantly cites himself as sort of a classical liberal, which seems to sort of cross over in broad strokes with libertarianism, just the basic non-aggression principle, and that the government has no job regulating anything that is consensual activity.
00:42:32.000You've been critical, to a certain extent, of classical liberalism.
00:42:35.000How do you distinguish between conservatism and classical liberalism?
00:42:41.000First of all, all these terms, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, it's important to be aware all these terms are 19th century terms.
00:42:49.000So, when we trace their histories, I mean, these ideas really are much older than 19th century, but when we trace their histories, it's always a little bit anachronistic.
00:42:57.000So, let's take someone who's sort of, everybody kind of agrees is the, you know, the conservative is Edmund Burke.
00:43:05.000Burke was not the first conservative because he himself stands for an Anglo tradition that goes back many centuries, and that's the way he saw it.
00:43:14.000But since everybody agrees that he's a conservative, so let's take him.
00:43:19.000Edmund Burke spent his career arguing a version.
00:43:27.000He didn't explicitly oppose the British Empire.
00:43:32.000But all of his major fights were to help in the self-determination of the American people, the Irish people, India, which was controlled by the British at the time.
00:43:45.000is a very, very strong sense that the British cannot sit in London and make decisions for all these other countries in the world.
00:44:01.000Now, Burke sees the world in terms of nations just like the Bible does.
00:44:07.000He inherits a common law tradition, you know, of thinkers like Selden and Fortescue and Koch, Hale.
00:44:14.000These thinkers all see the world in terms of nations the way that the Bible does.
00:44:18.000And what holds these nations together is a love of an inheritance, a tradition.
00:44:25.000I already said it's not homogenous, every nation is internally diverse, but there is some kind of a tradition.
00:44:32.000Burke thinks the English tradition is simply the best tradition of government that there has ever been, the freest.
00:44:40.000And he's talking about English Christianity and the common law and obviously the English language.
00:44:48.000Now, putting the nation and its traditions in the center is extremely different from what later comes to be called liberalism.
00:44:55.000Liberalism grows out of that tradition, but what troubles me when I talk to my classical liberal friends is that They think that Enlightenment rationalism, that at some point in the 1700s, some really, really smart people figured out a bunch of rights which simply are the answer to, you know, the way everybody in the world should live.
00:45:20.000And I think this is historically, you know, Utterly false.
00:45:24.000What actually happened is that over a thousand years of commenting on the Bible and developing their common law, the English developed almost all of the rights that are in the American Bill of Rights, and the Americans sort of copied and pasted it along with most of the structure of the American Constitution.
00:45:46.000Understanding that that's what happened, first of all, it makes you a little bit more humble.
00:45:51.000Because it means that you don't sit around thinking, oh, my brain is so smart.
00:46:06.000I think it leads to all sorts of terrible wars.
00:46:09.000And internally, it can also lead to oppression.
00:46:12.000Burke's conservatism is much more moderate because it's realistic.
00:46:18.000He knows that nations are internally diverse, that they consist of different tribes, and he's looking to try to figure out how can we hold our nation together.
00:46:29.000Where can we draw the borders so that they are safest?
00:46:33.000How can we deploy our resources so that our country goes on for many, many more centuries?
00:46:39.000And I feel that, you know, Americans actually had a lot of that Burkean common sense conservatism back a generation ago, before the New World Order.
00:46:54.000I mean, when I was sort of inducted into the conservative movement in the 1980s, you know, we were always talking about, you know, how do you synthesize Edmund Burke and Adam Smith?
00:47:05.000And I thought that was a pretty reasonable place to be.
00:47:08.000That's a pro-religion, pro-nationalist view of freedom and free markets as leading to economic growth.
00:47:21.000I thought that was a great place to be.
00:47:23.000And somewhere along the line in the last 30 years, the American and English, British conservatives dropped religion and dropped nationalism, and they're just on free markets.
00:47:38.000And okay, I also believe in free markets, but they're so far gone they can't tell what a border is for.
00:47:45.000And this is really important to understand.
00:47:47.000Classical liberalism does not in and of itself have the resources to tell you about borders, for example.
00:47:56.000If all you do is study liberal thinkers, when I say liberal thinker, I mean any thinker who thinks that politics can basically be reduced to free and equal individuals coming together On the basis of consent.
00:48:11.000If you think politics can be reduced to that, and you don't understand that there's mutual loyalties that pull tribes together, and that pull nations together, and that any statesman worth anything has to care about those things, well, so you're not going to understand.
00:48:24.000So what's the problem of open immigration?
00:48:27.000Let's just flood the country with people of a different national tradition than we do.
00:48:32.000If you're a classical liberal, you can't answer that question.
00:48:35.000And that's disturbing to me, that Americans can't answer that question anymore.
00:48:38.000So in a second, I want to provide a basic defense to that question.
00:48:42.000I also want to ask you about whether the kickback to classical liberalism is coming not in the form of conservatism, but in the form of government interventionism.
00:48:49.000I'm going to ask about that in just one second.
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00:50:14.000Okay, so let's talk for a second about the answer to that question.
00:50:17.000Let's pick up the classical liberal mantle for a second and argue in favor of the idea that the argument about borders is that classical liberalism still has the requirement to protect its own values.
00:50:27.000Meaning if you don't agree with classical liberalism, you don't get to come in.
00:50:29.000So it would be a completely ideologically based border argument.
00:50:33.000That classical liberalism says, you know, yes, free and equal individuals who are coming together on the basis of consent, but we don't consent, so you can't come in.
00:50:41.000Why couldn't you pace a border policy on that?
00:50:43.000Well, my first problem with it, before we even get to the border, my first problem with it is that I just think it's an extremely weak political theory.
00:50:52.000All right, now I'm speaking just, you know, from the perspective of, you know, science or from, you know, political theory.
00:51:02.000We want to simplify the political world because simplifying it makes it easier for us to understand things.
00:51:12.000But there's a difference between really powerful and useful simplification and really dumb simplification.
00:51:20.000So to me, dumb simplification is when you take human beings whose fundamental political characteristic is that they're sticky, that they develop these mutual loyalties to one another, that a family is an incredibly strong that a family is an incredibly strong thing.
00:51:39.000And a tribe is an incredibly strong thing.
00:51:41.000I mean the reason that a small nation or tribe can stand up to world empires is because of its cohesion, because of the fact that the mutual loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for one another.
00:51:55.000That is something that makes these human groupings unbelievably strong.
00:51:59.000So my first objection is to the way we learn political theory.
00:52:04.000In every Introduction to Political Theory course, where the central characteristic of human beings that makes political order is completely ignored.
00:52:13.000And then you can't understand what's going on.
00:52:18.000Then if we take the specific example of the border, The reason that human societies have borders is because of this clustering.
00:52:29.000Jordan Peterson does a really good job of convincing young people that actually human beings are hierarchical in nature, that we only feel good if we join into a community You know, which has leaders, which has elders, which passes down a tradition.
00:52:50.000So now if you take a map of, you know, a geographical map and you look at where the different tribes are and you try to figure out, you know, who's loyal to who.
00:53:01.000So, you'll be able to draw rough borders.
00:53:04.000I already said they'll never be perfect, right?
00:53:07.000But you'll be able to draw rough borders and you say, okay, within this territory, that particular tradition is going to get to determine what the law is and what the norms are.
00:53:17.000And some other territory, the other tribe, which has a different tradition, different norms, they're going to be able to.
00:54:02.000Not every child is going to be loyal to what they were taught.
00:54:04.000But in general, children are born into families.
00:54:07.000And it's those families that teach them what tribe and what nation and what tradition to be loyal to.
00:54:13.000And even, you know, I have plenty of teenagers and they rebel, they're programmed to rebel, you know, they resist and they push the boundaries.
00:54:22.000But they're always pushing the boundaries outward from The traditions that they inherited from their family and their community.
00:54:30.000So even if they rebel and they move over, they're still, they've moved over from a baseline that comes from where their children.
00:54:56.000That's the biblical idea, even though it wasn't said quite like that by Moses.
00:55:01.000And I don't want people pretending that, you know, that it's about consent, because then they'll start to say, well, if we could get the Iraqis to consent to American government, then the Americans should be running Iraq, right?
00:55:17.000The Americans should just not be running Iraq, period.
00:55:21.000So I want to ask about the thinning out of conservatism.
00:55:24.000So you mentioned that before, conservatism that included the biblical tradition, included religion, included common bonds and certain social fabric being thinned out toward basically just free markets.
00:55:36.000One of the things that troubles me is that the kickback has not been in favor of the rebuilding of social fabric in a lot of areas.
00:55:42.000the kickback has been in favor of an anti-free market tendency, which is to say, well, free markets ought to be overthrown in favor of the so-called common good.
00:55:50.000And you hear language used like, well, shouldn't the market work for us?
00:55:53.000And I just keep thinking that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what free markets represent.
00:55:56.000I mean, in the end, free markets represent the idea that I'm capable of alienating my own labor.
00:56:01.000They don't represent something that you hitch to the wagon of family, and then we all get to combine together and then figure out how to invade each other's rights in order to benefit the common good, especially in the violation of some.
00:56:13.000You can just steal some rich guy's money and now you've benefited a bunch of families.
00:56:16.000So it seems to me that the kickback to a thinned out conservatism, a sort of libertarian minded conservatism with regard to government that stretched out into the societal realm where it went too far has been in the wrong area.
00:56:29.000The pushback actually should be a real reinculcation of a lot of the same values that were lost, not a pushback against the free market.
00:56:37.000I mean, you know that I've been involved in the last couple of years in organizing in America and Europe what hopefully is going to turn out to be a thoughtful national conservatism, which my hope is that it's going to be an appropriate response to this sort of rampant libertarianism and or neoconservatism on the one hand, and then the
00:57:04.000The rising white identity politics on the right, both of which I oppose.
00:57:10.000I mean, I actually think that there's, what's happened is that the conservative movement, as it turned to economics as kind of the sole issue that people really need in order to understand politics, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not too much.
00:57:30.000And so, as it moves in that direction, what happens is that this impoverished understanding of what politics is about leads people who feel that libertarianism has gone too far, they feel the Republican Party has gone too far in the direction of Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick or Milton Friedman.
00:57:54.000And I think that they're seeing things that are real problems.
00:57:59.000I mean, like the issue of to what extent did America's unwillingness to take China seriously as a rival and to say, OK, America's companies are going to move to China.
00:58:16.000That is a serious problem and a serious question.
00:58:19.000But I completely agree with you that That the debate is along this more government intervention in the economy, less government intervention in the economy axis.
00:58:36.000Nobody talks about, and this is, I mean almost nobody, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but in general, conservative politics in America and in the UK and in Europe is all about economics and about where, how much government interventions there are going to be.
00:58:54.000As soon as you start talking about these other things, then religion and nationalism, then people come back and they say, they start giving you economic answers.
00:59:06.000Like, there's an opioid addiction problem, so we need an economic, we need an economic answer to that.
00:59:16.000God and Scripture are disappearing, not even from just liberal communities, but even Christian communities are having trouble keeping their kids within the tradition.
00:59:28.000And the answer is charter schools, which is an economic answer.
00:59:33.000But the problem is economics will not solve these problems.
00:59:39.000We need a political theory that takes human beings as they are, which means that we have to recognize that there is such a thing as cohesion.
00:59:47.000We have to figure out what family cohesion is about, tribal and national cohesion.
00:59:51.000We have to figure out what we actually need to do to encourage those things.
00:59:54.000Now, if you're Hayek, then you may very well say to me that Every single thing that I come up with is like a government intervention, and so I'm a fascist.
01:00:07.000Like, let's say, I want Bible in the schools.
01:00:11.000I mean, at this point I'm not talking about, like, forcing people to be religious.
01:00:16.000I'm just talking about the total ignorance of Americans about their own past, which is never going to stop if we can't put Bible back in the schools.
01:00:27.000The answer to that is to understand what the American nation is, to understand that it's not a race, but to understand that it does have traditions, to figure out what are the most important things in those traditions, and to say it's a priority to teach those things.
01:00:43.000Now, if you can do it, through charter schools.
01:00:51.000But if you can't do it through charter schools, and I've been hearing, I'm not against them, but I've been hearing about this, my whole life I've been hearing about how charter schools are going to solve this problem.
01:00:59.000I want a discussion about why Americans simply, beginning in the 1940s, they wiped Christianity and Bible and the entire heritage, the entire set of ideas out of the school systems and created a country the entire set of ideas out of the school systems and created a country in which every school is a safe space in which you'll never, ever get to hear about God or scripture or what That's totally nuts if you want the country to have a future.
01:01:28.000If you want it to have a future, it has to have a past.
01:01:32.000I'm happy to—look, I live in a socialist country.
01:01:36.000No one dislikes socialism as much as I do.
01:01:40.000I mean, I pay roughly 50 percent income tax, 17 percent value-added tax, another 20 percent payroll tax, plus import taxes.
01:01:56.000But if they're going to tell me that That economics, which is the science of the choosing free, consenting individual, can answer the basic problems America has today, that's false.
01:02:09.000So in the remaining moments that we have left, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a question about the socialist country from which you come, the state of Israel.
01:02:17.000So a lot of Americans on the right, obviously, are very supportive of the state of Israel.
01:02:22.000They see commonality, cultural commonality, religious commonality in many cases.
01:02:26.000Increasingly, on the left, Israel has become extraordinarily unpopular.
01:02:30.000It's becoming more unpopular in areas of the alt-right, particularly, or the more isolationist right, paleo-conservative right.
01:02:38.000What do you make of Israel's sort of place in America right now, where Israel stands with the American people?
01:02:45.000I want to distinguish between the alt-right and the paleo.
01:02:49.000I mean, these labels are a little bit squishy and fluid, but there's a line you can draw between the rising white identity movement, which is I've paid careful attention to it in the last couple of years.
01:03:04.000I'm very sorry to report that it is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic.
01:03:14.000I mean, sometimes they will facetiously say that they like Israel because they think that Israel is a racist state like they want America to be.
01:03:24.000Most of them really detest Jews in Israel.
01:03:26.000I want to distinguish between that and the old paleoconservative right which had lots of problems with Israel and saw Israel as kind of hostile to their worldview when what they were doing was fighting Universal liberalism, right?
01:03:47.000When universal liberalism, the New World Order, when that took over the Republican Party, they felt they had to fight it, and they saw Israel being sold as, look, it's a liberal democracy like America, it's part of the liberal empire, and they resisted it.
01:04:00.000I think I see a big change taking place in those circles now, where Israel's nationalism is being taken, and I'm talking by people who are not racists, And they're looking to Israel as nationalists all across Europe and in other countries are looking to Israel as a model of a successful national state.
01:04:24.000And not only are they sympathetic, but they ask, are there lessons that we can learn from Israel that can help us with the disintegration of the United States?
01:04:36.000I mean, Israel has had plenty of problems in my lifetime, but at the moment, it's probably the strongest it's ever been.
01:04:43.000It's economically the strongest, but it also is the only country in the world where, I mean, the Jewish fertility rate is almost double what it is in...what the fertility rate in most Western countries is, and it continues to rise.
01:05:01.000In other words, it's a very special place where the feeling of national Mutual loyalty.
01:05:14.000Unites the left and the right, the religious and the non-religious.
01:05:17.000Of course, there's tensions and fights, but Israel is a very cohesive country.
01:05:23.000And the nationalists in the United States now, they look at Israel.
01:05:45.000These are things that allow the American nationalist right to rethink Israel and think of it in terms of an alliance.
01:05:54.000And the more anti-Israel the left becomes, the more the nationalist American right seems to be moving in this direction of re-identifying And I say re-identifying because, of course, the ancestors of Anglo-Americans or Dutch-Americans or Scottish-Americans, their ancestors saw biblical Israel as a model for them.
01:06:20.000And some of that is beginning to come back, seeing Israel as a helpful model for what America might someday be.
01:06:30.000Okay, so in a second I'm going to ask you the final question, which is, what do you see the future of America as, and what do you see the future of Israel as in the next few years?
01:06:37.000But, if you want to hear Yoram Hazony's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
01:06:40.000So, to subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
01:06:47.000Yoram Hazony, the book is The Virtue of Nationalism.