Yoram Hazony ｜ Rediscovering The Right
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Summary
What does it mean to be a conservative? What is a conservative and why does it differ from a liberal? In this episode, my friend Yoram Hazoni and I discuss the difference between being a liberal and a conservative.
Transcript
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Whatever you want to say about me, I am not a liberal.
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And I find that most of my friends on the right are not liberals.
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But we're told that to be a conservative today is to be a liberal.
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That the conservatives are the real liberals and the liberals have become leftists.
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And the leftists are like the socialists and the radicals and the Marxists, but not the classical liberals, except for some.
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Well, my friend Yoram Hazoni will help us to discover that because he's got a wonderful new book out,
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And you should know that there was not one minute during my entire life where I thought I was a liberal.
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Because especially these days, and especially in this country,
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I fear that the liberals have gone completely radical and half the conservatives are liberals.
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And we can't even articulate what it means to be a conservative.
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Is to be a conservative to be a great defender of liberty, whatever that means,
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is to be a conservative to be like those 17th and 18th century people who called themselves liberals,
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or is to be a conservative something different?
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A conservative is somebody who sees religious and political tradition as the key to maintaining a nation through time
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So you can tell you're talking to a conservative because they're always trying to focus on,
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is my nation or is a certain nation, is it becoming cohesive?
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Is it becoming something that's more capable of propagating through time,
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And that's a very, very different way of thinking about politics than liberals.
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Liberals, you know, we all know lots of liberals.
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Liberalism basically begins with the idea that human beings are by nature free and equal
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and then goes on to say, well, you know, what's the purpose of government?
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It must be to defend the freedom and equality that belongs to individuals by nature.
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I mean, we've all heard a million variations of that.
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And the question is, what's the relationship between somebody who begins with the individual
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and says the individual has all of these liberties by nature and the point of politics is to protect them
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and a conservative who says, well, hold on a second.
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If society doesn't, political society doesn't think about anything other than the freedom and equality of individuals,
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then what's going to happen to trying to actually propagate this thing over generations and centuries?
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The conservative immediately moves to thinking, you know, aren't there some kinds of restraints that we need?
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Aren't there some kinds of things that we need to be handing down, things we need to do in order to be able to transmit good and important and true things to future generations?
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And the moment you ask that, you're in a different conversation.
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This is a totally different way of viewing things because the classical liberal and the modern liberal,
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they're both beginning their look at politics from the lens of rights.
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What you're saying is the conservative looks at politics and says, hey, what are my circumstances?
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What are my natural loyalties and relationships?
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I'm born into this world not as a free-floating atom that has all sorts of abstract rights.
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I'm born into this world as a little baby to a mommy and a daddy.
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And maybe I've got some siblings and maybe I'm in a church and I've got some responsibilities there.
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And I've got some responsibilities to my nation.
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It's as though we're not even having the same conversation that the liberals are.
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Yeah, I think it's a very different conversation.
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But at this point, I mean, if we take a look at America, Britain, various other countries,
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which have been operating under the assumption, let's say at least since World War II,
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there's been this assumption that these are liberal democracies.
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That was, you know, before World War II, nobody used that expression pretty much.
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But the idea that liberalism, it is kind of the public religion or the public philosophy
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of the United States and of other European countries.
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And we've been, these countries have been in this framework now for, I don't know, about 60 years,
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I mean, I don't know if people have quite grasped this yet,
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but there was the 60 years of, we can call it, you know, the hegemony of liberal ideas,
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which is just fancy talk for saying, you know, basically everybody who was anybody was a liberal
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and anybody else was on, you know, was on the sidelines.
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Right, even most of the conservatives were liberal.
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And that sort of monopoly that basically you had to be one kind of liberal or another
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in order to be legitimate in society, that's collapsed.
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In 2020, most of the liberal institutions in America and the UK and a lot of other places
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capitulated in front of this wave of woke neo-Marxism, which, you know, it's related to liberalism
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in some ways, but it really is a different worldview.
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And you can see that it's a different worldview.
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And under these circumstances, where liberalism is quickly, it really is quickly declining.
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And I would think that if you were a liberal, you'd want to know, you know, what did we do wrong?
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You know, you'd want to say, we thought that the whole world would just become more and more reasonable,
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that everybody would adopt liberalism, that all countries would adopt liberalism,
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that people really believed that, you know, just a little while ago.
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And so the conservative question, what would you need to do in order to be able to propagate
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anything through the generations, to preserve anything?
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We've seen that liberalism doesn't have what it takes to do it.
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We joke now, we say, that the conservatives, during the 60 years of hegemonic liberalism,
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the conservatives didn't even conserve the women's bathroom.
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We might not be preserving the Supreme Court and other institutions of government.
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We had eight months of widespread rioting that was cheered on by the political class.
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You know, I think that under a certain age, almost everybody's right of center is saying that.
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We need to ask the question, what would you have to do in order to be able to conserve something?
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First of all, just because it's this obvious question you can't get away with.
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I mean, are there societies that are capable of conserving anything?
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And if so, what would you have to do to be like?
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So there's that, and there's an additional question, which I don't think we can avoid,
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which is that an awful lot of young people, I'm sure you encounter this all the time,
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an awful lot of young people who see that liberalism has collapsed and think that the
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neo-Marxist thing is completely insane, a lot of those young people are themselves turning
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to, you know, all sorts of characters on the sort of further right who are advocating,
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you know, one kind or another of dictatorship and fascism.
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And I mean, a lot of them explicitly saying, look, Christianity, Judaism, the Bible, you
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know, the Anglo-American tradition, the American constitution, a lot of them are saying, look,
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You know, I don't think that's true, but, you know, we'd better have that argument right
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But yes, it's sometimes called the horseshoe theory, I think, that when you get far enough
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right, it's difficult to distinguish between the people on the far right from the far left.
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I mean, I've seen this when you're talking about very, very extreme people on the right.
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They'll often be in favor of abortion or some kind of eugenics policy, just like the people
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on the far left and the people in the kind of normal right, you know, or the, they, that's
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That you'll find, I find that people on the very, very far right are very anti-Christian.
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They'll, and explicitly so, they'll be sort of militant atheists or pagans or something
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I mean, they're, so, so what you're saying is, okay, liberalism's collapsed.
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We need some alternative, but you don't, you don't want people to become a bunch of,
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you know, baby killing pagans who want to destroy Western civilization.
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Yeah, I think, I, I think if, if, if we just sort of summarize, like where the discussion
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is pretty much, the discussion is, uh, fewer and fewer people are, are consciously real
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liberal, still, you know, still holding on for dear life, large numbers of people moving
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far left, smaller numbers of people moving in, especially among younger people moving
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And then there's this big vacuum, there's this big space, which, um, you know, you and
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I and, and various of our colleagues have been trying to, uh, argue that there is, there
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is such a thing as national conservatism, as a nationalist conservatism, which is, uh, about
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preserving the religious and political traditions of the nation.
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That's a hard case to make now because the, the traditions are so weak.
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But if, if there's going to be an alternative, it's going to be in that space and it's going
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So for young people who have been just completely either not educated or maleducated, they've
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How are they supposed to answer their professors when the professors or their teachers or when
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the professors say, look, the only thing that even resembles conservatism in America
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The, the founding fathers, they were all liberals.
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John Locke practically wrote the constitution, uh, and the declaration of independence, you
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So even if you wanted to conserve something in America that was not liberalism, you could
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This is, this is a, uh, an important famous argument, which won the day, um, roughly in the
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Meaning the people who are saying it, they're claiming this was true since the day that America
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But the question is, is historically, when did people actually believe that?
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When did people think that America has always been liberal?
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And, and by the way, it's, it's kind of funny that, that Americans say that they've always
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And French say that they've always been liberal since the French revolution.
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And the English say that they've always been liberal since, since the, the glorious revolution.
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And the Germans just say that they've always been liberal.
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And it, no, every, every, every major nation has this same brainwash.
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People come out of the trauma of, uh, of, of World War II.
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And they say, we've got to do something completely different, radically different.
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And that's when the big push to, uh, to turn, uh, to turn away from, um, different traditions
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of, uh, uh, of, um, uh, Catholic democracy, Protestant, Protestant republicanism, the pre-World
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War theories of, of, of, you know, of what European, Europe and America were.
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However, it's after World War II that that stuff just gets erased.
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And you, you find books by famous professors for the first time in, in the 19, you know,
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late 40s, 1950s, arguing this, that the United States was born liberal, that, that it never
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It's a perfectly good idea, but it, it isn't, it isn't true.
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Very, very effective, but it's, it's not historically true.
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No, it's, it, it, it, it's, it's extremely effective.
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There was a moment where, uh, American professors and intellectuals said, George Washington is not
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And Thomas Jefferson really was the kind of, uh, of liberal that, that we're talking about.
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That, that, that did exist at the American founding.
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What they skipped is that the American constitution was written by the other party.
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And, and that, that theory depends, believing that theory depends on believing that, that,
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that there weren't two parties at the American founding, a liberal party and a conservative
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Uh, the, the, the, the national conservative party at the American founding was called the
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federalists and, uh, the, the, the main players, um, George Washington, uh, John Jay, uh, Alexander
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Hamilton, John Adams, and a guy named Gouverneur Morris.
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You'd think people would, would talk about him.
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He's the guy who actually drafted the American constitution of 1787.
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Like, you know, kind of an important guy to know what he actually thought.
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So the, these, these, uh, five and their party, um, the way that they looked at the American
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founding was, um, uh, there was the American revolution in 17, 1776.
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And, uh, and then there were 13 independent countries and we tried to fight a war against
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Britain, uh, being 13 independent countries, overthrowing the traditions and, uh, the, the,
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the, the British traditions that we'd inherited.
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And it didn't work at almost no point during the war was Washington able to raise the troops
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he needed to pay the troops that he needed for, for what they were doing.
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He rarely had the money that he needed to actually be able to move the troop.
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Yorktown, you know, the glorious, I don't mean to make fun of this, but it's important
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to know Yorktown, the glorious victory, you know, when, when the, the French swoop in and
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the, and the American troops come down, you know, from the North and, and, and that's
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it, we, we, you know, the Americans won, we won.
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So, but, but those troops were moved by private donations, like individuals wrote checks.
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The Continental Congress couldn't even fund the movement of the troops to the battle.
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Couldn't, right, to, to the battle to win the war.
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The, George Washington and his officers knew from years of experience that, that America
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came this close to having, to, to being completely wiped out in this war.
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And the reason was because the view that says, look, all you need really is liberty.
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It's all, it's just like, all you need is freedom.
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They're going to see that it's not in their interests, you know, to have the British rule them.
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And so they're going to go to war and the people are going to, you know, it's all, everybody's
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And Washington says, this, this is, this is, this is, this is not reality.
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And so the, the conservatives who founded America, the national, nationalist conservatives,
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what they did, this is, this was Washington was, was saying this throughout, you know,
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very early in the war, that we're going to need a government that is a lot like the British
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It has to be a strong central government with a very powerful executive and, and a balanced
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by, you know, bicameral legislature with all sorts of inherited British traditions, like,
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you know, the jury trial and the legislature being responsible for taxation and the legislature
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And what Washington and his comrades, his fellows, most of the people at the, the, the, the, the,
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the convention that wrote the constitution, the majority had been officers with Washington
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And what these guys said was, there's no hope for us if we don't have a restoration of something
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that looks a lot like the British constitution, like the, the traditional English constitution.
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Those, those conservatives are the people who founded America as a nation.
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They brought English common law into the federal government in the United States and established
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the, the, the British tradition officially as the legal tradition of the United States.
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And, and then these guys after World War II say, well, no, um, there were no conservatives.
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It all would like, you know, came out of the, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was
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Thomas Jefferson made it all up out of the brilliance of his head.
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We are told there were not political parties at the founding of the country that only developed
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And, uh, uh, you know, it wasn't that the federalists, the conservatives, that they really
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It was just kind of everybody got together and there were no sides and it was all, it
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We're frankly, even usually taught that conservatism is a younger political vision than liberalism
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because conservatism is just a reaction to liberalism.
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And so it doesn't have much of a history and it's kind of incoherent.
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And I think it was Lionel Trilling who said that conservatism is not a coherent, uh, worldview.
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It's rather a series of irritable mental gestures.
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It's, it's something that was, um, designed, uh, by, uh, intellectuals who actually, um, uh,
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saw an opportunity after World War II to, to just say, we can, we can get to utopia and
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we can, we can just eliminate all of the, uh, uh, the evil in the world by adopting enlightenment
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liberalism as an official, like an official state religion basically.
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And, uh, that, that was, uh, in the United States, that, that was, that began being implemented
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in the 1940s, um, with, uh, uh, the late 1940s, you already see the first Supreme Court decisions
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after World War II saying, um, that separation of church and state, you know, has, has been
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America's constitution, you know, since its founding.
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It's especially strange because, for instance, uh, one of the reasons for, uh, not establishing
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a church at the national level at the constitution is that there were established churches at
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It wasn't to protect people from the government have any, having any role with religion.
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It was that you already had state establishments.
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So in 1948, uh, the American Supreme Court in, in, in, in McCullough, um, rules unconstitutional
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the following set up in Chicago schools, Chicago public schools, um, voluntary, uh, student
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The students get to choose whether they want to learn from a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew
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Like half the states in the United States had something like that system.
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And that's what they, that's what the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional is this, you know,
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this, uh, cooperative teaching of, of God and scripture to, to children in the schools.
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By the 1960s, the Supreme Court rules prayer unconstitutional rules, Bible instruction, uh, if it has anything
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And the United States is, uh, uh, shifts from being a, you know, what, what, uh, Franklin
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It shifts from God-fearing democracy to liberal democracy.
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And that's the 60-year experiment that, that, that, that we tried and it failed.
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It's, it's, it was such effective propaganda that even I had believed that story for, for
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Most conservatives I know have believed that for most of my political life.
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You've seen this, it really only, you notice, huh, maybe something's off here.
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When, when you point out, I was really about the fifties and sixties that all of a sudden
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you see, uh, before that, for goodness sakes, there were blasphemy laws in the country at
00:22:10.780
There, I mean, there, there are all sorts of things that are unimaginable.
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And, and, and for, and, and now we are told that if you believe that marriage is between
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a man and a woman, if you believe that that is a true statement, that you are so reactionary,
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you are so out of keeping with the American tradition, where that was universally acknowledged
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to be the case until about five minutes ago, as so as to be, you should be cast into the
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outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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So you, you, you mentioned this, this, another piece of bizarre propaganda that, that, uh,
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If you just think about it for, I think for a moment, I mean, it's, it's such a strange
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He, he founded the tradition that he's conserving.
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You know, he, he was, he became the great conservative by arguing for conservatism, but he invented
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And, and so he was actually a revolutionary, right?
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So I, I, I, I begin my, my new book with a little bit of history.
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And, uh, and I think, I think a lot of readers are going to be, um, astonished to discover
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that if you go back in the English common law tradition, um, to the 1400s, you could probably
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go earlier, but in the 1400s, there's a, a, a great Anglo conservative thinker named John
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Fortescue, who, uh, wrote a book called In Praise of the Laws of England.
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It's available in a, in a, uh, in a, uh, in a, uh, a new Cambridge edition where, where
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And this English political theorist is explaining, um, the separation of powers.
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He's saying, well, why is, why is the English constitution the greatest constitution in the
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Why is it better than the French or the German or other constitutions?
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And he's explaining, well, there's the seven separation of powers between the king and
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parliament and the, the, uh, the, the system of checks and balances.
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And he talks about the fact that, uh, our king is under law and, uh, uh, that there's rule
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of law and, and, uh, uh, which is protected by the jury trial and explains the difference
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between the English jury trial and the, the, the system in France where they torture people
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in order to find out whether they did things or not.
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And he says, that's like the road to hell, not to justice.
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But, but he's, he, he, he, he, he talks about property.
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He talks about how property is, is, is, is this fundamental English right.
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Because property is the key, not just to prosperity for everyone, but also to freedom.
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And he talks about how in England, the king has no right to enter the home of the lowliest
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peasant and to take anything that belongs to him or, or even to enter without his permission.
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Now this is being written in the 1470s and it, and it, it, it, it, it, it, it's a tradition
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that is, if you're an American, it's your tradition.
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It's where you, it, it, it, it, it, it's where this all came from.
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And when Burke 300 years later, after Fortescue, when, when Burke is defending this tradition,
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He's explicitly saying that all of these great thinkers for centuries and centuries who, who
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created the English common law tradition and, and, and the, the, the system that brings,
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um, it, individual liberty, but also, uh, uh, um, religion and national independence and
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all these things that we consider conservative, or at least, you know, uh, conservatives consider
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Burke is finding in a tradition that's many centuries old.
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And, um, look, if you're conservative, if you're thinking maybe you want to be conservative,
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and even if you're one of these people who's saying conservative, conservatism never conserves
00:25:52.660
anything, then, then, you, stop reading liberals.
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I mean, you drink the Kool-Aid, it, it, it, it does things to your brain.
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That's, you, you ought to, you don't need to discover something anew.
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You can actually rediscover something that is 700 years old now, almost.
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You can do that in conservatism, a rediscovery by Yoram Hazoni.
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And I, I look forward as we now get past all of this liberal propaganda, as we try to reassert
00:26:21.320
some confident understanding of what it means to be a conservative, I look forward to really
00:26:26.220
elevating the way in which we will be owning the libs into the future, and hopefully rebuilding