The Michael Knowles Show - May 30, 2022


Yoram Hazony ｜ Rediscovering The Right


Episode Stats


Length

26 minutes

Words per minute

173.67253

Word count

4,615

Sentence count

249

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:37.660 Whatever you want to say about me, I am not a liberal.
00:00:41.420 And I find that most of my friends on the right are not liberals.
00:00:45.800 But we're told that to be a conservative today is to be a liberal.
00:00:49.720 That the conservatives are the real liberals and the liberals have become leftists.
00:00:52.880 And the leftists are like the socialists and the radicals and the Marxists, but not the classical liberals, except for some.
00:00:58.780 And it's very, very confusing.
00:01:01.740 But I know that I am not a liberal.
00:01:03.980 I know it down in my gut.
00:01:06.060 I know that I am a conservative.
00:01:07.580 But what does it mean to be a conservative?
00:01:09.020 Well, my friend Yoram Hazoni will help us to discover that because he's got a wonderful new book out,
00:01:14.480 Conservatism, A Rediscovery.
00:01:16.600 Yoram, thank you for coming on the show.
00:01:17.840 Well, you're very welcome.
00:01:19.620 And you should know that there was not one minute during my entire life where I thought I was a liberal.
00:01:25.160 I am envious of you that you knew that.
00:01:28.400 Because especially these days, and especially in this country,
00:01:34.320 I fear that the liberals have gone completely radical and half the conservatives are liberals.
00:01:40.460 And we can't even articulate what it means to be a conservative.
00:01:43.180 Is to be a conservative to be a great defender of liberty, whatever that means,
00:01:48.220 is to be a conservative to be like those 17th and 18th century people who called themselves liberals,
00:01:55.460 or is to be a conservative something different?
00:01:59.220 There is.
00:01:59.840 There is a third option.
00:02:01.800 A conservative is somebody who sees religious and political tradition as the key to maintaining a nation through time
00:02:15.040 and building up its strength.
00:02:17.140 All right.
00:02:17.880 So you can tell you're talking to a conservative because they're always trying to focus on,
00:02:26.160 is my nation or is a certain nation, is it becoming cohesive?
00:02:32.240 Is it becoming stronger?
00:02:33.740 Is it becoming something that's more capable of propagating through time,
00:02:38.340 handing on its traditions to its children?
00:02:40.780 Or is it becoming less so?
00:02:42.400 And that's a very, very different way of thinking about politics than liberals.
00:02:49.540 Liberals, you know, we all know lots of liberals.
00:02:53.020 Liberalism basically begins with the idea that human beings are by nature free and equal
00:03:00.380 and then goes on to say, well, you know, what's the purpose of government?
00:03:05.260 It must be to defend the freedom and equality that belongs to individuals by nature.
00:03:09.860 I mean, we've all heard a million variations of that.
00:03:14.000 And the question is, what's the relationship between somebody who begins with the individual
00:03:19.180 and says the individual has all of these liberties by nature and the point of politics is to protect them
00:03:24.720 and a conservative who says, well, hold on a second.
00:03:29.540 If society doesn't, political society doesn't think about anything other than the freedom and equality of individuals,
00:03:37.620 then what's going to happen to trying to actually propagate this thing over generations and centuries?
00:03:43.840 The conservative immediately moves to thinking, you know, aren't there some kinds of restraints that we need?
00:03:51.680 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?
00:04:02.940 And the moment you ask that, you're in a different conversation.
00:04:05.860 This is a totally different way of viewing things because the classical liberal and the modern liberal,
00:04:12.820 they're both beginning their look at politics from the lens of rights.
00:04:17.420 What are my natural rights?
00:04:18.960 What are my positive rights?
00:04:20.560 What are all the rights that I'm entitled to?
00:04:22.920 What you're saying is the conservative looks at politics and says, hey, what are my circumstances?
00:04:27.420 What's my family?
00:04:28.280 What are my natural loyalties and relationships?
00:04:30.480 What are my obligations that I have?
00:04:32.100 I'm born into this world not as a free-floating atom that has all sorts of abstract rights.
00:04:36.820 I'm born into this world as a little baby to a mommy and a daddy.
00:04:39.860 And maybe I've got some siblings and maybe I'm in a church and I've got some responsibilities there.
00:04:44.260 And I've got some responsibilities to my nation.
00:04:46.340 It's as though we're not even having the same conversation that the liberals are.
00:04:51.580 Yeah, I think it's a very different conversation.
00:04:54.940 But at this point, I mean, if we take a look at America, Britain, various other countries,
00:05:00.300 which have been operating under the assumption, let's say at least since World War II,
00:05:07.320 there's been this assumption that these are liberal democracies.
00:05:11.420 That was, you know, before World War II, nobody used that expression pretty much.
00:05:15.020 But the idea that liberalism, it is kind of the public religion or the public philosophy
00:05:24.120 of the United States and of other European countries.
00:05:27.700 And we've been, these countries have been in this framework now for, I don't know, about 60 years,
00:05:34.740 except that in 2020, it basically collapsed.
00:05:39.060 I mean, I don't know if people have quite grasped this yet,
00:05:43.400 but there was the 60 years of, we can call it, you know, the hegemony of liberal ideas,
00:05:48.600 which is just fancy talk for saying, you know, basically everybody who was anybody was a liberal
00:05:53.680 and anybody else was on, you know, was on the sidelines.
00:05:55.920 And even the conservatives were liberal.
00:05:58.040 Right, even most of the conservatives were liberal.
00:06:00.560 And that sort of monopoly that basically you had to be one kind of liberal or another
00:06:07.220 in order to be legitimate in society, that's collapsed.
00:06:13.200 That's broken.
00:06:14.240 In 2020, most of the liberal institutions in America and the UK and a lot of other places
00:06:20.920 capitulated in front of this wave of woke neo-Marxism, which, you know, it's related to liberalism
00:06:31.380 in some ways, but it really is a different worldview.
00:06:34.080 And you can see that it's a different worldview.
00:06:36.260 You can see that something big has changed.
00:06:38.620 Liberals no longer have the monopoly.
00:06:40.180 And under these circumstances, where liberalism is quickly, it really is quickly declining.
00:06:50.900 And I would think that if you were a liberal, you'd want to know, you know, what did we do wrong?
00:06:56.680 You know, you'd want to say, we thought that the whole world would just become more and more reasonable,
00:07:02.800 that everybody would adopt liberalism, that all countries would adopt liberalism,
00:07:06.200 that people really believed that, you know, just a little while ago.
00:07:10.180 And now it's obviously false.
00:07:12.140 And so the conservative question, what would you need to do in order to be able to propagate
00:07:21.180 anything through the generations, to preserve anything?
00:07:26.420 We've seen that liberalism doesn't have what it takes to do it.
00:07:29.160 So what would it have to be like?
00:07:30.900 We joke now, we say, that the conservatives, during the 60 years of hegemonic liberalism,
00:07:36.460 the conservatives didn't even conserve the women's bathroom. 1.00
00:07:39.040 We didn't conserve anything.
00:07:41.080 We didn't conserve marriage.
00:07:42.260 We didn't conserve biological sex.
00:07:44.820 We didn't conserve admiration for our country.
00:07:47.220 We now regularly protest the American flag.
00:07:49.980 We might not be preserving the Supreme Court and other institutions of government.
00:07:53.880 We had eight months of widespread rioting that was cheered on by the political class.
00:07:58.040 We didn't conserve anything.
00:08:00.800 You know, I think that under a certain age, almost everybody's right of center is saying that.
00:08:09.840 We need to ask the question, what would you have to do in order to be able to conserve something?
00:08:13.220 First of all, just because it's this obvious question you can't get away with.
00:08:16.640 I mean, are there societies that are capable of conserving anything?
00:08:19.820 And if so, what would you have to do to be like?
00:08:21.920 So there's that, and there's an additional question, which I don't think we can avoid,
00:08:27.680 which is that an awful lot of young people, I'm sure you encounter this all the time, 0.55
00:08:32.260 an awful lot of young people who see that liberalism has collapsed and think that the
00:08:37.340 neo-Marxist thing is completely insane, a lot of those young people are themselves turning
00:08:42.940 to, you know, all sorts of characters on the sort of further right who are advocating,
00:08:48.300 you know, one kind or another of dictatorship and fascism.
00:08:53.380 And I mean, a lot of them explicitly saying, look, Christianity, Judaism, the Bible, you
00:09:00.700 know, the Anglo-American tradition, the American constitution, a lot of them are saying, look,
00:09:04.940 all of these things, they're defeated.
00:09:07.000 They're gone.
00:09:07.620 And we saw that they can't hold their own.
00:09:10.220 You know, I don't think that's true, but, you know, we'd better have that argument right
00:09:16.700 now.
00:09:17.220 Right.
00:09:17.700 But yes, it's sometimes called the horseshoe theory, I think, that when you get far enough
00:09:22.840 right, it's difficult to distinguish between the people on the far right from the far left.
00:09:27.080 I mean, I've seen this when you're talking about very, very extreme people on the right.
00:09:31.300 They'll often be in favor of abortion or some kind of eugenics policy, just like the people 0.99
00:09:36.940 on the far left and the people in the kind of normal right, you know, or the, they, that's
00:09:42.140 where you find pro-life.
00:09:43.060 That you'll find, I find that people on the very, very far right are very anti-Christian.
00:09:47.880 They'll, and explicitly so, they'll be sort of militant atheists or pagans or something
00:09:51.680 like that.
00:09:52.080 I mean, they're, so, so what you're saying is, okay, liberalism's collapsed.
00:09:55.940 We need some alternative, but you don't, you don't want people to become a bunch of, 0.99
00:09:59.380 you know, baby killing pagans who want to destroy Western civilization. 0.73
00:10:02.860 Yeah, I think, I, I think if, if, if we just sort of summarize, like where the discussion 0.89
00:10:08.320 is pretty much, the discussion is, uh, fewer and fewer people are, are consciously real
00:10:15.820 liberal, still, you know, still holding on for dear life, large numbers of people moving
00:10:21.320 far left, smaller numbers of people moving in, especially among younger people moving
00:10:27.000 to, you know, into this, to the far right.
00:10:29.340 And then there's this big vacuum, there's this big space, which, um, you know, you and
00:10:34.740 I and, and various of our colleagues have been trying to, uh, argue that there is, there
00:10:40.140 is such a thing as national conservatism, as a nationalist conservatism, which is, uh, about
00:10:45.980 preserving the religious and political traditions of the nation.
00:10:50.680 That's a hard case to make now because the, the traditions are so weak.
00:10:54.240 But if, if there's going to be an alternative, it's going to be in that space and it's going
00:10:58.520 to be on that subject.
00:10:59.940 Right.
00:11:00.340 So for young people who have been just completely either not educated or maleducated, they've
00:11:08.700 been taught things that aren't true.
00:11:10.540 How are they supposed to answer their professors when the professors or their teachers or when
00:11:15.300 the professors say, look, the only thing that even resembles conservatism in America
00:11:19.660 is conserving liberalism.
00:11:22.400 You hear this a lot.
00:11:23.160 The, the founding fathers, they were all liberals.
00:11:26.500 John Locke practically wrote the constitution, uh, and the declaration of independence, you
00:11:30.660 know, this is, uh, this is all liberalism.
00:11:32.880 So even if you wanted to conserve something in America that was not liberalism, you could
00:11:38.540 not do it.
00:11:39.820 Yeah.
00:11:40.000 This is, this is a, uh, an important famous argument, which won the day, um, roughly in the
00:11:47.840 1940s, 1950s.
00:11:49.380 Meaning the people who are saying it, they're claiming this was true since the day that America
00:11:53.760 was founded.
00:11:54.340 We've always been liberals.
00:11:55.300 But the question is, is historically, when did people actually believe that?
00:12:00.900 When did people think that America has always been liberal?
00:12:03.420 And, and by the way, it's, it's kind of funny that, that Americans say that they've always
00:12:07.540 been liberal, you know, since the revolution.
00:12:09.800 And French say that they've always been liberal since the French revolution.
00:12:13.240 And the English say that they've always been liberal since, since the, the glorious revolution.
00:12:17.500 And the Germans just say that they've always been liberal.
00:12:20.100 And it, no, every, every, every major nation has this same brainwash.
00:12:24.660 Yeah.
00:12:24.920 And they were all born at the same time.
00:12:26.740 They're all post-World War II.
00:12:28.700 People come out of the trauma of, uh, of, of World War II.
00:12:33.820 And they say, we've, uh, the two world wars.
00:12:37.500 And they say, we've got to do something completely different, radically different.
00:12:41.600 We have to make sure this never happens again.
00:12:43.280 And that's when the big push to, uh, to turn, uh, to turn away from, um, different traditions
00:12:52.540 of, uh, uh, of, um, uh, Catholic democracy, Protestant, Protestant republicanism, the pre-World
00:13:00.640 War theories of, of, of, you know, of what European, Europe and America were.
00:13:06.380 However, it's after World War II that that stuff just gets erased.
00:13:12.540 And you, you find books by famous professors for the first time in, in the 19, you know,
00:13:19.100 late 40s, 1950s, arguing this, that the United States was born liberal, that, that it never
00:13:28.000 had any conservatives.
00:13:29.740 And that argument won the day for a while.
00:13:32.240 And it's completely false.
00:13:33.460 I mean, other than that, it's fine.
00:13:34.400 It's a perfectly good idea, but it, it isn't, it isn't true.
00:13:37.000 Very, very effective, but it's, it's not historically true.
00:13:39.820 No, it's, it, it, it, it's, it's extremely effective.
00:13:42.700 There was a moment where, uh, American professors and intellectuals said, George Washington is not
00:13:48.460 going to be the father of our country.
00:13:49.860 Thomas Jefferson is.
00:13:50.940 And Thomas Jefferson really was the kind of, uh, of liberal that, that we're talking about.
00:13:58.360 That, that, that did exist at the American founding.
00:14:00.640 What they skipped is that the American constitution was written by the other party.
00:14:05.060 And, and that, that theory depends, believing that theory depends on believing that, that,
00:14:11.260 that there weren't two parties at the American founding, a liberal party and a conservative
00:14:15.940 party.
00:14:16.360 Uh, the, the, the, the national conservative party at the American founding was called the
00:14:20.940 federalists and, uh, the, the, the main players, um, George Washington, uh, John Jay, uh, Alexander
00:14:29.180 Hamilton, John Adams, and a guy named Gouverneur Morris.
00:14:32.800 He's got this, this, this great name.
00:14:34.840 You'd think people would, would talk about him.
00:14:36.900 Nobody ever talks about him.
00:14:37.780 He's the guy who actually drafted the American constitution of 1787.
00:14:41.020 Like, you know, kind of an important guy to know what he actually thought.
00:14:44.480 So the, these, these, uh, five and their party, um, the way that they looked at the American
00:14:51.460 founding was, um, uh, there was the American revolution in 17, 1776.
00:14:57.220 And, uh, and then there were 13 independent countries and we tried to fight a war against
00:15:02.660 Britain, uh, being 13 independent countries, overthrowing the traditions and, uh, the, the, 0.92
00:15:08.880 the, the British traditions that we'd inherited.
00:15:11.040 And it didn't work at almost no point during the war was Washington able to raise the troops
00:15:17.160 he needed to pay the troops that he needed for, for what they were doing.
00:15:21.440 He rarely had the money that he needed to actually be able to move the troop.
00:15:25.220 Yorktown, you know, the glorious, I don't mean to make fun of this, but it's important
00:15:28.220 to know Yorktown, the glorious victory, you know, when, when the, the French swoop in and
00:15:32.780 the, and the American troops come down, you know, from the North and, and, and that's
00:15:37.320 it, we, we, you know, the Americans won, we won.
00:15:39.800 So, but, but those troops were moved by private donations, like individuals wrote checks.
00:15:47.180 The Continental Congress couldn't even fund the movement of the troops to the battle.
00:15:50.720 Couldn't, right, to, to the battle to win the war.
00:15:54.100 The, George Washington and his officers knew from years of experience that, that America
00:16:00.300 came this close to having, to, to being completely wiped out in this war.
00:16:05.400 And the reason was because the view that says, look, all you need really is liberty.
00:16:11.360 You know, like all we need is freedom.
00:16:12.960 Like we'll, we'll all be free.
00:16:14.360 It's like the Beatles.
00:16:14.980 All you need is love.
00:16:15.720 No, it is.
00:16:16.000 What does that mean?
00:16:16.580 Right.
00:16:16.840 It's all, it's just like, all you need is freedom.
00:16:19.140 And, and all you need is freedom.
00:16:20.540 How does that work?
00:16:21.520 Well, people are going to volunteer.
00:16:22.960 They're going to see that it's not in their interests, you know, to have the British rule them.
00:16:26.880 And so they're going to go to war and the people are going to, you know, it's all, everybody's
00:16:31.380 going to volunteer to do everything.
00:16:33.380 And Washington says, this, this is, this is, this is, this is not reality.
00:16:37.980 This is, this is insanity.
00:16:39.420 Right.
00:16:39.820 And so the, the conservatives who founded America, the national, nationalist conservatives,
00:16:44.580 what they did, this is, this was Washington was, was saying this throughout, you know,
00:16:48.580 very early in the war, that we're going to need a government that is a lot like the British
00:16:53.580 government.
00:16:54.020 It has to be a strong central government with a very powerful executive and, and a balanced
00:17:00.860 by, you know, bicameral legislature with all sorts of inherited British traditions, like,
00:17:06.040 you know, the jury trial and the legislature being responsible for taxation and the legislature
00:17:10.620 making the laws and, and the executive veto.
00:17:13.180 I mean, you can just go on and on.
00:17:14.340 And what Washington and his comrades, his fellows, most of the people at the, the, the, the, the,
00:17:22.760 the convention that wrote the constitution, the majority had been officers with Washington
00:17:27.120 in his army.
00:17:28.240 And what these guys said was, there's no hope for us if we don't have a restoration of something
00:17:35.520 that looks a lot like the British constitution, like the, the traditional English constitution.
00:17:39.980 Those were conservatives.
00:17:41.700 Those, those conservatives are the people who founded America as a nation.
00:17:45.660 They brought English common law into the federal government in the United States and established
00:17:53.820 the, the, the British tradition officially as the legal tradition of the United States.
00:17:57.740 And, and then these guys after World War II say, well, no, um, there were no conservatives.
00:18:03.300 They weren't conserving anything.
00:18:04.720 It all would like, you know, came out of the, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was
00:18:08.480 Thomas Jefferson made it all up out of the brilliance of his head.
00:18:11.220 Don't you know, don't you know, don't you see?
00:18:13.380 It's amazing even the way it's taught now.
00:18:16.180 We are told there were not political parties at the founding of the country that only developed
00:18:20.640 later on as we approach the election of 1800.
00:18:22.940 And, uh, uh, you know, it wasn't that the federalists, the conservatives, that they really
00:18:29.480 are responsible for the constitution.
00:18:30.800 It was just kind of everybody got together and there were no sides and it was all, it
00:18:34.880 was all kind of kumbaya.
00:18:36.380 We're frankly, even usually taught that conservatism is a younger political vision than liberalism
00:18:44.180 because conservatism is just a reaction to liberalism.
00:18:47.280 And so it doesn't have much of a history and it's kind of incoherent.
00:18:49.760 And I think it was Lionel Trilling who said that conservatism is not a coherent, uh, worldview.
00:18:54.720 It's rather a series of irritable mental gestures.
00:18:58.880 All of, you're saying all of that's false.
00:19:00.960 I'm saying all that's propaganda.
00:19:03.780 It's, it's not just false.
00:19:05.200 It's, it's something that was, um, designed, uh, by, uh, intellectuals who actually, um, uh,
00:19:13.980 saw an opportunity after World War II to, to just say, we can, we can get to utopia and
00:19:20.440 we can, we can just eliminate all of the, uh, uh, the evil in the world by adopting enlightenment
00:19:29.120 liberalism as an official, like an official state religion basically.
00:19:33.200 And, uh, that, that was, uh, in the United States, that, that was, that began being implemented
00:19:40.200 in the 1940s, um, with, uh, uh, the late 1940s, you already see the first Supreme Court decisions
00:19:46.560 after World War II saying, um, that separation of church and state, you know, has, has been
00:19:52.360 America's constitution, you know, since its founding.
00:19:56.260 But they only discovered that in 1947.
00:19:59.840 I mean, it's a little bit strange.
00:20:01.920 It's especially strange because, for instance, uh, one of the reasons for, uh, not establishing
00:20:08.820 a church at the national level at the constitution is that there were established churches at
00:20:13.700 the state level.
00:20:14.380 It wasn't to protect people from the government have any, having any role with religion.
00:20:18.000 It was that you already had state establishments.
00:20:20.300 So in 1948, uh, the American Supreme Court in, in, in, in McCullough, um, rules unconstitutional
00:20:29.920 the following set up in Chicago schools, Chicago public schools, um, voluntary, uh, student
00:20:37.880 participation in religious instruction.
00:20:40.500 The students get to choose whether they want to learn from a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew
00:20:46.040 during school hours about religion.
00:20:48.760 Okay.
00:20:49.560 That's 1948.
00:20:50.820 Like half the states in the United States had something like that system.
00:20:54.400 And that's what they, that's what the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional is this, you know,
00:21:00.260 this, uh, cooperative teaching of, of God and scripture to, to children in the schools.
00:21:06.220 By the 1960s, the Supreme Court rules prayer unconstitutional rules, Bible instruction, uh, if it has anything 0.97
00:21:14.460 to do with religion, unconstitutional.
00:21:16.640 And the United States is, uh, uh, shifts from being a, you know, what, what, uh, Franklin
00:21:23.380 Roosevelt called a God-fearing democracy.
00:21:25.740 It shifts from God-fearing democracy to liberal democracy.
00:21:29.300 Mm-hmm.
00:21:29.420 And that's the 60-year experiment that, that, that, that we tried and it failed.
00:21:34.840 Now, now we better do something else.
00:21:36.580 It's, it's, it was such effective propaganda that even I had believed that story for, for
00:21:43.720 most of my conscious political life.
00:21:46.180 Most conservatives I know have believed that for most of my political life.
00:21:51.580 And it, so you've seen it crumble around you.
00:21:54.180 You've seen this, it really only, you notice, huh, maybe something's off here.
00:21:57.680 When, when you point out, I was really about the fifties and sixties that all of a sudden
00:22:02.040 you see, uh, before that, for goodness sakes, there were blasphemy laws in the country at
00:22:06.380 various points.
00:22:07.240 It was, no one thought that was, and then.
00:22:09.660 There were Sabbath laws.
00:22:10.780 There, I mean, there, there are all sorts of things that are unimaginable.
00:22:13.340 Right.
00:22:13.580 And, and, and for, and, and now we are told that if you believe that marriage is between
00:22:19.760 a man and a woman, if you believe that that is a true statement, that you are so reactionary,
00:22:25.660 you are so out of keeping with the American tradition, where that was universally acknowledged
00:22:30.520 to be the case until about five minutes ago, as so as to be, you should be cast into the
00:22:34.480 outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth.
00:22:36.500 So you, you, you mentioned this, this, another piece of bizarre propaganda that, that, uh,
00:22:43.180 Edmund Burke founded conservatism.
00:22:45.560 If you just think about it for, I think for a moment, I mean, it's, it's such a strange
00:22:49.340 thing to say.
00:22:50.340 He, he founded the tradition that he's conserving.
00:22:53.800 You know, he, he was, he became the great conservative by arguing for conservatism, but he invented
00:22:58.640 the whole thing.
00:22:59.620 And, and so he was actually a revolutionary, right?
00:23:02.780 And it doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:23:04.380 So I, I, I, I begin my, my new book with a little bit of history.
00:23:09.640 And, uh, and I think, I think a lot of readers are going to be, um, astonished to discover
00:23:16.120 that if you go back in the English common law tradition, um, to the 1400s, you could probably
00:23:22.680 go earlier, but in the 1400s, there's a, a, a great Anglo conservative thinker named John
00:23:28.600 Fortescue, who, uh, wrote a book called In Praise of the Laws of England.
00:23:32.360 It's very easy to read.
00:23:34.020 It's available in a, in a, uh, in a, uh, in a, uh, a new Cambridge edition where, where
00:23:38.720 they, they fix the spelling.
00:23:40.060 So it's just a breeze and it's short.
00:23:42.020 And there it is.
00:23:43.080 It's the 1470s.
00:23:44.960 And this English political theorist is explaining, um, the separation of powers.
00:23:52.080 He's saying, well, why is, why is the English constitution the greatest constitution in the
00:23:56.140 world?
00:23:56.480 Why is it better than the French or the German or other constitutions?
00:23:59.480 And he's explaining, well, there's the seven separation of powers between the king and
00:24:04.580 parliament and the, the, uh, the, the system of checks and balances.
00:24:08.700 And he talks about the fact that, uh, our king is under law and, uh, uh, that there's rule
00:24:14.120 of law and, and, uh, uh, which is protected by the jury trial and explains the difference
00:24:19.460 between the English jury trial and the, the, the system in France where they torture people
00:24:24.460 in order to find out whether they did things or not.
00:24:26.280 And he says, that's like the road to hell, not to justice.
00:24:29.100 But, but he's, he, he, he, he, he talks about property.
00:24:33.520 He talks about how property is, is, is, is this fundamental English right.
00:24:38.160 Why?
00:24:38.440 Because property is the key, not just to prosperity for everyone, but also to freedom.
00:24:43.020 And he talks about how in England, the king has no right to enter the home of the lowliest 0.82
00:24:49.220 peasant and to take anything that belongs to him or, or even to enter without his permission.
00:24:54.380 Now this is being written in the 1470s and it, and it, it, it, it, it, it, it's a tradition
00:25:01.000 that is, if you're an American, it's your tradition.
00:25:04.740 It's where you, it, it, it, it, it, it's where this all came from.
00:25:07.580 And when Burke 300 years later, after Fortescue, when, when Burke is defending this tradition,
00:25:14.160 he doesn't think he's inventing conservatism.
00:25:16.820 He's explicitly saying that all of these great thinkers for centuries and centuries who, who
00:25:22.260 created the English common law tradition and, and, and the, the, the system that brings,
00:25:27.340 um, it, individual liberty, but also, uh, uh, um, religion and national independence and
00:25:35.140 all these things that we consider conservative, or at least, you know, uh, conservatives consider
00:25:39.840 them conservative.
00:25:41.280 Burke is finding in a tradition that's many centuries old.
00:25:44.760 And, um, look, if you're conservative, if you're thinking maybe you want to be conservative,
00:25:48.800 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.
00:25:56.120 Yeah.
00:25:56.320 Stop reading the propaganda.
00:25:57.660 I mean, you drink the Kool-Aid, it, it, it, it does things to your brain.
00:26:01.420 That's right.
00:26:01.940 That's, you, you ought to, you don't need to discover something anew.
00:26:05.380 You can actually rediscover something that is 700 years old now, almost.
00:26:10.020 You can do that in conservatism, a rediscovery by Yoram Hazoni.
00:26:14.120 Yoram, thank you so much for coming on.
00:26:15.960 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
00:26:30.340 something of our civilization.
00:26:32.200 Thank you for coming on.
00:26:32.880 Sounds fantastic.
00:26:33.960 Thank you.