TRIGGERnometry - January 19, 2023


＂Liberalism Cannot Defeat Wokeness＂ - Yoram Hazony


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 10 minutes

Words per minute

154.18504

Word count

10,861

Sentence count

514

Harmful content

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Yoram Hazzoni is the author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, a new book on the politics of the middle ground between the two extremes. He is also the founder of the Edmund Burke Foundation and the National Conservative Conferences around the world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.100 If you as a person want to be able to do something other than sitting on the sidelines while history makes the decisions for you, then you have to take a side.
00:00:10.680 You have to pick the one that you think is the best and throw yourself into repairing and making that as best as it can be.
00:00:18.000 The alternative they're facing is to just let the woke neo-Marxists win.
00:00:22.920 Not just to win at the level of government, but also to win in your personal life.
00:00:27.140 And what I'm saying is that there has to be an alternative.
00:00:32.000 And think about it for a second.
00:00:33.960 That alternative is not going to be liberalism.
00:00:37.000 It's not going to be liberalism because liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism.
00:00:41.780 Every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago.
00:00:48.520 So if liberalism had the antibodies, if it was enough to say, let's just be free, if that was strong enough to be able to defeat woke neo-Marxism, we wouldn't be where we are today.
00:00:59.700 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:12.600 I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:14.100 I'm Constantin Kissin.
00:01:15.180 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:20.220 Our brilliant and timely guest today is the author of a new book, Conservatism, a Rediscovery.
00:01:25.740 Yoram Hazzoni, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:27.180 Thank you for having me.
00:01:29.120 It's a pleasure.
00:01:30.320 We cannot wait to speak with you.
00:01:32.380 We've got some very interesting things to discuss.
00:01:34.540 Before we do, though, other than being the author of this book, tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:01:45.840 Okay, the very short version.
00:01:47.780 If you want the long version, read the book.
00:01:50.260 The short version is I live in Jerusalem, married to Yael.
00:01:54.580 We have nine children and, at this point, three grandchildren.
00:01:59.340 Thank God, more on the way.
00:02:01.660 I grew up in the United States, as you can hear.
00:02:06.380 Met my wife in college.
00:02:08.400 We've founded a Reagan-Thatcher publication in college called the Princeton Torrey.
00:02:16.560 And since then, I've been involved in Jewish and Israeli ideas.
00:02:27.480 I have a doctorate in political theory.
00:02:29.960 I've published some books on the Bible and its relevance to us today.
00:02:35.980 And most recently, after 2016, the Brexit-Trump year, I gathered with some friends and colleagues, and we founded an international organization called the Edmund Burke Foundation, which operates in various democratic countries.
00:02:59.320 The Edmund Burke Foundation runs the National Conservatism Conferences, which have been taking place for several years annually in the United States and in Europe.
00:03:11.320 And there's going to be a NatCon UK this coming spring.
00:03:15.360 Well, Yoram, it's great to have you on the show, because one of the things you talk about in the book, and you're not the only one talking about it, because I think quite a lot of smart people are starting to realize what I'm about to say.
00:03:29.900 I heard Peter Thiel talking at an NatCon event in the U.S.
00:03:33.960 And everybody, you know, me, my friends, Francis, we're all starting to understand that, you know, we all know what we're against. 0.99
00:03:42.760 We are against the idiocy of wokeness. 0.98
00:03:45.300 A lot of us, Francis and I in particular, are also against some of the idiocy of the anti-wokeness that's starting to filter through. 0.99
00:03:52.220 There are things that we all oppose.
00:03:54.780 But the question, I think, for a lot of people is, well, what are we for exactly?
00:03:58.600 What do we believe? Because, you know, the caricature version of sort of owning the libs gets old very quickly.
00:04:05.440 It's uninspiring. It doesn't offer anything.
00:04:08.140 It's not something that a young person in particular can look at and go, this is what I want to be the view of life that I have.
00:04:16.380 This is how I'm going to go through life. These are the things I'm going to build.
00:04:19.740 It's negative. It's deconstructive rather than being constructive.
00:04:23.480 There's no optimism. There's no creativity. There's no building of anything.
00:04:27.060 So what is it that conservatism of the way of the vision that you describe has to offer to those people who are perhaps looking for some kind of middle ground between those two extremes?
00:04:38.080 Well, let's begin with liberalism, because I think the most important thing to understand is that 2020 was a watershed year in Britain, in America and across many other democratic nations.
00:04:53.760 It was the year that liberal ideas, which had been dominant, you can say hegemonic, at least since the Second World War.
00:05:03.600 2020 was the year that that hegemony dominance of liberalism broke.
00:05:09.840 And the way that you can tell that is that the traditional liberal perspective, let me just define it for a second.
00:05:18.580 The traditional liberal perspective, which says in order to understand, to know what you need to know about politics and about life,
00:05:26.820 what liberals will say, what you need to know is that individuals are by nature free and equal,
00:05:32.500 that we take on moral and political obligations on the basis of consent, and that the purpose of government is to defend our rights.
00:05:40.580 That had been for 50, 60, 70 years the basis for public life.
00:05:48.520 And most of the major political parties in the West embraced one version or another of that liberalism.
00:05:57.080 Now, conservatism is a different beast.
00:06:01.840 Conservatism is, conservatives begin from the question of, I'm born into a family, a nation, a religious tradition.
00:06:13.240 I'm born into various things that I did not create.
00:06:17.080 I didn't construct them.
00:06:18.940 I might want to improve them, to add to them, to build them up.
00:06:23.680 I might want to reform them.
00:06:25.020 I might want to restore them.
00:06:26.940 But the conservative asks about the inheritance that we've received and fundamentally wants to know,
00:06:34.460 what do we need to do in order to, so that our nation, our religion, our political inheritance can propagate across generations?
00:06:47.120 So, as you'll see in my book, if you take a look at it, the difference between, this difference between someone who wants to create a space in which we can all pursue our own thing,
00:07:03.700 that's the liberal, that's the liberal, and a conservative is that the conservative says, look, we've inherited many things and many of those things are good and we need to figure out how to build them up.
00:07:15.060 Conservatism is fundamentally a creative project.
00:07:18.020 And those two groups, anti-Marxist liberals, anti-Marxist conservatives, we do have to fight side by side against the common woke opposite, the woke cultural revolution, which is on the verge of winning.
00:07:39.960 But liberalism and conservatism are two different things and we will each in the end have to decide which side of that argument we're on as well.
00:07:49.080 Well, we've got to win the fight in terms of wokeness first, but I suppose the reason I bring up a positive vision of the future,
00:07:56.840 which I think is sorely lacking with everyone who opposes wokeness at the moment, is that the question for me is,
00:08:05.400 why would I join your fight from an outsider's perspective?
00:08:08.860 I know why I'm against wokeness because it mimics many of the terrible things that I saw happen in my own and my family's history and Francis likewise. 0.99
00:08:17.540 But if I'm just a normal person in the UK or in America, and I'm not too bothered about, you know, all the stuff that I see on social media, maybe I'm not on social media.
00:08:27.620 Why should I be either one of these liberals or one of these conservatives and oppose it so harshly?
00:08:33.300 If you don't have a slogan for me, you know, join our fight and you get this, this and this, or you get to keep this and this and this.
00:08:41.740 But that's how people think, right?
00:08:43.080 Why should I be on your side, Yoram? 0.99
00:08:44.620 Well, conservatives believe, and I think this is true, and I think that more and more people will see this.
00:08:53.020 Conservatives believe that in order to be a healthy, happy human being, you actually have to be part of an inheritance, which is then being handed down.
00:09:04.440 Again, I want to emphasize that that doesn't mean you have to believe everything that is inherited.
00:09:09.520 But conservatives think that human nature is such that if you raise children and you tell them, look, do whatever you want, do whatever feels good, use your own reason, exercise your own thinking, and come to your own conclusions.
00:09:25.720 And you don't give them anything else, a great, great many people, maybe the majority, end up stuck and unable to make the decisions among, you know, what exactly is it that I'm supposed to do and what is it I'm supposed to believe?
00:09:42.560 So we have to start somewhere, and I suggest that the question, you know, as I posed it, that we begin with, what is it that you've inherited that you yourself actually would like to see handed down to your children, to your grandchildren?
00:10:00.800 Or let's say into the future, maybe you don't have children yet, so that's a question.
00:10:07.640 So traditional worldviews, a Christian worldview, a Jewish worldview, a nationalist worldview, a conservative worldview, all of these worldviews, what they do is they place you within a kind of a hierarchy where the past hands down things,
00:10:31.860 your ancestors hand down things, your parents, your community hands down things, and you have a responsibility to fight for those things.
00:10:44.820 You say, why should you fight? Well, if you think that there are some things that are better than other things, then you should fight.
00:10:53.400 I mean, it doesn't feel good to not fight if you're watching terrible things happening, and I think that's where we are.
00:11:00.920 I think we are watching terrible things happening.
00:11:04.500 What do you mean by terrible things, Yoram? 0.99
00:11:07.580 Well, look, I'm going to describe this from my own perspective, and I know that many of your listeners, you can get on or get off as you see fit.
00:11:19.780 The world that Brits and Americans and others fought for in the Second World War was a world in which there was a framework of ideas.
00:11:37.380 Those ideas, let's name some of them, God and scripture, nation and family, man and woman, honor, the sacred, the beautiful, the free.
00:11:55.020 All of these ideas are ideas that if you take a look at what has wokeism been doing since its initial victory in 2020, what it's doing is overthrowing all of these inherited concepts.
00:12:13.600 Okay, so as a Christian friend just told me a few weeks ago, he said, look, here in Colorado, he helps run a university there.
00:12:23.120 He said, here in Colorado, we used to have this wonderful liberal idea that each should be free to choose his own religion or lack of religion in his own path.
00:12:35.960 And now we've moved from that being the default position in society to the default being that if you don't honor, in this particular case, the issue was gay marriage, but you don't have to agree about that.
00:12:51.860 It can be other things.
00:12:52.960 If you don't honor gay marriage, we will force you publicly to honor it. 1.00
00:12:58.240 There's no such thing anymore as a personal view and a private view.
00:13:03.800 Now, if you're the kind of person who thinks that the old liberalism where we inculcated and attempted to hand on religious liberties, if you think that that's not worth fighting for, so what can I tell you?
00:13:25.800 If you don't think that marriage is something that is worth fighting for, or that having children in the future, or that Britain continuing to exist is something worth fighting for. 0.60
00:13:36.260 So I understand you.
00:13:38.500 I feel for you.
00:13:39.300 But most people are not like you.
00:13:41.240 Most people, they get meaning out of life by selecting those things that appear to be overall good and just and working to build them up.
00:13:54.480 That's how we know that we're doing something that's worthy in life.
00:13:59.700 Joram, I'm going to ask you two questions.
00:14:02.460 Number one, as a conservative, do you have to be religious?
00:14:06.860 Do you have to believe in a religion?
00:14:09.580 And number two, there's another question.
00:14:12.240 Hasn't religion played its own part in its own diet for particularly organized religion?
00:14:16.800 When you look at the corruption endemic in the church, for instance, I was raised Catholic.
00:14:22.220 I look at what the Catholic has done, particularly its abuses when it comes to children, the rancid cover-ups of numerous popes. 0.74
00:14:32.480 I'm like, no wonder people don't believe it anymore after what they have done.
00:14:35.780 Okay, well, look, first of all, I'm not a Catholic.
00:14:41.780 I'm an Orthodox Jew.
00:14:43.760 And I don't want to be pulled into trying to defend a particular religious framework.
00:14:54.840 I mean, certainly there are, you know, my good friend Rod Dreher was a Catholic, and he was one of the reporters who led the, in the 2000s, the investigations, the journalistic investigations into the things you're describing in the church.
00:15:15.520 And he himself decided to convert to Orthodox Christianity because of his experiences with the Catholic church. 0.88
00:15:24.520 Now, look, a religious worldview is one that begins by saying human beings are crummy.
00:15:32.260 Christians say human beings are fallen. 0.97
00:15:34.340 We Jews don't speak that way, but we do think that human beings are extremely fallible and tend towards all sorts of evil things.
00:15:45.520 And, you know, every human institution and every human political theory, whether, you know, whether it's liberal or conservative Christian or Jewish or any other imperialist or nationalist, every human ideology is going to have examples of people who are bad people and policies that are bad policies and evil things that are done in its name.
00:16:09.700 You know, you know, people say to me, isn't the church evil?
00:16:13.600 And, you know, certainly the church has done evils, but, you know, do the evils of the church actually compete with the evils of atheists like Stalin and Hitler and Mao? 0.90
00:16:25.840 Well, okay, we can argue about this.
00:16:27.840 But I think, you know, where we started was what brings meaning to the life of the individual, an individual sitting on the sidelines saying, why should I fight?
00:16:40.080 I'm not saying that you should fight for every single inherited tradition.
00:16:45.620 I'm saying that you yourself will take up meaning and self-esteem and self-worth when you join a community that you think is on the whole something that improves human life, that on the whole hands down things that make things better.
00:17:05.460 So, look, I always tell people, if you grew up in a Christian family, then you should start with Christianity because that's your inheritance.
00:17:13.280 But somebody who finds the road blocked and should they pursue Judaism or some other inheritance, it's possible. 0.98
00:17:22.940 My wife grew up in a Christian family and she, in adulthood, became a convert to Judaism.
00:17:29.700 And I know people who went the opposite direction as well.
00:17:32.180 And so, look, there's every single tradition that you point to, you can find things that are wrong and even evil with it, every single one.
00:17:44.840 But if you as a person want to be able to do something other than sitting on the sidelines while history makes the decisions for you, then you have to take a side.
00:17:55.440 You have to pick the one that you think is the best and throw yourself into repairing and making that as best as it can be.
00:18:03.320 And what do you think is going to happen, Joram, if we don't pick a side?
00:18:06.460 Well, look, I think the writing is already on the wall.
00:18:14.900 I mean, look, we can make light of woke as an online phenomenon, but I don't think it's simply an online phenomenon.
00:18:26.520 Woke is a descendant of Marxism.
00:18:32.300 And in chapter seven of my book, I go into exactly why, but it is a framework that sees human societies as consisting of contending groups and defines whoever is strongest.
00:18:50.980 Which, by the way, I think that's reasonable, that part, but Marxists go further and they say that whoever is the leading group, the dominant group, is inevitably oppressing and exploiting the weaker groups.
00:19:05.960 And instead of seeking some kind of accommodation that will allow the different groups to get what they need and to live in peace, Marx calls for the exploited groups to overthrow and destroy the ruling class, the dominant class.
00:19:24.720 Now, this wokeism is a version of this theory.
00:19:30.540 It is both explicitly and implicitly a revolutionary movement whose purpose is to destroy whatever it is that the dominant classes have inherited.
00:19:41.800 The dominant classes in Britain and most other Western countries today are liberal.
00:19:47.500 And what wokeism seeks to destroy above and beyond anything else is the dominant liberalism.
00:19:55.020 Now, what do you get if you destroy the dominant liberalism and you don't have some kind of sophisticated and healthful conservatism to replace it?
00:20:09.240 What you get is an ongoing revolution which will look like a communist country.
00:20:17.100 If you want to live in the old Soviet Union, that's the direction that we're going. 1.00
00:20:23.120 And what evidence do you have for this, Joram?
00:20:26.700 What have you seen that is saying to you that we're moving towards the USSR or like in my case, Venezuela?
00:20:37.200 What's the evidence?
00:20:38.360 Look, if you read history, especially right now we're talking about the history of ideas, right?
00:20:46.760 We're talking about what is the dominant idea in a place like the Soviet Union and how does that end up working out?
00:20:56.120 And the claim that the Marxists always made, their claim was injustice is the result of the evil that is done in the name of the bourgeoisie.
00:21:10.660 That's what we call liberalism today.
00:21:12.500 The liberal classes, they claim to bring freedom and equality, but in fact, what they bring is oppression.
00:21:20.760 That was Marx's argument.
00:21:23.400 And it's now been tried as a political system in dozens of countries, including in Venezuela and in Russia and China.
00:21:36.040 There hasn't been a single instance in which the revolution that Marx calls for, that some version of it has been brought into being that doesn't uproot and destroy both the things that are inherited and cherished that are conservative, like religion and family and nation, and the things that are inherited that are liberal.
00:21:59.480 Well, the liberties and freedoms, both what's good about conservatism and what's good about liberalism is annihilated by Marxism.
00:22:08.620 So what we're looking at, the people who actually advocate this worldview, they say, well, look, it's not the old Marxism because we've replaced the revolution of economic classes with a revolution of identity groups, a revolution of gender groups and racial groups and others, sexual orientation and so on.
00:22:38.100 And that claim has actually, I mean, it's interesting, it's true.
00:22:44.340 That's the reason we call this neo-Marxism instead of Marxism is because of the fact that there is a shift when the revolution is not strictly an economic revolution.
00:22:52.800 But guess, guess what, guess what the woke neo-Marxism, by moving away from the economic revolution of the old Marxism, they've given this great gift to the woke, which is that the woke can take over capitalist companies, can take over highly profitable companies, highly profitable and prestigious universities.
00:23:17.080 In other words, the woke can simply become the new ruling structure in place of liberalism, but the idea of oppressing and destroying anyone who disagrees remains from the old Marxism.
00:23:28.900 So it's an improved Marxism in the sense that it looks like it's more effective, but in the sense that, you know, that anyone who's lived under such a regime would want to repeat the experiment.
00:23:40.740 I doubt that very much. 0.99
00:23:42.500 Well, this is why Francis and I both opposed wokeness before we understood any of these terms, because we were just two idiot comedians. 0.98
00:23:52.160 And suddenly we started talking to people like you who could explain things. 0.94
00:23:55.680 But instinctively, it's very clear that this is a highly illiberal ideology that wants to shut things down, prevent people from expressing their views, prevent people from opposing publicly what they say.
00:24:07.520 Because if you oppose it, you must be, you can't just be countered with argument, you have to be destroyed.
00:24:12.400 You're a bad person, TM, right?
00:24:15.020 So I'm totally with you on that, Joran.
00:24:17.460 But one thing, coming back to our earlier conversation about what you have to offer the world, I would say to you that your slogan has got to be meaning and fulfillment.
00:24:25.000 Because as someone who became a father for the first time seven months ago now, I am starting to realize very quickly that something Francis actually always said, which is, you know, the fulfillment that you experience in your life depends primarily on the people around you, your family, your friends.
00:24:42.460 You know, are they well?
00:24:43.840 Are they unwell?
00:24:44.660 Are you connected with them?
00:24:45.800 Are you disconnected from them?
00:24:47.200 And these are all the things that any form of Marxism will instinctively attempt to destroy, because like religion, these are things that tie you in.
00:24:56.460 And that, I think, is something that is definitely people that you should run with, which is you're offering people meaning and happiness and fulfillment in the world in which people take a crap ton of antidepressants and all the rest of it.
00:25:09.100 But I want to come back to something that you mentioned, which has become a very dirty word in our politics in the UK, in America and elsewhere, which is nationalism.
00:25:20.360 The idea of the nation itself is a highly questionable construct, I would put it to you.
00:25:25.640 And anyone who seeks to enshrine or protect it is automatically racist, xenophobic, hates people with different skin colors, et cetera.
00:25:33.960 Is that, first of all, do you think that's accurate, that that is how we now we see that term?
00:25:40.920 But also, how do you, can you detoxify it?
00:25:44.240 Do you need a new word?
00:25:45.480 Do you need a new vision?
00:25:46.960 You know, talk to us about nationalism and why it's become such a dirty word.
00:25:50.640 Well, look, in general, I like the old words.
00:25:54.140 Because you are conservative, it makes sense.
00:25:56.720 No, but for a reason.
00:25:58.760 I think that when previous generations worked and developed a word, it's usually part of a scheme.
00:26:07.360 It's usually part of a group of ideas rather than an individual word.
00:26:12.060 And in general, these inherited schemes of ideas, they're what allow us to find not only meaning but even truth in reality.
00:26:22.100 That doesn't mean that the inherited schemes don't sometimes need to be repaired.
00:26:25.220 But when I hear an old word, before I reject it, I would like to know what was good about that word, what was true about it.
00:26:35.000 You know, maybe in the end I'll decide that I don't like it.
00:26:37.120 But I want to know why did it work so well?
00:26:40.240 And the idea of the nation and the independent nation, the term nationalism is, I think that you're right, that there are many liberal but especially Marxist circles in which the word nationalism is some kind of terrible word.
00:27:01.160 And the reason for it is pretty straightforward, that the idea of nationalism is the idea that the world is governed best when there are many different independent nations that each one can chart its own course according to its own traditions and its own ideas.
00:27:18.940 Now, this idea enters into the history of the world in the time of the Bible.
00:27:26.820 It's a very, very old idea.
00:27:29.580 The Bible, I'm talking about the Bible as a political document.
00:27:36.340 I'm not, you don't have to, you know, believe in one religion or another to understand what I'm saying.
00:27:42.340 The Bible is politically, it's an anti-imperial document.
00:27:48.400 It's filled with empires whose goal is to conquer the entire world.
00:27:53.480 So that's the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Romans later.
00:28:01.460 All of these empires are, they're very different from one another, but they have one thing or at least one thing in common, which is that each one of them has a god or gods that orders the king to conquer the four corners of the earth in order to bring peace and prosperity to mankind.
00:28:19.280 And that's not a stupid dream, the idea of conquering the whole world, because the claim is that when the world is divided, then there are ceaseless wars and conquests.
00:28:31.800 And these wars destroy the economy, they bring disease and death. 0.52
00:28:36.420 And so the goal of the imperialist is to, is always to eliminate competition and warfare and to bring peace and prosperity.
00:28:47.860 The Bible rebels against this worldview and says, look, no, that's, that's not the right way.
00:28:57.040 The right way is that each nation should have a border that it doesn't cross.
00:29:02.620 Each nation should be independent.
00:29:04.360 It should find its own way to God.
00:29:05.900 It should have a king, as it says in Deuteronomy, a king that comes from its own people, prophets that come from its own people.
00:29:15.340 In other words, it's an, it's an argument for, for the freedom of large groups of people, if the freedom of society is to say, we don't want to go the way a different society is going.
00:29:27.360 We want to go our way and to try to make that work.
00:29:29.920 And so a nationalist is somebody who will say, look, let's try to have this tolerance for other nations that do things differently from us.
00:29:42.580 And in the end, it may turn out that their way is in some ways better than ours.
00:29:46.640 And then we'll be able to learn from them and vice versa.
00:29:50.140 Okay.
00:29:50.280 So when, when the word nationalist is used in its sort of normative sense in the last couple of centuries, it was, it was usually a progressive term.
00:30:02.700 It was a, a, a, a, a term that said, instead of somebody sitting in, you know, in, in, uh, Beijing or in, in Washington and deciding how the, the entire planet should be operated.
00:30:14.960 Why don't we allow, uh, different, uh, different, different ways of life, different, uh, ways of thinking to flourish.
00:30:22.320 And we'll find out in the longterm, which one, which one is best.
00:30:26.780 But hold on, uh, but, uh, the, I, the, I'm sure that is the trajectory of how it's been used before, but that is not what the word nationalism means.
00:30:35.820 If you read it in a newspaper today, a nationalist is someone who hates immigrants, who doesn't want, who wants to close the borders, uh, who is, uh, quite likely to be some kind of ideological descendant, either of Adolf Hitler, who was a German nationalist, or, uh, people might look around and go, well, Vladimir Putin, he's reincarnated a Russian nationalism, which is causing the war in Ukraine.
00:31:01.080 Right. That's what people think about quite often now when they talk about nationalism.
00:31:05.260 And so when you say national conservatism, it's like, ah, it's, it's both those bad words in one combination, Yoram.
00:31:14.020 Okay. Well, uh, guilty for having combined the words.
00:31:18.180 Um, and, uh, and, and, uh, if, if they, if the words scare people, well, you know, that's not so bad.
00:31:25.020 That means we can have a good, a good, a good discussion about it. 0.96
00:31:28.000 Um, the, the, um, uh, look, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're sort of right about Hitler and you're sort of wrong about Putin, or I don't know if, if, if you're asking on behalf of someone else, but someone who says that Putin is a nationalist, uh, is simply ignorant. 0.96
00:31:45.020 No, I agree. 0.94
00:31:45.540 He's an imperialist primarily.
00:31:47.340 He is, but, but he is building, he is building a Russian nationalism in terms of we Russians, we're superior to others, et cetera.
00:31:54.560 Look, every, every empire is, is run by, you know, one, one nation or one or two nations, but just to be, just to be clear about this in Putin's own speech.
00:32:07.100 Now I'm talking about the way he understands himself.
00:32:10.680 Putin, Putin sees Russia, explains Russia as a multinational, a multinational federation, you know, something like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
00:32:21.180 He doesn't, he, that's his, that's the way that he presents, for him, he, the, the, the, the nationalist Nazis are the Ukrainians because they stand in the way of, of the multinational empire that he's trying to build. 0.57
00:32:34.300 Okay, so, so let, so let, let's put Putin aside.
00:32:37.060 Hitler is more interesting because, uh, because Hitler does in fact use the word, word nationalism.
00:32:43.680 And so for, for, uh, me, me to, uh, uh, to try to revive the, the earlier use of the word, which, which is what I'm doing, I do really have to deal with the fact that, you know, Hitler's Mein Kampf, which I, you know, I don't, I don't recommend the book.
00:32:59.560 But if, if you, if you read it, then you'll see that, uh, that the way that Hitler, uh, appropriates the word nationalism, he takes it away from, you know, from the, from, from, from the nationalist visionaries, uh, of the 19th century who were, you know, uh, who spoke the way I speak.
00:33:17.320 And, and, and he says, well, actually I have a new, new definition of the word nationalism and, uh, and, and you'll see that it's the opposite.
00:33:26.420 He uses the word to mean, to mean the opposite.
00:33:28.460 He explicitly treats the idea of independent nations and he rejects them.
00:33:33.040 He rejects the idea of a world of independent nations.
00:33:35.860 He explicitly says that there needs to be a biological competition among races and that that competition has to end with Germany being the mistress of the globe and Lord of the earth.
00:33:50.420 Okay.
00:33:50.980 So, so that by the traditional definition, Hitler is a biological imperialist.
00:33:56.860 There is no nationalism in Hitler, despite the fact that he used that word.
00:34:00.220 Now we have to decide, uh, since he's taken, he's taken what I think was, it was basically a good sound word and he's, he's, he's corrupted it and turned it into its opposite.
00:34:11.000 So what should I do?
00:34:12.820 So some people say, okay, let's just drop the word nationalism.
00:34:16.020 Let's say, let's call it patriotism.
00:34:18.320 Okay.
00:34:18.500 So that's, that's for example, Orwell, or we'll say, okay, let's give the word nationalism to Hitler and we'll just call ourselves patriots.
00:34:24.840 The, the, the, the problem, uh, that, that I have with this other than the fact that I don't like the fact that, that a tradition that I inherited from my father and from my ancestors, that that tradition needs to be given up because of, uh, because, uh, among other things, Hitler not only, uh, killed my people and yours, uh, but, uh, but, uh, and, and, and destroyed Europe.
00:34:47.920 But also in addition, we have to give up our, our traditional terms because he, he, he destroyed those two.
00:34:53.380 So in part, I just don't, I don't like that.
00:34:56.300 But I also have, you know, as a, as a scholar of the subject, I, I have a little bit of a problem, which is that sometimes when you give up words, you cease to be able to express the idea properly.
00:35:07.700 And patriotism is, uh, it's, it's very close to nationalism, but patriotism is refers, uh, it in every usage that I'm familiar with, it refers to loving your own country.
00:35:19.080 I'm, I'm, I'm a patriot of, uh, of England or of the UK.
00:35:23.940 I'm a patriot of, of, uh, Israel or of America or of India.
00:35:28.280 Um, that's a perfectly good usage of the word, but patriotism is not a description, never has been used as a description for a proposal for a, the best, for, for a better world order.
00:35:40.680 Nationalism is a description, is a proposal for how to better run the world.
00:35:45.400 It doesn't just say, I love my country.
00:35:47.580 Nationalism means I, I, I, I love my country, but I also make space for my neighbors to love their country.
00:35:55.820 That's the reason that a border between us is, is a useful thing because good, good borders make good neighbors.
00:36:02.160 So nationalism is, uh, I, I, in 2018, I published a book called The Virtue of Nationalism.
00:36:07.900 Nationalism is a, is a virtue to the extent that what it means is that we develop the type of personality that is capable of, on the one hand, um, seeking out what's, uh, what's good and worthy in our own, in our own nation.
00:36:23.340 But on the other, recognizing the, the, uh, uh, uh, the, the boundaries of what we understand and allowing that other people should have that same freedom to, to, to experiment and try to create something good that's different in their nation.
00:36:37.660 Now, I, if you give up the word nationalism, the problem is there is no substitute for that word.
00:36:43.060 You, you simply erase the political theory I just described because there's no, there is no other word for it.
00:36:49.740 Isn't part of the problem as well with nationalism, Yoram, is that this idea that our way of life is better, which then leads to the arrogant assumption that you can then impose your way of life and your belief system on other countries, as in bringing democracy to Iraq, et cetera.
00:37:07.600 And it doesn't work because people are fundamentally, these people are fundamentally different.
00:37:12.420 Their culture is different.
00:37:13.440 Yes, I, I, I, I, I agree with you, but I think that, uh, but I, I, I think that what you are describing is a liberal imperialism.
00:37:22.240 It is, it is, it is, it is, uh, look, let, let, let me, let me just back up for one second.
00:37:28.200 Um, conservatism is, is unlike conservatism, which is a worldview that's based on, on different traditions in different places and different times.
00:37:38.280 Conservatism is, it's not a universal theory like liberalism or Marxism, liberalism and Marxism are, both of them are theories that claim that they have the answer for how we should be governed in every time in every place in history.
00:37:54.240 That's what makes them, them, them, them both in different ways, revolutionary, uh, uh, revolutionary ideologies or political theories.
00:38:02.280 A liberal who says, um, that, and, and this has been a great many, uh, uh, liberals have, have, have made this argument that, that Locke or, uh, uh, Rousseau or Spinoza or Kant or their descendants, that they discovered the universal answer
00:38:23.380 to how all human beings must live, the only, the one, the one legitimate way to live.
00:38:30.080 And Rousseau says explicitly, the others say it implicitly, Rousseau says explicitly, there is only one legitimate constitution, which is, which is the enlightenment liberal constitution.
00:38:42.280 Any other constitution, Rousseau says that if it varies in the slightest, then it's illegitimate and has to be overthrown.
00:38:49.320 Now, when we're talking about these, this, this, uh, reprehensible theory that, uh, that, uh, uh, uh, people sitting in Washington or, or, you know, in London or in Brussels, that their political worldview is so correct that it justifies going to Iraq or Afghanistan or any other corner of the world and imposing that worldview on a different country.
00:39:15.080 That is precisely liberal imperialism.
00:39:19.200 And it's, it, it is inherent in enlightenment liberalism because of the claim that, that the liberal theory is universal, that it's the only correct theory for all times and places.
00:39:29.940 Yoram, you reminded me, uh, there's someone who grew up in the Soviet Union.
00:39:32.780 You mentioned that Marxism, uh, has this, uh, you know, feeling that it can explain everything everywhere.
00:39:38.180 Uh, there was a, there was an old Soviet joke about a guy who invents a public shaving machine, uh, and he goes to the, whatever commissariat that's supposed to evaluate this potential new invention.
00:39:49.300 And he explains the model.
00:39:50.380 He says, well, what happens is you stick your face in it and these blades come out and they, they cut off your stubble and everything's fine.
00:39:56.620 And the guy looks at him and goes, yeah, but everyone's got a different face shape and, you know, body type and everything, you know, different stubble length.
00:40:04.680 Uh, you know, people might put their face in and it's not the right shape.
00:40:08.340 And when he says, well, don't worry, it's only the first time repeat for using it repeatedly using it is going to fix that problem, isn't it?
00:40:15.260 Um, but you mentioned that, um, that is, that is the way these people think that they've got the one solution that's fit one size fits all.
00:40:24.600 It always works.
00:40:25.300 And if, if it doesn't work, it's because you are at fault as opposed to the machine that they came up with.
00:40:31.840 That's, that's, that's exactly, that's explicitly exactly what, what we're told is, is you spent 20 years trying to, to bring liberalism, liberalism to Afghanistan.
00:40:43.060 Uh, why didn't it work?
00:40:44.700 Well, look, there, there, there, there, there are all sorts of problems in the execution.
00:40:48.920 There's always problems in the execution.
00:40:51.000 There's never, ever a flaw in the idea.
00:40:53.640 Right.
00:40:53.920 Uh, but what I was really piqued my curiosity, uh, in what you were saying is you mentioned that conservatism doesn't have that view.
00:41:00.960 Right.
00:41:01.580 And can you explain a little bit more about that difference?
00:41:05.340 Yes.
00:41:05.600 Um, if you'll, uh, allow me again to just, just touch on, on, on the Bible.
00:41:11.200 There's this, um, remarkable, um, uh, issue in, you know, that I think you, you see it almost immediately when, when you start studying the Hebrew Bible is that, uh, Moses is supposed to be talking to God, creator of heaven and earth.
00:41:26.940 And he gets a law from, you know, the law from God, the 10 commandments and so on.
00:41:31.880 And, and this law is supposed to be something that's going to improve, um, conditions for all mankind.
00:41:38.480 And there's all sorts of texts that say so.
00:41:40.680 Now the question is, so if that's, if this is a universal, um, thought, you know, these 10 commandments, then, then, then why does God give Moses borders and say, you're not allowed to cross them?
00:41:55.020 You're not allowed to take one inch of your neighbor's land, uh, because I've given their land to, to, to these other nations.
00:42:02.620 And so there, there is this tension from the very beginning in the, uh, uh, in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which is, uh, you know, played, played out also in, in, uh, uh, in England, the common law tradition and in the UK.
00:42:19.380 And that tension is between the thought that we actually think that we've discovered something that would be, that could be good for many other peoples.
00:42:29.900 But on the other hand, that doesn't give us the right to go out and conquer them and impose these ideas by force.
00:42:37.540 So this is, this is kind of, this is the, the, the original source of, uh, of the Anglo American conservative tradition, uh, which, which wants to say on the one hand, there is something that is, uh, that is uniquely good, uh, about Britain.
00:42:54.560 There is something that's uniquely good about the, the, uh, the British or the American tradition, but the, to take the additional step, which says the fact that we have something uniquely good gives us a right to,
00:43:07.520 impose it on others that, that, that that's where it's supposed to stop.
00:43:12.720 So if you take, let's say, um, uh, John Fortescue is in praise of the laws of, uh, of England, which if you, you haven't read it, I recommend it to, especially to Brits, but to everybody, it's a short book.
00:43:24.360 It's, it's, believe it or not, it's from the 1400s and you just open it.
00:43:27.620 It's like, it's, it's beautifully written.
00:43:29.480 Like it was written, you know, yesterday.
00:43:32.360 And, uh, and, uh, Fortescue says, look, the common law, the laws of England.
00:43:37.520 They just are the best laws that anybody's ever had.
00:43:40.800 But then he starts, he turns to France and Germany and he addresses the question of, you know, should, should the French and the Germans simply adopt the English constitution?
00:43:48.960 He says, no, because the, the laws of France and Germany may be better suited for their conditions, for their, their, their economic conditions, their religious conditions, the, the character of the people.
00:44:02.560 He, he, he, he leaves open the possibility that over time things could be changed and improved in France or Germany, but he doesn't, he, he disallows the, the, the, the step that goes, because we have the freest country and we have the best laws, therefore they should be adopted by others.
00:44:20.580 Yoram, do you think part of the problem with your message is to put it bluntly, conservatism and nationalism aren't sexy?
00:44:31.960 But they're not, like no one puts Edmund Burke on a t-shirt.
00:44:35.660 I'm sorry.
00:44:36.220 I've seen loads of Che Guevara.
00:44:37.860 I've never seen Edmund Burke, you know, isn't that, isn't that the real challenge here?
00:44:42.400 Well, look, I don't know, maybe if I can, maybe if I convince, you know, sexy guys like yourselves to, you know, then we'll have some kind of hope of winning, you know, because you're right.
00:44:58.680 I'm just, you know, like this poor Shlub writes books. 1.00
00:45:01.860 I succeeded in conning my wife into thinking that it was worth throwing in with me.
00:45:06.860 But, you know, what can I tell you?
00:45:09.960 Let's, let's make the following, the following agreement.
00:45:14.540 I may not know how to make something sexy, but it doesn't, it doesn't mean necessarily that it's not going to appeal to a young generation, which is facing.
00:45:29.040 Here's the alternative they're facing.
00:45:31.440 The alternative they're facing is to just let the woke neo-Marxists win, not just to win at the level of government, but also to win in your personal life.
00:45:40.980 And what I'm saying is that there, there has to be an alternative and think about it for a second.
00:45:47.220 That alternative is not going to be liberalism.
00:45:50.320 It's not going to be liberalism because liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism.
00:45:54.480 It's every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago.
00:46:02.540 So if liberalism had the antibodies, if it was enough to say, let's just be free, if that was strong enough to be able to defeat woke neo-Marxism, we wouldn't be where we are today.
00:46:13.400 So sexy or not, people have to ask the following question.
00:46:16.720 And I think they have to, if I want to have, as you say, meaning, fulfillment, purpose, a decent life for me, my family, my friends, my children, my grandchildren, if I want that.
00:46:28.280 So I have to, I have no choice.
00:46:30.360 I have to start thinking about what did I inherit, which gave me the possibility of a decent life, and what can I do to make sure that it's handed down.
00:46:39.900 Today, that is, in a sense, a, a, it's a counter-revolutionary thought to say, to say liberalism wasn't good enough.
00:46:48.960 It brought Marxism.
00:46:50.640 What can we do now?
00:46:51.880 Let's, let, let, let, let's look through the closet of the things that we have in our inheritance and see what could actually, what used to work.
00:46:59.600 What could work for us?
00:47:01.300 Look, I, I don't know, when I was 18, I thought that was pretty exciting.
00:47:08.180 Well, there you go.
00:47:09.440 But Joram, you make an interesting point, and I want to ask you something about liberalism, because this is a question I've been wrestling with.
00:47:16.980 First of all, I'd love for you to explain why you believe that liberalism has been as susceptible as it has been to this illiberal ideology.
00:47:25.820 And also, once, once you've kind of given, in fact, why don't you answer that, and then I'll ask you the follow-up question.
00:47:31.260 Well, look, the, the, the question here is, is really about what are human beings really like?
00:47:37.660 Okay, because, because liberals assume, and I, again, I'm talking about the, the, the thing that's handed down from, from, from, from Locke and Spinoza and Hobbes and Kant, and all the way down to today where, you know, liberalism and Marxism are the two things that are basically taught in the universities.
00:47:57.660 And, and so the, the basic idea, what is a human being like, that liberals start with and end with, is human beings are fundamentally free creatures that are rational, they can make their own decisions, they'll get to the truth by arguing with one another, and, and, and, and they don't need to take on any obligations except the ones that make sense to them.
00:48:23.380 That's it. That's the, that's the liberal idea. Okay, so there's a lot that's noble there. There's a lot that's obviously attractive there, especially, especially, by the way, to teenagers, who I've had, no, seriously, at this point, I've raised, you know, I'm, my wife and I are raising our eighth and ninth teenagers.
00:48:39.620 And so we know, I know something about teenagers, and teenagers, they get, you know, they, they, they get to a certain stage, and the hormones are running wild, and they're built to, to start questioning things, which is good. That's what allows them to become strong and independent.
00:48:53.420 The problem is, that, that, that, afterwards, after they do their, you know, their, their, their, their rebellion thing, and their reconsidering thing, they're supposed to land somewhere and start building something.
00:49:05.260 If you have a liberal society in which the schools and the government, everybody, the churches, everybody's constantly teaching, the only thing you need is to be free and to think for yourself.
00:49:17.440 If that's all you're teaching, then the things that are necessary to inherit and transmit, to live a life of inheriting and fixing things and restoring them and transmitting them in better shape, every single thing that you need to do that is not included in the kit.
00:49:35.480 But that's the problem, is that you tell two generations of liberals of, by the way, this is mostly the way I grew up also, that you tell two generations of, of, of kids at home and in school, and you keep telling them, just think for yourself.
00:49:51.300 And guess what? You, the, the, the, the, the, the implicit premise is that they're all going to come out liberals, but the truth is they don't come out liberals because they do think for themselves.
00:50:00.900 And a lot of them comes up, come out Marxists and some of them even come, come out like racialists and fascists.
00:50:06.000 And, and today, looking at two generations of this experiment, but we, we, we eliminated God, we, we, we, we eliminated scripture, we, we, we eliminated tradition.
00:50:15.760 You don't have to be like your parents. You don't have to be like your nation. We got rid of all these obligations.
00:50:21.580 So does it last? No, it doesn't last. It does. It can't sustain itself because, because since nothing is being inherited and transmitted, basically what you're telling kids, they reach 18 and you send them to college.
00:50:36.500 You say, all right, you're, you're, you're, you're just going to hang out with 18 year olds for the next five years, four years.
00:50:43.080 And, and, and there's, there's going to be no inheritance. You make it up, figure it out for yourselves.
00:50:48.360 There are no role models. There is no community. There's no church. The professors, they come give a lecture once in a while, but there's no inheritance.
00:50:56.420 And so they think for themselves and guess what they come out with. Marxism.
00:51:00.740 Yoram, and this is a question that, uh, again, having, being a recent father, it's made me think about a lot because I can feel my views on things change as I watch my son grow, because I am someone who's very liberal when it comes to drugs, for example.
00:51:18.240 Uh, and I believe in decriminalizing many drugs. However, when I think, do I want my son to be able to buy heroin at the pharmacy when he turns 16 or 18 or whatever, probably not. Right.
00:51:29.920 How much do you think that some of these movements are the product of the declining birth rate in Western societies where people delay, defer, and sometimes abstain from having children entirely?
00:51:44.280 And that is something that clearly has an impact on how you view the world.
00:51:47.560 Yeah, no, that's, that's exact, that's exactly, exactly right. That, that if you come and visit, you know, my Orthodox Jewish community where there are, you know, there's, there's 15 synagogues in the neighborhood and, uh, and, and people are raising large families and they get married young.
00:52:08.640 Okay. And they have many children. So a society like that is a society in which, you know, not every single individual, but in general, what happens is that,
00:52:17.320 that you grow up with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, many families around you, you, you see early marriage and, uh, and, and bringing children into the world.
00:52:30.420 You're not scared of it because you know it well, you see how it's done. By the way, keeping, keeping a marriage together is one of the hardest things a human being can do in life.
00:52:40.700 It's a skill. You can't just marry somebody having never seen it done and expect, expect that, you know, how to do it just like, just like child, child rearing and, and, and, and running a congregation and running a nation.
00:52:56.040 And staying married is a skill that needs to be learned. And so young people who grow up around, uh, uh, mothers and fathers that stayed married, despite the incredible difficulties and hardship of doing it, but they stayed married for 40 or 50 years.
00:53:11.800 Those people learn how to do it. And young people who grow up around, uh, uh, uh, children being raised and rebellious teenagers who then come back to the fold and, and continue to work to, to, to, to, to hand on the traditions.
00:53:24.900 These are all skills that you learn by being part of that kind of community. And if you're not part of that kind of community, you can think all sorts of crazy things about, about what you can do, about what, what is actually possible.
00:53:38.560 One of the things that is not possible is to, uh, is to, uh, is to wait until you're 35, um, marry somebody, have a child for the first time at the age of 35, when you're, you're, you're, you yourself do not have families around you that are models for how to do it and think that you're going to be able to raise your children to, uh, to, to, to, to be happy, well-adjusted, strong people.
00:54:01.140 It's, it, it, it's factually not true. Just come visit, come look. I'm, I'm making it a, it's an empirical challenge. Just go look at conservative societies, conservative communities and how they work. And, and, and you'll, you'll start to think, well, maybe I just was raised to think the wrong things.
00:54:22.880 No, I agree with you. And it's something we think about a lot, both of us, um, uh, as we go through our own journey of kind of unwinding some of the societal programming and, and, and all the rest of it. The last question in this line of thinking that I wanted to ask you, Yoram, is how much of an inherent conflict does there have to be between liberalism and conservatism? Because from my perspective, there are things in my life that I'm definitely conservative minded about.
00:54:51.960 There are definitely things in my life that I'm liberally minded about. Now that could be, you know, a sign of my mental ill health, but it could also be a sign of the fact that actually there are many portions of these two worldviews that are perfectly combinable together. I think there's probably nothing within a healthy version of conservatism that, for example, says, well, we mustn't have freedom of speech. It might say, well, you have your freedom to express these views. We don't agree with them. We don't like them. We don't believe in them.
00:55:21.960 But you are allowed to express them. You're not going to be punished or put in prison for saying that. But we as a society don't necessarily agree with that. Right. Right. Um, it may have a liberalism around other things. Does that, is there an inherent conflict between the two visions? And if so, where is it?
00:55:38.960 Look, there are indeed many things on which anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives can agree and should agree today. And in fact, we need to be working together and developing the kinds of friendships and alliances that will allow us to do things like maintaining free speech traditions.
00:56:05.740 But there, there is a fundamental disagreement between mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives about what exactly it is we're defending, even on the issue of free speech.
00:56:20.220 Because most of my liberal friends are under the mistaken impression that the freedom to speak is in some way natural, that it is, you know, that you just do it, you know, everybody does it, you know, just leave people alone. Government should get out of the way and it'll be fine. Everybody will have the right to free speech.
00:56:41.720 This is absolutely false. But again, this is the kind of thing. Try, try raising a family of nine children, any number of children, and you will immediately see that there is no natural free speech.
00:56:55.000 That the way that freedom of speech is inculcated is through an incredibly painful process of getting people, getting young people sitting around a dinner table or sitting around a living room to artificially restrain themselves from stepping.
00:57:14.280 Look, what's the natural thing? The natural thing is for the kid to say, shut up. I don't like that. You can't say that. And then to charge over and start hitting them. That's the natural thing.
00:57:23.780 All kids are natural. That's the nature of what happens when people speak freely naturally. The custom of, no, you're going to wait your turn. You're going to be quiet until your sister is done talking.
00:57:38.280 When she's done, now it's your turn. Now you speak. It is incredibly difficult to inculcate and it can only be inculcated through a custom, through a tradition of teaching children how to do that.
00:57:50.880 And then they grow up and then they continue doing it as adults because they learned as children.
00:57:55.300 So even on free speech, we have a disagreement about whether it's natural or whether it's a tradition.
00:58:01.760 Conservatives say it's a learned tradition that has to be inculcated.
00:58:04.820 And that allows conservatives also to disagree with liberals on the following kind of thing.
00:58:12.960 If you think that if you're a liberal and you think that freedom is basically the supreme value, individual liberty, then you find it difficult to balance individual liberties with other necessary goods which conservatives believe in.
00:58:27.900 So, for example, a conservative will tend to say having an iPhone with – having hardcore pornography available on everybody's iPhone, every 12-year-old in his pocket is going to have hardcore pornography because that's freedom of speech.
00:58:50.640 A conservative will say, no, that is not our tradition of freedom of speech.
00:58:55.560 There is an Anglo tradition of freedom of speech.
00:58:57.860 It goes back 500 years.
00:58:59.220 It's principally related to political speech.
00:59:01.800 We can extend it to all sorts of other things.
00:59:03.960 But that doesn't mean that we have to, you know, go the whole way and say anything that anybody feels like taking a photograph of has to be circulated by any medium whatsoever to our children.
00:59:16.000 And liberals and conservatives will disagree about that.
00:59:18.620 It's a very good point, Yoram.
00:59:21.940 The one aspect of this conversation that I think we're missing is a whole economic aspect of it, in which you look at these kids who come out and they're woke or Marxist, whatever you want to call it.
00:59:34.700 And look, we can criticize and we can say what they believe is wrong.
00:59:38.360 And I agree with that.
00:59:40.040 But it's very difficult to ask young people to be conservative when the gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider, when it's becoming more and more difficult to own property.
00:59:50.900 And a lot of people will look at themselves, will look at society that they are emerging into and going, well, why do you want me to conserve all of this when you don't allow me access to it?
01:00:03.080 Yeah, I think you're actually going to like my book on this score.
01:00:12.080 The conservative does not think that the responsibility of government is only to defend individual freedoms, no matter what their consequences are.
01:00:21.120 So my teacher, Irving Kristol, wrote a book called Reflections of a Neoconservative.
01:00:29.420 You should flag that the word neoconservative was used in a completely different way 30 years ago from the way it's used now.
01:00:36.020 And he wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism.
01:00:39.560 And his understanding was that the purpose, the first purpose of government is to maintain the nation.
01:00:51.840 Maintaining the nation means that the different groups in the nation have to be loyal to one another. 0.93
01:00:56.300 They have to maintain a certain degree of allegiance and trust with one another.
01:01:01.600 And any kind of theoretical philosophical principle, which, you know, like the free market, which is healthy and good.
01:01:15.780 I mean, going all the way back to Fortescue, we're talking about, again, in the 1400s, Fortescue says, you know, why is England the freest nation on earth?
01:01:26.760 It's because we're careful with property, because the English king is not allowed to enter the home of the poorest farmer without the permission of the farmer.
01:01:42.900 All right.
01:01:43.040 So there is property as an important part of this Anglic tradition.
01:01:47.540 But if you get to the point where the accumulation of wealth in a small number of hands is beginning to cause the rupture of the society, well, so that's Disraeli, right?
01:02:05.680 I mean, we're discussing what is one nation conservatism?
01:02:09.800 One nation conservatism is the introduction of minimum social safety net by the conservative party.
01:02:21.980 And the reason that they introduced it was because they looked at industrialization.
01:02:30.000 They looked at the vast wealth that industrialization was creating.
01:02:32.840 They looked at the dislocation of the traditional family and social structures which had protected people.
01:02:44.860 And they said, look, we're going to have a revolution, and justifiably so, because people know they've been torn away from everything that used to protect them.
01:02:56.580 And now we have to step in and come up with a new arrangement that allows the wealthiest and the poorest and the working class to be able to live together as one nation, to be able to maintain loyalty to one another.
01:03:11.640 And that is not what happens when you take the free market as an absolute and you say, this is the final, ultimate principle.
01:03:21.380 That makes sense.
01:03:22.200 Francis, I suppose the question for us Brits that would be interesting to ask is, Joram, you've got your dream.
01:03:28.120 I mean, it's 2023.
01:03:30.080 We have had a conservative-led government in this country for 13 years, right?
01:03:35.680 They don't seem to have delivered any of the things that you claim are the virtues of conservatism.
01:03:40.860 What's going on?
01:03:41.460 What's going on is that I mentioned at the beginning that post-World War II, the major political parties in the UK and in America and across Europe adopted different forms of liberalism.
01:03:59.700 And in particular, after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conservatism of the Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II era was a conservatism that still had elements of nationalism and religion and traditional morals as part of the package.
01:04:29.680 You can say, not enough, you can argue about that, but it was still part of the package.
01:04:35.440 As soon as Reagan and Thatcher are shoved aside, the movement that went by the name of conservatism became a radical liberal movement.
01:04:48.680 It became a liberal internationalist movement.
01:04:52.180 George H.W. Bush announced the New World Order in which for the first time in a hundred generations – he says, a hundred generations have struggled to try to reach the imposition of a liberal international order on the entire planet, and we today are going to do it.
01:05:12.120 Now, that is not conservative.
01:05:15.660 It's not conservative.
01:05:16.880 It's not conservatism.
01:05:21.680 It's more correct to call it neoliberalism, but liberal international order is, I think, the best, most accurate name for it.
01:05:30.960 It's the idea that liberal ideas should be imposed on the entire globe under a single legal system with the American army and some help from the Brits enforcing it.
01:05:44.520 And that theory has dominated the Tory party since Thatcher was pushed off the stage and continues to have a strong influence on the Tories to this day.
01:06:00.640 And so when I'm talking about conservatism, I'm not telling you that you should vote for the conservative party in the UK no matter what it does.
01:06:10.180 I'm telling you what the tradition of conservatism, of Anglo-conservatism was.
01:06:15.800 And I look forward to the day when the Tories, and if not the Tories, then some other political party, will adopt a conservative platform.
01:06:26.360 I believe that that conservative platform, in addition to simply being correct philosophically, I also think that we got to see in the 2019 election the potential electorally today of an actual conservative-looking platform to sweep Britain.
01:06:49.420 And the fact that the Tories, the fact that the Tories don't know how to implement what was in that platform, well, so they may end up losing an election or two in order to learn.
01:06:59.580 Do you think that your version of conservative is essentially incompatible with globalization?
01:07:10.420 Yes, it's not incompatible with multinational cooperation.
01:07:17.060 Uh, conservatives can, can, you know, certainly believe in, uh, in, uh, uh, alliances, uh, of mutual interest in trade where it's, where it's mutually beneficial in, in, uh, learning from other countries and exchanging with other, I mean, all of these things are compatible with, with a world of independent nations.
01:07:35.560 What's not compatible is, um, is the idea of erasing the borders, uh, of, of, uh, um, of a single currency for, you know, for, for tens or hundreds of nations.
01:07:47.780 It's not compatible with a world government.
01:07:49.980 It's not compatible with a, with a world judicial system that, you know, imposes the ideas of, of, of, uh, of Brussels or Washington on the whole world.
01:07:59.460 But, but, so I would say, yes, cooperation and mutual exchange, absolutely.
01:08:06.280 But a, a, a, a common government or governance over all nations, it, it, it's, it's, it's just poison.
01:08:14.880 Just say no.
01:08:16.580 Yoram, I think we're, we're running out of time.
01:08:18.880 So, uh, I've really enjoyed our conversation.
01:08:21.740 I recommend everybody gets the book Conservatism, a Rediscovery.
01:08:25.180 And as always, before we ask you our questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see, uh, what is the one thing that we're not talking about, in your opinion, that we really should be?
01:08:39.960 There, there, there are many things.
01:08:41.640 Here's, here's one.
01:08:43.720 What does it, what does it mean?
01:08:45.800 What does it mean that people, that, that, that young people are afraid to have children?
01:08:50.440 They don't want to have children anymore.
01:08:52.260 What is, what does that tell you?
01:08:53.740 What does that teach you?
01:08:54.560 What should we do about it?
01:08:56.220 I think it tells you everything.
01:08:57.360 If you think about it.
01:09:00.060 Yoram, it's been an absolute pleasure.
01:09:02.280 Thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:09:04.200 If people want to find you online, if people want to buy your book, where is the best place to do that?
01:09:09.840 Well, the, the book is on, on Amazon or book depository or any, any other place that sells books, uh, Conservatism or Rediscovery.
01:09:18.320 If you want to learn about and to get involved with, or to just to think about the national conservatism movement, uh, take a look at nationalconservatism.org, uh, or natcon.org.
01:09:31.560 You can get there, uh, nationalconservatism.org is where, uh, the young people who think that it's sexy to, that it's, uh, sexy to, uh, to, uh, preserve your, uh, your nation and your inheritance, improve it and pass it on to future generations.
01:09:50.320 Please consider coming.
01:09:53.360 Yoram Hazani, thank you so much.
01:09:55.060 And thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:09:57.440 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or, or show all of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.
01:10:04.780 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:10:10.120 Take care and see you soon, guys.
01:10:12.020 Is the greater danger to conservatism, the left, or the pendulum in political thought swinging so violently back the other way that it goes straight past conservatism into genuine far-right ideology?