The Michael Knowles Show - Yoram Hazony | Rediscovering The Right

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Yoram Hazony joins the show to discuss his new book "Conservatism: A Rediscovery." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whatever you want to say about me, I am not a liberal, and I find that most of my friends on the right are not liberals. But we're told that to be a conservative today is to be a liberal, that the conservatives are the real liberals, and the liberals have become leftists. And the leftists are like the socialists and the radicals and the Marxists, but not the classical liberals, except for some. And it's very, very confusing. But I know that I am not a liberal. I know it down in my gut. I know that I am a conservative, but what does it mean to be a conservative? Well, my friend Yoram Hazzoni will help us to discover that because he's got a wonderful new book out. Conservatism, a rediscovery. Yoram, thank you for coming on the show.

You're very welcome, and you should know that there was not one minute during my entire life where I thought I was a liberal. I'm envious of you, that you knew that, because especially these days and especially in this country. I fear that the liberals have gone completely radical and half the conservatives are liberals. And we can't even articulate what it means to be a conservative. Is to be a conservative to be a great defender of liberty, whatever that means, is to be a conservative to be like those 17th and 18th century people who called themselves liberals? Or is to be a conservative something different? There is. There's a third option. A conservative is something. A conservative is something.

somebody who sees religious and political tradition as the key to maintaining a nation through time and building up its strength. So you can tell you're talking to a conservative because they're always trying to focus on is my nation or is a certain nation, is it becoming cohesive? Is it becoming stronger? Is it becoming something that's more capable of propagating through time, handing on its traditions to its children, or is it becoming less so? And that's a very, very different way of thinking about politics than liberals.

Liberals, you know, we all know lots of liberals. Liberalism basically begins with the idea that human beings are by nature free and equal. And then goes on to say, well, you know, what's the purpose of government? It must be to defend the freedom and equality that it belongs to individuals by nature. I mean, we've all heard a million variations of that. And the question is, what's the relationship between somebody who thinks, who begins with the individual and says the individual has all of these liberties by nature and the point of politics is to protect them? And a conservative who says, well, hold on a second.

If political society doesn't think about anything other than the freedom and equality of individuals, then what's gonna happen to trying to actually propagate this thing over generations and centuries? The conservative immediately moves to thinking, you know, aren't there some kinds of restraints that we need? 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. And the moment you ask that, you're in a different conversation. This is a totally different way of viewing things because the classical liberal and the modern liberal, they're both beginning their look at politics from the lens of rights. What are my natural rights?

What are my positive rights? What are all the rights that I'm entitled to? What you're saying is the conservative looks at politics and says, hey, what are my circumstances? What's my family? What are my natural loyalties and relationships? What are my obligations that I have? I'm born into this world not as a free-floating atom that has all sorts of abstract rights. I'm born into this world as a little baby to a mommy and a daddy and maybe I've got some siblings and maybe I'm in a church and I've got some responsibilities there and I've got some responsibilities to my nation. It's it's as though we're not even having the same conversation that the liberals are. Yeah, I think it's a very different conversation

But at this point, I mean, if we take a look at America, Britain, various other countries, which have been operating under the assumption, let's say at least since World War II, there's been this assumption that these are liberal democracies. That was, you know, before World War II, nobody used that expression pretty much. But the idea that liberalism, it's the, it is the public, kind of the public religion or the public philosophy of the United States and of other European countries. And we've been, these countries have been in this framework

now for, I don't know, about 60 years, except that in 2020 it basically collapsed. I mean, I don't know if people have quite grasped this yet, but there was the 60 years of, we can call it, you know, the hegemony of liberal ideas, which is just fancy talk for saying, you know, basically everybody who was anybody, was a liberal and anybody else was on the sidelines.

And even the conservatives were liberals. Right, even most of the conservatives were liberal. And that sort of monopoly that basically, you had to be one kind of liberal or another in order to be legitimate in society, that's collapsed. That's broken. In 2020, most of the liberal institutions

in America and the UK and a lot of other places, capitulated in front of this wave of woke neo-Marxism, which, you know, it's related to liberalism in some ways, but it really is a different worldview. And you can see that it's a different worldview. You can see that something big has changed. Liberals no longer have the monopoly. And under these circumstances,

where liberalism is quickly, it really is quickly declining. And I would think that if you were a liberal, you'd want to know, what did we do wrong? You know, you'd want to say, we thought that the whole world would just become more and more reasonable, that everybody would adopt liberalism, that all countries would adopt liberalism, that people really believed that, you know, just a little while ago. And now it's obviously false. And so the conservative question, what would you need to do in order to do in order to, to be able to propagate anything through the generations,

to preserve anything. We've seen that liberalism doesn't have what it takes to do. So what would it have to be like? We joke now, we say that the conservatives, during the 60 years of hegemonic liberalism, the conservatives didn't even conserve the women's bathroom. We didn't conserve anything. We didn't conserve marriage.

We didn't conserve biological sex. We didn't conserve admiration for our country. We now regularly protest the American flag. We might not be preserving the Supreme Court and other institutions of government. We had eight months of widespread rioting that was cheered on by the political class. We didn't conserve anything. You know, I think that under a certain age, almost everybody's right of center is saying that.

We need to ask the question, what would you have to do in order to be able to conserve something? First of all, just because it's this obvious question you can't get away with. I mean, are there societies that are capable of conserving anything? If so, what would you have to do to be like? So there's that. There's an additional question, which I don't think we can avoid, which is that an awful lot of young people, I'm sure you can encounter this all the time, an awful lot of young people who see that liberalism has collapsed and think that the neo-Marxist thing is completely

insane. A lot of those young people are themselves turning to all sorts of characters on the sort of further right who are advocating, you know, one kind or another of, you know, one kind or another of dictatorship and fascism. And I mean, a lot of them explicitly saying, look, Christianity, Judaism, the Bible, the Anglo-American tradition, the American Constitution, a lot of them are saying, look, all of these things,

they're defeated, they're gone, we saw that they can't hold their own. You know, I don't think that's true, but we better have that argument right now. Right. Yes, it's sometimes called the horseshoe theory, I think, that when you get far enough right, it's difficult to distinguish between the people on the far right from the far left. I mean, I've seen this, when you're talking about very, very extreme people on the right, they'll often be in favor of abortion or some kind of eugenics policy, just like the people on the far left and the people in the kind of normal right, you know,

that's where you find pro-life. I find that people on the very, very far right are very anti-Christian. and explicitly so. They'll be sort of militant atheists or pagans or something like that. I mean, so what you're saying is, okay, liberalism's collapsed. We need some alternative, but you don't want people to become a bunch of, you know, baby-killing pagans who want to destroy Western civilization. Yeah, I think if we just sort of summarize like where the discussion is pretty much,

the discussion is fewer and fewer people are consciously real liberal still, you know, still holding on for dear life, large numbers of people moving far left, smaller numbers of people moving, especially among younger people moving into this, to the far right. And then there's this big vacuum. There's this big space, which you know, you and I and various of our colleagues have been trying to argue that there is such a thing as national conservatism, as a nationalist conservatism, which is about preserving the religious and political traditions of the nation, that's a hard case to make now because the traditions are so weak. But if there's going to be an alternative, it's going to be in that space and it's going to be on that subject.

Right. So for young people who have been just completely either not educated or maleducated, they've been taught things that aren't true, how are they supposed to answer their professors, when the professors or their teachers, when the professors say, look, the only thing that even resembles conservatism in America is conserving liberalism. You hear this a lot. The founding fathers, they were all liberals. John Locke practically wrote the Constitution and the Declaration Independence. You know, this is all liberalism. So even if you wanted to conserve something in America that was not liberalism, you could not do it. Yeah, this is an important. famous argument which won the day roughly in the 1940s, 1950s.

Meaning the people who are saying it, they're claiming this was true since the day that America was founded, we've always been liberals. But the question is historically, when did people actually believe that? When did people think that America's always been liberal? And by the way, it's kind of funny that Americans say that they've always been liberal since the revolution, and French say that they've always been liberal since the revolution, and French say that they've always been liberal since the French Revolution and the English say that they've always been liberal since the glorious revolution. The Germans just say that they've always been liberal.

Every major nation has this same brainwash. And they were all born at the same time. They're all post-World War II. People come out of the trauma of World War II and they say, the two world wars and they say, we've got to do something completely different, radically different. We have to make sure this never happens again. And that's when the big push to turn away from different traditions of Catholic democracy, Protestant republicanism, the pre-World War theories of what European, Europe and America were,

it's after World War II that that stuff just gets erased. And you find books by famous professors for the first time in the 19 you know late 40s 1950s arguing this that the United States was born liberal that that it never had any conservatives and that argument won the day for a while and it's completely false I mean other than that's fine it's a perfectly good idea but it isn't very very effective but it's it's not historically no it's it's a extremely effective. There was a moment where American professors and intellectuals said George Washington is not going to be the father of our country. Thomas Jefferson is. And Thomas

Jefferson really was the kind of liberal that we're talking about. That did exist at the American founding. What they skipped is that the American Constitution was written by the other party. And that theory, believing that theory depends on believing that there was, that there weren't two parties at the American founding, a liberal party and a conservative party. The National Conservative Party at the American founding was called the Federalists. And the main players, George Washington, John Jay,

Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and a guy named Governor Morris. He's got this great name. You'd think people would talk about him. Nobody ever talks about him. He's the guy who actually drafted the American Constitution of 1787. like, you know, kind of an important guy to know what he actually thought.

So these five and their party, the way that they looked at the American founding was, there was the American Revolution in 1776, and then there were 13 independent countries, and we tried to fight a war against Britain being 13 independent countries, overthrowing the traditions and the British traditions that we had inherited, And it didn't work. At almost no point during the war was Washington able to raise the troops he needed to pay the troops that he needed for what they were doing. He rarely had the money that he needed to actually be able to move the troop.

Yorktown, you know, the glorious, I don't mean to make fun of this, but it's important to know, Yorktown, the glorious victory, you know, when the French swoop in and the American troops come down, you know, from the north. And that's it. You know, the Americans won. We won. But those troops were moved by private donations. Like individuals wrote checks.

The Continental Congress couldn't even fund the movement of the troops to the battle. Couldn't write to the battle to win the war. George Washington and his officers knew from years of experience that America came this close to being completely wiped out in this war. And the reason was because the view that says, look, all you need really is liberty. You know, like all we need is freedom. Like, we'll all be free.

It's like the Beatles. All you need is love. What does that mean? Right. It's just like, all you need is freedom. And all you need is freedom. How does that work? Well, people are going to volunteer.

They're going to see that it's not in their interests, you know, to have the British rule them. And so they're going to go to war and people are going to, you know, it's all, everybody's going to volunteer to do everything. Yeah. And Washington says, this is, this is, this is not reality. This is insanity. And so the conservatives who founded America, the nationalist conservatives, what they did, this was Washington was saying this throughout, very early in the war, that we're going to need a

government that is a lot like the British government. It has to be a strong central government with a very powerful executive and balanced by, you know, bicameral legislature with all sorts of inherited British traditions like, you know, the jury trial and the legislature being responsible for taxation and the legislature making the laws and the executive veto. I mean, you can just go on and on. What Washington and his comrades, his fellows,

most of the people at the convention that wrote the Constitution, the majority had been officers with Washington in his army. And what these guys said was, there's no hope for us if we don't have a restoration of something that looks a lot like the British

Constitution, like the traditional English Constitution. Those were conservatives. Those conservatives are the people who founded America as a nation. They brought English common law into the federal government in the United States and established the British tradition officially as the legal tradition of the United States. And then these guys after World War II say, well, no, there were no conservatives. They weren't conserving anything. It all looked like, you know, came out of the, it was, it was, it was, it It was Thomas Jefferson made it all up out of the brilliance of his head. Don't you know? I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you value.

The Canberia Hotels got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. Don't you know, don't you see? It's amazing, even the way it's taught now. We are told there were not political parties at the founding of the country that only developed later on as we approach. the election of 1800 and, you know, it wasn't that the Federalists, the conservatives, that they

really are responsible for the Constitution. It was just kind of everybody got together and there were no sides and it was all kind of kumbaya. We're frankly even usually taught that conservatism is a younger political vision than liberalism because conservatism is just a reaction to liberalism and so it doesn't have much of a history and it's kind of incoherent. And I think it was Lionel Trilling, who said that conservatism is not a coherent worldview. It's rather a series of irritable mental gestures. You're saying all of that's false. I'm saying all that's propaganda. It's not just false. It's something that was designed by intellectuals who actually saw an opportunity after World War II to just say, we can get to utopia. I mean, we can get to utopia.

we can just eliminate all of the evil in the world by adopting Enlightenment liberalism as an official, like an official state religion, basically. And that was, in the United States, that began being implemented in the 1940s. With the late 1940s, you already see the first Supreme Court decisions after World War II saying that separation of church and state has been America's Constitution since its founding, but they only discovered that in 1947. I mean, it's a little bit strange. It's especially strange because, for instance, one of the reasons for not establishing a church at the national level at the constitution is that there were established churches at the state level.

It wasn't to protect people from the government having any role. with religion, it was that you already had state establishments. So in 1948, the American Supreme Court in McCullough rules unconstitutional the following setup in Chicago schools, Chicago public schools. Voluntary student participation in religious instruction, the students get to choose whether they want to learn from a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew, during school hours. about religion. That's 1948.

Half the states in the United States had something like that system. And that's what the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Is this cooperative teaching of God and scripture to children in the schools. By the 1960s, the Supreme Court rules prayer unconstitutional,

rules Bible instruction, if it has anything to do with religion, unconstitutional. and the United States shifts from being what Franklin Roosevelt called a God-fearing democracy. It shifts from God-fearing democracy to liberal democracy. And that's the 60-year experiment that we tried and it failed. Now we better do something else. It was such effective propaganda that even I had believed that story for most of my conscious political life.

Most conservatives I know have believed that for most of my political life. So you've seen it crumble around you. You've seen this. It really only, you notice, huh, maybe something's off here, when you point out, I was really, about the 50s and 60s, that all of a sudden you see before that, for goodness sakes, there were blasphemy laws in the country at various points. No one thought that was.

There were Sabbath laws. There were all sorts of things that are unimaginable. Right. And now we are told. that if you believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, if you believe that that is a true statement, that you are so reactionary, you are so out of keeping with the American tradition,

where that was universally acknowledged to be the case until about five minutes ago, so as to be, you should be cast into the out of darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. So you mentioned this another piece of bizarre propaganda that Edmund Burke founded conservatism. If you just think about it for, I think, for a moment, I mean, it's such a strange thing to say. He founded the tradition that he's conserving.

He became the great conservative by arguing for conservatism, but he invented the whole thing. And so he was actually a revolutionary, right? Doesn't make a lot of sense. So I begin my new book with a little bit of history. And I think a lot of readers are going to be astonished. discover that if you go back in the English common law tradition, to the 1400s you could probably go earlier, but in the 1400s there's a great Anglo-conservative thinker named John Fortescue who wrote a book called In Praise of the Laws of England.

It's very easy to read. It's available in a new Cambridge edition where they fix the spelling, so it's just a breeze and it's short. And there it is. It's the 1470s. And this English political theorist is explaining the separation of powers. He's saying, well, why is the English constitution the greatest constitution in the world? Why is it better than the French or the German or other constitutions?

And he's explaining, well, there's the separation of powers between the king and parliament and the system of checks and balances. And he talks about the fact that our king is under law and that there's rule of law and which is protected by the jury trial, and he explains the difference between the English jury trial and the system in France where they torture people in order to find out whether they did things or not. And he says, that's like the road to hell, not to justice.

But he talks about property. He talks about how property is this fundamental English right. Why? Because property is the key, not just to prosperity for everyone, but also to freedom. and he talks about how in England, the king has no right to enter the home of the lowliest peasant and to take anything that belongs to him or even to enter without his permission. Now, this is being written in the 1470s, and it's a tradition that is, if you're an American,

it's your tradition. It's where this all came from. And when Burke, 300 years later, after Fortescue, when Burke is done, defending this tradition, he doesn't think he's inventing conservatism. He's explicitly saying that all of these great thinkers for centuries and centuries who created the English common law tradition and the system that brings individual liberty but also religion and national independence and all these things that we consider conservative, or at least conservatives consider them conservative, Burke is finding in a tradition that's many centuries old. And look, if you're conservative, if you're thinking maybe you want to be

conservative, and even if you're one of these people who's saying conservatism never conserves anything, then stop reading liberals. Stop reading the propaganda. I mean, you drink the Kool-Aid. It does things to your brain. That's right. You ought to, you don't need to discover something new. You can actually rediscover something that is 700 years old now, almost. You can do that in conservatism or rediscovery by your Yoram Hazzoni. Yoram, thank you so much for coming on and I look forward as we now get past all of this liberal propaganda as we try to reassert some confident understanding of what it means to be a conservative.

I look forward to really elevating the way in which we will be owning the libs into the future and hopefully rebuilding something of our civilization. Thank you for coming up. Sounds fantastic. Thank you.