TRIGGERnometry - "Liberalism Cannot Defeat Wokeness" - Yoram Hazony

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli-American philosopher and political theorist. He is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and author of multiple books including 'The Virtue of Nationalism' and 'Conservatism: A Rediscovery'. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. 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. 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. And what I'm saying is that there has to be an alternative and think about it for a second. That alternative is not going to be liberalism. It's not going to be liberalism because liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism. Every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago. 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 all neomarchism, we wouldn't be where we are today. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant and timely guest today is the author of a new book, Conservatism, A Rediscovery. Yoramazani, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

We cannot wait to speak with you. We've got some very interesting things to discuss. 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? Okay, the very short version. If you want the long version, read the book. The short version is, I live in Jerusalem, married to Yale.

We have nine children, and at this point three grandchildren. Thank God more on the way. I grew up in the United States, as you can hear, met my wife in college. We've founded a Reagan-Thatcher publication in college called The Princeton Tory. And since then, I've been involved in Jewish and Israeli ideas. I have a doctorate in political theory. I've published some books on the Bible and its relevance to us today. And most recently, after the 2016, after 2016, the Brexit-Trump year, I gathered with some friends and colleagues,

and we found it's an international organization called the Edmund Burke Foundation, which operates in various democratic countries. 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. And there's going to be a NACCON UK this coming spring. 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.

I heard Peter Thiel talking at an ACON event in the US. And everybody, you know, me, my friends, Francis, we're all starting to understand that, you know, we all know what we're against. We are against the idiocy of wokeness. A lot of us, Francis and I in particular, are also against some of the idiocy of the anti-wokenness that's starting to filter through.

There are things that we all oppose. But the question I think for a lot of people, people is, well, what are we for exactly? What do we believe? Because, you know, the caricature version of sort of owning the libs gets old very quickly. It's uninspiring. It doesn't offer anything. It's not something that a young person in particular can look at and go, this is what, this is what I want to be the view of life that I have. This is how I'm going to go through life. These are the things I'm going to build. It's negative. It's deconstructive rather than being constructive. There's no optimism. There's no creativity. There's no building of anything. 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? Well, let's begin with liberalism because I think the most important thing to understand is that the 2020 was a was a watershed year in Britain, in America and across many other democratic nations. It was the year that liberal ideas, which had been dominant, you can say hegemonic, at least since the Second World War, 2020 was the year that that hegemony dominance of liberalism broke. And the way that you can tell that is that the traditional liberal perspective, let me just define it for a second, the traditional liberal perspective, which says in order to understand, to know what you need to know

about politics and about life, what liberals will say, what you need to know is that individuals are by nature free and equal, that we take on moral and political obligations on the basis of consent, and that the purpose of government is to defend our rights. That had been for 50, 60, 70 years the basis for public life. And most of the political, most of the major political parties in in the West embraced one version or another of that liberalism. Now, conservatism is a different, is a different beast. Conservatism is, conservatives begin from the question of, I'm born into a family, a nation, a religious tradition. I'm born into various things that I did not create. I didn't construct them. I might want to improve them, to add to them, to build them up. I might want to

reform them. I might want to restore them. But the conservative asks about the inheritance that we've received and fundamentally wants to know what do we need to do in order to, so that our nation, our religion, our political inheritance can propagate across generations. 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, 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. Conservatism is fundamentally a creative project. 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. 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. Well, we got to win the fight in terms of wokeness first. But I suppose the reason I bring up a positive vision of the future, which I think is sorely lacking with everyone who opposes whokeness at the moment, is that the question for me is, why would I join your fight from an outsider's perspective?

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. 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. Why should I be either one of these liberals or one of these conservatives and oppose it so harshly if you don't have a slogan for me, you know, join our fight and you get this, this, this and this, or you get to keep this and this and this. But that's how people think, right? Why should I be on your side, Europe?

Well, conservatives believe, and I think this is true, and I think that more and more people will see this, 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. Again, I want to emphasize that that doesn't mean you have to believe everything that is inherited. 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. And you don't give them anything else. A 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, I'm.

I'm supposed to do and what is it I'm supposed to believe. 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? Or let's say into the future. Maybe you don't have children yet. So that's a question. So traditional world views, 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, your ancestors hand down things, your parents, your community, hands-down. down things. And you have a responsibility to fight for those things. 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. 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. I think we are watching terrible things happening. What do you mean by terrible things, Yor? Well, look, I'm going to describe this from my own perspective. And I know that, you know, many of your listeners, you can get on or get off, you know, as you see fit. 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. Those ideas, let's name some of them, God and scripture, nation and family, man and woman, honor, the sacred, the beautiful, the free. 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.

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. 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. 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. It can be other things. If you don't honor gay marriage, we will force you publicly to honor it. There's no such thing anymore as a personal view and a private view. 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, you know, what can I tell you 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. So I understand you. I feel for you, but most people are not like you. 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. That's how we know that we're doing something that's worthy in life. Yoram, I'm going to ask you two questions. Number one, As a conservative, do you have to be religious? Do you have to believe in a religion? And number two, there's another question. Hasn't religion played its part in its own diet

for particularly organized religion? When you look at the corruption endemic in the church, for instance, I was raised Catholic. I look at what the Catholic has done, particularly its abuses when it comes to children. The rancid cover-ups of numerous popes. I'm like, no wonder people don't believe. leave it anymore, after what they have done? Okay. Well, look, first of all, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, I don't want to be pulled into, um, you know, into trying to, to, to, uh, to defend a particular, uh, religious framework. I mean, I, I, I, I, certainly there are, you know, my, my, my good friend, Rod Dreher was, was, was, was a Catholic and he was one of the, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

who led the in the 2000s, the investigations, the journalistic investigations into the things you're describing in the church. And he himself decided to convert to Orthodox Christianity because of his experiences with the Catholic Church. Now, look, my, a religious worldview is one that begins by saying human beings are crummy. Christians say human beings are fallen. We just don't speak that way, but we do think that human beings are extremely fallible and tend towards all sorts of evil things. And every human institution and every human political theory, 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. You know, people say to me, isn't the church evil? And, you know, certainly the church has done evils,

but do the evils of the church actually compete with the evils of atheists like Stalin and Hitler and Mao? Well, okay, we can argue about this. But I think, you know, where we started was what brings what brings meaning to the life of the individual, an individual sitting on the sideline saying, why should I fight? I'm not saying that you should fight for every single inherited tradition. 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. 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. But

somebody who finds the road blocked, and should they pursue Judaism or some other inheritance, it's possible. My wife grew up in a Christian family, and she, in adulthood, became a convert to Judaism. And I know people who went the opposite direction as well. And so, look, there is every single tradition that you point to, you can find things that are wrong and even evil with it, every single one. 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. 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. And what do you think is going to happen, Yeram, if we don't pick a side? Well, look, I think the writing is already on the wall.

I mean, look, we can make light of woke as an online phenomenon, but I don't think it's simply, online phenomenon. Woke is a descendant of Marxism. And it, chapter seven of my book, I go into exactly why, but it's a, it is a framework that sees human societies as consisting of contending groups and defines whoever is strongest, which, by the way, I think that's reasonable, that part. But But Marxists go further, and they say that whoever is the leading group, the dominant group, is inevitably oppressing and exploiting the weaker groups. 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.

Now, this wokeism is a version of this theory. It is both explicitly and implicitly, a revolutionary movement whose purpose is to destroy whatever it is that the dominant classes have inherited. The dominant classes in Britain and most other Western countries today are liberal. And what wokeism seeks to destroy above and beyond anything else is the dominant. liberalism. 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? What you get is an ongoing revolution, which will look like a communist country. If you want to live in the old Soviet Union, that's the direction that we're going. And what evidence do you have for this, what have you seen that is saying to you that we're moving towards the USSR? Or like in my case, Venezuela.

What's the evidence? Look, if you read history, especially right now we're talking about the history of ideas, right? We're talking about what is the dominant idea in a place like the Soviet Union? And how does that end up working out? 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. That's what we call liberalism today. The liberal classes, they claim to bring freedom and equality, but in fact, what they bring is oppression. That was Marx's argument.

And it's now been tried as a political system in, you know, in dozens of countries. And including in Venezuela and in Russia and China, 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, the liberties and the freedoms, both what's good about conservatism and what's good about liberalism is annihilated by Marxism. So 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, 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. And that claim has actually, I mean, it's interesting, it's true. 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. But 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. 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. So it's an improved Marxism in the sense that it looks like it's more effective, but in the sense that anyone who's lived under such a regime would want to repeat the experiment, I doubt that very much. Well, this is why Francis and I both opposed workness. Before we understood any of these terms, because we were just two idiot comedians. And suddenly we started talking to people like you who could explain things. 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, because if you oppose it, you must be, you can't just be countered with argument. You have to be destroyed. You're a bad person, TM, right?

So I'm totally with you on that. Your Honor, but one of the 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 because as someone who became a father for the first time seven months ago now, I am starting to realize very quickly that something in Francis actually always said, which is the fulfillment that you experience in your life depends primarily on the people

around you, your family, your friends, are they well, are they unwell, are you connected with them, are you disconnected from them? 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. 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 done of antidepressants and all the rest of it. 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. The idea of the nation itself is a highly questionable construct, I would put it to you, and anyone who seeks to enshrine or protect it is automatically racist, xenophobic, hates people with different skin colors, etc. Is that, first of all, do you think that's accurate that that is how we now we see that term, but also how do you, can you detoxify it? Do you need a new word? You need a new vision.

You know, talk to us about nationalism and why it's become such a dirty word. Well, look, in general, I like the old words. You are conservative. It makes sense. No, but for a reason, I think that when previous generations worked and developed a word, it's usually part of a scheme. It's usually part of a group of ideas rather than an individual word. And in general, these inherited schemes of ideas, they're what allow us to find not only meaning, but even truth in reality.

That doesn't mean that the inherited schemes don't sometimes need to be repaired. 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. You know, maybe in the end I'll decide that I don't like it, but I want to know why did it work so well. 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 a, you know, some kind of terrible word. 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 now this this idea enters enters into the history of the world

in in the time of the Bible it's a very very old idea the the Bible when I'm talking about the Bible as a political document. You don't have to believe in one religion or another to understand what I'm saying. The Bible is politically, it's an anti-imperial document. It's filled with empires whose goal is to conquer the entire world. So that's the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Romans later, all of these empires, 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. 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, and these wars destroy. And these wars, the economy, they bring disease and death. And so the goal of the imperialist is to, is always to eliminate competition and warfare and to bring peace and prosperity. The Bible rebels rebels against this worldview and says, look, no, that's not the right way. The right way is that each nation should have a border that it doesn't cross. Each nation should. Each nation should be independent. It should find its own way to God. 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. In other words,

it's an argument for the freedom of large groups of people, the freedom of societies to say, we don't want to go the way a different society is going. We want to go our way and to try to make that work. And so a nationalist is somebody. who'll say, look, let's try to have this tolerance for other nations that do things differently from us. And in the end, it may turn out that their way is in some ways better than ours, and then we'll be able to learn from them and vice versa. Okay. So when the word nationalist is used in its sort of normative sense in the last couple of centuries, it was usually a progressive term. It was a term that said, instead of somebody sitting in, you know, in Beijing or in Washington

and deciding how the entire planet should be operated, why don't we allow different ways of life, different ways of thinking to flourish? And we'll find out in the long term which one is best. But hold on. But I'm sure that is the trajectory of how. how it's been used before. But that is not what the word nationalism means 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, who is quite likely to be some kind of ideological descendant either of Adolf Hitler, who was a German nationalist or people might look around and go, well, Vladimir Putin, he's reincarnated a Russian nationalism, which is causing the war in Ukraine. That's what people

think about quite often now when they talk about nationalism. And so when you say national conservatism, it's like, it's both those bad words in one combination, Yoram. Okay. Well, guilty for having combined the words. And if the words scare people, well, you know, that's not so bad. That means we can have a good discussion about it. The, the, look, you're sort of right about Hitler and you're sort of wrong about Putin, or I don't know if you're asking on behalf of someone else, but someone who says that Putin is a nationalist is simply ignorant. No, I agree.

He's an imperialist primarily. He is. But he is building a Russian nationalism in terms of we Russians, we're superior to others, et cetera. That is happening. Look, every empire 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, now I'm talking about the way he understands himself. Putin sees Russia, explains Russia as a multinational, a multinational federation, you know, something like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He doesn't, he, that's his, that's the way that he present, for him, he, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, of the word, which is what I'm doing, I do really have to deal with the fact that, you know, Hitler's Mind Kampf, which I don't recommend the book, but if you read it, then you'll see that the way that Hitler appropriates the word nationalism. He takes it away from, you know, from the nationalist visionaries of the 19th century who were, you know, who spoke the way I speak. And he says, well, actually, I have a new, new definition of the word nationalism. And you'll see that it's the opposite. He uses the word to mean the opposite. He explicitly treats the idea of independent nations, and he rejects them.

He rejects the idea of a world of independent nations. 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. So that by the traditional definition, Hitler is a biological imperialist. There is no nationalism in Hitler, despite the fact that he used that word now. We have to decide since he's taken what I think was basically a good sound word, and he's corrupted it and turned it into its opposite. So what should I do? So some people say, okay, let's just drop the word nationalism. Let's say, let's call it patriotism. Okay, so that's, that's for example, Orwell. Orwell say, okay, let's give the word nationalism to Hitler and we'll just call ourselves patriots.

The problem that I have with is other than the fact that I don't like the fact that a tradition that I inherited from my father and from my ancestors, that that tradition needs to be given up because because among other things, Hitler not only killed my people and yours and destroyed Europe, but also in addition, we have to give up our traditional terms because he destroyed those two. So in part, I just don't like that, but I also have, you know, as a scholar of the subject, 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. And patriotism is, it's very close to nationalism, but patriotism refers, in every usage that I'm familiar with, it refers to loving your own country.

I'm a patriot of England or of the UK. I'm a patriot of Israel or of America or of India. 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 best for a better world order. Nationalism is a description, is a proposal for how to better run the world. It doesn't just say I love my country. Nationalism means I, I love my country, but I also make space for my neighbors to love their country. That's the reason that a border between us is a useful thing because good, good borders

make good neighbors. So nationalism is, in 2018, I published a book called The Virtue of Nationalism. Nationalism 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, seeking out what's good and worthy in our own nation, but on the other, recognizing the boundaries of what we understand and allowing that other people should have that same freedom to experiment and try to create something good that's different in their nation. If you give up the word nationalism, the problem is there is no substitute for that word. You simply erase the political theory I just described because there is no other word for it.

Isn't part of the problem as well with nationalism, Your Honor, is that this idea that our way of life is better, which then leaves to the arrogant assumption that you can then impose your way of life, in your belief system on other countries, as in bringing democracy to Iraq, et cetera. And it doesn't work because people are fundamentally, these people are fundamentally different. Their culture is different. Yes, I agree with you, but I think that what you are describing is a liberal imperialism. It is, it is, look, let me let me just back up for one second. conservativeism is unlike conservatism, which is a worldview that's based on different traditions

in different places and different times, conservatism is 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 and every place in history. That's what makes them both in different ways. revolutionary ideologies or political theories. A liberal who says that,

and this has been a great many liberals have made this argument that Locke or Rousseau or Spinoza or Kant or their descendants, that they discovered the universal answer to how all human beings must live, the one legitimate way to live. And Rousseau says explicitly, the others say it implicitly.

Rousseau says explicitly, there is only one legitimate constitution, which is the Enlightenment liberal constitution. Any other constitution Rousseau says that if it varies in the slightest, then it's illegitimate and has to be overthrown. Now, when we're talking about this reprehensible theory, that, that people sitting in Washington 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, that is precisely liberal

imperialism. And it is inherent in enlightenment liberalism because of the claim that the liberal theory is universal, that it's the only correct theory for all times and places. Yoram, you reminded me there's someone who grew up in the Soviet Union. You mentioned that Marxism has this feeling that it can explain everything everywhere. There was an old Soviet joke about a guy who invents a public shaving machine, and he goes to whatever commissariat that's supposed to evaluate this potential new invention, and he explains the model.

He says, well, what happens is you stick your face in it, and these blades come out, and they cut off your stubble, and everything is fine. And the guy looks at him, goes, yeah, but everyone's got a different face shape and, you know, body type and everything, you know, different stubble length. You know, people might put their face in and it's not the right shape. And he says, well, don't worry, it's only the first time. Repeat for using, repeatedly using it is going to fix that problem, isn't it? But you mentioned that that is the way these people think, that they've got the one solution that's one size fits all. It always works.

And if it doesn't work, it's because you are at fault as opposed to the machine that they came up with is a fault. That's explicitly exactly what we're told is you spent 20 years trying to bring liberalism to Afghanistan. Why didn't it work? Well, look, there were all sorts of problems in the execution. There's always problems in the execution. There's never, ever a flaw in the idea. Right. But what I was really piqued my curiosity in what you were saying is you mentioned that conservatism doesn't have that view, right?

And can you explain a little bit more about that difference? Yes. If you'll allow me again to just touch on the Bible, there's this remarkable issue in that I think you see it almost immediately when you start studying the Hebrew Bible is that, Moses is supposed to be talking to God, creator of heaven and earth, and he gets a law from, you know, the law from God, the Ten Commandments and so on. And this law is supposed to be something that's going to improve conditions for all mankind. And there's all sorts of texts that say so. Now, the question is, so if that's, if this is a universal thought, you know, these Ten Commandments, then then why does God give Moses borders and say, you're not allowed to cross them. You're not allowed to take one inch of your neighbor's land

because I've given their land to these other nations. And so there is this tension from the very beginning in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which is played out also in England, the common law tradition and in the UK. And that tension is between the thought that, We actually think that we've discovered something that could be good for many other peoples. But, on the other hand, that doesn't give us the right to go out and conquer them and impose these ideas by force. So this is kind of, this is the original source of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, which wants to say on the one hand, there is something that is uniquely good. about Britain. There is something that's uniquely good about the British or the American tradition, but to take the additional step, which says the fact that we have something uniquely good

gives us a right to impose it on others, that's where it's supposed to stop. So if you take, let's say, John Fordiske's in praise of the laws of England, which if you haven't read it, I recommend it to, especially to Brits, but to everybody, it's a very good. It's a short book, it's, believe it or not, it's from the 1400s. And you just open it, it's like, it's beautifully written, like it was written, you know, yesterday. And Fortescue says, look, the common law, the laws of England, they just are the best laws that anybody's ever had. But then he starts, he turns to France and Germany and he addresses the question of, you know, should the French and the Germans simply adopt the English constitution? He says no, because the

the laws of France and Germany may be better suited for their conditions, for their economic conditions, their religious conditions, the character of the people. He leaves open the possibility that over time things could be changed and improved in France or Germany, but he disallows the step that goes, because we have the freest country and we have the best laws, therefore they should be adopted by others. Do you think part of the problem with your message is, to put it bluntly, conservatism and nationalism aren't sexy. But they're not.

No one puts Edmund Burke on a T-shirt. I'm sorry, I've seen loads of Che Guevara. I've never seen Edmund Burke, you know? Isn't that the real challenge here? Look, I don't know. Maybe if I can, maybe if I convince you. you know, sexy guys like yourselves to get on. You're barking up the wrong tree, my friend.

Then we'll have some kind of hope of winning, you know, because you're right. I'm just like this Porch Lube writes books. I succeeded in conning my wife into thinking that it was worth throwing in with me. But, you know, what can I tell you? Let's make the following agreement. I may not know how to make something. sexy, but it doesn't mean necessarily that it's not going to appeal to a young generation, which is facing, here's the alternative they're facing. 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. And what I'm saying is that there has to be an alternative and think about it for a second. That alternative is not going to be liberalism. It's not going to be liberalism because liberalism is what brought woke neo-Marxism. Every single institution that the woke neo-Marxists are running now was a liberal institution 15 years ago. 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. So sexy or not, people have to ask the following question, 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. So I have to, I have no choice. 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? Today, that is, in a sense, it's a counter-revolutionary thought to say, to say liberalism wasn't good enough. It brought Marxism. What can we do now? Let's look through the closet of the things that we have in our inheritance

and see what used to work. What could work for us? Look, I don't know. When I was 18, I thought that was pretty exciting. Well, there you go. You make an interesting point, and I want to ask you something about liberalism because this is a question I've been rest,

with. 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. And also, once you've kind of give, in fact, why don't you answer that? And I'll ask you the follow. Well, look, the, the question here is, is really about what are human beings really like? Okay. Because liberals assume, and I, Again, I'm talking about the thing that's handed down from Locke and Spinoza and Hobbes and Conton and all the way down to today where liberalism and Marxism are the two things that are basically taught in the universities. And so 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 they don't need to take on any obligations except the ones that make sense to them. That's it. 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, my wife and I are raising our eighth and ninth teenagers. And so I know something about teenagers. And teenagers, they get, you know, they get to a certain stage and the hormones are running wild and they're built to start questioning things, which is good. That's what allows them to

become strong and independent. The problem is that afterwards, after they do their, you know, their rebellion thing and they're reconsidering thing, they're supposed to land somewhere and start building something. If you have a liberal society in which the schools and the government, that the churches, everybody's constantly teaching, the only thing you need is to be free and to think for yourself. 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. 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 kids at home and in school, and you keep telling them, just think for yourself. And guess what? 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. And a lot of them come out Marxists and some of them even come out like racialists and fascists. And today looking at two generations of this experiment. We eliminated God, we eliminated scripture, we eliminated tradition. 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. So does it last? No, it doesn't last. It can't sustain itself. Because since nothing is being inherited and transmitted, basically what you're telling kids,

they reach 18 and you send them to college, you say, all right, you're, you're just going to hang out with 18-year-olds for the next five years, four years. And there's going to be no inheritance. You make it up, figure it out for yourselves. 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. And so they think for themselves and guess what they come out with. Marxism. Yoram, and this is a question that, again, 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, 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? How much? How much? 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? And that is something that clearly has an impact on how you view the world. Yeah, no, that's exactly, that's exactly right. That if you come and visit, you know, my Orthodox Jewish community where there are, you know, There's 15 synagogues in the neighborhood, and people are raising large families, and they get married young, 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 you grow up with many families around you. you see early marriage and bringing children into the world. You're not scared of it because you know it well. You see how it's done. By the way, keeping a marriage together is one of the hardest things a human being can do in life. It's a skill. You can't just marry somebody, having never seen it done, and expect that you know how to do it. just like child,

child rearing and running a congregation and running a nation, staying married is a skill that needs to be learned. And so young people who grow up around mothers and fathers that stayed married despite the incredible difficulties and hardship of doing it, but they stayed married for 40 or 50 years, those people learn how to do it.

And young people grow up around children being raised and rebellies teenagers who then come back to the fold and continue to work to hand on the traditions. 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 what you can do,

about what is actually possible. One of the things that is not possible is to wait until you're 35, marry somebody, have a child for the first time at the age of 30, when 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 be happy, well, adjusted, strong people. It's factually not true. Just come visit, come look. I'm making it. It's an

empirical challenge. Just go look at conservative societies, conservative communities and how they work. And you'll start to think. Maybe I just was raised to think the wrong things. I agree with you. And it's something we think about a lot, both of us, as we go through our own journey of kind of unwinding some of the societal programming and all the rest of it. The last question in this line of thinking that I wanted to ask you,

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. 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 world views 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. 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? It may have a liberalism around other things. Is there an inherent conflict between the two visions? And if so, where is it? 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. But 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. 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. Just leave people alone. Government should get out of the way and it'll be fine. Everybody will have the right to free speech. This is absolutely false. But again, this is the kind of thing. Try raising a family of nine children, any number of children.

And you will immediately see that there is no natural free speech. 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, sitting around a living room to artificially restrain themselves from stepping. 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. 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. 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 and then they grow up and then they continue doing it as adults because they learned as children. So even on free speech, we have a disagreement. about whether it's natural or whether it's a tradition. Conservatives say it's a learned tradition that has to be inculcated. And that allows conservatives also to disagree with liberals on the following kind of thing. 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. 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. A conservative will say, no, that is not our tradition of freedom of speech. There is an Anglo tradition of freedom of speech. It goes back 500 years. It's principally related to political speech. We can extend it to all sorts of other things, but that doesn't mean that we have to 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. And liberals and conservatives will disagree about that. It's a very good point, Yoram. 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 Marxists, whatever you want to call it.

And look, we can criticize and we can say what they believe is wrong. And I agree with that. 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. 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 concern all of this when you don't allow me access to it?

Yeah, I think you're actually going to like my book on this score. The conservative does not think that the responsibility of government is only to defend individual freedoms no matter what their consequences are. So my teacher, Irving Crystal, wrote a book called Reflections of a neoconservative. You should flag that the word neoconservative was used in a completely different way 30 years ago from the way it's used now. And he wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism. And his understanding was that the first purpose of government is to maintain, the nation. Maintaining the nation means that the different groups in the nation have to be

loyal to one another. They have to maintain a certain degree of allegiance and trust with one another. And any kind of theoretical philosophical principle, which, you know, like the free market, which is healthy and good, I mean, going all the way back to Fortescue, we're talking about, again, in the 1400 says, Forskue says, you know, why, why is England the freest nation on earth? It's because we're careful, because we're careful with property, because the English king is not allowed to, to enter the home of the poorest farmer without the permission of the farmer. So there is property as an important part of this Anglic tradition. 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?

I mean, we're discussing what is one-nation conservatism? One-nation conservatism is the introduction of minimum social, safety net by the conservative, the conservative party. And the reason that they introduced it was because they looked at industrialization. They looked at the vast wealth that industrialization was creating. They looked at the dislocation of the traditional family and social structures which had protected people. And they said, look, we, we, we, we were. We, we, we, we, we, 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.

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. And that is not what happens when you take the free market as an absolute and you say, this is the final ultimate principle. That makes sense. Francis, I suppose the question for us, Brits, that would be interesting to ask is, you've got your dream.

I mean, it's 2023. We have had a conservative-left government in this country for 13 years, right? They don't seem to have delivered any of the things that you claim are the virtues of conservatism. What's going on? What's going on is that I mentioned that, 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. And in particular, after 1989,

after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the, the conservatism of the Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul the Second era was a conservatism that still had elements of nationalism and religion and traditional moral morals as part of the package. You can say not enough, you can argue about that, but it was still part of the package. As soon as Reagan and Thatcher are shoved aside, there is the movement that went by the name of conservatism became. a radical liberal movement. It became a liberal internationalist movement. George H. W. Bush announced the New World Order in which for the first time in a hundred generations of struggle to try to reach the imposition of a liberal international order on the entire planet, and we today are going to do it. Now, that is not conservative. It's not conservative. It's not conservative. It's

conservatism. It's more correct to call it neoliberalism, but liberal international order is, is I think, the best, most accurate name for it. 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 in enforcing it. And that theory, has dominated the Tory party for since since, since Thatcher was pushed off the stage and continues to have a strong influence on the Tories to this day. And so when I'm talking about conservatism, I'm not telling you that you should vote for the, for the, for the, the conservative party in the UK, no matter what it does. I'm telling you what the tradition of conservatism, of Anglo-conservatism

was. 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. 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 of looking platform to sweep Britain. 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. Do you think that your version of conservative movement is essentially incompatible with globalization?

Yes, it's not incompatible with multinational corporate. cooperation, conservatives can, you know, certainly believe in, in alliances of mutual interest, in trade, where it's mutually beneficial in learning from other countries and exchanging with other countries. I mean, all of these things are compatible with, with a world of independent nations. What's not compatible is, is the idea of erasing the borders of a single currency for, you know, for tens or hundreds of nations. It's not compatible with a world government. It's not compatible with a world judicial system

that imposes the ideas of Brussels or Washington on the whole world. So I would say yes, cooperation and mutual exchange, absolutely. But a common government or governance over all nations, it's just poison. and just say no. Yoram, I think we're running out of time. So I've really enjoyed our conversation. I recommend everybody gets the book Conservatism, a rediscovery.

And as always, before we ask you our questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see, what is the one thing that we're not talking about, in your opinion, that we really should be? There are many things. Here's one. What does it mean? what does it mean the people that young people are afraid to have children. They don't want to have children anymore. What does that tell you?

What does that teach you? What should we do about it? I think it tells you everything if you think about it. Yoram, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, if people want to buy your book, where is the best place to do that? Well, the book is on Amazon or book depository or any other place.

place that sells books, conservatism or rediscovery. If you want to learn about and to get involved with, or just to think about the National Conservatism movement, take a look at Nationalconservatism.org or NatCon.org you can get there. National conservatism.org is where the young people who think that it's sexy to, that it's sexy to preserve your nation and your inheritance, improve it and pass it on to future generations, please consider coming. Yoram Hazani, thank you so much and thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show.

All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Is the greater danger to conservatism the left or the pendulum in political thoughts swinging so violently back the other way that it goes straight past conservatism into genuine far-right ideology?