Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism

With apologies, this post gets a little more into politics than past posts. I’ve always considered myself a conservative, but the terms liberal and conservative in American politics are becoming more and more confusing. In a recent back and forth discussion of dysgenics, Richard Cocks referred to me as a “liberal Christian” for objecting to the dehumanization of political opponents. I do in fact see myself as a “classical liberal,” which is probably what he was referring to, but I couldn’t help feeling that he was using the term as a pejorative. I also read this as part of a broader movement to expel the “classical liberal” conservatives like me from a new harder-hitting 21st century conservatism. In the new version of conservatism, the goal isn’t individual freedom and limiting the scope of government per se, but rather to obtain and use government power to grab back what has been lost in the culture wars, including the status of family and religion. At the heart of this movement is a basic pessimism about the liberal project, believing that liberty and rule of law have failed to secure traditional values relating to church and home in the modern world. 

Image from publisher

One embodiment of this new post-liberal conservatism is being referred to as “National Conservatism” and seems to be gaining momentum in respectable and influential circles. Co-signers of the manifesto in the link include billionaire Peter Thiel, Senator Jim DeMint, Victor David Hanson, Rod Dreher, Michael Knowles, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Yoram Hazony, among others. This is a varied and influential list from the right. Yoram Hazony is the thought leader in this school, or at least the most active advocate of this idea. A couple months ago I came across his book Conservatism: a Rediscovery, noting that it seemed to misunderstand the relationship between rationalism and religion for John Locke. I’ve been reading the book (listening to the Audible version), and I can confirm that Hazony misreads Locke, not just on rationalism and religion, but on basically everything. But I’ll come back to that later. Let me start where Hazony and I agree.

Hazony diagnoses a society with declining religiosity, failing homes, defined by a listless decadence due to a lack of solid moral values. Much of his book is a stout defense of traditional families and family values, which is fantastic. He is at his rhetorical best in his denunciation of the postmodern attack on moral values since about the 1960s, although he lays the blame not on 20th century postmodernism or something like that but on “Enlightenment liberalism,” which is weird, and I will get back to that. 

I liked the summary of modern Marxism in Conservatism: A Rediscovery. He labels as “modern Marxism” or “updated Marxism” a shifting array of movements and ideas that are deliberately slippery and made difficult to define or pin down (e.g. Critical Theory(ies), CRT, “woke,” BLM, etc.). Hazony’s description of what he calls “The endless dance of liberalism and Marxism” seems apt to me:

Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal. …

Marxists point to many genuine instances of un-freedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights. 

Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of un-freedom and inequality, after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists demands for new rights.

Return to Step 1 above and repeat.

I also enjoyed reading the section of the book describing the British conservative tradition, which he takes to be the foundation for his National Conservative theory. He summarizes the work of Fortescue, Hooker, Seldon, Burke, and others. I was unfamiliar with this history outside of Burke and appreciated this part of the narrative. 

But once he arrives at John Locke, it gets weird (and I guess I kind of took it personally). A central theme of this book is Hazony creating a barely recognizable straw man of what he calls “Enlightenment Liberalism,” attributing it largely to Locke, and bashing it with a stick over and over again as the counterpoint to his National Conservatism. But the terminology and history are so muddled it’s hard to know what he is really talking about at all. In some chapters I mostly agree with Hazony if we replace every instance of “Enlightenment Liberalism” or “Enlightenment Rationality” with the term “Postmodernism,” and most mentions of the name John Locke with maybe Michael Foucault. But there are other places where he clearly means to attack the core of classical liberalism, as in freedom and skepticism of government power. 

To begin with, Hazony complains that Enlightenment Liberalism became dominant in the US and other Western nations starting in the 1960s, yet he repeatedly blames this influence on the Enlightenment movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, and specifically on Locke, who died in 1704. Obviously there is a gap here somewhere. 

And then there is his confusing term “Enlightenment liberalism.” The supposed features of Locke’s Enlightenment liberalism that are repeatedly hammered are:

• Government (and all family and social structures) exist only by consent of the individual. The individual is free to opt out and withdraw his/her consent at any time.
•  “Reason alone” dictates the optimal arrangement for how government (and family and social structures) are to be organized. All existing traditions, including religion and family, are of no worth and can be abandoned at will as reason may dictate.
• Everyone and anyone can apply reason about these issues and come to the same conclusions. 
• These reasoned conclusions apply everywhere and to all societies equally.
• All people are equal, meaning adult children don’t need to respect parents and all choices and lifestyles are just as good as any other. 
• All people are free, meaning they can do whatever they want, like get into Princeton or immigrate to the US at will.

His terms are so muddled and his rhetoric so heavy-handed that whenever I hear him say “reason alone” or “free” or “equal” or “Enlightenment liberalism” or even “liberal” I now instinctively roll my eyes in preparation for the ritual beating of the straw man. While a version of some of these ideas have infected our society in recent times and have contributed to its decay, it’s absurd to attribute the statements listed above to John Locke or as defining attributes of his idea of liberalism. At best, this is a deliberate and uncharitable misreading of the Second Treatise, distorted so as to mimic postmodernism, mixed with a heavy dose of Descartes’ rationalist extremism. 

As I have pointed out here and here, Locke was deeply religious and argued that reason was only valuable when built on the foundation of revelation. He also wrote on parenting, clearly teaching parents to be a strong guide and authority when children are young, but allow greater autonomy as they approach adulthood, which is good common sense. Hazony writes in very bad faith when he suggests that Locke’s concern for equality under the law means that for liberalism there need be no hierarchy in family or church, no respect for parents or authority, and no moral values (no need to respect some lifestyles and choices over others). This bad faith argument style raises a red flag for me and provokes deep skepticism.

Hazony is a bright guy. He knows his history. He knows his political theory. At risk of being uncharitable, I have to suspect the heavy-handed rhetorical trickery is deliberate. Why would he need to resort to distortion in history and theory in order to paint liberalism and John Locke as the bad guy, rather than “modern Marxism” and maybe Herbert Marcuse? What is at first just odd and off-putting starts to make sense if we see his attack on classical liberalism as providing theoretical cover for a more Trump-friendly National Conservatism that emphasizes Winning! over archaic concerns about liberty and rule of law. 

The true nature of his National Conservatism becomes clear as he goes through 20th century intellectuals and political figures to determine who is in, in this newly defined conservatism, and who is a “liberal”:

• Franklin Roosevelt: He is in for his wartime Christian Nationalism, but criticized for expanding the welfare state. 
• Eisenhower: In, as part of the “era of Christian Nationalism”
• Russell Kirk: In. Way in. (Except for the part where he defends John Calhoun.)
• Friedrich Hayek: Out. Too much emphasis on Liberty (!)
• Frank Meyer: Out. Too much emphasis on Liberty. (!) Too skeptical of government power. (!)
• William Buckley Jr.: Out. (!) Too much emphasis on Liberty. (!) Too skeptical of government power. (!)
• Leo Strauss: Out. Too little deference to tradition.
• Reagan, Thatcher: In.
• Ayn Rand: Out. 

At this point let me step back for a second to emphasize the grand nature of Hazony’s project. The noteworthy philosophers are not those with completely novel ideas, or even those with good ideas, but those who were able to crystallize a new but yet unspoken sentiment into tangible and intelligible theory. This was Locke’s work in 1688, as his Two Treatises captured in ink the ideas behind England’s Glorious Revolution. His words resonated not because they were novel but because they reflected existing intuitions and values. That rising sentiment was what we now call classical liberalism. Hazony’s work today is to crystallize a newly-rising sentiment attempting to fill the vacuum of classical liberalism’s disintegration in an increasingly secular age. Hazony’s words seems to be resonating on the political right, but time will tell whether he succeeded or not in his ambitious task. 

At the core of it all, Hazony and I align on the central importance of the most critical things: God and family. At times while listening to the book I really wanted to be all in on his vision of government designed to protect God and family. The main thing that holds me back is his mental model of government. He wants to use expanded government power to advance our social goals, where I see that as a devil’s bargain. Hazony’s National Conservatism is based on a tribal model of government he compares to a family. The father and mother, bound with ties of loyalty to each other, to the family as a unit, and to the other individuals within the family, strive for the good of both the family as an entity and the members thereof. The family members respect the father and mother as superiors and learn from them, thereby enabling traditional wisdom to be passed down through the ages. 

By contrast, my “liberal” model of government leaders is that of corrupt or corruptible status-seekers who would do whatever they can to build their wealth and power, and are only held back by well-designed legal structures and the watchful eye of a wary public. Politicians need to be given as little scope and authority as possible, and political structures must ensure that self-interest and the public interest align, and that any fundamental or dramatic changes can only be made by factions coming together in a compromise, so that no one faction can stack the deck. This is part of the beauty of the liberal order as originally conceived. I worry that any expansion of centralized power for good aims would quickly be subverted and used for evil - whether by the right itself, or via a leftist reaction.

As a thought experiment, what if the mostly-Protestant US government had explicitly been tasked with preserving religious (read: Protestant) values? How would Jews and Catholics have fared? Even with the religious freedoms in place in the Constitution, early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were persecuted by state governments and left un-defended at the mercy of mobs because their beliefs were seen as a threat. They literally had to leave the US in order to find some peace. Then when they were brought back into the US, the US government persecuted the Saints mercilessly through the law for decades (via the unconstitutional Edmonds-Tucker Act) because they were seen as a threat to Protestant morality. If the US government were explicitly endowed with the role of protecting religious values, there is a very good chance my religion would have been banned. As a religious minority, I am grateful for the liberal framework of the Constitution, and I would rather not water down our freedoms.

I’ll close with one further objection. This one is more abstract, but I am convinced that abstract cultural attitudes are what determines a society’s fate in the long run. Hazony’s model for government in Conservatism: A Rediscovery is explicitly tribal and hierarchical. I am not being uncharitable - he spends a lot of time making this point. He is right, of course, that social hierarchies do exist in reality. True and unconstrained freedom does not really exist. Truly egalitarian societies cannot really exist, and true Justice can never really be achieved. Just as we can never perfectly emulate Christ as individuals, we can never perfectly attain these liberal ideals as a society. 

Classical liberalism is best seen as a value or aspiration toward which we strive as best we can, always coming up short. Hazony’s National Conservatism seems to have given up on these aspirations and is content to settle for pure power politics and tribalism. For me, this is very concerning. It is true that liberalism never fully lived up to its promises and never will, but much has been gained in the attempt. Everything that is unique about the West came from rejecting pagan tribalism and instead seeking to emulate Jesus Christ. Christ taught us 2000 years ago that we are all children of God, and therefore spiritual brothers and sisters, no matter what family we come from, what gender, what degree of wealth, or what nationality. 

As these Christian moral intuitions seeped into culture and legal codes over the centuries (as described in Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism), the West (and only the West) came to overcome tribalism, and eventually arrived at the liberal tradition and egalitarian moral intuitions we take for granted today. The results are apparent in any analysis of Western Civilization - freedom, prosperity, science, the arts - human flourishing like no other society in history, ever. In advocating for a tribal mode of government Hazony would have us reject this grand Christian inheritance just like the Marxists he rightly opposes. 

Perhaps the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism is intended not just to lure left-leaning liberals into taking on Marxist positions - but also to antagonize and egg on the right into abandoning classical liberalism in favor of unprincipled tribal power politics against the left. And so, from both sides liberalism is deconstructed bit by bit. 

[Update 8-31-22] Just one more note. When discussing the principles upon which National Conservatism is built, Hazony mentions a strong executive power vested in the “king or president.” If National Conservatism is indifferent between monarchy and republic, it is not for me. Despite Hazony’ lauding of the old British political tradition, there is a reason the American colonies wanted to break away and establish a new political order. Here is 1 Samuel 8:10-19 (KJV):

10 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king.

11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;