Is Hazony a Continuist or a Discontinuist? I thought before that he’s more of a Discontinuist, but maybe he needs another category, say, Re-Contintuist.
There’s a part of me that thinks that Hazony would be better off if he called what’s he’s talking about something other than ‘Conservative’, perhaps a Whig. I don’t think the word ‘conservative’ really has much meaning in the political sphere anymore because most Americans think in Right/Left/Center terms, and his conservatism is automatically associated with the Right, and really the value of what he’s doing—or at least how I want to see what he’s doing— is to establish a common-sense center.
So, for instance, he’s not the kind of conservative who thinks FDR was a proto-Communist, but as a pragmatic member in good standing of what he defines as the American Conservative Nationalist Tradition. He has more scorn for the Libertarian and Neocon Right.
The Hazony that shows up in this book dislikes ideological fanatics, whether they’re on the Left or the Right. Whether that’s who he is outside of the book remains an open question for me. But we’ll come back to who the ‘real’ Hazony is later. The challenge now is to understand the ‘text’ and what in it makes sense.
In my last post about Hazony, my goal was to establish why Hazony dislikes Liberalism so much, and the key point was that there’s much in this antipathy for Liberalism that many on the Bernie Sanders Left would would share. Hazony is against stupid Neocon wars like Bush/Cheney’s in 2003, and he’s against the Neoliberal global order that has had such a devastating effect on the lives of non-professional class Americans. For him ‘Conservatism’ means something very different from what most Liberals think it means, and he’s at pains to explain exactly what it is and what it’s not.
H’s goal is not to attack individual Liberals but the paradigm into which Liberals, i.e., most Americans on the mainstream Right and Left, have been indoctrinated, and to offer an alternative paradigm that he argues would, if adopted, provide the superstructure for a much healthier society.
I like the idea of ‘paradigms’ because they get to underlying structural issues that unconsciously shape how and what people think. A lot of people see themselves as ‘critical thinkers’. It’s a cliche that it’s not the university’s job is to teach you ‘what to think’, but rather ‘how to think critically’. But that very rarely means to examine the underlying paradigm that shapes thinking at a place like a university.
What ‘critical thinking’ usually means at most universities is how to apply the Liberal paradigm in such a way as to evaluate whether certain cultural and political attitudes align with Liberal values, and to condemn them if they don’t. There’s very little critical thinking about whether the underlying Liberal paradigm gives us the best framework to evaluate what kind of values a truly healthy society should have.
So what is the essential structure of H’s Liberal Paradigm? Here’s how he summarizes its essential premises:
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All men are perfectly free and equal by nature.
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Political obligation arises from the consent of the free individual.
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Government exists due to the consent of a large number of individuals, and its only legitimate purpose is to enable these individuals to make use of the freedom that is theirs by nature.
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These premises are universally valid truths, which every individual can derive on his own, if he only chooses to do so, by reasoning about these matters. (p. 98)
I think this is basically right. It might feel a bit reductive, but that’s how paradigms work. There are few people who lean Left who would think that this paradigm completely explains their thinking, but it functions like an ‘archetype’ in structuring thinking at an unconscious level. And the energy that animates this archetype is the belief that nothing is more important than the free, autonomous individual, and government has no role except to promote and protect that freedom and that autonomy. All other considerations are subordinated to this central value.
I’ll come back in another post to take a closer look at this characterization of the Liberal Paradigm—and its dancing partner Neo-Marxism—but the main goal today is to understand the Conservative Paradigm and to contrast its essential elements with the Liberal Paradigm. So here are the essential premises of the Conservative Paradigm:
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Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty.
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Individuals, families, tribes, and nations compete for honor, importance, and influence, until a threat or a common endeavor recalls them to the mutual loyalties that bind them to one another.
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Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchically structured, their members having importance and influence to the degree they are honored within the hierarchy.
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Language, religion, law, and the forms of government and economic activity are traditional institutions, developed by families, tribes, and nations as they seek to strengthen their material prosperity, internal integrity, and cultural inheritance and to propagate themselves through future generations.
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Political obligation is a consequence of membership in families, tribes, and nations.
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These premises are derived from experience, and may be challenged and improved upon in light of experience. (pp. 100-101)
If the archetypal energy for the Liberal Paradigm comes from the sacrality of the autonomous individual, then for the Conservative Paradigm, it’s about the sacrality of the “community” structured from the bottom up—from family, to tribe, and to nation. There is, for H, room for individuality, eccentricity, difference, but not so much of it that it would undermine the cohesiveness of the community on its different levels.
I think it’s fair to say that Liberals value community, but that it is a subordinate value to the autonomy of the individual. And it’s fair to say that conservatives value the individual, but it’s a subordinate value to the community. For conservatives communities are mostly something into which you are born and have no choice about and for which the individual should feel a deep loyalty and sense of duty to sustain. For Liberals, communities are chosen—and can be unchosen. Consent is critical, and loyalty is secondary to one’s personal happiness and one’s freedom to pursue it unhindered by community duties or obligations if one determines that his community is no longer worthy of his consent.
H would say that there’s no such thing as the individual without his being in some kind of community and cultural heritage that comes with it. He would argue that this idea of the autonomous individual is a unique and rather bizarre innovation of modern societies that has had dreadful consequences that inevitably dissolve societies into atomic, anomic goop. Whatever cohesiveness Liberals feel in their lives is just a leftover, a pale echo, from a foundation laid by their conservative ancestors, an inheritance that Liberals have progressively squandered. Liberal values are the smile without the traditionalist cat.
Liberalism mistakes for something obvious or readily apparent to any reasonable person what was in fact developed over a long period of time through a process of trial and error:
Enlightenment liberalism is a political doctrine based on the assumption that reason is everywhere the same, and accessible, in principle, to all individuals; and that one need only consult reason to arrive at the one form of government that is everywhere the best, for all mankind. It borrows certain principles from the earlier Anglo-American conservative tradition, including those limiting executive power and guaranteeing individual freedoms …. But liberalism regards these principles as stand-alone entities, detachable from the broader conservative tradition out of which they arose. Liberals thus tend to have few, if any, qualms about discarding the national and religious foundations of traditional Anglo-American government … as unnecessary, if not simply contrary to universal reason. In their effort to identify a form of government mandated by universal reason, liberals have thus confused certain historical-empirical principles of Anglo-American conservatism, painstakingly developed and inculcated over centuries, … for universal truths that are accessible to all human beings, regardless of historical or cultural circumstances. (pp. 31-32).
Again the Herder themes emerge here regarding particularity of ‘nations’ and cultural heritage as incommensurable with other particular nations and cultural heritages. The Liberal paradigm rejects any such idea of incommensurability. What’s true in England should be equally true in China, India, or Saudi Arabia. Any society that resists the reasonableness of what Liberals propose is obviously in thrall to entrenched interests whose only motivation for defending their national heritage is to hold onto their privilege and power.
So let’s spend a little time unpacking Hazony’s Conservative Paradigm:
Hierarchy defines the basic bones of any Conservative society. We are all born into a family, which belongs to a tribe, which belongs to a nation. Each of these is a layer of the hierarchy, and the hierarchical structure of each is replicated at each level. We are first and foremost social beings, not individuals. Our individuality, or sense of being a concrete self, depends on our being situated in concrete, face-to-face communities, and how we grow and mature as full human beings requires a trellis of interrelationships that looks backward toward the ancestors and forward toward future generations.
He recognizes that ‘hierarchy’ is a radioactive word, and as soon as Liberals hear it they assume that the higher dominates the lower, and he would acknowledge that that often happens, but he insists that hierarchies often can and do work in positive ways, especially when those at higher levels are acculturated to see their role as serving the best interests of those in their care at lower levels.
As parents serve their children, so tribal leaders serve the families that compose the tribe, and national leaders serve the needs of the tribes that compose the nation. The leaders at each level are continuously striving to make their family, tribe, or nation the best it can be–to promote its happiness, prosperity, and general flourishing.
This is easiest to do when their is general agreement about what flourishing means–but we'll come back to that thorny issue later. But the short answer for him would be that flourishing is what people in any particular cultural tradition have thought it to be from what was bequeathed to them from their ancestors. He does not see this as a static inheritance, but one that evolves as its members prudently adapt to changing circumstances, but they must adapt in a way that remains consistent within the basic framework of the paradigm outlined above.
Now each of these levels maintains its cohesiveness by forming mutual bonds of loyalty vertically and horizontally within the hierarchy. I think that family loyalty is easy for most people to understand. We're always rooting for the people we love to succeed. Hazony primary example of the tribe is the congregation, which means a religious community at the local level. The picture of Annunciation parish that has emerged in the last few days would be a good example, but this experience of tribal belonging has become harder to find for most Americans, as guys like David Brooks continuously lament. I addressed this problem in Dying Traditions that I posted last week. It’s one thing to long for community; it’s another to find one that is actually vital and healthy. It’s hard for “tribes” to thrive for reasons that Hazony never, imo, adequately addresses, but let’s stipulate that American life would be healthier if healthy “tribal” communities were something that we could all participate in at some level.
How you get from tribe to nation is pretty murky in Hazony’s account, especially in a society as complex as that in the U.S. And so how loyalties play out in such a society at the level of nation is left unsatisfactorily developed, in my opinion. He seems satisfied simply to assert that a healthy American nation would continuous with what he calls the Anglo-American Conservative tradition that he traces back to the 15th Century in John Fortescu, Richard Hooker in the 16th Century, and particularly John Selden in the 17th Century.
I will freely admit to never having heard of any of these guys except Hooker. H would say, as I would would say about the classical philosophical tradition, that’s because they aren’t taught, and they should be. Maybe he’s right about that. If they were taught, he argues, we would see that American figures like the Federalists George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, the Whigs Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln are not Liberal heroes, but Conservative ones.1 They are squarely in this Anglo-American Nationalist “Conservative” Tradition as he defines it.
Figures like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine most definitely are not in this tradition, and all our troubles trace back to their malign influence, according to Hazony. But John Locke is taught, while Selden and Hooker are not, so we see all the founders as the intellectual heirs of Locke, and Hazony argues that’s hugely distorting. But if Hazony is right about that, then as I suggested above, I’d argue that there are good reasons to include FDR and even Bernie Sanders in this Conservative Nationalist tradition as well.
What distinguishes this Anglo-American Nationalist “Conservative” tradition from the “Liberal” tradition? Its pragmatism, its wanting to solve real-world problems rather than to impose an ideologically pure poltical program top-down. I’d argue that Hazony’s Conservatism, if he were consistent about it applying it, would, require that he reject everything that is Jacobin in Project 2025. (Maybe he does, but I doubt it, and I assume he doesn’t until I learn otherwise.)
I had originally planned to discuss how his ideas about mutual bonds of loyalty and honor provide the emotional or group psychological dimension to make this hierarchical system work as a cohesive unity. But that would make this post way too long, so I might address that instead in a future post.
What’s important to understand for now about points 1, 2, and 3 in the Conservative Paradigm summarized above is that in H’s explanation of it, it’s an extreme version of an extrinsic motivational system, and because its rewards and punishments are driven by honor and shame, it is very vulnerable to promoting ambitious sociopaths to positions of power. So, for instance, It perfectly explains the Republican Party during the Trump years.2 When does the loyalty and and honor/respect ethic flip into spineless sycophancy to make way for King Lear? Everything depends on who gets to define what’s honorable and what’s shameful.
But Hazony would probably retort that if we have a healthy society with vital religious communities, a society whose families and schools acculturate its children into truly honorable, community-centered attitudes and behaviors preparing them for life as adults in a society that reinforces that acculturation with strong social norms, and rewards those who most exemplify those norms by promoting them to higher levels of responsibility, then that should prevent sociopaths from rising to the top.
We’re in transition, he might argue. The first goal is create a healthy society, which ours is not because of its emphasis on radical individualism and autonomy. A healthy, community-centered society will produce healthy, community-centered adults—not narcissists. Do Liberals have a better idea about how to filter out narcissists and sociopaths from positions of power? Because clearly they rise to the top everywhere in the Liberal system. Liberal societies incentivize sociopathy; they are sociopath factories.
There are a lot of people on the communitarian Left that would agree with a lot of that. But in practice Hazony’s explicit and implicit endorsements of people like Trump, Hegseth, Vance, et al., raise serious questions about his fitness to make judgments about who’s fit to serve the American Nation. How to explain this? Again, the book that he wrote paints a picture of someone who should be a Never-Trumper. He’s not. Something is askew. Rather than his debating Ezra Klein, I think his debating Never-Trumpers like David French or Charlie Sykes would be more instructive.
In the meanwhile, my working hypothesis is that he’s blinded by what he calls Neo-Marxism. His ideas about the urgency of the threat that Neo-Marxism (what I call the Phony Left) poses explains a lot about what’s a little cuckoo on the intellectual Right in this moment. It justifies in their minds attitudes that seem inexplicably extreme, if not a little nutty, to people outside the NatCon world. Are they seeing something the rest of us are not? I’ll address that question in my next post on Hazony.
Notes
1. We don’t think of people like Washington and Adams as conservatives, because the conservatives in revolutionary America were the Tories. Anyway, how can a revolutionary be a conservative? Well, in H’s telling his ‘conservatives’ have a heritage that dates back to the War of the Roses, and their view were hegemonic until after the death of Elizabeth in 1603. The new enemies of this Conservative heritage were he Divine-Right monarchists like the Stuarts, the fanatical proto-Jacobin Puritans like Cromwell, and the new group of Enlightenment rationalists for whom John Locke became the exemplar.
I thought this discussion was interesting and clarifying. I always had a hard time understanding where John Adam’s obsession with having a monarchical presidency with all the royal ceremonial trappings came from. Hamilton wasn’t as extreme, but clearly he wanted a strong “unitary executive”. Knowing this I thought it ironic how Hamilton has become such a Liberal icon after the Broadway hit. The Federalist wanted a strong, king-like executive, but they wanted his powers checked by the legislative and judicial branches. This is the conservative tradition that H traces back to Fortescu. Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were all ‘king-like’ in their presidencies. And it’s with that rationale that some of the MAGA intellectuals justify Trump. How’s he different?
2. What Liberals don’t understand is that behavior and attitudes that are dishonorable within the Liberal paradigm aren’t dishonorable within the Conservative paradigm. Loyalty and being a team player are far more important values in their self-declared war against Liberal hegemony. We saw this in William Buckley whose defense of a truly despicalble human being in Roy Cohn was essentially justified by this loyalty code. “He’s one of us,” Buckley would argue. “It would be dishonorable for me to abandon him.” Liberals also don’t understand that this loyalty code is their superpower in maintaining party solidarity, which is so sorely lacking among Liberal political factions.
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