Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Yoram Hazony is the president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He earned his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, his PhD degree from Rutgers University. His degree is in political theory. As president of the Herzl Institute, Dr. Hazony leads research efforts in the areas of Jewish political thought, philosophy and theology.
Dr. Hazony is an award-winning author with his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, winning the Conservative Book of the Year from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2019. It’s his most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, that’s the topic of our conversation today.
Yoram Hazony, welcome to thinking in public.
Yoram Hazony:
Thank you for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be on.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. I’ve been in an intellectual conversation with you for a long time through your books and writings and it’s very good to have this opportunity. And the opportunity’s really afforded by the publication of your latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. And so I just want to start off by asking you the question, why this particular book at this time?
Yoram Hazony:
Well, I’ve been involved with conservative things most of my adult life since I was in college, even a little bit before. And I have this feeling that in a lot of ways, times have become more desperate than they’ve ever been on the one hand, and on the other hand, the clarity of the conservative message, I think, has faded to the point that it’s very uncertain how are conservatives supposed to offer aid and assistance in very, very difficult times, both in the United States and in other democratic countries, in Europe and elsewhere. And one thing that I know that especially the younger people who have some impulse in the direction of conservatism or the right more broadly, I think that one thing we hear from them all the time is, “What has conservatism ever conserved?”
It’s not intended to be a hostile remark, although sometimes it sounds like that. I think it’s a genuine question. If we look at the last couple of generations and we see the way in which Western nations have abandoned God and scripture, but also family and loyalty to the nation, to the independence of nations, at this point, man and woman, honor and sanctity, the Sabbath, you can just go on and on. I think it’s completely reasonable to ask, “What has conservatism conserved?” and the purpose of this book, rather than being an apology for how great conservatism has been in recent years, what I try to do is to ask what I think is the necessary question, what would it look like to actually conserve something, to actually construct a society and in fact, individual personal lives that would be capable of conserving things?
Albert Mohler:
It is a truth that right now the issue of labels is as controversial as in any recent decade, I think, in American history. I grew up also into the conservative movement, and in my entire adult life, I have been a part of that movement and trying to understand that movement. In the earliest period of my life, the English-speaking conservative tradition really came to prominence with The fusionism of National Review Magazine and the context of the Cold War. It was further defined by the Reagan-Thatcher years in which conservative thought, “Okay, we found our political identity in these two Titanic political leaders.”
But we’re in a period, 30 to 40 years later, in which clearly the term conservative itself has to be defined in its most basic term. And so you start out by asking, “What has conservatism conserved?” but just define the aims of conservatism in your mind.
Yoram Hazony:
Look, my coming into conservatism was during the Reagan years and the Reagan-Thatcher years certainly is an inheritance of 1960s fusionism, a great deal of what we can say was really accomplished rolling back socialism. The defeat of communism is certainly due to that movement. But in this book, I make an argument that Anglo-American conservatism is actually a much, much older tradition. It goes back quite a few centuries even before Burke. I know not everybody’s interested in this kind of ancient history, but when you briefly take a look at, at this English constitutional inheritance which then becomes the American constitutional inheritance with certain repairs, but a great deal of it is, in fact, preserved for centuries.
When you take that broader look, I think that you can think of conservatism as a political standpoint that places the religious and national tradition at the heart, at the heart of strengthening and maintaining the nation. So we have centuries of thinkers and political activists who saw Christianity, in particular Protestantism, the English Common Law which most people don’t realize was in incorporated by the founders into the national law of the United States, of course, the English language and so on. These aspects of national and religious tradition defined for many centuries who and what the English first, the British, and then the Americans, who and what these people were. These are the things that gave the strength, allowed them to recognize themselves and to have some coherence. And I think it’s a mistake to see this as an issue of race. It’s not about race. It’s about these traditions and whether they are upheld.
So when we look today at what people call conservatism, I think that, in the 1980s, it was still true, as Irving Kristol said, that conservatism in this tradition was based on three pillars, first religion, second nationalism and third economic growth. That’s a statement from the Reagan years and that’s the conservatism that I grew up with. And I think that, at some point after the fall of the Berlin wall, the religious and national aspects of this movement dropped out and it became a … Maybe it’s a little bit of exaggeration, but not much, it became about individual liberty on all issues all the time. There’s a good word for a movement that’s about individual liberties on all issues all the time. That word is liberalism.
And so even though Anglo-American conservatives cherish, obviously, individual liberties, they’re not the basis and foundation on which everything is built. The individual liberties are a crucial cherished principle, but it’s one of a number that have to be properly balanced. So today, I think one of the great challenges for conservatives is to distinguish ourselves, to redefine, re-understand ourselves, rediscover ourselves as people who actually believe in a number of crucial important principles. And we aren’t liberals. Liberals can be allies. We need to work with liberals in order to deal with the rise of woke neo-Marxism and the rise of China, but conservatives and liberals are two different things, right?
Albert Mohler:
Well, I will, perhaps, just to set some issues before us here, what I feel in common immediately with you is that I start with the biblical inheritance and my conservatism also immediately gets to the fact that it is within, in my case, a Protestant frame and an Anglo inheritance that is very much a British inheritance. And by the way, the works of Fortescue and Selden are on the shelves in my library. To walk into my library is to walk into the library of your book, by the way, your books and from them to Burke. And even as a high school student, reading Burke and understanding tradition and then later would add others to that, but family, church, in your case synagogue nation, those are the tripod of my understanding of not just conservatism, but what we are seeking to conserve.
I also want to throw out an argument. I want to get you to tell a story, but I’m going to throw out an argument and that is that your latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is really an amplification of what you’ve already introduced readers to in The Virtue of Nationalism. And so reading, and by the way, I also brought your Philosophy of Hebrew scripture here, which I found fascinating. But my point is this, this is an ongoing conversation in your mind and books come out of that mental work but also a sense of urgency. And so my thesis that I just want to present to you as an author is that this book is a continuation in particular, the conversation you started in The Virtue of Nationalism. And I want to ask what happened that led you to believe this book really needed to enter the public conversation at this time.
Yoram Hazony:
I think you’re describing it all correctly. My first book is already 20 years old. It was called The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul. And at that time, America looked really sturdy and Europe looked okay too in a lot of ways and the state of Israel, which is I live with my wife and kids in Jerusalem and that’s where we make our home and the state of Israel seemed like it was on the edge tottering. And the question that I addressed in that first book was, “Where have all the traditions gone?” There was this new liberal liberalism that was making life in Israel, to my mind, unrecognizable and dangerously so. So that’s actually where I began the conversation and it’s a little strange, but now 20 years later, it feels as though those same issues which were so troubling about Israel have overtaken America.
And obviously, Israel’s a small country. It’s very different from the United States in a lot of ways, but at the same time, there is something that unites all of the Western democracies, all of the nations that have in one way or another come out of this great Anglo-American tradition of biblical religion and nationalism. And we all are facing a common opponent that is mutating and getting more difficult to handle with every passing year. I think that we can say that in 2020, I think it’s fair to say that, in 2020, 2020 was a watershed and I think it might have been a watershed even without the coronavirus.
The main reason 2020 was a watershed is because the hegemony of liberal ideas, the political conditions in which you could count on most people of the left and the right to agree on certain basic liberal premises which had been agreed upon basically since World War II. That came to an end in 2020. Liberalism has still a very powerful framework, but I think realistically, it is being severely challenged and successfully from the left, by this neo-Marxist wokeism. And I also think that many non-liberal views, some of them, I think, are positive and some of them are positively awful, are also appearing on the right.
And in a way, everything is up for grabs now. The traditions have really been worn down to the point that almost anything can happen. And so I felt it’s the last moment to be able to write this book and publish it and feel like I put out there what I have to say.
Albert Mohler:
Well, it’s an excellent book. I want to say I think it’s one of the most important books in conservative thought in many years, but I would say that about your book, The Virtue of Nationalism and did and that gets to one of the interesting contemporary developments here in the United States. And that’s the rise of the so-called national conservatives. And I would consider myself very much an ally of that movement. If you go back to the American presidential election in 1960, so that’s a good watermark, go back 60 years from the year you just mentioned of crisis, if you were to take, as I do with students, the democratic and the republican national platforms of 1960, if you can just take the name of the two parties out, it’d be very difficult to distinguish between the two. Even in terms of something as mundane as tax policy, and on National Defense, the Democrats appear to be more hawkish even than the Republicans.
They’re challenging Eisenhower, his legacy. As I say to students, you have to realize that the left, and I don’t mean that just exactly Democratic and Republican, but in the United States partisan binary, that’s what it means, the Democrats have abandoned virtually all of this, all of it. There’s hardly anything. I think they would they’d associate with from their own party platform in 1960. The Republicans have added to their platform and certainly changed several things in terms of economics and the role of government, but primarily they’ve added concerns to that 1960 platform.
But now we’ve arrived at the point where to say conservative is no longer to have a clear identity in a way that enabled a political conversation, a moral conversation, a conversation about the good in government for the last 30 years. You are offering not just a definition of conservative, I want to say, you’re offering a rebuke and I revel in the rebuke. But let’s be honest, you are telling a lot of conservatives they’re not conservative.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah. I do my best to not simply be insulting, but I can’t disagree with what you’re saying. It’s a little bit bizarre. There are quite a few people who are known as prominent conservatives and who I’ve known for decades. We’ve known each other well, and at some point around 2016, probably before then, but clearly in 2016, they stopped talking to people like me and people like me is not necessarily people who were publicly endorsing Donald Trump for president because I didn’t. It’s actually something much deeper which is that the idea that there’s something precious and crucial about America as an independent nation. That is a traditional inheritance that it’s a biblical inheritance. It’s based on biblical religion.
And if you throw out the Bible, then you’re in danger already of losing your independent nation. These kinds of things used to be completely utterly acceptable. In the 1980s, they were simply an integral part of the way that Reagan and Thatcher saw the world. And people like Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham were a part of the Reagan coalition, but not an alien part, they were an integral part of that coalition. And at this point, to say those kinds of things, frankly, to some people who still call themselves conservatives, it sounds like authoritarianism. It sounds like fascism. It sounds like something horrible.
Albert Mohler:
Well, number one, you’re not insulting in your book, but you are clear. I don’t know how many people are going to respond to this, but let me tell you, I came to the conclusion about six or seven years ago that the word conservative in the American and the British context, I’m very involved in both in that sense, in both conversations, the term conservative has come down to mean two different things. And I think actually one of them alone is legitimate. And that is that there are permanent truths, there are permanent virtues, there are permanent laws and permanent structures of existence that are absolutely necessary to have a flourishing society, to have any, any livable human order.
But I think what we have right now are two different movements. And one of them just wants to conserve as much as possible while maintaining allegiance with the current regime. And the other one says, “No, there are certain fundamentals that are absolutely necessary and the laws of which means we will not have a free, a flourishing society respectful of human beings.” And so I just want to say, I think we’re down to that now. I think a lot of the people who call themselves conservatives or neo-conservatives or hybrid diffusionist conservatives 20 years ago, I think they’re not conservatives. I think they are delayers of what they see as inevitable.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah. To a certain degree, I don’t even see the delaying anymore. You’re completely right. It’s just gotten to the point that people are talking about an international liberal order based on individual liberties and that’s all they have to say. They’re not talking about tradition anymore. They’re not talking about certainly not about God or the Bible, but more than that, they’re not asking, “What is the Anglo-American tradition? What does it mean? How does it approach these eternal things?” Those questions are just gone and it’s time to part ways. There are liberals. There are conservatives, like I said before, that’s not intended to insult anybody.
We can have all sorts of friends and allies for all sorts of things, but if conservatives who are people whose focus is tradition as the strength of the nation, tradition as the only thing from which we can really gather strength and restoration, people who are thinking that they’re somewhere else, and at this point, we need to gather those people, we need to strengthen them, we need to reteach ourselves and renew ourselves. There’s so much richness to be turned to, but the public debate, as you say, the fusionist debate, it’s at this point so shallow. We have to turn to something much deeper.
Albert Mohler:
The key, I think, to distinguishing your thought on conservatism in terms of the clarity of what you’re trying to focus on is indeed the fact that there’s a givenness and the biblical rooting makes that extremely clear. Not only biblical tradition, but biblical authority within the culture makes that very clear, but there is the importance of, and I want to come back to the family and marriage in a moment, but the nation is essential as it turns out. Now, again, I have to keep going back to your last book before this most recent, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, The Virtue of Nationalism. You wrote that book partly because nationalism has been given a bad name. Even conservatives, who once would have identified themselves clearly as nationalists, they’re now running scared from the term and we have the left routinely speaking of me and of others as Christian nationalists as if we’re supposed to be running from that. I’m not about to run from that. I’m not about to join their one world order and frankly has absolutely no roots for the human rights they claim to be preserving in the first place.
Yoram Hazony:
Look, I just had this conversation with a prominent person in Los Angeles who said to me, this over the Sabbath, said, “All the words that we would naturally want to use, all of those words, nationalism is tainted, but so is Christian nationalism, but so is Christianity, so is Judaism if you mean that you actually believe it and live it.” We have to understand this about the culture that we’re living in is that it’s been revised over the last 60 years in a rolling ongoing cultural revolution. And that cultural revolution has turned almost every term that you could use to rally people, something that used to be honorable into something that is despicable, deplorable, as people say.
We have to be careful about this. We want to make sure that the things that we stand for are not just reactive, but that they actually are constructive and leading to a restoration and reconstruction. But I think we have to stop being afraid. You can’t be afraid to use terms like nationalism or Christian nationalism. The haters have got the culture all lined up already. The only question is how we respond. Are we going to step up and embrace who we are proudly or are we going to be afraid and accommodate?
Albert Mohler:
I want to press an intellectual question here and that is the issue of ontology being largely missing from your discussion. And I think that might be because of a conversation that’s rather distinctively Jewish versus just distinctively Christian. But when I look at a transgender woman swimming on the University of Pennsylvania Swim Team and you see the photograph, when you look at the claims concerning same sex marriage and now pregnant people and a same sex couple, two men supposedly having a baby, I just want to come back and say that the tradition is grounded in, at least my argument, the historic Augustinian, is that it’s based in ontology.
You still can’t get past the fact that it’s going to take a man and a woman, it’s going to take a womb to provide a baby. There are ontological truths that tradition is going to have to respect, but even if a society says, “We’re not going to respect those traditions.” “You know what? The sperm and the egg are still going to respect those traditions.”
Yoram Hazony:
Right, yeah. Well, you and I are in complete agreement about this, but you’re also right. You’re right to notice that my arguments are that they come from a Jewish tradition which is a little bit less emphatic about our capacity to use reason in order to arrive at final and complete truths. The Old Testament and Talmud, they’re not texts that speak with a single clear sharp voice. They’re texts that have … The Old Testament has multiple prophets, who don’t always … From a Jewish perspective, they don’t always say the same thing. They argue with one another. The rabbis certainly argue with one another.
The Talmud is basically a record of philosophical and legal argumentation among different people. That doesn’t mean anything goes, but Judaism is a school of thought more than it is a sharp doctrine, a sharp creed. And our approach to the way you look at the world is perspectival. The truth emerges from the argument among different perspectives, each one grasping a certain piece of the truth, but none of us have the ability to grasp the truth finally and holy. So it’s very interesting that this discussion about the relationship, what can human beings know about ultimate truths is it’s not just Jewish. It’s actually picked up by Selden and this conservative tradition.
And one of the striking strange things about English history that makes it so fascinating is that the time of the reformation and the struggles of the 17th century in England are a time of great Protestant learning in traditional Jewish sources.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely, yeah.
Yoram Hazony:
I’m sure you know this, but very few people in your audience know this, that you have a giant of Protestant theology law and political theory like John Selden writing treatises, hundreds of pages long about the Talmud.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and this is something distinctive in the Anglo tradition, the Anglo-British tradition. Gertrude Himmelfarb spoke with this as philosemitism, British philosemitism. And actually, it was Himmelfarb who introduced me to a lot of that tradition. And as a Christian, I was pleased and surprised honestly to find the depth of the engagement, but it wasn’t just an interest in say Moses and early Israel. It was an interest in politics. It was an interest in how the world is intended to work. And that the wisdom of Israel translated into and it makes its way into the coronation oath of the British Monarch.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s astonishingly deep. You can go back as far as … People laugh when I say this, but it’s true. You can go back as far as Alfred the Great. We’re talking about the 900s. He’s incorporating chunks of the Book of Acts directly into the English legal tradition. It’s an astonishing thing. It’s an incredible story and it hasn’t been fully told either because the academia today isn’t interested in telling that story.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I tell people, you don’t understand the British monarchy without understanding the invocation of Zadok the Priest in the coronation. That’s astounding in historical terms.
Yoram Hazony:
It is. It’s an absolutely astounding story. And just from the perspective of scholarship and not political anything, the things are … They’re related somehow, but even if you’re just interested in historical truth, the astonishing Anglo-American identification with Israel, and you can almost say romance with the Jewish sources through the ages, it’s a beautiful and fascinating thing.
Albert Mohler:
I want to come back to two points, two arguments made in your book. And for those who are familiar with the conservative conversation over the last half century, one of the shocking things that you underline, and it’s been observed by many, but you really go at it harder than others in the contemporary conversation, you go at the fact that the conservatism and classical liberalism are not the same thing and this is a confusing issue. It was very confusing to me as a teenager. I could understand the claims of classical liberty, but by the time you got, even to the Reagan years, there were people saying, “We’re the true liberals.” Even a Reagan played with that a little bit himself, having been a liberal Democrat at one point, “We’re the true liberals,” this classic liberal tradition.
And one of the things I most appreciate about your indictment is that you go right at John Locke. And I must say, as a Baptist, in turns of religious Liberty, I’ve got to reserve some words of respect for John Locke on religious Liberty. But in terms of Locke’s understanding that the only binding relationships on Earth are those of consent, that destroys civilization. It doesn’t further it.
Yoram Hazony:
Yup. Well, again, I think there’s a lot of people who just get upset because at this point, you’re just not supposed to criticize Locke. It’s an image of the American founding that was born in the 1940s, 1950s which says, “This isn’t a nation with traditions many centuries old. It’s an idea that was invented by brilliant people during The Enlightenment,” meaning to say, in the 1700s, human beings for the first time in history figured out the great truths that are universally true. Before then, it was all basically darkness.
Albert Mohler:
Novus ordo seclorum.
Yoram Hazony:
Right. And so that picture turns Locke and Kant and Spinoza and Russo on the social contract. You’ll think I’m exaggerating, it actually turns these books into a new scripture and the books are used in schools. Of course, schools where Bible and God are no longer taught. These books are used in high schools, in universities to advance a new religion which has no need for scripture and no need for tradition and no need for God. Now, I’m not saying that that was John Locke’s goal. That would be a preposterous thing to say. Again, I think Locke has a place, is a place in the American founding and the Anglo American tradition, but that you can’t turn him into a prophet.
You can’t turn his view of reason into God himself or into God’s word. That’s a step that is just too far. It puts an end to the entire tradition. And I think we don’t have any choice, but respectfully to resist this.
Albert Mohler:
But it does explain a lot. It explains a very great deal I think. And you mentioned, say, 2016, and thereafter, I want to say I think the roots were there before and just in American politics, I’ll say in the breakup of the Bush Republican coalition in the aftermath of the George W. Bush administration and during the Obama years. I think an awful lot of people who thought they were conservatives 10 years prior to that thought, “No, we’re just going to negotiate a way through this,” and in a Lockean sense. If everything comes down to consent and the consent of the government, which means not just the government, but I think in the larger sense, consent to the culture, then we’re just going to have to figure how we can give enough consent to try to bring out the better things.
You and I both know people who claimed the conservative mantle, who made the argument that we should adopt and endorse same sex marriage because after all marriage is a conserving institution and so it will … The liberation of sexual impulses is a given now. So all we need to do is and must do or can do is to try to restrain that within certain bounds. I think both of us would agree, marriage can’t be anything other than the union of a man and a woman.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, certainly.
Albert Mohler:
And consent could be something else actually won’t make it something else. And that takes me back to ontology, but nonetheless, I think an awful lot of people that used to be called conservative are now just living in an intellectually of foolish dream that’s not conservative at all.
Yoram Hazony:
This issue of consent, it’s already taken up by Selden and Hale and other. We’re talking about many centuries ago that the great English Protestant statesmen took up the question of, “Can our society really be based on consent?” I thought a pretty persuasive argument. Their argument was that if the only thing that’s holding together, legitimately holding together our society is consent, if the only way that we take on obligations is through consent, then you also have to say that when you stop consenting, then the force of those obligations stops, right? I think that argument was being, being made at the dawn, the very dawn of liberalism by conservatives and I don’t think it’s ever been responded to, there has to be something other than the consenting individual.
Yoram Hazony:
If it’s only the consenting individual, then you’ve turned the consenting individual into God. He alone decides what obliges him. So it’s not actually a theory. The theory of consent is taught as though it’s a theory of moral obligation, but it’s not. It’s a theory of the freedom from moral obligation.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And if you extend that beyond the individual and you say the consent, say, of groups or societies, again consent can only get you so far because, again, you can consent to the fact that people are pregnant, but that doesn’t make people pregnant. And so, I see these toxins released, especially among younger Americans or younger people in the Western world. And they’re fed this ideology and I do think cultural Marxism is a good way to put it, by the way. They’re fed this ideology of liberation in which consent is, whether it’s sex or for that matter or anything else or government. That’s all that matters, but they can get together and consent to whatever they may choose that doesn’t change reality. And furthermore, it doesn’t hold anything together. It won’t hold them together.
Yoram Hazony:
Yup. Reality, as I understand it, it’s not only about what objects there are. It’s also about what obligations you have.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. One implies the other.
Yoram Hazony:
Right. There are versions of this argument that try to avoid God. You hear this in academia that, “Well, we have the natural law and it obligates us. The beauty of it is you don’t really need God,” and I really think that’s a mistake. It’s a mistake because, again, this is going back to this issue of, “How smart are we?” I think we just need more humility about our ability to figure it all out. The place that God plays in the economy of a religious person’s thoughts is that whenever you have a principle that you’re tempted to say, “Wow, I know this for absolute certain. I can just rule the world on the basis of this principle because it’s so obviously true.”
A religious person bumps into God. At some point along that way, he bumps into God, he or she and feels, “I’m just going too far. I just can’t know that much. There’s a point at which I have to say that there are things that are beyond me.” And God and the scriptural tradition, people talk about that the guiderails are coming off. You heard that expression? The guiderails are coming off. And the reason the guiderails are coming off is because those guiderails were the tradition of common sense that we inherited through centuries, thousands of years of studying scripture and placing ourself in a humble relationship with the God of scripture.
And you can’t just do without it. Here we are, it’s two generations after God and Bible were asked to remove themselves from the American public schools and people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman anymore. You have to think about that. People are using reason. You can’t say they’re not reasoning. All these professors writing these theories. They have reason coming out of their ears. The problem is not that they’re not reasoning. The problem is that their reason is detached from any kind of humility about the demands of reality, as you say, but also about the demands of a God who knows a thing or two that we don’t know.
Albert Mohler:
No, I appreciate that argument. I will also say that in reading all your works through the years, what frustrates me is that I wish you’d first met a Protestant advocate of natural law rather than a Catholic advocate of natural law because they’re two different things, both talking about the natural law, but the Protestant limitations, understanding I should say of limitations upon natural law in terms of human sinfulness, they’re equal and opposite assertions. Number one is Romans 1, that even the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen in the things that are made, so that they’re without excuse.
But immediately thereafter, Paul, doesn’t say, “Here’s how successful human beings are at figuring this out.” He goes right into, “Here’s the dissent into utter depravity that happens nonetheless.” And so again, we have to come back again and say, “Look, the problem is that if you deny God, if you deny the tradition based upon scriptural reasoning and common sense, as you say, if you reject everything from the English common law and the grounding of Anglo-American constitutionalism, then all you are left with is politics. That’s all you’ve got. And I think that’s where we have arrived and I’m frustrated so many people think they’re conservative that I think they’re instead on the right maybe or slightly on the right, that they’re increasingly agreeing that it’s just politics. I think if it’s just politics, we’re doomed.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah. Well, there is a world view like that in which there’s nothing but power and the things people believe compete with one another just because they’re associated with different power groups and each power group has its own view. And none of that is connected to truth. And that is, that’s something that conservatives are accused of. You hear it more and more is, “Well, those traditions you’re talking about, they’re just masking a power structure.” That’s the Marxist reading of it. There’s some truth to it. It’s not absolutely false, but the reason that it’s false is that our traditions are the tool that we use to approach the truth.
We’re part of a tradition of seeking the truth and a person can always get to the point of saying, “My tradition is no good. I think I’m going to switch to a different tradition because I think they’re better at it.” But one thing human beings cannot do is you leave one power hierarchy and you enter another one. You can’t free yourself from it. That’s what you beings are like. But the question, “Is the hierarchy that you’re a part of, is it actually trying to get to the truth or is that just a cynical cover for doing harm to people you despise because you despise them?” And I completely agree that that’s where we’ve ended up.
And look, I care an awful lot about America’s future and that’s before you point out that if the world is going to be run by China, it’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be very, very, very hard for us, for all of us. And so we need a restoration and the way through to that restoration can only be through a repentance, through a rediscovery of the original sources of America’s strength and Britain’s strength. I’ll just say something a little bit hopeful which is that I know the trajectory looks terrible, but I think it’s important to remember that human beings are just really bad at seeing the future.
Almost nobody saw the collapse of the Soviet Union coming. I remember there must have been two guys, right? And almost nobody saw the housing bubble and the crash of the world economy. Almost nobody saw the return of nationalism. Trump and Brexit was a complete surprise. In 2020, the resurgence of the neo-Marxism. Well, all of us, just about all of us were taken by surprise that by how successful that was. I think we should just be humble about this. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do and I think it’s pretty clear what we need to do. And it’s up to God whether he rewards our actions and our hearts. If he wants to, he’ll reward it and we’ll succeed. I think the societies that we live in are … If they fall, it’s not like nobody’s warned us.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah, there’s so many things I’d love to pick up on just from the last few minutes of your conversation there, but I do want to say, as you’re looking at, for instance, this sudden rise of Marxism, and I say sudden because I really confronted it first when I was a teenager, but it was Marcuse, Habermas and all this, but they appeared to have very little traction on the ground. Well, no, they got a lot of traction on the ground, but the problem is that the more Marxism is, the less plausible it is even within Marxist structures for very long. By the time you get to the Bolshevik, Marx is a symbol. They’ve really abandoned Marxism.
And so I’m very interested in what’s going to be happening on the left in the United States because, when they actually try to push their ideology on the American people, it doesn’t work very well. But what they do is keep pressing the envelope and subverting the traditional authorities in the United States and putting everything in an ethos of liberation in such a way that the society’s going to have to make some fundamental choices going forward. And those choices will be either conservative or liberal in the classic sense. And there’s still an argument to be had. That’s why you wrote your book.
Yoram Hazony:
Right. It’s true. There’s still an argument to be had and we need to make the best possible use we can of the time we have. It’s really now or never. People have been sitting on the sidelines since the 1980s. Allan Bloom, right? The Closing of the American Mind. He said, “Take a look at what’s in the universities. This is just going to take over that.” There’s one guy who basically did see it. So we’ve been hearing this for a long time. And a lot of good people have done all sorts of good things, but it hasn’t been strong enough. It hasn’t been big enough. It hasn’t been devout enough. It’s now or never.
Albert Mohler:
The bravest argument you make in your book is not the argument for nationalism. It is not the argument for the Anglo-American conservative tradition. The bravest argument you make in your book is one that I have not seen anyone make in decades in this way and that is that conservatism requires conservative lives. And I just want to tell you, I really appreciate your courage in addressing that so forth rightly. I’d really invite you to spell that out just a bit.
Yoram Hazony:
Well, another part of the liberal framework is this idea that government is one thing and private individuals are another thing and there’s no connection between them and that just isn’t true. If Donald Trump is the president, he doesn’t need to legislate or enact anything. Just his words shape the way that the culture is, the way people see things for good and for bad. If Barack Obama’s president, the same, just his stature and his capacity to communicate shape the culture. Government and society are completely intertwined. There is no way to separate them.
And what that means is that we have a whole generation of very well-meaning conservative activists who think that if they stand up for, I don’t know, let’s say pro-family policies or oppose abortion, these are obviously important things, but they think that if they’re speaking on the right side, and if they’re holding the right signs, then they’re conservatives. But there is no separation between public life and private life. The real test of whether you’re a conservative is if you’re a conservative person, if you’re leading a conservative life. A person who is … This is going back to conservatism being about tradition.
Either you are plugged into a society at this point, it’s usually an Orthodox Christian congregation or Orthodox Jewish congregation, either you’re plugged into the chain of transmission so that older people who are handing down things, genuine things from the past that they know about are there to teach you, either you’re there and receiving it or you’re not actually a conservative, you’re a liberal with some conservative opinions. And I think that the argument about what public policy needs to be, it has to happen, but the real argument, the real decisive place where the future of American Western democracy is going to be decided is when these young people in their 30s who want to save their country, their tradition but are living completely liberal lives, they just keep putting off getting married and they keep putting off having children, serving in the military is just too much of a burden.
And they would feel like complete jokers if they began to keep the Sabbath or if they actually opened the Bible and studied it. All of this, it has a huge, huge impact. A person who is not plugged into the tradition, not part of the chain of transmission doesn’t really know what a conservative is.
Albert Mohler:
So someone asked me the other day and it was a young man saying, “Who is a conservative?” And I said, “A conservative man is a man who, before turning to political theory, marries his wife, honors his wife, is faithful to his wife, does not divorce his wife, with his wife, welcomes children into the world and considers it their first obligation to transmit the truth and the faith to their own children.” We do get to politics. We do get to world affairs, but I appreciated so much the fact that you offered this as a principle, that a conservative is one who lives a conservative life.
And as you say, there are so many young people who think themselves conservatives, but they’re just animated by ideas, but there is reckless, some of them, in terms of their personal lives as anyone on the far left. And the odd thing is, Yoram, on the other hand is that you have people who on the left, and by that, I really don’t mean the squad. I don’t mean that far on the left, that I don’t know them, but there are people, working at the Brookings Institution, and on the faculty at Yale, or in your case, Princeton. And they hold very liberal ideas except at home. The consistency of life that I aim for is one, in which, in other words, they’re liberal ideas, but they live very conservative lives at home.
And I just want to come back and say I think wholeness, honesty is found in living by conservative principles, yes, but living conservative lives and showing others the virtue in that. So I am so indebted to you for this conversation and for your books and your books are so fertile. I want to talk about everything from reason and revelation in terms of how we understand scripture to, well, ontology. You are an unusually brave writer. You’re an unusually good thinker. And I want more people to read your works. And most importantly, this latest book Conservatism: A Rediscovery coming out from Regnery Gateway. Yoram Hazony, thank you so much for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Yoram Hazony:
I very much appreciate the conversation. I hope we see each other in real life soon.
Albert Mohler:
We’ll have to make that happen.
Many thanks to my guest, Yoram Hazony, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at AlbertMohler.com under the tab Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.