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 president of the Hertzl Institute in Jerusalem and Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and his PhD from Rutgers University in political theory. Dr. Hazony is an award-winning author. His book, The Virtue of Nationalism, won the Conservative Book of the Year Award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for 2019. In its revised and expanded edition, that book has just appeared again. The Virtue of Nationalism is the topic of our conversation today.
Professor Hazony, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Yoram Hazony:
Good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Albert Mohler:
I really enjoyed our conversation on your book on Conservatism. I have really looked forward to this conversation on the reissue of your book, The Virtue of Nationalism. Honestly, I think this is the most important book on the issue of nationalism written in our times, and I appreciate the fact that it’s already out in what amounts to a revised and expanded edition. I would appreciate if you’d tell me the story of how this book came about.
Yoram Hazony:
Well, I think everybody probably remembers 2016. It was a time of almost, panic, I mean meltdown that was taking place first in the UK over Brexit. Which, to my amazement was received by elites in Britain and in Europe really with kind of hysteria. And that was followed up by the Trump administration President Donald Trump’s election in November, 2016. And there again, it wasn’t just the left, it was much of the Republican party, the conservative leaning media that treated Donald Trump as though the sky had fallen and all these really terrible accusations that he was mentally ill, that he had no principles, just no end of chaotic thinking. I thought untidy and even unprincipled thinking on the subject of what it is, what was happening. And it was somewhere in February, 2016, so before Brexit and before the election, that Professor Steven Grobe—who’s an old and dear friend. He’s a Jewish scholar of the political thought of the Bible and in particular of nationalism, we’d been friends for many, many years—he contacted me in February of that year and said, “Listen Yoram, just drop whatever it is that you’re doing, pull together anything you’ve got from your years of thinking about nationalism now this moment for a book.” I’m a little bit of a stubborn person. I don’t usually take that kind of advice, but I looked around and I became convinced that Steven was right, that this was necessary. It was necessary because the public debate, the public sphere, but also academic debate on the subject of nationalism was confused. I felt that it was confused, that it didn’t do justice to the political theory of nationalism or to the history of nationalism in the Western tradition, and it certainly wasn’t doing justice to this new Brexit and Trump world.
Albert Mohler:
This new Brexit and Trump world. That’s the one way to put it. Hysteria came on the left and frankly in very established places. So the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Justin Welby spoke about Brexit and spoke against it, describing it as a representation of fascism. And you look at that and you just wonder how did he jump from Brexit to fascism? Is that what it looks like from Westminster?
Yoram Hazony:
Yep. Well, that’s what it looks like to a lot of people, but that’s a very specific kind of perspective. It’s a post-World War II phenomenon of both liberal and Marxist thinkers. Justifiably looking at Hitler and fascism, and Hitler did refer to himself as a nationalist. I don’t think we necessarily need to accept Hitler’s terminology…
Albert Mohler:
Especially since he acted as an imperialist.
Yoram Hazony:
Yes. So we don’t need to learn political philosophy from Hitler, God forbid. But after the second World War, many liberal writers and many Marxist writers took the opportunity to take the term nationalism, which until then had been very broadly used and accepted to refer to a theory of political order that says the world is governed best when it’s governed as a world of independent nations.
So nationalism is really a political theory of the principle of national independence and why it’s important. And so many important liberal and Marxist figures dove in to say, “Well, Hitler is nationalism.” Anybody who’s talking about a world of independent nations is implicitly then shoved into the absolute evil category. And that was the way they were responding. They were responding both to British national independence and to Trump’s election, the American first framing of what’s the purpose of Trump’s politics. Both of those had this effect as though Hitler had come in. In fact, some previously responsible and reputable commentators explicitly said that this was the return of the 1930s in Germany and I felt like I had a responsibility to present what I thought was a much more fair and sensible view of these things.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think it’s not only fair and sensible. I think a couple of things mark it. Number one, you’re really writing very much in the Anglo-American tradition here, political tradition. And so one of the things you accomplish is this demonstrating, say to English speaking readers, this is your tradition. This is exactly what produced Britain. This is exactly if not the British Empire, at least Britain and certainly the United States and the very principles you articulate here, marked for the greater part of the American experience exactly what Americans thought of themselves.
Yoram Hazony:
I think that’s exactly right. I’m very much a lover of the Anglo-American tradition of both branches. And it’s strange. I mean, my academic background is in political theory, a very, very great degree to which the way that political theory, political philosophy is now taught, it’s very much taught from—you’ll think this is kind of funny—but it’s very much taught from a kind of German perspective…
Albert Mohler:
I know exactly what you mean.
Yoram Hazony:
Where England is not considered to have so many important achievements in America. Somehow Britain and America become kind of like a side issue and everybody’s always, the intellectuals always want to be talking about Marx and Hagel and Nietzsche and Carl Schmidt, and there’s an endless list…
Albert Mohler:
Herder.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, Herder too. So no, there really is a need for Americans and Brits for the English speaking world to rediscover its own inheritance.
Albert Mohler:
One of the points you make in the book is that Germany’s not the right place to look here if for no other reason, the Germany had no real national tradition. You had the independent Prussian states, they were unified in one sense by Bismarck in the 19th century, but there was no strong German ideal until basically the German empire. And so, they never had a stable national identity the way that both the British and the Americans have had, and for that matter, many other European nations have had.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, the German history is one of mostly for a thousand years of aspiring to be the new Roman Empire. When we’re talking about nationalism, we’re talking about independent national states. We’re assuming that there is such a thing as a nation that you can identify throughout human history, peoples that are bound together by ties of mutual loyalty. They have their own language or religion, sometimes both, and a history of coming together feeling a certain kinship. It’s not based on race because all of these nations adopt new tribes into them, but nevertheless, it’s a family like feeling of kinship, which is the foundation of national independence. It’s what creates the possibility of self-determination. And also democracy can only function in that context when there’s a people that feel sufficient trust to one another because they have an inherited tradition, even if they’re arguing terribly.
Albert Mohler:
That’s what I was taught in school, by the way, in the public school in the United States in the 1960s. I was taught that that was exactly the American experience and the American expectation.
Yoram Hazony:
So that was, I would say by the 1960s academics, professors in the United States had succeeded in turning that into something bad, into a particularism.
Albert Mohler:
I’d say by the end of the decade, I can say in the early part of the decade, it was very intact. Of course, at the elite level and on the coast, on the campuses it’d be different. But in the heartland, that notion of pride in America as a nation and as a national compact, that was very real.
Yoram Hazony:
And it probably still exists in the heartland.
Albert Mohler:
It does. I think election results indicate that it exists in very powerful way.
Yoram Hazony:
But we’ve discovered one of the things we’ve discovered during our lifetimes is the extraordinary power of the universities. Absolutely. They’re not ivory towers, they’re more like transmitting like radio towers. And what happens at the universities determines the permissible range of opinions, whatever’s taught in the university. That’s the range that students, once they graduate, they think that that’s what’s acceptable.
Albert Mohler:
I think you said something like this years ago. I’ve cited it many times. In one sense, we all live on campus now.
Yoram Hazony:
We do.
Albert Mohler:
The influence of the university is so pervasive in society, and frankly the way I put it socially is this: It’s not just that the universities are the origins and enforcers as many of these ideas, it’s that they become the social reference point. It’s really interesting to see how many people, for instance in Hollywood want to make certain they don’t violate the latest campus rules. So, they almost concretely live on a campus.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, they do. So when we think about what it means to, for all of us to grow up and still be living on a university campus, so part of it is the intellectual and ideological inheritance. You’re only allowed to think the things that you’re allowed to think in these institutions, and part of it also has to do with civil discourse. It has to do with the way we speak to one another.
I mean, dorm room conversations are in terms of the way people talk, the names they call one another, the way they speak about one another. I mean, it’s a rowdy time and a growing time for young people. What happens though when those young people never mature and they come to speak irresponsibly? By speak irresponsibly, I mean in order to have a democracy, you have to have at least two parties that speak as though they respect one another. And America had that during the Reagan Carter era or the Nixon Kennedy era. If you go back and look at those debates, I’m sure that the competition between the sides was just as intense, but all sides understood that when you speak to another, you have to speak, you have to honor the other tribes. You have to make sure everyone understands that we’re in this together, and that’s not what dorm room conversations are like, and that’s not what public life in America or in Britain or in other countries is like.
Albert Mohler:
Just as a testimony to that, last night I was looking for something and instead came across Richard Nixon speaking of Lyndon Baines Johnson with enormous respect and humor and called him the greatest legislator of the age, even though they went head-to-head on so many issues, and the Democrats and the Republicans were as divided politically in 1968 as ever, but there was a respect back and forth. You mentioned Reagan and Tip O’Neill, et cetera. I think the loss of that, which, by the way, is reinforced, I think by a pretty dangerous political culture, the loss of that means that it’s just demonization.
Yoram Hazony:
Yes. So if we apply that to the distinction between an independent nation and an empire, empires are never democracies. Empires are always imposed by force on vast parts of the world and countless peoples. And there you don’t need to worry as much about the coming together of the competing tribes for very simple reason that power is centralized in an emperor, and the emperor deals with whatever trouble comes up, he deals with it through violence.
Albert Mohler:
Even if that emperor being named Vladimir Putin.
Yoram Hazony:
Yes, absolutely. Empires can come in many, many different, they come in many different flavors. They can have many different ideologies. As you said, Hitler had a Nazi empire and Stalin had a communist empire, and Napoleon had something that was very close to a enlightenment rationalist empire. It was kind of a liberal empire. But all of these empires—Christian empire and Muslim empire, Chinese empire—what they all have in common is that they’re not democracies. They don’t function that way. They hold things together in the end by force and the whole theory of an independent nation, which we have it going all the way back to Scripture, back to the Old Testament, the idea of one nation under God, a nation with borders, a nation with boundaries, a nation whose competing tribes have to pull together somehow, and it’s just not going to happen by force. This is a whole different political theory America was founded on and Britain too, and it’s scary. It’s scary that it’s being lost in our generation.
Albert Mohler:
I have read so many of your books sometimes, I’m not sure in which book you made a certain argument, but I think it may be in your book on the philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, that you point out that when you have Israel in the Old Testament, you take the statements made in terms of the giving of the law through Moses. It was given to a nation, and Israel did not aspire to be an empire. It saw itself as a nation among other nations, a nation blessed by God, chosen by God uniquely given the perfect law, but a nation among other nations.
Yoram Hazony:
And that’s explicit. Abraham is promised when he first meet Abraham at the beginning of Genesis, God promises him, “I will make of you a great nation.” The concept of Israel as an independent nation with its own purpose in the world is at the very foundation of Judaism and enters Christianity as this crucial principle from there. But it’s all through it. It’s not just Abraham, the idea of borders beyond which you’re not allowed to go in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people “Here are borders and we’re not allowed to touch an inch of the territory of our neighbors.” And this is something that really, I think our political theory programs and political philosophy programs really need to take much more seriously. This is the first place that we have a God who instead of telling the Assyrians like the God of the Assyrians, tells them, “What’s your job? Your job is to conquer the four corners of the earth.” The Babylonians, their God wants them to bring peace and prosperity to the world by conquering the four corners of the earth. And that’s the same thing we get with Alexander and with the Roman empire and so on. And so the Hebrew Scriptural concept of Moses speaks to God, creator of heaven and earth. And we have the law directly from God. Why not bring it to the people of the earth? But that universal mission to teach the world, it is tied from the beginning to borders and a limitation on what human beings are in fact allowed to do. Why is that? Because the idea of trying to rule the world by force from the perspective of the prophets is simply evil. It means endless unjust bloodshed and theft and so many other evils. It is in fact a form of idolatry itself.
Albert Mohler:
But as a Christian understanding the universal mission given to the church, it’s not a form of empire. In other words, it is not a people, a polis, in the sense of establishing a rival empire. It is a different universal vision, but it only makes sense in the background of Israel’s particular calling and the existence of Israel as a nation. So I find that clarification extremely helpful.
Yoram Hazony:
I think Christianity is so rich in part because it’s inherited both Jewish nationalism or Hebraic nationalism of the Old Testament, the idea of one nation under God. It also has inherited the universal aspiration of the Roman Empire. I mean, that’s not the teaching of the church, but politically, the Roman Empire has a vision of uniting all of mankind under a single political rule. And for Christians, there are different traditions. Again, if we talk about the German tradition or the Russian tradition, these are Christian traditions which are imperial…
Albert Mohler:
Well, in the Eastern sense, explicitly territorial. You have a Serbian Orthodox church, a Greek Orthodox church, a Russian Orthodox church that’s territorial.
Yoram Hazony:
Yes. And all of those really are national churches. The Ethiopian church, the Armenian Church, those really are national churches, and they remind us of ancient Israel in that way that the nation is inextricably tied to a certain Christian religious vision. The Russians, I don’t think ever got that message, and they’ve never yet really been nationalists and the Germans do. I’m not saying it’s impossible.
Albert Mohler:
But in both those cases that I don’t want to go too far from the main course of our conversation here, but in both cases, there were amalgams of peoples and nations that were inherently unstable from the start. It’s a huge difference between Greece and Russia. Those are two different projects.
Yoram Hazony:
Yep, absolutely. And it’s interesting, I was, I’m reading through Plato’s Republic again on the Sabbaths with my younger children, and I did it once with the older children. I’m doing it with the younger children, and we were all very surprised to discover that Socrates is, at one point, Socrates explicitly says that the appropriate order is for all Greeks to be friends and for Greeks to be enemies with barbarians. So the theory that Plato actually says it’s a sickness, a sickness of the nation, that it’s divided into many different city states and that they’re warring against one another. So that’s really surprising to discover there.
Albert Mohler:
In your thesis of The Virtue of Nationalism, you point to two dangerous, indeed, sometimes even horrifying alternatives. And one of them is anarchy and the other is empire. And so you situate nation as between anarchy and empire.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
The alternative to both.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, the alternative to both. There’s people that tend to forget that the state, like a centralized state with a standing government, where somebody’s job is to rule 24 hours a day. And a police force, a standing police force, professional police, professional soldiers, a professional paid bureaucracy to keep track of the entire public. This is extremely new development in human history. It’s only five or 6,000 years old, maybe seven, but it’s very new and politically, the topic of the Old Testament is the clash between these new empires made possible only by the incredible wealth of agriculture in the big river valleys and the Nile and the Euphrates and so on.
So there’s a clash between these vast imperial states and the order of tribes and clans, the order of tribes and clans, it’s fair to call it anarchy. There is no central government. Every family, every tribe is its own government. It has its own foreign policy. It goes to war with the neighboring families and the Old Testament, its testimony to the time when the shepherds and the hillsides living with their families and their clans and their tribes without central government, when they are forced to come to the conclusion that there is no way for these kinds of tribes to resist empire. Empire is an innovation which is far too strong, and it will in the end, conquer everything. And the prophets, when they endorse uniting the tribes of a certain nation and creating one nation under God, they are putting on the table an alternative to the imperial state. They already know that whatever the advantages there may have been of anarchic freedom, humanity is not going to have that anymore. And they propose the nation state is something that could be, if it’s God-fearing, it could be strong enough to be able to stand up empire.
Albert Mohler:
And Israel, the shining example.
Yoram Hazony:
Israel becomes, well, Israel, we’re told that Israel is supposed to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Later, Moses teaches us that Israel is supposed to be a nation of priests, a nation of priests, meaning the priests were the teachers. So this commission, this covenant between God says that I’ll make you my precious people in return. You need to be holy and you need to become teachers for the world. All of this is paving the way for the prophecies of the later days of as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Zachariah, all of the prophets almost describe the later days as a time when empires will not be predatory anymore. The idea that the wolf is going to lie down with the lamb, the wolf is Assyria, the wolf is Babylonia, and the lamb is the small peoples.
Albert Mohler:
Wolf is Cyrus.
Yoram Hazony:
The wolf is Cyrus. So they have a clear alternative, a political alternative, which at the time is a revolution in political thinking. And that revolution is that uniting as a nation and standing up to conquering empires, that’s the path to the improvement of the world.
Albert Mohler:
You very persuasively argue and in a way that’s entirely consistent with a Christian understanding of subsidiarity and the order of creation. You point out the nation really begins with family. And I think that’s absolutely crucial to the argument. And by the way, the absence of the family is a meaningful unit in political science is I think one of the indications, the greatest disaster in our times, the average academic conversation about politics hardly ever mentions the family. And if it does, it’s condescending.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, the curriculum, and when I say curriculum, I don’t mean formal. I’m just talking about what is taught, what is taught. I mean, I learned liberal political theory, I learned it already in high school and then as an undergraduate and then in graduate school. And it is based on the assumption and all these famous enlightenment names, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, all of them, and Rousseau’s Social Contract also. All of them assume, they paint a picture as though what you need to know about politics is the individual and then the state, you have free individuals and then the individuals, they consent, and they create a state. That’s it.
There’s individual in this state and all of politics is somehow supposed to be worked out through this incredibly abstracted, unrealistic claim that human beings live as individuals and then by consent they become states. And none of this is, it is never true. Human beings never live as individuals. They always live in a society. And that society has everywhere in all of human history, everywhere experience reaches. It has something like the family and families joining together in clans and tribes and tribes joining together in nations. That’s the human anthropology. If we’re going to be empirical about this, you want to do it actually caring about reality. That’s the way human beings are built and the liberal claim that no, we’re all free individuals. We can choose or not choose whether we have a state. If we don’t like the state, we’ll choose to have a different state. It’s completely utopian. It’s totally unrealistic.
Albert Mohler:
Right. No, and it’s a lie. I mean, just to state it bluntly, it’s a lie. It’s a lie against reality. I would even stress the point you made a bit further because you said in some form or another, it’s basically been a very stable form. The heterosexual family starting with marriage and the man and the woman and their children, but also their parents and the larger kinship structure. There are different ways those are arranged in some, certainly a minority cases in world history, however you get polygamy or something like that. But it is still based upon the pair and their children. That is the nucleus of the family. And it’s often slandered these days as the nuclear family
Yoram Hazony:
For sure. I mean that’s the biblical vision.
Albert Mohler:
It’s the practical experience.
Yoram Hazony:
No, I think that anthropologically, you can find all sorts of strange things in the world, but for sure it’s true that the norm that Scripture is looking for is the husband and wife. And even there are obviously plenty of examples of polygamy in the Old Testament, but they never work out…
Albert Mohler:
Always absolutely.
Yoram Hazony:
The Old Testament systematically wants to teach us over many, many examples that the multiplication of wives is a way to destroy the family.
Albert Mohler:
May I point out something, I noticed this just a few weeks ago. It is right there before me for quite a long time. I just noticed it. The idea of parents and their children, mother and father and their children. It’s everywhere in literature. Everywhere. It’s everywhere in experience. But I noted, and I really hadn’t thought about this before because I was doing some research on an individual. I just pulled up the Wikipedia page and almost every Wikipedia page for any major person has in a column, “Parents, mother, and father.” In other words, the ideologues may say, “We’re done with that.” The fact is that Wikipedia is not done with that because you don’t know who this person is without reference to his or her parents. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yoram Hazony:
I agree. And the reason that it bothers people who are talking about absolute freedom, they want to think that you can be anything you want to be. There’s no constraints. That absolute freedom is what the human being is born for, is born to. But if we’re talking about how do human beings organize themselves in reality, the reality is that a man and a woman are needed and they’re not just needed for conception and for bringing a child into the world. The child is crippled if not raised by a mother and father. And I’m not saying there is a problem with the term nuclear family because the traditional family is not just raising children with the mother and father…
Albert Mohler:
And that phrase did not come from the friends of the family.
Yoram Hazony:
No, no, absolutely not. The traditional family is a family in which the grandparents are still in the picture.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Yoram Hazony:
And aunts and uncles are in the picture. And you grew up with cousins, you grew up with second cousins, and then those extended families, they come together at church, they come together at synagogue. And that’s also a polity. It’s also a political organization for common purposes.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that’s so helpful in terms of your understanding of the nation. The nation doesn’t begin with the nation. It also doesn’t begin with the individual. It begins with families. And then as you say, other groupings. Other groupings of necessity, other groupings of locality, other groupings of common interest. And so it is not just families or a family, it’s families, and there are others who are drawn into that unit. It becomes a larger polis.
Yoram Hazony:
So, we have a big problem. I mean people, they don’t tend to think of liberalism as the revolution. It’s very common now to talk about the left, the woke, the progressives. They’re the revolution. They’re the ones who are explicitly violent in the streets and calling for the overthrow of society and its destruction and replacement with something else. The problem is that liberalism, even though in its best forms, it, it’s much more tolerant and focuses on important things like enabling people to have greater personal freedom. Those are good things. The problem is that we’re not taught to understand enlightenment liberalism as a revolutionary philosophy, a philosophy which because of the fact that it begins with the individual and goes straight to the state, it has no place for the family. It has no place for associations of clan and tribe and congregation, the sort of push to the side that, oh, that’s civil society. Those are intermediate structures.
Albert Mohler:
By the way, only civil society as if that’s not necessary to the society, if it’s not even basic to the society.
Yoram Hazony:
Right. Because the assumption is there’s the individual in the state. The individual can do whatever he wants and the state is going to set limits, and that’s it. We’re done. And as you say, it’s a lie. There is no such choice. We don’t have a choice. We can have a choice that we want to leave our family and go try to join some other family. We can have a choice. We can leave our nation and go become part of another nation. But what we can’t do, what human beings are not able to do, is to be part of no family and no tribe and no nation that doesn’t exist anywhere…
Albert Mohler:
To come from nowhere.
Yoram Hazony:
To come from nowhere or to choose to go nowhere. You want to go live on Walden Pond for a few months? Congratulations, and then you’re going to write a book about it and you’re going to sell it to all the people in your community. That’s who you’re writing it for. Human beings don’t exist outside of community.
Albert Mohler:
Why has the very concept of nation become such a focus of outright hatred from the left? What is it? What does the reality of nation limit that the left wants to be free from?
Yoram Hazony:
Well, in this book, The Virtue of Nationalism, there’s a discussion towards the end about why is it that? Why is it universal theories? Why is it that liberals and Marxists hate nationalists so much? And the core of it is the insistence on being able to do something a different way from the perspective of liberalism and Marxism. We’ve got all the answers. We know how human beings should live for all times in all places in history, and certainly from here going forward. And nationalists are, they’re about, it’s funny to say this today, but they really are about diversity…
Albert Mohler:
A diversity of nations.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah. Moses may be communicating directly with God, creator of heaven and earth, but that doesn’t make him competent to rule all the other nations of the world to go out and conquer India like Alexander, we’re going to go conquer India and we’re going to make them live the right way. And Scripture is against it. And what that means is that Anglo-American conservatism is also against that. It is at its foundations thinks that human societies are going to be different. They’re going to have different languages, they’re going to have different variations on religion. Even a universal religion like Christianity is still broken down into many, many different nations and different peoples that approach Christianity in different ways. And the tolerance, this is emphasized by Hooker, for example, by Hooker and Selden and Burke. And the idea that you are in a position to know what’s best for all the other nations. That’s idolatry. That’s assuming God’s place. That we leave to God. And liberals and Marxists hate this insistence. They’ve got a universal theory. They know it’s absolutely right. Who are the Afghanis, the people in Afghanistan to stand up and say, “No, we have our way.” It makes them mad. It makes them real mad. They don’t like that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, evidently ready to go to war over it. And by the way, people, just in terms of recent American and international history, people think about, for example, recent wars and they’re almost always blamed on presidents, and presidents are not without responsibility. But it’s really interesting to go back and look at the cultural context and see how many people in that elite class were calling for that war until it came unpopular… And that includes Vietnam.
Yoram Hazony:
It does…. Look, the belief that you’ve got the final political answer and all too common, it’s a human thing. You’ve got a particular idea and you think your idea is really good, and sometimes it is really good. The American Constitution is really a beautiful thing. It’s a remarkable achievement, not invented out of whole cloth. It’s something inherited from the British Constitution in many, many respects. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing admired by people, the world over. But there’s a difference between having something beautiful that’s yours, that’s admired that others can learn from and saying it’s for export. Actually, it’s the final thing. It’s the thing. Everybody’s got to accept this because it just makes so much sense. That’s too much.
Albert Mohler:
I’ve been working in the same space for a long time, and so appreciative of your work. I want to tell you recently my wife and I were in several European nations and for an extended period of time, got to talk with a lot of people. And I will just tell you that in not one case, did anyone with whom I spoke, from cab drivers to people in hotels, to people who hosting us, at no time did anyone say, “I’m European.” Not one time, not once I would press the case, and they never denied being European, but they never saw themselves as European. And so there was a statement of German identity, a statement of French identity. But I’ll tell you, the one that was most insistent was Swiss identity. The Swiss are identified supposedly as in Geneva, the headquarters of world internationalism. But the Swiss, I think is as patriotic as any other European people I’ve ever met. And they insist on being Swiss. So there’s a part of me that says all of this globalism, the Davos culture, all the rest, it really is effective only at the level of the elites. The average person, including by the way, people who work in elite institutions in Switzerland, you ask their primary identity, they say Swiss period. There’s a persistence to the notion of nation. There’s a resistance to the idea of empire and even when it comes to something like the EU. But a lot of my research lately has been in some of the founding documents of the EU. And they’re not just bad. They’re horrifying.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, they’re horrifying. And some of the impulse behind the United Nations after World War ii, which is in some sense noble. We’ve been through two world wars and the Holocaust, and we don’t want to live through anything. I mean, it’s certainly an admirable impulse, but the belief that you’re going to herd all the nations into a room and they’re going to follow Robert’s Rules of Order and there’ll be procedure on, there’ll be votes and decisions will be made that way. It was then and is now completely disconnected from human reality. What human beings, what are they like and interesting that God could have said to Abraham, “I’m going to make your name great. You’re going to be a blessing to all the individuals of the world. You’ll be a blessing to everyone,” without mentioning, “I’m going to make you a great nation without mentioning the families of the earth.” Our inheritance, I think, is just much more realistic than our scriptural inheritance is very, very realistic in comparison to the liberal architects of the United Nations or the European Union who are dreaming of overcoming human nature. And those dreams have been dashed on the rocks of reality, and people don’t like it today. Many people don’t like it when you talk about Scripture as a source for political teaching, but it’s so refreshing to read something that’s actually realistic about what human beings really are.
Albert Mohler:
In thinking through these things—and by the way, I’ve done a project on the United Nations founding just for my own purposes and factory and in my own thinking—and the amazing thing to me there is how the Americans hedge their bets at every turn. And so the idea, the average, I think academic has, and on campuses they talk about the United Nations and the United States and our participation in the United Nations. They don’t generally acknowledge all the different ways in which, for example, the United States made certain that the sovereignty of the United States could never be impeded by the United Nations, sovereignty of other nations? Maybe. Of the United States? Never.
And just recently in the last several days, someone with a Carnegie Endowment for World Peace wrote a piece castigating President Trump in terms of the action against Iran and made the statement that the president acted illegally by not gaining prior authorization from the United Nations and the Security Council and went on to say, this is what would prevent war. And then actually mentions Russia without any acknowledgement that the obvious fact is Vladimir Putin doesn’t care at all what the Security Council of the United Nations thinks. So I looked at it and I thought, it’s one thing to persist in a bad idea that’s verifiably false. It’s another thing to go to the New York Times and just advertise in the face, not only of history, but of facts on the ground right now that the international system is what is most important. Clearly it isn’t. It never has been.
Yoram Hazony:
It never has been. And so when you go back to the first Gulf War, George HW Bush, and he’s the first President of the post Berlin Wall era talking about how there’s going to be a New World Order, a New World Order. I still remember standing in the kitchen and the first time I heard that phrase in this sort of chill, it does unimaginable that, but that’s what he was talking about was the New World Order. And he said explicitly, for hundreds of generations, mankind has sought this. What’s this? We’re going to end the law of the jungle and we’re going to have rule of law. There’s going to be one law that’s going to wrap the entire world in a single legal, judicial system for the planet, and America’s going to be its enforcer. Those were crazy days.
Albert Mohler:
And those words came from a Republican.
Yoram Hazony:
Those words came from a Republican who has a reputation of being like, “I don’t do the vision thing.” I don’t know who wrote that for him, but he actually was about the vision thing and that vision thing.
Albert Mohler:
But there’s a pedigree there, so forgive me, but I mean, you’re talking about Prescott Bush, United States Senator, very much a part of those internationalist conversations. You’re talking about Wall Street banking, in other words, all this, they really, and this is something that comes up with Davos and the whole thing, there are those who want to see the world just as one giant unified market. It is not even so much they want a unified empire. That may be the cost of getting the unified market, but what they want is one giant unimpeded market.
Yoram Hazony:
And President Trump, he gave them lots of reasons to hate him, but here’s especially. A striking aspect of why do they hate him so much? Because the moment he starts talking, I mean, this goes all the way back to his first campaign, the moment he starts talking about how freedom is really good, but the idea that if you build a factory that you have absolute right to benefit from America’s laws and and America’s traditions, and then you build this factory and then you can move it to China to the home of our enemies, and you have the right to make more money and to help build up a foreign empire and to dispossess all the workers in your family. Well, look, all of us understand that if it’s a few factories, then obviously it’s important to let people freely exercise their property rights. But as soon as it becomes like the national culture is that if you’re part of the elites and you own things, there’s no problem moving them all to China and leaving America destitute. When Trump started talking about that, I mean he was just taking this theory of the universal market, the theory of Freidman or of Hayek and saying, we’re not going to do this anymore. It doesn’t make any difference if individuals…
Albert Mohler:
Pulling out the rug from under our own feet.
Yoram Hazony:
Yeah, because there is such a thing as an American nation, and you can’t just do whatever you want to it. Property rights are crucial. They’re absolutely the cornerstone of a moral society. But there’s limits. There’s limits to everything. And the idea that you can do absolutely anything you want with your property without any concern for what it does to your nation, Trump stood for no, you can’t actually, there are limits. There are going to be limits. And all those elites that we’re talking about who felt like, I go to Davos, I meet all the other elites from the whole planet, the borders are all going to fall and we’re going to have one big market. He stood against it, and it might be the, nothing made people angrier than that.
Albert Mohler:
Finally, for this conversation, let me ask you, how would you update the conversation on nationalism, even from the first edition of your book to the second edition just out? Where’s this conversation now? Where’s it going?
Yoram Hazony:
Well, when the book first came out, I think people were really looking at nationalism as this kind of crazy renegade return to something from the past that could still be wiped out. Now, it’s seven years later, and I think things have swung around to a very, very great degree. I mean, we’re now after the Russian imperial invasion and we’re after the war against Iranian empire where after the, I mean, I don’t think people understood what China’s ambitions were until 2020, until the epidemic, the coronavirus suddenly in 2020, people realized that China’s controlling the ability of America to produce medicines, to produce the most basic things you need in order to be…
Albert Mohler:
Not to mention the source of the virus.
Yoram Hazony:
And not to mention the source of the virus and the unwillingness of the Chinese to step forward as good One Worlders and just share everything they know and to help everybody’s health. That was a tremendous learning moment about the nature of human beings, the nature of evil and the nature of the international system.
So at this point, I think, look, there’s still many, many people who are committed to this liberal internationalist one world ideal, but it’s coming down. It’s coming down fast. Almost every Democratic party now has political that they’re different from one another. I like some of them, some of them less. But these nationalist political movements are united in demanding the independence of their own nations. And now we have nationalist National Conservatism conferences, and you’ve spoken at them and many other important figures. And at these conferences, we get to meet scholars, policy people, political figures, spiritual leaders from many different countries who are aware that national independence has to be brought back. It has to. There’s no possibility. There’s no possibility…
Albert Mohler:
There’s no human flourishing, human good, human stability…
Yoram Hazony:
There’s no human flourishing. There’s no human stability. And even the individual liberties that are supposed to be the excuse for one world government, they only happen. They only happen within the nation state with an independent country, with a powerful tradition of these inherited individual liberties. There is no other way. So we’ve made a lot of progress in the last seven years. The world has not become less dangerous. Our opponents are much more aggressive now. I mean, there’s not just the attempts to use the legal system to prevent Trump, to push him out of being eligible to be president. We’re seeing that everywhere now. The leader of the French opposition, MRE Lapin, it’s been declared, it’s illegal. She’s not allowed to run for president. I hope it’ll be overturned. But that’s the situation…
Albert Mohler:
Nation after nation, we see this…
Yoram Hazony:
In Romania we actually saw the election stolen. The front runner was simply arrested. I mean, it wasn’t just the front runner. He won the first election. The courts voided the election on some trumped up excuse and arrested him, and then forced another election that brought one of the good guys, the EU supporters into power. And we’re not used to this. We’re just not, none of us are used to this. None of us are used to circumstances in which there is one internationalist liberal political party, which considers its ideology to be so true and so important that really if you stand for something else, you’re going to be labeled a Nazi or a fascist…
Albert Mohler:
Or autocrat.
Yoram Hazony:
Right or an autocrat. They will arrest you. Now, that sounds like crazy talk just 10, 20 years ago. I think all of us was somebody saying the things I just said, which was like, what are you talking about? We have a flourishing democracy, peaceful transitions of power, but we’re losing that and many people see it. And so the nationalist movements are constantly gaining in strength, but also the aggressiveness with which our opponents are willing to push us out of political legitimacy is also gaining strength. And God should help us. We don’t, it’s not up to us. We do our best. It’s not up to us how this is going to end. God’s going to decide how it’s going to end, but we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress in terms of teaching people about the importance of nationalism and its relationship to Scripture, to family, to everything that’s inherited and good. And I’m hopeful.
Albert Mohler:
Well, once again, I believe your book’s one of the most important of our time and appreciate it greatly thankful for this revised edition and for ongoing conversations. Yoram Hazony, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Yoram Hazony:
My pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Yoram Hazony for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For 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, and until next time, keep thinking.