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2024-07-08

Hazony: Is Conservative Revival Possible?

  • By the 1960s, Protestant nationalism had given way to Enlightenment-liberalism, “liberal democracy,” which promoted civil rights but also lifted restrictions on pornography and banished Christianity from public schools.
  • In US and Europe, liberalism was seen as the final political theory that would spread to every nation and last forever.
  • Both parties in the US adopted some aspect of this idea; among the Republicans it took the form of libertarianism, but on both sides the centrality of the nation was downplayed or even opposed.
  • The dominance of this view ended in between 2016 and 2020, when the Republicans advanced an America-first agenda, and Democrats adopted openly Marxist policies, including intersectionality as means of identifying oppressor and oppressed along racial lines.
  • Liberalism as the ascendant theory had lasted only 60 years.
  • The Anglo-American sentiment for the constitutional tradition is still strong, though, and it seems to provide a center around which national conservatism might play a role in reshaping the political vision, perhaps in alliance with anti-Marxist liberals (libertarians and others).
  • A problem for conservatives to overcome is ignorance of why “God and Scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred” should be conserved.
  • Liberalism (including libertarianism) conserves nothing.
  • Liberalism is devoted entirely to freedom, even freedom from the past, and it is thus opposed to the conservation of what is good from the past into the present and future.
  • A revival must include a rediscovery of the practice of studying history in order to preserve what is good, and it must involve not only conservative government but also the practice of being personally conservative and living conservatively.
  • A revival requires repentance, retracing steps, undoing what was wrongly done, and setting out again on the right path.
  • In politics, conservatism refers to “the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.”
  • Anglo-American conservatism:
  • John Fortescue (1400s)
  • Richard Hooker (1500s)
  • John Selden, Matthew Hale (1600s)
  • Edmund Burke, George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton (1700s).
  • Daniel Webster (1800s) espoused what Hazony calls “national conservatism.”
  • Anglo-American conservatism properly becomes national conservatism whenever forces threaten to dissolve the nation, whether from within or from without.

I did not make bullets from the introductory material that summarizes the contents of the book’s chapters.

Hazony: English Conservative Tradition

  • Unlike liberalism or Marxism, conservatism in Hazony’s view is not universal but particular to the culture of a nation.
  • In the introduction, he had mentioned his not being an advocate of defining “conservative” (as I do) in terms of the natural law.
  • In my view, conservatism is, so far as it respects the natural law, just so universal as liberalism is.
  • Yet Hazony is in part right because conservatism must look to the cultural and national particularities for material to arrange, to inform.
  • Perhaps Aquinas might agree that natural law is the form of conservatism, but each individual instance of it would be a unique individual because its cultural matter is a principle of individuality.
  • Hazony, focusing on the particularity, denies the universal aspect, but I suspect that his love for the Anglo-American version of conservatism owes precisely to its end in representing the very natural law that Hazony, like the liberals whom he decries, seems to think that the mind cannot comprehend well enough to craft a political philosophy.