I am still working my way through Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery (for previous posts on this work see here, here and here).
I have just read through a section on nationalism and I was struck immediately by its prescience - recent debates on social media illustrate exactly the kind of issues raised by Hazony.
Hazony begins by defining conservative politics around a defence of family and nation. We are born into these and they claim our loyalty:
a conservative political theory begins with the understanding that individuals are born into families, tribes and nations to which they are bound by mutual loyalty...Each nation and tribe possesses a unique cultural inheritance carrying forward certain traditional institutions, which can include its language, religion, laws, and the forms of its government and economic life.
From this we understand that the nation is not the same thing as the government or the state that rules over it. A nation can and often does exist without any fixed government established over it...And there are also many governments or states that rule over multiple nations...(p.90)
He leaves out common ancestry as an aspect of nation, but nonetheless his general approach here is sound. What matters to his argument is the comparison he then makes to the way that Enlightenment liberalism has approached the concept of nation:
The liberal paradigm is blind to the nation. Nothing like the nation is to be found in the premises of Enlightenment liberal political theory. In the rationalist political tracts of the Enlightenment, the term "nation" (or "people") is merely a collective name for the individuals who live under the state. On this view, the nation comes into existence with the establishment of the state and is dissolved when the state is dissolved. This is another way of saying that the nation has no real existence of its own. There are only individuals and the state that rules over them. (p.91)
I cannot emphasise this enough. Enlightenment liberals might still use the term "nation". But their philosophy changed what could be understood by this term very radically. Once the liberal philosophical underpinnings were adopted, then political thought and discussion went in a very particular direction, in which traditional nationalism no longer fitted. This is why conservatives who support a traditional nationalism need to rethink the kind of politics that has been inherited in the modern West.
Hazony goes on to develop this line of thought further:
Thus we find that instructors in political theory...avoid discussing the nation...Instead, they discuss the political world using only concepts such as the individual, freedom, equality, government, and consent, which appear in the premises of Enlightenment political theory...But such instruction is powerless to explain many of the most basic phenomena of political life. It has no resources to describe the rivalry among nations and their ceaseless quest for honor, their pursuit of internal unity and cohesion, their struggle to maintain their own language, religion and political traditions, or their insistence on the inviolability of their laws and borders. And indeed, entire generations of political and intellectual figures have been educated in such a way as to leave them blind to the importance of these things. (p.91)
Hazony then gives examples of how policy makers have been blind in practice. He begins with free trade deals with China which he criticises as follows,
This is a policy couched entirely in terms of the individual, the state, and the individual's presumptive freedom to do whatever he and his trading partners consent to do without state interference. It is blind to the nation, and to the bond of mutual loyalty that bind nations and tribes together. Indeed, to the extent that bonds of national loyalty are even mentioned in discussions of free trade, they are described as irrational "market distortions" that may cause inefficiencies.
The consequent offshoring of jobs to China and the stimulus to growth of Chinese manufacturing were a result of policy makers being "blinded by the liberal paradigm" and therefore unable to see, amongst other things, that "abandoning America's manufacturing capabilities would lead workers to regard themselves as betrayed...bursting the bonds of mutual loyalty that had made America a cohesive and internally powerful nation."
The most prescient piece of writing, however, concerns immigration. Hazony observes,
The inability to see tribe and nation as central in political affairs is reflected in debates on immigration as well. Viewed through the lens of Enlightenment liberalism, immigrants and prospective immigrants are indistinguishable from the native individuals of a given country. They are perfectly free and equal, just as the natives are. Nothing in the liberal paradigm justifies depriving them of their freedom of movement into a given country, or the freedom to compete with native individuals for employment and other resources. (p.94)
Earlier in the year all of this burst into open debate when certain figures (on the right) defended the idea that American workers should compete for American jobs against the global workforce. They argued that it would be like "DEI" (diversity, equality and inclusion) if American workers were given preference for jobs in their own country. American workers were told they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps or perhaps adopt the lifestyle of those living overseas in order to compete against the global workforce.
To me this demonstrated a stunning absence of the mutual loyalty that nations are usually founded on.
As an example of the debate, in the exchange below we had someone saying "I have zero interest in competing with the entire world for a job" which was met with a dismissive "Very DEI" - as if it would be an intrusion into normal hiring practices for an American employer to train and to employ American workers rather than those from overseas.
Here is a voice in the debate that is more in line with the paradigm favoured by Hazony:
Finally, Hazony also makes a connection between the lack of support of the nation within Enlightenment liberalism and declining fertility rates. This connection seems obvious to me, but is rarely mentioned in discussion of falling birth rates.
The undermining of family life is explained in two parts by Hazony. First,
A dogmatic belief in the individual's freedom has moved liberals to destigmatize - and eventually, to actively legitimize - sexual license, narcotics, and pornography, as well as abortion, easy divorce, and out-of-marriage births, until finally the family has been broken and fertility ruined in nearly every Western country.
But there is also a connection between the loss of communal loyalties and an unwillingness to raise the next generation:
Paradigm blindness doesn't only affect policymakers and political elites. At every level of society, people no longer feel a sense of responsibility to marry and raise up a new generation of the family, tribe, and nation. Marriage and children are regarded as nothing more than one possible choice within the sphere of individual freedom....too few are left who see their nation as a valuable thing, and even fewer feel called to do their part to sustain it. (p.97)
This is a (very) abridged version of Hazony's argument. Hazony goes on in the next part of the book to do something that really does need to be done, which is to set out an alternative paradigm to the Enlightenment liberal one - but perhaps more on that later.
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