{"id":187262,"date":"2026-05-11T17:19:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T01:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?page_id=187262"},"modified":"2026-06-05T13:15:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T21:15:38","slug":"covenant-against-empire-the-project-of-yoram-hazony-part-two","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?page_id=187262","title":{"rendered":"Covenant Against Empire: The Project of Yoram Hazony – Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part One<\/a><\/p>\n

‘American Nationalists<\/a>\u2019 (July 2, 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This essay attempts to reconstruct an alternative American canon by recovering a submerged political tradition and presenting it as the authentic foundation of the American state. Hazony and Ofir Haivry challenge a dominant assumption of modern American political culture: that the United States is a creedal nation founded on universal abstractions of liberty, consent, and individual rights.
\nThe argument cuts deeper than a defense of nationalism. The American republic emerged as the political expression of a particular people with inherited traditions, religious assumptions, legal continuity, and civilizational cohesion. The Federalists become the architects of the American nation. George Washington (1732-1799), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), John Jay (1745-1829), John Adams (1735-1826), Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), and their allies founded the American regime that survived into modernity. They did more than stabilize the Revolution.
\nHazony and Haivry advance a revisionist interpretation. Against the Jeffersonian narrative, they argue that nationalist statecraft consolidated the United States through centralized authority, judicial supremacy, industrial policy, assimilationist immigration structures, and a Protestant-inflected public culture. The essay works as history, constitutional interpretation, political theory, and ideological intervention. It revives the Federalists as models for contemporary nationalism.
\nThe essay refuses to reduce the founding era to procedural constitutionalism. Hazony and Haivry insist that constitutions do not emerge from abstract reason alone. Political order depends on pre-political solidarity. The Federalists understood this. The Constitution presupposed an American nation formed through shared habits, common law traditions, Protestant moral assumptions, and collective historical memory.
\nThe emphasis on inherited cohesion is a major theoretical contribution. Modern liberal discourse assumes political systems sustain themselves through neutral procedures and rights adjudication. Hazony and Haivry reject the assumption. The Federalists believed national cohesion preceded constitutional structure. The state consolidated and preserved an existing civilizational inheritance rather than manufacturing a people from scratch.
\nJay carries the argument here. His description of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion” challenges the contemporary picture of America as a propositional nation. Hazony and Haivry present Jay articulating a “thick” conception of nationality rooted in cultural inheritance rather than assent to abstract principles.
\nThe argument contests the postwar liberal consensus. Through the twentieth century, mainstream American political thought defined the United States through universalist abstractions detached from ethnicity, religion, inherited custom, and historical continuity. American identity became procedural adherence to democratic norms and constitutional principles. Hazony and Haivry call this interpretation ideological revisionism dressed as historical neutrality.
\nOne implicit theme is epistemic coercion. The dominant liberal framework did more than forget the Federalist tradition. The framework rendered the tradition illegible. The inherited Anglo-American Protestant dimensions of the founding became embarrassing or irrelevant. Modern Americans learned to treat nationalism as “un-American,” despite the decisive role nationalist statecraft played in constructing the republic.
\nBy defining the nation through abstract propositions, liberalism turns thick cultural inheritance into a suspect category. Traditions rooted in religion, ancestry, historical continuity, or civilizational loyalty come to appear incompatible with the regime’s moral vocabulary. The Federalists become victims of a successful interpretive displacement.
\nA system designed for preservation becomes an engine of transformation once elite reproduction shifts. Modern constitutional conflicts emerge partly from this logic. Contemporary courts deploy Federalist-created powers to advance ideological projects hostile to the civilizational assumptions that justified judicial supremacy.
\nUniversities founded to preserve theological orthodoxy became engines of secularization. Bureaucracies built to strengthen national cohesion facilitated post-national administration. Courts designed to defend inherited constitutional order evolved into instruments for reconstructing society according to abstract moral principles. Hazony and Haivry expose a central dilemma of conservative statecraft: centralized institutions stabilize a regime while creating tools future elites repurpose against the founding order.
\nThe discussion of Hamiltonian economics restores the connection between economic policy and national sovereignty. Hazony and Haivry reject the idea that early American nationalism was compatible with laissez-faire universalism. Hamilton’s economic vision was developmental and geopolitical. Tariffs, manufacturing subsidies, national banking, industrial recruitment, and infrastructure development generated national power.
\nThe tariff was a source of national energy, not just a tax. Hamilton understood that political independence required industrial capacity. A nation dependent on foreign manufacturing for military and economic survival cannot stay autonomous. The Federalist developmental state decoupled American survival from European discretion.
\nModern debates over semiconductor production, pharmaceutical dependency, supply chains, rare earth minerals, and Chinese industrial dominance reveal the persistence of Hamiltonian questions. Economic sovereignty remains inseparable from geopolitical agency. A nation unable to manufacture essential goods becomes vulnerable to coercion regardless of its formal constitutional independence.
\nThe Federalists supported immigration restrictions and gradual naturalization because citizenship required cultural integration into an inherited national tradition. Hamilton’s warnings against indiscriminate immigration reflected concern that uncontrolled migration might erode “uniformity of principles and habits.”
\nThe section reveals the difference between nationalist and voluntarist conceptions of citizenship. For the Federalists, membership in the nation required acculturation into a particular civilization. For Jeffersonians, citizenship became an act of will. A man became American through assent and residence.<\/p>\n

‘The Challenge of Marxism<\/a>\u2019 (2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hazony wrote this during the institutional convulsions of 2020. The essay tries to explain why major liberal institutions appeared unable to resist the moral and political demands of anti-racism, social justice activism, and identity-centered movements. His central claim is stark. Liberalism does not merely coexist uneasily with Marxism. Liberalism generates the conditions for Marxism’s continual return. The current crisis of liberal institutions therefore reflects internal exhaustion, not external assault alone.
\nHazony’s concern is civilizational. He wants to explain why societies organized around abstract principles of freedom, equality, and individual autonomy repeatedly become vulnerable to ideological movements that delegitimize inherited norms, destabilize institutions, and undermine democratic pluralism.
\nHazony argues that liberal elites misread the historical meaning of the fall of Soviet communism. The collapse of the Berlin Wall created an illusion that Marxism had been defeated for good. This confidence blinded Western elites to the possibility that Marxist frameworks might reappear in altered form within liberal societies. Hazony argues that contemporary movements operating under labels such as “anti-racism,” “social justice,” “critical race theory,” or “progressivism” are not isolated phenomena but updated variants of Marxist political logic.
\nStable societies are not societies without hierarchy. They are societies where inherited institutions balance power, obligation, reciprocity, and legitimacy enough to avoid intolerable oppression. Political order depends not on abolishing hierarchy but on moderating and legitimizing it. Hazony’s conservatism emerges as a defense of historically evolved structures against ideological movements seeking total moral reconstruction.
\nThe essay reaches its conceptual climax in Hazony’s theory of the “dance of liberalism and Marxism.” Marxism is not liberalism’s opposite but its recurrent offspring. Liberalism establishes abstract principles such as freedom and equality while undermining the inherited traditions that stabilize their meaning. Marxists then use liberalism’s own universalist premises to identify new forms of inequality and exclusion. Liberals, embarrassed by the gap between abstract ideals and social realities, gradually absorb the Marxist critique. The cycle repeats.
\nThis argument is Hazony’s deepest contribution. Concepts such as freedom, equality, and justice hold no self-evident meanings independent of historical traditions. Once inherited norms lose legitimacy, the concepts become permanently contestable. Every remaining distinction, hierarchy, exclusion, or asymmetry becomes vulnerable to reinterpretation as oppression.
\nHazony’s examples drawn from immigration, elite university admissions, and transgender athletics illustrate the instability. Liberal reason alone cannot explain why national borders should matter, why selective institutions should exclude applicants, or why biological sex distinctions should structure athletic competition. Every answer depends on inherited assumptions, informal norms, and historically evolved understandings that liberal rationalism progressively weakens.
\nThe critique gains force when set within the context of technological fragmentation. Hazony frames the present crisis primarily as a crisis of liberal ideas. Communication technologies, however, may now be equally decisive. Social media platforms restructure the incentives governing political and moral discourse. Algorithms reward emotional intensity, denunciation, tribal signaling, moral absolutism, and rapid outrage escalation. Under such conditions, procedural liberalism stands psychologically and technologically disadvantaged.
\nTraditional liberal institutions relied on mediating structures capable of slowing conflict and stabilizing norms: churches, professions, local communities, national newspapers, universities, and political parties. Social media dissolves many of these intermediary structures and replaces them with fragmented networked coalitions engaged in continuous reputational combat. Informal norms cannot survive long within environments optimized for perpetual visibility, viral escalation, and ideological signaling.
\nThe technological dimension alters Hazony’s framework in important ways. Contemporary polarization might not primarily reflect the triumph of Marxist ideas over liberal ones. It might instead reflect communication systems that industrialize factional conflict regardless of ideology. Social media transforms moral language into an instrument of coalition signaling. Public denunciation becomes a reputational performance demonstrating loyalty to one’s group. The result is continuous moral escalation.
\nLiberal proceduralism suffers under these conditions because procedures are emotionally thin. They promise neutrality, fairness, and restraint, but they rarely supply existential purpose or collective meaning. Contemporary activist ideologies succeed partly because they offer narratives of struggle, redemption, victimhood, guilt, and moral purification that procedural liberalism intentionally abandoned. Hazony recognizes the exhaustion intuitively, though he underestimates how much technological media systems intensify it.
\nThe final section of the essay concerns the relationship between Marxism and democratic legitimacy. Hazony argues that democracy requires the mutual recognition of competing political parties as legitimate participants within a shared constitutional order. Marxist frameworks treat rival political groups not as legitimate opponents but as embodiments of oppression. Democracy collapses once one side denies the legitimacy of the other.
\nThe essay is about the exhaustion of a civilization that no longer believes in the moral legitimacy of its own inherited institutions, yet lacks any stable alternative capable of replacing them. The result is a society organized around ideological purification, institutional fragility, managerial moralism, and fragmented coalition warfare. <\/p>\n

‘Torah From Heaven: Moses and Sinai in Exodus<\/a>\u2019 (2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This essay defends the classical Jewish doctrine of revelation at Sinai against contemporary theories of unfolding revelation. Hazony reconstructs a biblical theory of knowledge, authority, political order, and human transformation that he argues modern Jewish theology has surrendered under pressure from academic biblical criticism.
\nScripture is not primitive myth awaiting philosophical refinement but instructional narrative that communicates philosophical claims through literary devices, typological contrasts, and recurring metaphors. The Sinai account cannot be reduced to historical reportage or legal transmission. It is a structured meditation on what revelation is and what sort of beings human beings must become to endure it.
\nThe central structural feature of the essay is Hazony’s analysis of the threefold hierarchy among the people, the elders, and Moses. The people stand at the foot of the mountain and retreat in terror. The elders ascend partway and glimpse God from afar. Moses alone ascends to the summit and speaks with God “as a man speaks to his neighbor.” These distinctions are not merely political or ceremonial. They mark different levels of epistemic attainment.
\nThe mountain functions as the governing metaphor. Hazony reads Sinai as a representation of ascent toward knowledge of God’s nature and will. Those at the foot of the mountain possess little understanding. Those higher on the slope possess greater clarity. Moses, standing nearest the summit, attains the highest perspective available to man. Even Moses does not reach heaven. Above the summit remains the sky from which God descends.
\nHuman beings strive upward through courage, discipline, and intellectual exertion, but revelation depends on divine initiative. Human ascent alone cannot bridge the gap between man and God. Knowledge of transcendence requires strenuous human effort and divine descent in equal measure.
\nHazony contrasts this biblical epistemology with the philosophical inheritance of Plato. Plato’s allegory of the cave culminates in contemplation of the sun, a symbol of intelligible order and stable form. Hazony’s Sinai culminates not in serene illumination but in cloud, smoke, and fire. The biblical God resembles the sky more than the Platonic sun. One may perceive portions of the sky but never conceptually encompass it. Revelation grants partial knowledge without promising exhaustive comprehension.
\nThe people experience God as a “devouring fire.” Moses first encounters God in the burning bush that burns but is not consumed. Hazony transforms this contrast into a theory of revelation. Divine truth is not passive illumination. It is transformative pressure. Revelation uproots habits, destabilizes inherited assumptions, and threatens the integrity of the existing self. The people recoil because they experience revelation as destruction.
\nKnowledge is not detached contemplation. It is ordeal. The fire metaphor conveys that truth acts upon the knower. Revelation does not merely transmit information. It remakes the human being exposed to it. Hazony’s citation from Jeremiah, “Are not my words like fire,” supplies the interpretive key to the essay’s epistemology.
\nHazony’s reading of “fear of God” deepens the framework. Fear is not irrational trembling before arbitrary power. It is the psychological consequence of moral understanding. Once one grasps the structure of reality and the destructive consequences of corruption, one becomes afraid to transgress. Revelation exposes the self to judgment. The people retreat because they do not wish to endure the painful transformation that knowledge requires.
\nHazony emphasizes that Moses never escapes creaturely existence. Revelation does not liberate him from bodily life. Moses climbs, fasts, carries stone tablets, argues, descends, breaks tablets, and physically shines. Revelation occurs through bodily ordeal rather than transcendence of embodiment.
\nThe treatment of eating and drinking reinforces the anthropology. The people eat and drink in idolatrous excess. The elders eat and drink while maintaining partial attention to God. Moses fasts for forty days in pursuit of higher knowledge. These distinctions establish a hierarchy of self-mastery corresponding to the hierarchy of knowledge. Prophecy requires disciplined desire. Higher understanding depends not on escape from the body but on ordered relation to appetite.
\nThe people fear Moses’ radiant face as they feared God’s fire at Sinai. Hazony reads the symmetry as decisive. Revelation cannot enter the world without inspiring fear because it threatens to uproot the old self and its corrupt habits. Transformed humanity appears unsettling to ordinary humanity. Moral and spiritual transformation produces social tension.
\nThe essay carries substantial strengths. Hazony restores existential seriousness to the Sinai narrative and offers a philosophically ambitious contemporary Jewish account of revelation. His treatment of metaphor impresses because he refuses to reduce biblical imagery to decorative symbolism. The mountain, the fire, the cloud, and the tablets remain intellectually operative categories rather than literary embellishments.
\nHazony’s achievement forces modern readers to confront the unsettling possibility that revelation is not comforting affirmation but dangerous knowledge. The God who illuminates is also the God who judges. The fire that gives life is the same fire that destroys corruption. Sinai asks not simply whether revelation occurred, but whether human beings possess the courage to stand before it.<\/p>\n

Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes<\/em><\/a> (2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this Yale University book, Yale political scientist Steven B. Smith writes: “The face of national conservatism is no longer Friedrich Hayek but Martin Heidegger<\/a>.”
\nThe line is representative in form of the academic reaction to Hazony, heavier than typical in weight.
\nThe form is recognizable. The weight is not.
\nThe form first. Linking the National Conservatism project to Nazism is a standard move in the establishment-liberal repertoire. It is a set piece mainstream-liberal critics reach for when they need to place NatCon outside the room without the labor of an argument. Smith works in a recognizable channel.
\nThe weight is unusual for a Yale University Press hardcover. Patriotic-humanist framing that blocks dismissal as a progressive polemic. The Brooks-Will-Kagan blurbing coalition<\/a> that gives the book establishment-center reach. The Jewish liberal humanist provenance, which forces the move inside the Jewish internal argument about which strand of Jewish thought speaks politically.
\nIf we step back, we note that the academy as a whole has not engaged Hazony at all. The Heidegger line is exceptional partly because most academic responses to him do not happen in print. They happen as silence.
\nThe silence is the dominant register. Hazony holds no tenure-track position at any American university. The Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism: A Rediscovery do not appear on political theory graduate syllabi at the top departments. The major journals (Political Theory, American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics) have not run symposia on his work. The annual conferences of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Political Theory do not feature his books. Princeton, his own alma mater, has not invited him to give the named endowed lectures it routinely offers to alumni of his caliber in other fields.
\nThe institutional structure he has built (the Edmund Burke Foundation, the National Conservatism conferences, the Herzl Institute, Shalem College in Jerusalem) exists because the mainstream did not invite him in. The conferences are the alternative academy.
\nInside that landscape, three modes of academic reception are visible.
\nThe hostile-progressive mode treats NatCon as the recognizable American expression of European authoritarianism. Schmitt and Heidegger references are tools of this mode.
\nThe serious-engagement mode, mostly from the right or the heterodox center. Patrick Deneen (b. 1964) at Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968) at Harvard Law, Sohrab Ahmari (b. 1985), R.R. Reno (b. 1959) at First Things, Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age. These figures read Hazony in detail and either ally with the project or argue with it on its own terms. The dialogue is real, but it happens outside the mainstream academy.
\nThe classical-liberal critique mode treats Hazony as worth arguing with rather than as a danger to be excluded.
\nSmith’s line belongs in the first mode but dresses for the second. That is what makes it distinctive. The mainstream liberal academy mostly responds to Hazony by ignoring him. When it responds in print, it usually does so from openly progressive positions, where the Heidegger move reads as partisan and gets discounted. Smith places the move inside the moderate-humanist register and stamps it with Yale. The result is the legible elite version of an exclusion otherwise enforced through silence.
\nSo: representative in shape. Representative in substantive claim. Unusual in institutional packaging. Useful diagnostically because the packaging makes the line readable. The academy’s relationship to Hazony is mostly invisible from outside. Smith’s sentence is the rare moment when the boundary becomes visible.
\nThe exclusion is not symmetrical. The same elite-liberal academy that produces the Heidegger line for Hazony extends respectful engagement to figures further left whose programs are no less politically contested. The asymmetry is part of what NatCon thinkers point to when they say the academy is not a neutral arbiter. <\/p>\n

‘Conservatism: A Rediscovery<\/em><\/a>\u2019 (2022)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a major work of political theory from the contemporary Anglo-American right. The book serves as intellectual history, philosophical treatise, political manifesto, and autobiographical meditation. It belongs to the family of postliberal critiques that emerged after the crises of globalization, populism, institutional distrust, and cultural fragmentation during the 2010s. Hazony aims to refound conservatism as a civilizational framework capable of replacing the exhausted paradigm of postwar Enlightenment liberalism. His critique cuts deeper than complaints about policy outcomes. He argues that liberalism constitutes a defective way of perceiving political reality.<\/p>\n

The book’s central claim holds that modern conservatism lost the capacity to conserve because it absorbed the assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism. Hazony contends that the Western political order established after the Second World War elevated liberalism from one political philosophy among many into a universal orthodoxy. Concepts such as individual autonomy, universal rights, procedural neutrality, and liberation from inherited authority became dominant organizing principles throughout public life. This transformation displaced older Protestant-national traditions that once structured Anglo-American society around religion, family continuity, communal obligation, and national cohesion. The result was not moral liberalization alone but civilizational disintegration.<\/p>\n

Hazony’s argument draws force from what he describes as the “paradigm blindness” of Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism, in his account, operates through categories such as “individual,” “government,” “rights,” and “consent” that function as cognitive filters. These categories render liberal societies incapable of recognizing what Hazony calls the “ineliminable realities” of tribe, nation, inherited loyalty, and communal cohesion. Liberalism therefore misunderstands the foundations of political order because it begins from an abstract anthropology detached from historical and social life. The individual imagined by liberal theory does not exist in reality. Men are born into networks of obligation, identity, language, religion, memory, and inherited attachment long before conscious consent enters the picture.<\/p>\n

Hazony argues that liberalism structurally cannot understand why such developments produce fragmentation and instability. Liberal elites failed, in his telling, because their conceptual vocabulary prevented them from perceiving the enduring force of nationalism and civilizational attachment. This “paradigm blindness” explains both the rise of populist nationalism and the inability of liberal institutions to anticipate geopolitical realities such as the rise of an assertive China. Liberalism believed economic integration and procedural rationality might supersede national and civilizational conflict. Hazony regards this belief as a catastrophic delusion rooted in defective premises about human nature.<\/p>\n

The intellectual structure of the book rests on Hazony’s reconstruction of an Anglo-American conservative tradition stretching from John Fortescue (c. 1394-c. 1479) and Richard Hooker (1554-1600) through John Selden (1584-1654), Edmund Burke, the American Federalists, and Abraham Lincoln. Hazony presents this tradition as anti-rationalist and empiricist. Political wisdom emerges not through universal deductive systems but through inherited experience accumulated across generations. Institutions survive because they embody tacit knowledge developed through historical trial and error. Nations preserve social order through traditions, customs, loyalties, and inherited patterns of restraint rather than through abstract philosophical design.<\/p>\n

The importance Hazony assigns to Selden reveals the deeper philosophical ambition of the project. Selden becomes, for Hazony, the paradigmatic theorist of historical empiricism. Law and political order are not products of universal reason but of inherited national experience. Men possess limited knowledge, and political prudence therefore requires humility toward inherited institutions. This historical empiricism stands in direct opposition to Enlightenment rationalism, especially the Lockean tradition that Hazony presents as the intellectual origin of modern liberal universalism. John Locke (1632-1704) emerges in the narrative as the chief villain.<\/p>\n

Hazony’s reconstruction of Anglo-American conservatism therefore functions as an alternative genealogy of modernity. Against the familiar story that casts liberalism as the culmination of political progress, Hazony proposes a rival lineage rooted in biblical constitutionalism, common law empiricism, national particularity, and historically evolved institutions. The political community is an inherited partnership extending across generations. Political order depends less on consent than on continuity.<\/p>\n

This distinction between consent and continuity becomes central to Hazony’s anthropology. He invokes the Hebrew concept of kavod<\/em>, meaning weightiness, honor, or glory. Hazony argues that institutions survive only when societies publicly attach honor to them. Families, religious traditions, military service, marriage, and nationhood endure because they are treated as worthy of reverence and sacrifice. Honor drives social transmission.<\/p>\n

Hazony insists that the most important obligations in human life are unchosen. Duties to parents, children, ancestors, congregations, and nations emerge from bonds of mutual loyalty rather than contractual agreement. Liberalism misunderstands social reality because it reduces obligation to voluntary association. Civilizations persist through inherited attachments that men do not choose and cannot wholly escape.<\/p>\n

The emphasis on kavod<\/em> also illuminates Hazony’s critique of cultural neutrality. Liberal societies often imagine that public institutions can remain neutral while private men preserve traditional moral commitments on their own. Hazony rejects this distinction as incoherent. Institutions survive only when publicly honored. Once the public sphere ceases to honor religion, marriage, patriotism, or inherited moral discipline, these institutions weaken within private life as well. Public legitimacy shapes what families and congregations can preserve at home.<\/p>\n

This insight structures Hazony’s devastating critique of postwar American conservatism, especially the “fusionism” associated with William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), Frank Meyer (1909-1972), and Cold War conservatism. Hazony characterizes fusionism as an unstable arrangement combining “public liberalism with private conservatism.” Conservatives accepted liberalism as the dominant public philosophy while hoping to preserve traditional morality within private and religious spheres. According to Hazony, this arrangement was doomed from the start because public institutions shape private moral life. “What is not honored in public also tends not to be honored in private.” The liberal-democratic hypothesis, that societies can discard their religious and national foundations while preserving stable freedom and cohesion, has failed in Hazony’s judgment after sixty years of experimentation.<\/p>\n

Hazony says conservatism failed because it accepted the philosophical premises of its opponents. By reducing conservatism to free markets, deregulation, procedural neutrality, and individual liberty, postwar conservatives abandoned the institutions and disciplines necessary for civilizational continuity. A conservatism grounded in liberty alone cannot conserve because liberty alone has no inherent capacity to reproduce stable traditions across generations.<\/p>\n

Hazony insists that conservatism must be lived. The later autobiographical and prescriptive sections move beyond abstract theory into questions of moral formation, personal discipline, and communal practice. Hazony rejects the naive Reagan-era belief in the “power of ideas” alone. Conservatism cannot survive through intellectual argument or policy platforms. Men learn it as a practical skill through participation in functioning institutions and disciplined communities.<\/p>\n

Hazony introduces the concept of teshuva<\/em>, meaning repentance or return. Civilizational renewal requires more than electoral victory. It requires men and communities to recover older patterns of life organized around restraint, obligation, and inherited practice. Conservatism, he argues, “is not something you can find in a book.” Men learn it through immersion within “conservative congregations” capable of transmitting habits of discipline and loyalty.<\/p>\n

This anti-rationalist emphasis on practice connects Hazony to broader traditions of tacit knowledge theory and conservative sociology. Men become conservative not primarily by mastering propositions but by inhabiting institutions that shape character. Families, congregations, schools, rituals, and communal expectations cultivate habits of self-restraint and continuity that abstract theory alone cannot reproduce.<\/p>\n

Hazony’s attack on contemporary hedonism follows from this framework. A society organized around what he calls the “monotonous parade of sensations” generated by pornography, drugs, entertainment, and “flickering screens” loses the discipline necessary for civilizational endurance. The problem is the destruction of the capacities required for transmission across generations. A population habituated to distraction, sensation-seeking, and radical autonomy cannot sustain institutions requiring sacrifice and loyalty.<\/p>\n

Paul Gottfried reviewed the book in Chronicles<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Marx was not in the least concerned with nonbinary oppression, raging homophobia, or the inherently evil nature of being white. This father of \u201cscientific socialism\u201d focused on socioeconomic antagonisms expressing themselves as class conflict…
\nUnlike Marxism, moreover, the woke left has long ceased paying homage to science and rationality. The left is driven by hate against traditional Americans with fixed gender roles, communal hierarchies, and some form of inherited religious faith. Truth, for the woke left, is determined and redefined by those in power. Woke beliefs have no necessary connection to what is empirically provable, since from the woke perspective, Western science and empirical demonstration are tainted by white, masculine, racist prejudice. Communism in Europe, at least in practice, never showed the frenzied nihilistic energy that seems endemic to the woke left. From tearing down statues to abolishing genders to inciting mob violence against white Americans to throwing open borders for invasion by Third World migrants, the woke left seems far more socially and culturally destructive than most past Communist governments.
\nThe end goal of wokeism is universal equality, which is to be brought about through a universal state. It opposes particularity, at least in the Western white world, and works to obliterate anything that is specifically Western. Indeed, wokeism offers the example of a thoroughly unhinged left that Communist governments and parties, as well as the Cold War in the West, all kept in check. Wokeism privileges those with deviant sexual appetites, anti-Christian and antiwhite fixations, and repugnance for bourgeois institutions, groups whom the Communists quite properly kept from rising in their parties and governments. The Communists held generally traditional moral views even if they practiced tyranny.
\nUnfortunately, the post-war conservative movement became so obsessed with \u201cfighting Communism\u201d that it failed to notice the far more dangerous enemy gathering its forces domestically. And by the end phase of the Cold War in the 1980s, neoconservatives were frequently making the charge that Communist regimes discriminated against homosexuals…
\nThe liberalism that the woke left cancelled was a greatly weakened form of the liberal persuasion, the exponents of which had already ceased to argue very convincingly for open discussion. For decades, that attenuated liberalism excluded the right, except for a moderate centrist version of it that would not upset leftist gatekeepers. The parameters of allowable discussion on many issues had become more and more restricted before a late modern form of liberalism gave up the ghost entirely. By then, universities were already being ideologically controlled while both government and the media had prepared the way for this postliberal age.
\nLiberalism in its last stages did not suffer from an indiscriminate tolerance, a condition that thinkers as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt viewed as liberalism\u2019s great weakness…
\nAt some point in the last 20 years, the very ideal of open discussion and debate fell into disrepute both in institutions of higher learning and in the media. What had become a shrunken, denatured liberalism was abandoned for a successor ideology: wokeism. Further, there may be no way back to what has been resoundingly repudiated and what took generations to collapse. Only an equally determined collectivism can effectively resist those who have ended the liberal era, or what became the pale imitation of one.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gottfried sees that procedural liberalism cannot defeat a coalition organized around moral solidarity and institutional power.
\nThe Marxism frame Hazony offers works as coalition glue for the right. It names a familiar enemy from an old fight conservatives know how to wage. But it obscures more than it illuminates. The oppressor\/oppressed binary is not uniquely Marxist. Marx adapted an older biblical pattern. Today’s woke coalition uses the same coalitional move any successful coalition uses: name a victim class, name an oppressor class, claim moral authority on behalf of the first. The Marx frame flatters conservatives more than it illuminates the opponent.
\nWoke power is not primarily ideological. It is institutional and material. Universities, HR departments, foundations, professional associations, credentialing bodies, corporate compliance systems, media gatekeeping. These are where the power lives. The ideas serve as the password into the network, not as the engine.
\nMAGA is a populist alliance held together by shared enemies, not shared ends. Its constituents disagree on most positive questions. Catholic integralists want one thing, evangelical Protestants want another, secular nationalists a third, post-religious vitalists a fourth, the new tech-right a fifth. The coalition supplies enough cohesion to disrupt but not to govern coherently. It has weak cadre formation, no equivalent credentialing pipeline, no durable bureaucratic penetration. It depends on Trump’s charisma and grievance media.
\nNational conservatism<\/a>, the Hazony project, tries to supply intellectual scaffolding for what is otherwise a mood. The conferences happen. The journals publish. But the audience is mostly the same several thousand people. The mass base of MAGA does not read Hazony and won’t adopt his categories if asked. Voters do not pull the lever for inherited tradition. They pull it because their towns are dying, their wages are flat, their kids are estranged, and the people who run things hold them in contempt. This is not a collective. NatCon is intellectuals without a mass base. MAGA is a mass without intellectuals. They do not fit together.
\nMAGA can disrupt. It can elect a president who breaks norms and rattles bureaucracies. It cannot build the parallel institutional architecture that might match the depth of the progressive managerial system. Building that takes generations of disciplined effort, alternative credentialing systems, alternative funding bases, alternative status markers, alternative marriage and family patterns. MAGA, compared to its enemies, lacks human capital.
\nAnti-woke movements cannot maintain collective focus without infringing on personal liberties. These rights are a coalition vocabulary more than a neutral standard. Every coalition polices its members. Liberalism policed its members through professional norms, peer review, and reputational gatekeeping that looked neutral because the police were the priests. A right coalition vigorous enough to displace the current ruling coalition will police its members too. It will look ugly, because all such policing looks ugly to the people getting policed. The choice is which coalition coerces and on behalf of which norms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

‘Should Universities Protect Campus Anti-Semites?<\/a>\u2019 (2024)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The essay is a sustained attack on the philosophical foundations of the postwar liberal university. Hazony’s central claim is not that elite universities have tolerated anti-Semitism or applied speech norms inconsistently. His deeper argument is that the liberal theory of the university as a neutral forum for unrestricted inquiry was always incoherent and unstable. The post-October 7 crisis exposed contradictions long concealed beneath procedural rhetoric about free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic neutrality.
\nLiberalism, in his account, imagines itself neutral and procedural while depending on inherited moral norms, tribal loyalties, and hierarchical structures it neither acknowledges nor understands. “Should Universities Protect Campus Anti-Semites?” extends this argument into higher education. The university serves as a case study in liberalism’s inability to recognize the substantive moral and institutional preconditions on which its own procedural ideals depend.
\nHazony opens with a diagnosis of what he calls a collision between two foundational commitments of the postwar liberal order. On one side stands the principle that anti-Semitism is intolerable in civilized societies after the Holocaust. On the other stands the elevation of free speech and free inquiry into quasi-absolute principles governing academic life. For decades, liberal institutions assumed these commitments could coexist, on the strength of the Millian belief that the free exchange of divergent ideas produces truth and moral progress. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) supplied the philosophical scaffolding, and the postwar university built on it without much questioning.
\nOctober 7 shattered this confidence. Hazony argues that American universities revealed themselves not as guardians against barbarism but as institutional incubators for ideological movements willing to justify or celebrate atrocities committed against Jews. Faculty-led demonstrations, student activism, and administrative equivocation showed, in his view, the inability of liberal proceduralism to defend even minimal standards of moral decency. The congressional testimony of Harvard president Claudine Gay (b. 1970) becomes, in Hazony’s telling, symbolic evidence that elite universities had subordinated substantive moral judgment to an absolutist conception of expressive freedom.
\nThe theme emerges with force in Hazony’s account of Princeton in the 1980s. He recalls a campus culture that, on the surface, appeared open. Conservative student organizations existed. Public debates flourished. Radical speakers such as Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) and Meir Kahane (1932-1990) addressed audiences without disruption. Student life seemed to model strong free speech norms.
\nYet Hazony insists that this surface openness concealed exclusion at the institutional level. Conservative faculty had been all but eliminated from the humanities and social sciences. Liberal professors justified the asymmetry on the grounds that intelligent and “perspicacious” people gravitate toward liberal politics. The university therefore never functioned as a neutral forum. It excluded conservatism while claiming allegiance to unrestricted inquiry. Hazony’s report of the Princeton sociologist Marvin Bressler (1923-2010), who told Jewish students at the kosher dining hall that professors support the Democratic Party because they are more perspicacious than the general population, reveals more than Bressler perhaps intended.
\nThe historical reconstruction serves a strategic purpose. Hazony wants to show that today’s campus radicalism did not emerge from an otherwise healthy liberal order. Contemporary ideological monoculture is the culmination of decades-long institutional patterns embedded within the liberal university. The problem is not that universities abandoned neutrality after 2015. Neutrality was always asymmetrical.
\nHazony’s treatment of ethnic studies programs and diversity initiatives deepens the argument. He treats the expansion of Black Studies and related academic programs after the 1960s as a decisive institutional turning point. Liberal administrators, animated by anti-conservative assumptions and identity-based inclusion efforts, created intellectual and bureaucratic spaces that empowered neo-Marxist frameworks centered on oppression, decolonization, anti-Whiteness, and anti-Zionism. Hazony cites Christopher Rufo (b. 1984), whose America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) traces the lineage running through Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the Black Panthers.
\nHere Hazony draws on a civilizational narrative common within national conservatism<\/a>. Universities appear not as epistemic communities pursuing truth through open inquiry but as institutional battlegrounds shaped by ideological patronage, administrative capture, and factional struggle. The rhetoric of neutrality obscured the underlying forces while easing the long-term institutional consolidation of revolutionary movements hostile to liberal civilization.
\nHazony argues that free speech is not a self-sustaining condition but a fragile institutional achievement dependent on moral discipline and reciprocal restraint. Liberalism imagines that procedural openness alone can generate a healthy intellectual culture. Hazony argues the reverse. Open inquiry survives only when participants share enough mutual honor and institutional loyalty to preserve the social conditions under which disagreement remains possible.
\nFunctioning regimes of free speech depend on disciplined behavioral norms. Participants must listen without interruption. They must respond through substantive argument rather than personal humiliation, threats, or intimidation. Opposing factions must recognize one another as legitimate participants within a shared moral order.
\nHazony offers an institutional account of why liberal proceduralism fails. A regime of unrestricted speech cannot survive if factions abandon reciprocal norms and seek domination through fear, disruption, or moral delegitimation. In such circumstances the free speech regime collapses because one side stops treating the other as a legitimate interlocutor and treats it as an enemy to be silenced.
\nHazony therefore reframes the relation between freedom and restriction. Liberalism assumes that restrictions on speech threaten free inquiry. Hazony argues instead that some restrictions are prerequisites for free inquiry because they preserve the moral ecology necessary for intellectual life. Free speech is not the absence of boundaries. It is the product of maintained boundaries.
\nThe university becomes, in this framework, less a marketplace of ideas than an institution of moral formation. Educational institutions are hierarchical. Faculty and administrators transmit norms downward to students. A university unable to enforce behavioral standards cannot preserve the conditions for inquiry, because inquiry depends on disciplined order.
\nHazony’s critique of contemporary universities follows from this anthropology. Neo-Marxist and Islamist-aligned campus movements do not seek open inquiry; they seek institutional conquest. Their use of intimidation, disruption, and ideological coercion shows that they reject the reciprocal norms required to sustain free speech regimes. Universities failed because they extended procedural protections to movements hostile to procedural pluralism.
\nThe argument culminates in a call for explicit substantive boundaries governing university life. Universities must prohibit advocacy of genocide and organized efforts to prevent others from speaking. Administrators must possess the authority to terminate faculty and suspend students who undermine the institutional conditions for inquiry.
\nHazony believes liberalism destroyed the moral foundations that made limited freedom possible. His critics might respond that once institutions abandon procedural neutrality for substantive orthodoxy, they drift toward ideological repression. The unresolved question is whether liberal neutrality was impossible from the beginning or whether Hazony mistakes the failures of contemporary universities for the destiny of liberalism.<\/p>\n

‘Everson Must Fall<\/a>\u2019 (2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Timon Cline, Josh Hammer (b. 1989), and Yoram Hazony’s (b. 1964) “Everson Must Fall,” published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy in 2025, presents itself as a doctrinal and historical critique of Everson v. Board of Education (1947). The scope of the essay is larger. It offers a theory of American constitutional order, a verdict on postwar liberal jurisprudence, and a litigation roadmap for the conservative legal movement. The article reads as a manifesto with footnotes.
\nThe Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy operates within the orbit of the Federalist Society and has long served as a forum for conservative legal argument that mainstream law reviews have not welcomed. The authors carry distinct movement profiles. Hazony chairs the Edmund Burke Foundation and leads the National Conservatism<\/a> project. Hammer writes for Newsweek and First Things and has advanced what he calls common good originalism. Cline writes for American Reformer, a postliberal Protestant outlet, and has produced a steady stream of essays defending state-level Protestant establishment as the historic American norm. The article gathers these three currents into a single argument and aims them at a single target.
\nThe argument runs as follows. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was a federalism provision. It barred Congress from interfering with state religious settlements. It did not announce a substantive theory of church-state separation. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, did not silently incorporate the Establishment Clause against the states. Hugo Black (1886-1971) and the Everson majority therefore manufactured a doctrine without textual or historical foundation in 1947, and the doctrine then served as the constitutional vehicle for stripping religion from American public life. The remedy is the overruling of Everson and the return of religious-establishment questions to state legislatures.
\nThe argument has scholarly company. Steven Smith, Carl Esbeck, Vincent Phillip Mu\u00f1oz, Mark David Hall, and James Hutson have all argued a version of the federalism thesis, and the authors lean on their work. Justices William Rehnquist (1924-2005), Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), and Clarence Thomas (b. 1948) have all written opinions or concurrences pressing parts of the same line. The article does not invent its scholarship. It assembles a position that has been gathering force for thirty years and presents that position with maximum confidence and minimum hedging.
\nThe historical reconstruction at the article’s center has real strengths. The survey of state constitutions and statutes between 1776 and 1820 is the strongest part of the essay. The authors document Protestant test oaths in New Hampshire, Trinitarian affirmations in Delaware, Christian-officeholder requirements in Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, and Vermont, the South Carolina constitutional declaration of “The Christian Protestant religion” as established, the Connecticut and Rhode Island continuation of colonial charters that pledged the colonies to Christian propagation, and the Massachusetts Standing Order that survived until 1833. The pattern is hard to dismiss. The standard liberal narrative, in which the American Founding produced a secular constitutional order interrupted only briefly by lingering establishment vestiges, cannot survive the documentary record the authors marshal. The article does not push this evidence further than its narrow point can bear. The states in 1789 had religious establishments of varying kinds, and the First Amendment did nothing to disturb them.
\nThe distinction the article draws between narrow and broad establishment also pays. Narrow establishment names official state support of a particular denomination, the Church of England type. Broad establishment names affirmative state encouragement of religion as such, without favoring one denomination over another. The authors observe that Americans abandoned narrow establishment by the 1830s but retained broad establishment through Bible reading in schools, Sabbath laws, blasphemy statutes, Thanksgiving proclamations, and judicial declarations that Christianity formed part of the common law. The point has historiographical merit. Many liberal accounts of disestablishment conflate these two forms and present the gradual decline of denominational support as evidence for a thoroughgoing secular settlement. The authors are right to separate them.
\nThe authors note that no established church remained anywhere in America by 1947. Everson, therefore, did not displace existing state establishments. What Everson and its progeny displaced were practices: school prayer, Bible reading, blasphemy enforcement, religious test oaths held over in some state constitutions, public funding of Catholic schools, and the gradual constitutional protection of secular humanists, atheists, and minority religious dissenters. The authors want these practices restored. The “federalism restoration” frame promises the return of state authority over religion, but what the authors want is the return of a particular religious settlement. State authority is the route, not the destination. Naming this clearly would force the article to defend the destination on its merits rather than on procedural grounds. The article declines that defense.
\nJustice Thomas’s argument that the Establishment Clause is structurally unique among the Bill of Rights provisions has force. The Free Exercise Clause, the Speech and Press Clauses, the Assembly Clause, and the Petition Clause all protect rights that individuals or groups hold against governmental interference. The Establishment Clause, on Thomas’s reading, protects state authority against federal interference. To incorporate it against the states is to invert its function. The argument is not absurd, and it is also not the consensus view. The competing reading holds that the Clause, even if originally directed at jurisdictional concerns, protects an individual interest in not being subject to coerced support of a religious establishment, and that this individual interest can sensibly apply to state governments after Reconstruction. The article presents Thomas’s reading as if it were the only defensible one. It is one of several defensible ones. The Court’s failure to settle the question for seventy-five years reflects the difficulty.
\nJustice Potter Stewart’s (1915-1985) “religion of secularism” argument is the article’s most persuasive philosophical move. The claim is that the state cannot occupy a position of true neutrality between religion and irreligion, because to remove religion from public institutions is to give precedence to a secular orientation. Public schools that exclude religious instruction inculcate a worldview in which religious questions are private matters, beyond public reason, and inappropriate for civic deliberation. This worldview is a substantive position, not a neutral one. The article presses this point well. The post-Everson regime did not produce a neutral public square. It produced a public square organized around an implicit metaphysics, and the metaphysics has substantive content.
\nWhat the article leaves unanswered remains the central problem. The authors describe a regime in which Massachusetts could have established Protestantism, Maryland could have required Christian officeholders, and South Carolina could have privileged The Christian Protestant religion while extending narrower toleration to non-Christian believers in God. The authors describe this regime with sympathy and treat its restoration as the goal of constitutional repair. Massachusetts, Maryland, and South Carolina in 1789 were demographically and culturally different from Massachusetts, Maryland, and South Carolina in 2025. The Massachusetts that supported Congregational ministers was ninety-five percent Protestant. The Massachusetts of 2025 has substantial Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, secular, and other populations. A restored Protestant establishment in Massachusetts in 2025 might coerce a much larger minority than the equivalent regime coerced in 1789. The authors do not engage this problem. They treat federalism as a procedural answer to a substantive question and assume that local majorities will produce outcomes the authors find acceptable.
\nThe Orthodox Jewish identity of two of the three authors does not solve this problem. Hazony and Hammer are both Jewish. The article describes a biblical inheritance shared by Christians and Jews and presents the proposed restoration as protective of both traditions. Orthodox Jews lived under disabilities throughout most of the period the article presents as exemplary. They could not hold office in most states. They were subject to blasphemy statutes that protected Trinitarian Christianity. They were excluded from schools and civic offices in many jurisdictions. The article asks readers to imagine a restored broad Protestant establishment that somehow extends warmth to Judaism without disabling it. That extension is a possibility, but it requires defending. The article does not defend it.
\nThe authors argue that Everson is the next Roe-style decision available for overruling, citing Dobbs, Bruen, Loper Bright, and Students for Fair Admissions as evidence of a Court willing to revisit longstanding precedent. They are right about the Court’s posture. The Roberts Court has overruled significant precedent and might continue to do so. The authors do not engage with the reliance interests that have built up around Everson and its progeny over seventy-five years. Public schools have been organized around the assumption that they will not mandate religious exercises. Funding structures for private education have been organized around the assumption that direct public funding of religious schools is constrained. Civic life, including the public role of religious minorities, has been organized around the post-Everson settlement. Overruling Everson might unsettle these arrangements. The authors treat this as a feature, not a problem. Readers should see the cost.
\nThe article’s prose carries the marks of its hybrid character. Some passages read as conventional legal scholarship, with close attention to text and precedent. Other passages read as movement essay, with rhetorical moves designed to mobilize. The line “Everson must fall,” repeated as a section break and as a closing imperative, comes from the genre of political pamphlet rather than legal scholarship. The same is true of the closing sentence: “For these reasons, it must fall.” The article does not pretend to occupy the position of disinterested scholarship.
\nThe deepest question the article raises is whether American constitutional law can sustain itself as a coherent practice across a population that holds substantively different views about the nature of public life. The authors think it cannot. They believe the postwar liberal settlement is incoherent because it claims a neutrality it does not deliver, and they believe the only stable settlement is one that returns substantive moral and religious questions to local majorities. The alternative view, which the article does not engage, holds that constitutional law performs a different function: it secures a framework within which substantive disagreement can be conducted without descending into religious or cultural civil war. On this view, the Establishment Clause, even in its post-Everson form, is not a substantive settlement of religious questions but a procedural settlement that lets substantive disagreement continue. The authors think the procedural settlement has failed. Others think it is the only thing standing between American society and the social conditions the authors describe with alarm. <\/p>\n

‘The Iran Strikes and the Trump Doctrine<\/a>\u2019 (2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This essay does more than defend the June 2025 American strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It seeks to formalize a nationalist theory of American foreign policy intended to replace the post-Cold War liberal internationalist consensus. The piece works at three levels at once: strategic interpretation of a single military operation, ideological manifesto for an emerging foreign policy school, and elite realignment document within American conservatism.
\nHazony contends that the Iran strikes reveal a coherent Trump Doctrine that cannot be assimilated to the conventional binary of neoconservative interventionism versus isolationist retrenchment. He proposes a third framework grounded in nationalism, strategic prioritization, regional burden-sharing, industrial realism, and civilizational pluralism.
\nThe article carries significance beyond Iran policy because it registers a broader transformation within American conservatism. During the Cold War and the decades after, Republican foreign policy fused military primacy, free-market globalization, and liberal-democratic universalism. Hazony marks a rupture with that synthesis. He treats liberal internationalism not as a noble project beset by practical difficulties but as a misguided worldview built on false premises about resources, legitimacy, and historical convergence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria become not evidence of policy error but of philosophical error.
\nThe sociological dimension surfaces in Hazony’s emphasis on figures such as J.D. Vance (b. 1984), Marco Rubio (b. 1971), and Pete Hegseth (b. 1980). They symbolize not merely a different strategic outlook but a different type of governing elite. Hazony contrasts the Ivy League policy technocrat with the nationalist-populist veteran shaped by military culture and skepticism toward cosmopolitan managerialism. The Trump Doctrine appears as a revolt against the post-national abstraction of the foreign policy establishment.
\nThe distinction does substantial work because Hazony’s nationalism is not simply territorial. It is moral and anthropological. He associates national strength with sacrifice, patriotic seriousness, military service, and social cohesion. Liberal internationalism failed not merely because it overextended American power, but because it eroded the civic virtues required to sustain power. Burden-sharing, national self-reliance, and cultures of military responsibility serve as more than strategic considerations. They are indicators of political vitality.
\nThe first principle of the Trump Doctrine, as Hazony presents it, is the recognition that “resources really are scarce.” The claim sounds straightforward, yet it carries deep implications. Hazony argues that post-Cold War liberalism operated as though American resources were effectively limitless. Military deployments, nation-building projects, foreign aid commitments, and alliance guarantees expanded without serious prioritization. The United States tried to stabilize Europe, democratize the Middle East, manage East Asia, and police global trade routes while assuming no major tradeoff existed among these objectives.
\nHazony rejects the premise. He holds that manpower, munitions production, political attention, and industrial capacity are finite. The emphasis on scarcity reflects an important post-Ukraine and post-October 7 shift in strategic thinking. After decades when globalization encouraged fantasies of post-industrial warfare and frictionless military supremacy, the return of attritional conflict exposed the continuing centrality of industrial production. Hazony’s references to munitions manufacturing carry weight because they ground geopolitics in material reality rather than ideological aspiration.
\nThis industrial realism marks a broader rematerialization of foreign policy thought. Hazony argues, implicitly, that financial sophistication and technological innovation cannot fully substitute for productive capacity. A nation unable to manufacture sufficient artillery shells, missiles, drones, or bunker-buster munitions cannot sustain prolonged strategic competition against major adversaries. Liberal internationalism assumed an “Arsenal of Democracy” that could indefinitely arm allies across multiple theaters. Hazony presents industrial scarcity as the defining strategic condition of the twenty-first century.
\nThe second principle follows from the first. Because resources are limited, strategic prioritization becomes indispensable. Hazony identifies China as the central geopolitical challenge facing the United States. He argues that American elites squandered decades of strategic attention on peripheral conflicts while China accumulated industrial, technological, and military strength. The wars of the Middle East become not merely costly but distracting. They consumed political focus while allowing the principal rival to expand largely unchecked.
\nThe argument aligns Hazony with the China-first school associated with Elbridge Colby (b. 1980) and other nationalist strategists. Yet Hazony’s approach differs from conventional realism in one respect. Traditional realists conceptualize states as interchangeable units competing within a balance-of-power system. Hazony treats nations as culturally rooted political organisms with distinct historical identities and capacities. His realism is civilizational rather than merely structural.
\nThe civilizational frame explains why Hazony casts foreign policy in moral and cultural terms. The world is not, in his formulation, “a homogeneous blob of converging liberal democracies,” but a landscape of distinct nations possessing different traditions, ambitions, and levels of cohesion. Liberal internationalism failed because it tried to erase these differences through universal administrative systems and supranational governance structures.
\nThe third principle concerns alliances. Hazony argues that America’s allies must become regional powers rather than dependent protectorates. The claim may be the most consequential element of his case because it redefines the meaning of alliance. During the Cold War, dependency often served American interests because dependent allies remained politically aligned and strategically subordinate. Hazony rejects the model. He argues that dependency weakens both protector and protected by eroding military seriousness, patriotic culture, and strategic responsibility.
\nHis admiration for Poland illustrates the point. Hazony highlights Poland’s rising defense expenditures, approaching 5 percent of GDP, as evidence of national revitalization. The presence of 10,000 American troops in Poland figures not as a permanent necessity but as a transitional arrangement that should diminish as Poland achieves greater self-reliance. Poland functions in the essay as a model of nationalist remilitarization within Europe.
\nThe example reveals the coercive dimension of the Trump Doctrine. Burden-sharing serves as discipline as well as cooperation. The United States pressures allies into military rearmament by threatening retrenchment. Hazony celebrates recent NATO commitments to increase defense spending as proof that nationalist pressure can reverse decades of European dependency.
\nYet the vision contains an unresolved tension. Independent allies might pursue their own national interests, which might diverge from those of the United States. Hazony assumes that self-reliant nations produce more stable alliances because they cooperate voluntarily rather than through subsidy and dependence. History suggests a more complicated picture. Independent regional powers often pursue revisionist ambitions, engage in prestige competition, or entangle larger allies in local conflicts. Hazony underestimates the degree to which nationalism can generate instability.
\nIsrael occupies the symbolic center of the essay because Hazony presents the country as the embodiment of nationalist military responsibility. For twenty months following October 7, 2023, Hazony portrays Israel as having largely dismantled the Iranian regional network through its own military efforts. Israeli soldiers, reservists, intelligence operatives, and civilians absorbed the costs of conflict directly. American and allied assistance remained supplementary rather than primary.
\nHazony presents the Iran bombing as selective technological supplementation. The United States contributed capabilities Israel lacked, namely the B-2 bomber and the 30,000-pound bunker-buster munitions needed to destroy deeply fortified facilities. Israel supplied the regional infrastructure, intelligence integration, operational persistence, and willingness to absorb long-term political and military costs.
\nHazony advocates strategic specialization. The United States becomes a provider of rare high-end military capabilities rather than the permanent occupier and administrator of entire regions. Regional allies supply manpower, geographic familiarity, and enduring political commitment. America supplies selective force multiplication.
\nThe Abraham Accords therefore become more than diplomatic symbolism in Hazony’s framework. He treats the accords as the institutional architecture of a new Middle Eastern order. Israeli military capacity combines with Gulf wealth and regional legitimacy to create a decentralized anti-Iranian alliance system capable of stabilizing the region without continuous American management. The accords serve as geopolitical infrastructure for a post-imperial American strategy.
\nHazony seeks to replace the model of a U.S.-led liberal empire with a network of self-sustaining regional powers coordinated through selective American support. The underlying assumption is that decentralized nationalism produces greater long-term stability than centralized liberal hegemony.
\nAmerica is strongest when its allies no longer depend on it for day-to-day survival. Strong allies, on this account, emerge from sovereign nations willing to defend themselves, cultivate patriotic seriousness, and bear the burdens of military responsibility directly. The United States supplements such nations selectively rather than supervising them permanently.<\/p>\n

‘The Man Driving the Nationalist Revival on the Right | The Ezra Klein Show’ (Aug. 1, 2025)<\/p>\n