Conservatism: A Rediscovery
By Yoram Hazony
Genery Gateway 2022

Margaret Thatcher once famously attempted to close debate at a Conservative Party policy meeting by slamming a copy of Austrian Economist Friedrich von Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty on the table and declaring “This is what we believe!” Hayek’s book was not a party tract, but the point is well taken: political movements need books. Books tracing a political heritage, adumbrating values and assumptions, providing direction. Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute, has written Conservatism: A Rediscovery which attempts to provide national conservatism, a right wing collectivist, nativist, illiberal movement with such a book along with a respectable face.

The great bugbear of the book is Enlightenment liberalism committed to an ethical rationalism. These liberals, devoted to the Cartesian method, elaborate “a political theory that they suppose is a construct of ‘reason,’ when in fact their deductions proceed from a series of fictions.” For them, “the consent of the free and equal individual is the ultimate principle from which everything else in the system is deduced.”

Opposed to this are Anglo-American conservatives grounded in historical materialism. Hazony takes Edmund Burke as its great practitioner. In this view:

the authority of government derives from constitutional traditions known, through the long historical experience of a given nation, to offer stability, well-being, and freedom. These traditions are refined through trial and error over centuries, with repairs and improvements being introduced where necessary, while seeking to maintain the integrity of the inherited national edifice as a whole.

These conservatives “consider liberty for the individual to be a previous good to be cultivated and protected, but one that find its place within a complex of competing principles that must be balanced against one another if the life of the nation is to be sustained.”

Hazony’s book begs refutation. Liberals will object to his unbalanced, simple history and the narrative constructed with it. They will rarely identify with his insistence of what their world view is, what it entails, and chafe at what he leaves out. Such books invite the kind of response that parses, balances, and corrects premises, philosophy, and history.

But this is to get lost in edifice. What is at the beating heart of Hazony’s books is what it national conservatism hates and what it wants: free individuals treated equally, left to use, yes, their reason so they might pursue ends of their own making are to be drown out by a state promoting “honor for God and Scripture, national cohesion, and the flourishing of the family and the congregation.”

In the post war era America has been afflicted by “Jeffersonian discourse focused on universal theories of individual rights, at the expense of a careful cultivation of America’s strength and cohesion as a nation.” The descendants of this Enlightenment-rationalist view, liberalism and Marxism, have given a generation much of whom are “like adolescents. . .[and] cannot imagine weighing themselves down with the constraints cultivated by tradition. They yearn only to be free.” And what horror resulted from this freedom? Hazony is worth quoting at length:

Within a generation or two, the declared neutrality of the government had been transformed into a neutrality of society itself, so that today one may choose to be a Christian, a Jew, or a pagan, and none of these choices will be honored above the other by the government, schools, or anyone else. Similarly, one may choose to be gainfully employed or to live on a stipend from the government, and again, neither alternative will be honored more than the other. In the same way, one may choose to serve in the military or to evade such service; to be married with children, divorced, or never married; to keep the Sabbath, go to the beach, or continue working straight through as though nothing on this blessed earth is sacred – and none will utter a syllable of praise or disparagement in any direction.

Not a syllable? Has Hozony spoken to anyone who attempted to live outside “the traditional family” through much of the post war era? A single parent trying to get by? A Muslim after 9.11? Or a young man conscripted into an unjust war? How have conservatives tended to react to these individuals?

Of course the household is not exempt from suffocation: “in a conservative society, then, young men and women have no wish ever to be the equals of their parents and teachers. Their wish is rather to preserve intact and advance within the hierarchy into which they were born. . .they will never be their parents’ equals.” And feminists “were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear.”

So children, you see, you will never match your parents. And, wives, without your husband and children to give you meaning you broke, found work and independence. We hope national conservatism appeals to you.

We know what national conservatives want. Slam this book on the table and declare “this is what they believe!” It should end the conversation. This might not be throne and altar, but it is blood and soil, with the altar never too far away.

-David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.