{A book preview is what you write when you haven’t read the book in question but would like to express an opinion about it anyway. Since I’m not shelling out $14.99 (for the Kindle edition) for Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, I will have to make my best guess, based on a brief excerpt and my powers of deduction, as to what it’s about.}
I have lost track of how many times, just in my own lifetime, American conservatism has been revived, restored, renewed, rediscovered, rehabilitated, and--mainly--relabeled. George W. Bush's ill-fated "compassionate conservatism" was hardly the first attempt to put lipstick on right-wing ideology. Decades before that, we had Frank Meyer's Cold War "Conservative fusionism," which was followed by "Neo-conservatism," the disillusionment with which led to the likes of Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," which featured granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing conservatives. There was (and is) Patrick Buchanan's holy war "cultural conservatism," with its "America First" motto. There are also post-liberals, integralists, paleoconservatives, constitutional conservatives, religious conservatives, free-market conservatives, traditionalist conservatives, Straussians, followers of Hayek, followers of Voegelin, die-hard fans of Joseph de Maistre, stubborn believers in Carl Schmitt, etc.
Fortunately, someone has come along to sort out this endless profusion of heterodoxy and heresy, to correct the erring sectarians, and to put true-blue American conservatism back on its feet. Yoram Hazony has written what Rod Dreher calls "an astonishing book," making its author, according to Dreher, “not only [conservatism’s] most important public intellectual, but also its passionate prophet.” Dreher’s fulsome praise comes in response to the publication of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Dreher is by no means alone in being astonished; other conservative thought-leaders have joined in the chorus. Ben Shapiro calls the book “fascinating, erudite, and mind-opening,” and R.R. Reno says that “Hazony’s powerful vision of conservatism for the twenty-first century is capable of steering the ship of state out of our present perils.” Even Peter Thiel, whose opinion counts because he is wealthy, is on board with Hazony’s “lucid exposition of a tradition of conservative nationalism that begins in the Old Testament and [continues] to our own moment.”
That is all, and I do not say this lightly, very exciting; or it would be if it were true. However, from what I can tell, and for all his obvious erudition, Hazony's premise would be at home on Fox News; contemporary America, he writes, is in a state of “permanent revolution and cultural devastation” beset by “an updated Marxism (calling itself ‘Progressivism,’ ‘Anti-Racism,’ or ‘Woke’) which has, in short order, “seized control of the institutions that had been, until only recently, responsible for the development and circulation of liberal ideas in America, Britain, and beyond.” Greg Gutfeld could not say it as well, but he would nod in agreement.
It is difficult to take seriously an author who insists that “By the summer of 2020, most of the important news media, universities and schools, big tech and other major corporations, and even the government bureaucracy and the military had adopted a policy of accommodating the new Marxism and advancing its agenda.” Apparently, we are all Marxists now, what with our identity politics, our pronouns, our Green New Deal, our deconstructionism, and our hegemonic intersectionality: all of it straight out of the Communist Manifesto/Port Huron Statement/Herbert Marcuse's posterior!
All of which is to say, if Hazony does yeoman work in tracing the lineage, intellectual and historical, of the kind of conservatism of which he approves, he does nothing at all to temper the hyperbolic rhetoric which modern "conservatives" have long been fond of wielding. Nor does he do anything to defuse right-wing tropes about the Sixties; not unlike every pre-1980 issue of National Review, Hazony expressly challenges the post-World War II liberal consensus, which led, by the 1960s, to “a new liberal constitution that guaranteed the civil liberties of blacks and other minorities, but also banned prayer and Bible-reading from the schools and lifted earlier restrictions on divorce, pornography, immigration, and abortion.”
What, Hazony implicitly asks, hath liberalism wrought? Nothing short of “the shocking destruction of the Anglo-American cultural inheritance [and] the suppression or stigmatization of many of the most important ideas and institutions around which life in Britain and America had been built, including God and scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred, among others.”
Look upon your works, Enlightenment liberals, and despair! At the same time, Hazony says, “In our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.” Conservatives didn’t start the fire, of course; but, according to Hazony, they haven’t done much to stop it, either. How in the world are we to survive this cultural and societal conflagration?
By returning to the past, says Hazony; that is, by “rediscovering the history and philosophy of conservatism, both of which by now have been largely forgotten.” This is in keeping with “an important principle of Anglo-American conservative thought: When faced with the disastrous consequences of a particular course of action, we must retrace our steps and restore, as much as possible, the conditions that existed prior to setting out on this course.” Onward we go to the past, before “the sudden rise of the new Marxists” spoiled everything that was good and decent about America.
I want to be clear: Conservatism: A Rediscovery seems well worth reading. You will learn much about the likes of John Fortescue, the 15th-century author of In Praise of the Laws of England, and John Selden, a 17th-century polymath 1 acclaimed by Hazony as “perhaps the most important figure in Anglo-American conservatism.” You will learn Hazony’s “nine principles” that explain “what government is for and what it should do.” 2 You will learn who and what imperils us and what to do about them. And you will learn something about living a "conservative life," as exemplified by Hazony, his wife, and their nine children. 3
You may even learn what all the fuss over the book is about, a fuss comparable to, say, the fuss over Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, or over J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, or over Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Conservatives seem to need to give each other pep talks from time to time to face the dreaded nihilistic abyss that is the secular modern West; and each pep talk is delivered by someone who is immediately declared the new spokesperson for conservatism. Today it's Yoram Hazony's turn; I can't wait to see whose turn it will be tomorrow.
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John Fortescue (judge) - Wikipedia
1 Shame!
2 I am pledged to secrecy, having signed an NDA. Also, as I mentioned, my free Kindle preview of Hazony’s book ended abruptly partway through Chapter One.
3 You might then read the essays at the online Law and Liberty symposium devoted to Hazony’s book, essays which take a somewhat more critical view of Conservatism than do Rod Dreher or Ben Shapiro. Toward a New Traditionalism? – (lawliberty.org)
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