chosen nations

CHOSEN NATIONS Yoram Hazony presents himself as the leader of a rejuvenated American nationalist right: an impresario, organizing conferences in the United States and Europe; and as a theorist, setting out a programme for the new movement in his latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism. The book may be read on two levels, on the one hand for its argument and on the other as an indicator of the coalitions and fissures on the contemporary American right. The son of an Israeli nuclear physicist, Yoram was raised in the United States. As an undergraduate at Princeton in the mid-eighties, he founded the Princeton Tory, a conservative, Reaganite-Thatcherite student journal of the sort that was being established at many American universities at the time. An encounter with the Jewish Defence League’s Meir Kahane inspired Hazony and a handful of his friends to return to the faith in which they had been raised. After completing his doctorate at Rutgers, Hazony joined several of this same group in Israel, where he served as an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, administered a think-tank and lived in a settlement across the Green Line until the outbreak of the Second Intifada occasioned a move to Jerusalem. Hazony quickly found himself implacably opposed to prevailing opinion in Israeli intellectual circles: the result, a fierce critique of the ‘post-Zionism’, avowed and tacit, of the country’s elite in his book The Jewish State (2000), announced him as a leading intellectual figure of Jewish conservatism. In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony’s project is ambitious: wielding two ideal types, the nation and the empire, he proposes to vindicate the former. Following his mentor Steven Grosby, he asserts that modern nations in fact represent a revival of the ancient form of political order exhibited by the ancient Jewish nation, or people. The independent rule of the Jewish people over themselves was established in fact ‘under the Seleucids’, and the theory that a world of limited, self-governing nations is preferable was propounded in the Old Testament, with its descriptions of the survival of the Jewish nation against Egyptian and Babylonian empire. Hazony’s definition of the nation is drawn from Deuteronomy: ‘The political aspiration of the prophets of Israel’, he writes, ‘is not empire but a free and unified nation living in justice and peace amid other free nations’. This nationalism is to be distinguished from imperialism, which promises peace through the unification of all mankind under a single regime. Christianity is the prototypical imperial ideology, but a paradoxical one, since it contains within it a seed of nationalism in the form of the Hebrew scriptures. Hazony sketches a history of nationalism in eclipses and revivals: during the long centuries which followed the conquests of Titus, the national principle lay dormant as empires rose and fell, all until the Reformation—with its attention to the Old Testament—unleashed it once more. The Thirty Years’ War pitted Catholic champions of universal empire against Protestant nationalists, with the latter emerging victorious. The new Protestant order rested on two principles, revived from the Old Testament: first, a ‘moral minimum’ needed for government to be considered legitimate, requiring the ruler to obey the pre-existing laws of the realm; and second, the notion that it was rightful for those nations strong enough to win their independence to maintain it. Still, imperialism has proven as resilient as nationalism, with the post-Westphalian period witnessing first a Napoleonic bid for empire in the nineteenth century and, in the twentieth, twin bids by Nazism and communism. Hazony is firm in classifying Nazi Germany as an imperialist rather than nationalist force: ‘Hitler’, he writes with the utmost confidence, ‘was no advocate of nationalism’. The Second World War, Hazony maintains, did not put an end to empire but was rather the occasion of the defection to the imperial side by a previously stalwart nationalist force, the United States. American imperialism more often goes by other names—the ‘liberal international order’, the ‘rules-based order’, the ‘indispensable nation’—but Hazony is contemptuous of such ‘murky newspeak’. The criticism extends to the European Union, whose similar deployment of euphemism (‘pooled sovereignty’, ‘ever closer union’) is mere window-dressing for an imperial project in the German or Catholic tradition. The appearance of the term ‘subsidiarity’ in eu law does not escape notice. Yet the eu is not an empire so much as an empire-in-waiting: Europe remains under American rule, with the eu as Washington’s ‘protectorate’. It will not be until American troops leave Europe that the bloc’s imperial ambitions will be actualized in the form of German dominance of the European continent. Hazony applauds the ‘new nationalism’ of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as the recent Anglo-American rebellion from empire—for the us, retreat from its role as liberal imperialist; for the uk, withdrawal from the European Union. Hazony then proposes to show how nations, ancient and modern, arise organically through the development of bonds of loyalty between families, ‘clans’ and ‘tribes’. Acknowledging the anachronism of these Biblical terms, Hazony insists they remain applicable today. The nation comes about when a number of tribes agree to join for their mutual security and protection against outsiders. The result is the birth of impersonal justice along fixed standards: the ‘rule of law’. But the underlying tribal structure does not disappear, nor do the ties of loyalty and the cultural practices it fixes in place. Here is Hazony’s implicit rebuke of Benedict Anderson: the nation is not an imagined community per se, rather a coalition of smaller communities which are not imagined but natural. It is a midpoint between the insecurity and personalized justice of the tribe and the homogenizing uniformity of empire. If nationalists are tribesmen compared to cosmopolitans, they are cosmopolitans compared to tribesmen. While Hazony maintains these tribal roots of the nation are not based entirely on ties of blood—he considers the matter settled after citing the example of Ruth the Moabite—he rejects two flavours of civic nationalism, Habermasian ‘constitutional patriotism’ and the ambient American notion of the ‘creedal’ or ‘propositional’ nation. (He does not cite Renan but seems no less hostile to French-style voluntarist notions of a nationalism based in a plébiscite de tous les jours.) Such notions deny the historically and culturally specific origin of the nation, in America’s case arising from English common law and Old Testament-inspired Protestantism. Jefferson’s supposed liberal universalism and revolutionary fervour is excoriated while Hamilton is recast as a Tory. America’s immigrants, such as its Catholics, must be considered additional ‘tribes’ adopted into the larger family. Hazony stops short of unequivocal endorsement of a right to national independence. Demanding ‘parsimony’ in his order of national states and citing logistical constraints, Hazony regretfully informs the reader that many groups that perhaps might like to become nations must remain mere tribes in a larger national body. He attacks European colonialism for drawing up the borders of what are now postcolonial states without regard for national division, making the development of free national states through consent of tribal leaders nearly impossible. This is the only moment in the book in which an area of the world beyond Europe, the United States and Israel comes into view. Hazony pairs his ideal types with rival epistemologies: nationalists, he says, are generally empiricists, while imperialists are rationalists. Drawing upon his 2017 essay in American Affairs with confrère Ofir Haivry, Hazony contrasts the tradition of ancient-constitutionalist English thinkers (John Fortescue, John Selden, Edward Coke—roughly the subject of J. G. A. Pocock’s 1957 monograph The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law) with a liberal tradition that stretches from Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hayek, Mises and Rawls. The former he praises, Selden especially because of his study of Talmudic law, and terms historical empiricists. These thinkers recognize the contingent and specific character of the uniquely virtuous English political system, as do their conservative successors, most significantly Burke. Locke, too, praised the English constitution but committed the error of attempting to derive it from the reasoned consent of individuals by means of a state-of-nature argument. The universalizing tendency of this move opened the way for liberal imperialism, from the French Revolution to ‘democracy promotion’ in the Middle East, as Locke’s successors sought to impose English-style government on societies plainly unfit for it, or even to collapse the world’s nations into a single federation. Moreover, liberal theory threatens the ties of ‘tribal’ loyalty on which nations depend because it does not recognize them and instead imagines all associations to derive from rational, self-interested individual consent, as if the nation were a mere business partnership. The last section, ‘Anti-Nationalism and Hate’, argues that while some nationalists do become antagonistic towards outsiders, they are largely peaceful and virtuous, and this tendency toward violence is if anything more pronounced among imperialist universalists of any stripe. While the archetypal example is Christian anti-Semitism, the chapter consists in large part of a meditation on anti-Zionism in the West. Hazony suggests that European opinion holds his country, Israel, to a different standard from surrounding Arab countries because the Israelis are erstwhile Europeans. In the logic of the Kantian progression from barbarism through nationalism into cosmopolitanism, the Israelis have regressed from the third stage to the second, and for this must be blamed. The state of Israel, Hazony polemically insists, is either ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘not Auschwitz’. To Israelis, it represents the political power which will prevent them from relying on the goodwill of other nations for their survival—that is, the predicament which generated Auschwitz. To European critics, its Law of Return and its constitution as an explicitly Jewish state represent the primitive nationalism which generated Auschwitz. The choice between these two alternatives is analogous to the overarching choice presented by the book, between nation and empire. How should The Virtue of Nationalism be assessed? It may be simplest to start with the historical chapters. Hazony’s founding of nationalism on the strictures of Deuteronomy gives him carte blanche to ignore the modern literature on the subject; Gellner, Kedourie, Benedict Anderson are listed in a single footnote. The influence of the Old Testament on Protestantism is emphasized uncritically: the only interpretation of the Bible suggested to be less than purely faithful and accurate is that of Locke. As his several citations of Kissinger’s World Order indicate, Hazony’s notions about the significance of the Thirty Years’ War are indebted to notions of ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ which, regardless of the efforts of Stephen Krasner and others, remain common in the American field of international-relations theory, despite lacking a firm basis in the history of the period. Catholic France is placed on the Protestant-nationalist side without explanation, and the imperialistic tendencies of Hazony’s infant national states (Britain, France, the Netherlands)—already in evidence at the time, from Ireland to the Indian Ocean—go unmentioned. Neither is Hazony consistent in his own assessment. The treaties which concluded the Thirty Years’ War, he writes, ‘re-founded the entire political order’. There is an endnote appended to this sentence, which begins: ‘The three Westphalia treaties do not announce a new political order’. In a review of Hazony’s The Jewish State, Mark Lilla noted that the author’s posture was not a recognizably Israeli one but rather that of ‘the American counter-intellectual’, that is, someone of neoconservative persuasion who engages not so much in intellectual activity per se as in the ‘battle of ideas’ with the goal of restoring, or defending, a previous order. Unlike his predecessors, Irving Kristol and others, Hazony had become a counter-intellectual without ever having been an intellectual. They had been canny generals in the ‘battle of ideas’; Hazony was a mere foot-soldier. In his earlier book these shortcomings were compensated by a genuine talent for excoriation and stirring personal appeal, but here Hazony must be a theorist, a less than ideal task for a man of his capacities. His handful of attempts to set down an aphorism illustrate the point. According to Hazony, ‘An iron law governing the operation of human reason is this: Whatever is assumed without argument comes to be regarded as self-evident’. This is to say that whatever is regarded as self-evident comes to be regarded as self-evident. Hazony’s reading of the Old Testament as a programme for a world of peaceful sovereign nations is not a natural one: for each passage in Deuteronomy containing a divine warning against the Israelites’ trespassing against other peoples, there is at least one other containing a divine promise to ‘dispossess nations greater and mightier than you’, to give the Israelites ‘their land in estate’ (4:38), to have them ‘dwell in their towns and in their houses’ (19:1–2), to smash their altars and ‘cultic pillars’ (7:5). These acts, not those of a peaceful, limited nation, are justified in the case of the Israelites because they are divinely ordained; but were the parties to switch roles, the invaders would be divinely punished. It is accordingly difficult to read the text as suggesting a normative theory of international relations which applies the same set of rules to all nations. Hazony’s single-mindedly political reading of the Old Testament displays noticeably less concern with religious themes as such than the work of the ‘atheist’ Rousseau. It is reminiscent of Hazony’s earlier monograph on the philosophy of Hebrew scripture, which is full of simple analogies with Greek philosophy and marked by a tendency to abstract away from the central assertion of Israel’s chosenness. Hazony’s Biblical-political category of ‘tribes and clans’, as an attempt to give the nation-state a natural rather than artificial character by emphasizing intermediate bodies between individual and state, has a certain Tocquevillian charm. But it is one thing to suggest the existence of a permanent set of contours in politics, and another to project an idea of primitive social structures—pertaining to an agrarian kingdom of a few hundred thousand inhabitants—directly onto modern societies and expect to produce a theory with explanatory force. What of Hazony’s critique of classical liberal theory? He proposes a ‘philosophy of political order’ which he takes to be prior to Greek ‘philosophy of government’ and free of the fallacies of liberal theory. ‘The enduring weakness of political philosophy descended from Hobbes and Locke’, Hazony insists, is the centrality given to the ‘calculations of consenting individuals’. Yet his own account begins with the individual. Individuals, he says, may decide to join institutions, like tribes or clans (apparently already in existence, although he claims to show how they originate). Three possible reasons may impel them to the choice: fear, hope for advantage, or—and in the best case—when they ‘see the interests and aims of the institution as their own’. That is to say, if one chooses an institution on the grounds that its interests are judged identical to one’s own interests, the decision is made from self-interest. The ‘loyalty’ to the collective to which Hazony offers such fulsome praise arises, according to him, out of rational, self-interested individual consent no less than Locke’s does. He has managed nothing more than the introduction of an intermediate step into the formation of the state by means of the social contract—that is all that his ‘tribes and clans’ amount to. Hazony calls the free but unstable condition of the world before the formation of the nation ‘anarchy’, but he would be better advised to call it what it is: the Lockean state of nature, in which the punishment of crimes is not yet depersonalized. As if this is not enough, Hazony describes explicitly as a social contract the formation of the state by voluntary consent of ‘tribal’ leaders. Eradicating any doubt that he is unaware of how short a distance he has travelled in the course of his critique of liberal theory, Hazony blithely asks the reader to note how ‘distant’ his account is ‘from the founding of the state as described in the theories of Hobbes or Locke’. No such theory is presented to explain the origin of empire. Hazony suggests that empires preach sympathy with mankind, but in fact depend on an internal loyalty in opposition to the other, to the unconverted. (Hazony’s nations depend too, he says, on loyalty formed in opposition to the other.) He also suggests that all empires are constituted to favour the original nation from which they grew. The implicit notion that an empire is a nation gone wrong, a nation that has overthrown its boundaries, is a greater threat to Hazony’s system than he seems to recognize: it hints that his injunction to nations not to interfere in other nations’ affairs is not self-enforcing. The dismissal of the city-state—incompatible with his framework—and its thought leaves him unable to address the argument of Machiavelli, that the only truly reliable means of security for states is to seek grandezza. For the same reason Hazony has little to say about the internal organization of ‘national states’, that is, regime type. To avoid the term ‘democracy’ he engages in Millian hand-waving: a ‘free state’ is one where ‘the cooperation of the ruled is given to the government voluntarily’. Here lies a key difference between Hazony’s critique of liberal imperialism and left critiques which emphasize notions of democratic self-determination. The segment of Hazony’s readership most equipped to criticize him on these grounds are the followers of Leo Strauss, but they are prohibited from doing so openly by the rules of their sect, since Hazony defends an order they too wish to preserve. (The tone of the review in the Claremont Review, the house journal of West Coast Straussianism, is indicative.) It is worth considering what their tacit objections are likely to be. Straussians are known for combining outward defence of the nation and its laws with an inward, self-consciously philosophical contempt for such things, supposedly derived from Plato’s scorn for Athenian democracy. Hazony’s work, which has none of the remove they cultivate, thus necessarily seems reflexive and unphilosophical. It does not pose ‘the question of the best regime’; it does not inquire whether the traditions to be defended are good ones, nor whether the ‘family, clan or tribe’ deserves the loyalty it demands. It is based, as they say, on opinion rather than knowledge. They are too cautious to assert that liberalism and communism are comparable—although they believe that they are—and they are too careful readers of Machiavelli and Rousseau to suppose, as Hazony does, that a unified people must exist before there can be laws and a state to govern them. To assert this is to misunderstand the role of the lawgiver, which is to create a people at the same time as he frames their laws. Moses had an Egyptian name, but his text disguises this fact. (This posture is in fact more compatible than Hazony’s with that of Gellner and Anderson.) Hazony rejects the Straussian reading of Rousseau in a footnote, confirming the disagreement, and also bringing to mind that it is a shame he does not seem to have paid attention to his Rousseau—if he had, he may have recognized an influence on his anti-cosmopolitan plea for peace among nations, noted also by Lilla. Straussians take issue with Hazony’s claim that the material collected in the Hebrew Bible contains the ‘first great works’ of the ‘Western political tradition’: for the Straussians this title must go to the dialogues of Plato. Even if the texts of the Hebrew Bible were to precede chronologically the texts of Greek antiquity (a subject of debate) they are genealogically second and philosophically secondary. The reaction of the Straussians reminds us that Hazony’s book was addressed to an American conservative intellectual establishment divided in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. After 2016, with large swathes of that establishment committed to a critical stance towards the President, the way had been opened for an insurgent new dispensation that might take inspiration from aspects of the Trump phenomenon with or without the man himself. West Coast Straussians like Michael Anton, early converts, saw Trump as a chance to wrest back control from progressive hijackers of the American ship of state. In the same period, a new policy journal, American Affairs, began to publish bold proposals for government agencies, showcasing the potential of an American right liberated from the straitjacket of free trade and the free market. Especially on the religious right—where there was always some tension with the ‘fusionist’ position—a new temperament was emerging: proudly nationalistic, critical of foreign wars yet hawkish on China, deeply resentful of conservative compromise on ‘social issues’ like abortion and gay rights, critical of classical liberal theory, agnostic on the free market. It was a Catholic who was to produce the first notable work of the new movement, which now began to be called ‘post-liberal’. Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen took on the role of a cynical Tocqueville in Why Liberalism Failed (2016), albeit without Tocqueville’s power of sociological insight. The atomization of American society and the ravages of deindustrialization were, he wrote, foreordained by the nation’s liberal founding. The book was criticized by the free-market right and praised by the religious right: a chasm yawned between National Review, the venerable fusionist organ, and First Things, the pugilistic flagship magazine of the religious right. In this context, Hazony and his book represented something of an olive branch. He purported to criticize Locke but, as we have seen, without actually departing from him; instead of rejecting the American founding he claimed merely to prefer Hamilton to Jefferson. The free market was affirmed but not dogmatically (the old neoconservative position, Kristol’s ‘two cheers’). The ‘post-liberal’ movement had challenged American conservatism from the perspective of the right: Hazony meant only to re-establish a robust ‘national conservatism’. As such Hazony’s book found a friendly reception both in Deneen’s orbit and also in National Review. Only Samuel Goldman sounded a decidedly contrary note in Modern Age. Ignored by most of the liberal press, with the exception of New York magazine’s in-house conservative and the New Republic, it was awarded ‘Conservative Book of the Year’ in 2019 and has become required reading in right-of-centre circles. Hazony’s status as an American-educated Israeli was also significant in the reception of his book, as Israel’s valence on the American right is in flux. Many of its erstwhile ‘paleo-conservative’ critics have come to believe that the country possesses the qualities they find lacking in American society: right-wing youth, high birth-rates, religious displays welcome in the ‘public square’, a strong sense of national purpose. Israel alone has what every country must have to survive: ‘God and enemies’. Who better to trust on the subject of nationalism than a citizen of the nation par excellence? Hazony was in the enviable position of being, from his vantage point in Jerusalem, less bound to respect the customary sacred cows of the us right, yet possessed of a highly secure set of conservative bona fides. Established as a broadly acceptable intellectual standard-bearer for the new dispensation, Hazony now began to organize on its behalf. He was already a serial intellectual entrepreneur. Besides his Princeton Tory and the Shalem Center, a think-tank which transformed into Israel’s first American-style liberal-arts college, there was also Azure, a now-defunct magazine; and finally the Herzl Institute, another think-tank. His latest enterprise is the Edmund Burke Foundation, which he conducts in coordination with R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, and Christopher DeMuth, a former president of the staunchly neoliberal American Enterprise Institute. These two figures are indicative of some sources of support for the new national conservatism: Catholic intellectuals, who have long held reservations about the relationship between capitalism and social atomization; and veterans of the conservative movement, apparent converts from the free market. In the past several years Hazony has organized a series of conferences under the ‘national conservative’ banner. The first of these, convened in the summer of 2019, starred two potential presidential candidates associated with the movement, Missouri senator Josh Hawley and Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, and attracted a raft of press, notably a treatment by Thomas Meaney in Harper’s—especially after a speaker, a law professor named Amy Wax, suggested conservatives should not be shy about championing immigration policies that privileged whites. Hazony defended Wax, arguing that her remarks had been misinterpreted. But it should not be concluded that Hazony has no enemies to his right. His distinction between Protestant- and Jewish-aligned nationalism and Catholic-aligned empire is helpful as a heuristic for navigating the arguments among right-wing American ‘critics of liberalism’. While Hazony’s coterie includes Catholics like Reno, Deneen and J. D. Vance, his book casts the Church as a chief villain, and as such it is not surprising that a more ultramontane faction, the ‘integralists’, despises him and considers his nationalism to be idolatrous. Their appellation, recalling the French intégristes, indicates a type more familiar in Catholic Europe than in America. Led by a vanguard composed of a blogging Cistercian monk and a Harvard Law professor named Adrian Vermeule, they demand that the temporal power of the state be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church. Vermeule, a specialist in administrative law, was prior to his conversion an exponent of the ‘nudge’ theory of Cass Sunstein. This theory, which emphasizes the temptation of man to err and the need for benevolent experts gently to direct him toward his own good, already has a certain Catholic flavour. It is a disposition Vermeule has smoothly integrated, so to speak, into his new faith, adeptly mixing a Maistrean sense of liberalism as felix culpa with a tacit Weberianism that considers the teaching of the Church as a ‘value’ which may be inserted like any other into the bureaucratic equation: sacraments instead of soda taxes. The ‘administrative state’—the executive-branch agencies with broad powers of statutory interpretation, otherwise the bugbear of us conservatives—is in Vermeule’s eyes a prime target for infiltration by Catholic paladins. Properly harnessed, it can be deployed to open the floodgates to Catholic immigration, ban abortion, pornography and blasphemy, redistribute income and promote the true faith, by the sword if necessary. To secure all this, the Constitution need not be rewritten, only reinterpreted, with the ‘general welfare clause’ a suitable Trojan horse for Thomism. Soon Vermeule will have the opportunity to see how far this method will take him: at the time of this writing, he is set to receive an appointment to a best-practices committee, the Administrative Conference, within the federal administrative bureaucracy. A second National Conservatism conference was held in Rome in early February 2020, coinciding auspiciously with the publication of the Italian translation of The Virtue of Nationalism—and, less auspiciously, with the first Italian coronavirus cases, a pair of Chinese tourists in a hotel on the Via Cavour (not far from the conference venue). Hazony was seeking to extend his influence to Europe and with his co-organizers had recruited a wide range of right-wing and Eurosceptic figures, among them Marion Maréchal, darling of the French right, and Viktor Orbán, lately the favourite statesman of American national conservatives. The conference title—‘Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations’—suggested Hazony’s attempt to reframe, if slightly, the familiar Cold War refrains in his own language of nationalism and imperialism. The Soviets had been defeated by Reagan and Thatcher so that the nations of Europe could be free, but now their freedom was menaced once more by the European Union. There was also an attempt to make amends with the Catholics, as suggested by the conference’s location and dedication; on their behalf Hazony now praised the Church as a bulwark against Soviet imperialism. But the Cold War has lost much of its power as a unifying force on the right, and the speakers could not agree on Hazony’s narrative. Orbán refused to praise either the Pope (Orbán is a Calvinist) or Margaret Thatcher (they had had some disagreement over Yugoslavia), and insisted, unsurprisingly, that Hungary had to chart an independent course within the European Union, rather than leave it. Hazony may still feel himself a Reaganite, but the Reagan Administration veterans sent over from Washington could not join him in denouncing nato as an imperial project, nor even the European Union, the formation of which they had welcomed at the time. As for the Catholics, the Polish writer and mep Ryszard Legutko, who is ardently cherished by Vermeule for his book, The Demon in Democracy (2016), did not help matters by repeating to the appalled Reaganites the book’s thesis that liberal democracy and communism are similar regimes. Meanwhile, the broader agenda of the new national conservatism seemed to fade from view. The first of Hazony’s conferences had embraced the adoption of an American ‘industrial policy’, a clear break from conservative economic orthodoxy, but now Christopher DeMuth, Hazony’s co-organizer, complained of the abandonment of ‘fiscal restraint’ in the us and uk. To gain purchase, an insurgent movement within American conservatism must have wide appeal, yet not be so ecumenical that it regresses to the mean. Strategic sacrifices from the programme may have to be made. Under Hazony’s direction the movement’s most intellectually fruitful subject, its economic heterodoxy as explored in the pages of American Affairs, may be the first thing to go. Hazony is clearly uninterested in the subject, a fact which his occasional gestures to an inchoate ‘economic nationalism’ cannot disguise. What will survive this process of trasformismo? Hazony cheers on Eurosceptics from a distance but does not seriously desire the withdrawal of us troops from Europe. He certainly does not demand a change in us policy towards his own country. He is not even a perceptible China hawk. The residuum is in large part a familiar and, it must be said, inert set of injunctions about American national self-worth and public displays of religion. The Catholics of the new radical right are more or less to be believed when they say there is nothing for them to cherish in liberal theory or its regime, but the same cannot be said for Hazony. If liberalism had only enemies like him, it would be in no need of friends. Alpa Shah, ‘Explaining Modi’ Oliver Eagleton, ‘Political Generations’ ABOUT CONTACT SUBSCRIBE SUBMISSIONS HISTORY PRIVACY ACCESSIBILITY © New Left Review Ltd 2020 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7734 8830