The Vices of Nationalism; America in the Longhouse; Revisiting Chomsky on Cambodia
Reading, Watching 11.23.25
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You can buy When the Clock Broke, now in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.
In case you missed it,
and I had our biweekly Live chat, which we do every other Wednesday at 2 pm.For any francophone readers, I spoke to Le Grand Continent last week about Trumpism, America First, and the future of the Republican Party.
Needless to say, I have very strong disagreements with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, but I thought the interview he did with Yoram Hazony—a kind of right-wing counterpart to my interview with Ezra Klein—on Fuentes and the antisemitism issue was excellent and subtly devastating. In case you don’t know, Israeli-American political theorist Yoram Hazony is one of the leading lights of the soi-disant National Conservative movement and the author of the 2018 book The Virtues of Nationalism. That book, whose self-professed fans include Viktor Orban and Georgia Meloni, and the National Conservatism conferences Hazony helped organize, were meant to provide an intellectual framework for MAGA and the populist New Right.
Hazony is a Modern Orthodox Jew, and he argues, using the Hebrew Bible, that the nation-state is the best and most just organizing principle humanity has developed. The only alternative is a cosmopolitan imperialism that subjects diverse peoples to homogenizing rule. Hazony insists that this nationalism need not be violently exclusionary or racist. This is somewhat belied both in theory and practice. I think it would be fair to say that Hazony is, at the very least, a sympathizer of the late ultranationalist Meir Kahane, whose Kach party is banned in Israel for racism and support of terrorism. And although his National Conservatism conference attempted to exclude white nationalists, it was immediately caught up in controversy because a speaker said the country would be better off with “more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Or, case in point, Tucker Carlson was once a keynote speaker at NatCon.
It should’ve been obvious to anybody that a nationalism that railed against a “globalist, cosmopolitan class” was at the very least adjacent to antisemitism. But Hazony lives in a world of pure ideas where there is no history, no experience, no concrete reality. There is just the Word. And the word of the day was “nationalism.” It was a slogan that would solve all the problems by its mere invocation. “National Conservatism” is a mere abstraction that tries to paper over the contradictions of the rightist coalition. The idea immediately breaks down when confronted with reality. Hazony remains in cloudcuckooland. What’s his solution to the antisemitism crisis on the right? Well, basically, Trump and JD Vance will save them: