By Robert Tracinski
Monday, November 22, 2021
During a recent conference of nationalist
conservatives—a faction attempting to bring intellectual substance and
coherence to the political phenomenon of Trumpism—one of the movement's leading
figures, Yoram Hazony, proposed “a new deal between national conservatives and traditionalists on
the one hand, and anti-Marxist liberals on the other.”
This new coalition is intended to replace
the American Right’s “fusionist” alliance between religious conservatives,
free-marketers, and Cold War hawks, who were once drawn together by their
shared antipathy to communism. Nationalists now regard fusionism with disdain,
and by proposing an alliance with the center-Left, Hazony and his faction hope
to downgrade the free-marketers and freeze out the secular libertarians.
This new alliance is a terrible idea, and
liberals would be well-advised to treat Hazony’s offer with a whole lot of
skepticism. Yet it seems that some of them are taking him up on it.
* * *
There is a basic rift on the “anti-woke”
Right that is increasingly coming out into the open. Some of us oppose the
censorious conformism of the social-justice Left because we are classical
liberals who believe that freedom of speech and inquiry are critical to the
functioning of a free society. Then there are those whose opposition rests on
the belief that they should be the ones imposing limits on
free inquiry in the name of traditional values. They don't want a free society,
they want a virtuous society, in which their idea of virtue is promoted by
government.
The nationalist conservatives are in the
second camp. During his speech at the recent conference, for example,
journalist Josh Hammer denounced the classical liberal wing of the Right as “effete, limp, and
unmasculine, because it removes from the political arena, and consigns to the
‘private’ sphere, the very value judgments and critical questions that most
affect our humanity and our civilization.”
Notice that the word “private” appears in
skeptical quotation marks. Hammer goes on to denounce “the fundamentally and
empirically false distinction between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ domains.” Those
of us old enough to remember when “wokeness” was called “political correctness”
might also remember that it was justified with a declaration that “the personal
is political.” The nationalist conservatives have now embraced this slogan in
pursuit of a quite different goal. In Hammer's words, that goal is “the defeat
of cultural wokism and restoration of cultural sanity by partial means of the
return of overt public religiosity—that is, the return of God to the public
square.” He concludes:
We need a
vision of conservatism that prioritizes not zombie free-market idolatry, but a
vigorous political agenda dedicated, to quote a popular 2019 essay, to
“fight[ing] the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying
the spoils.”
That 2019 essay was a broadside written by the religious polemicist Sohrab Ahmari, and the full
quote goes like this: “‘The only way is through’—that is to say, to fight the
culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the
form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the
Highest Good.” The “Highest Good,” capitalized like a proper noun, refers in Catholic doctrine to “obedience to the will of God.” Ahmari
goes on to call for “the use of the public power to advance the common good,
including in the realm of public morality,” the aim of which is “to enforce our
order and our orthodoxy.”
This is the context in which Hazony is
offering his new deal to centrist liberals. The key concession he demands is
this: “What we say to anti-Marxist liberals is where there is a large Christian
majority in a country ... the public life of the country has to be Christian.”
To which, he added, “Above all else we've got to get God and scripture back in the
schools.” At the same conference, Rod Dreher—fresh from a residency with Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary—proclaimed, “We need to unapologetically embrace the
use of state power.”
What would this mean in practice? The
nationalist conservative movement tends to be blustering and chest-thumping in
its rhetoric, and vague and elusive when it comes to specifics. But we’re
starting to see a few indications. Under cover of opposing the indoctrination
of children in public schools, nationalists have pushed for intrusive bans on any
teaching considered offensive to their political and religious sensibilities.
Some supporters have gone further still.
In a bipartisan essay for the New York Times by four writers opposed to
this project, the authors note that, "the Texas Public Policy Foundation,
a conservative think tank, published a list of words and concepts that help
‘identify critical race theory in the classroom.’ The list included terms such
as ‘social justice,’ ‘colonialism,’ and ‘identity.’” A conservative activist
group in New Hampshire, meanwhile, is promising a $500 bounty to informants who denounce teachers to the authorities, causing
them to “lose their jobs and licenses.”
On the national level, Rachel Bovard expressed the nationalist consensus that technology companies should be
required to “prove themselves corporate patriots” or else “they simply cannot
be allowed to endure” and should be broken into pieces by politically motivated
antitrust prosecutions. The nationalists hope to fight progressive censorship
by compiling their own lists of banned words, giving the state arbitrary power
over the economy, and building a conservative surveillance state.
One of the characteristics of our era is
that “anti-” has become a prefix that means “doing the same thing but in the
opposite direction.” To be “antiracist” is to repurpose racial animus and
prejudice against an ostensibly more deserving target. To be “antifascist” is
to dress and behave just like a fascist, but under a communist flag. Following the same pattern, a faction of the Right believes that being
“anti-woke” means employing the same tools of censorship and conformity, but to
advance a conservative political and social agenda.
* * *
This gulf between the classical liberal
Right and the religious/nationalist Right is not new. The old fusionists tried
to paper over these differences, but occasionally coalitional harmony was
disrupted by someone like Pat Buchanan bellowing about “religious war.” Yet, the fusionist coalition did have something to fuse it together—a
shared vision close to that of classical liberalism, even if the factions
sometimes offered different rationales in its defense. Some of these religious
classical liberals are still around.
But the nationalist conservative agenda is
so thoroughly illiberal that one wonders what the anti-Marxist liberals can
expect to get out of the alliance. This is especially true considering how
little liberals need the nationalists. Glenn Youngkin's recent victory in
Virginia’s statewide election indicates that woke ideology is poisonously
unpopular. Given the chance, people will vote against it and will cross party lines to do so. Nationalism is unnecessary,
ideologically and electorally, to achieve this result. In fact, given that
Youngkin performed far better than Donald Trump, who lost the state decisively
a year earlier, nationalism is almost certainly a hindrance.
In spite of the nationalists’ assumption
that they will be the senior partners in the new alliance, dictating its terms
and conditions, it is they who need the boost of association with a popular
cause. The cause doesn't really need them. So then why are some anti-Marxist
liberals apparently ready to accept Yazony’s offer? Some of these intellectuals
were featured speakers at the nationalist conference. As the Dispatch report notes, they include “Glenn Loury, a Brown University economics professor and
prominent black conservative critic of the left's anti-racist dogma; anti-woke
culture warrior Douglas Murray (don't tell them about his 2006 work NeoConservatism:
Why We Need It); ‘classical liberal’ YouTuber Dave Rubin; the Somali-born
champion (and, indeed, embodiment) of Enlightenment values Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”
A few of these speakers are associated
with a proposal to establish a new University of Austin dedicated to freedom of inquiry and opposition to illiberalism. Yet, its board
of advisors includes Sohrab Ahmari, self-described enforcer of “order and
orthodoxy,” as one of only three members who does not hail from academia. A
chapter in Ahmari’s recent book asks, “Should you think for yourself?”—a question he then answers
in the negative. So why was he invited to join the Austin board? “I told the
founders,” Ahmari explained, “that, standing in the ancient tradition of Catholic education, I
don't, in fact, believe that the university can or should enshrine mere free
speech or free inquiry as its highest ideal. I was pleasantly surprised when
they replied, ‘That's why we want you.’”
If anti-woke liberals pursue an
ideological coalition with anti-woke illiberals, it is liberalism that will
lose out. This strategic error recalls the squandered promise of the
Intellectual Dark Web, a name coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein, and
popularized by Bari Weiss, to describe a loose network of bloggers and
podcasters operating outside the reach of most mainstream gatekeepers. The
eventual fate of the IDW reminded us that sometimes a contrarian is a bold
independent thinker, but sometimes he’s just an angry crank who likes to say
the opposite of what everybody else is saying. This has been harshly exposed by
the COVID-19 pandemic, as some members of the IDW, most notably Bret Weinstein
and Heather Heying (the latter of whom also sits on the University of Austin's
board), have recklessly promoted anti-vaccine pseudoscience.
The line between “iconoclast” and
“crackpot” can be a fine one, and those who understand the value of
thoughtfully challenging the prevailing consensus should be more careful in
choosing their allies. They should certainly be reluctant to throw in their lot
with power-hungry nationalists openly opposed to free inquiry.
* * *
Nationalists are unlikely to be grateful
to liberals once they’ve served their purpose—just ask those now being cast out
of the old fusionist coalition. Classical liberals, Hammer complains,
contributed little of value besides helping to “defeat the Soviet Union” and
sustain “high GDP growth.” The defeat of the world's most powerful tyranny and
decades of improvements to human life? Is that all? So now they are being
ejected, and heaped with insults on their way out, because their efforts didn't
help the traditionalists achieve an American religious revival. Some day, when
the woke fad finally burns itself out, this is how anti-woke liberals who
embrace the nationalists can expect to be treated.
It is not impossible, nor is it foolish,
to benefit from work done by the nationalists or to cooperate with them on
narrow issues. The conservative writer and activist Chris Rufo, for example,
has done valuable work leaking internal documents that expose attempts at
political indoctrination in the public schools. But he has also dismissed invocations of First Amendment protections against the nationalist
agenda as appeals to “phantom freedoms.”
“Anti-woke liberals” must not forget that
their advocacy of liberalism is the whole point of being anti-woke. For this
reason, cooperation with the illiberal Right can only be limited and temporary,
at spots where our immediate interests converge. But let’s remain clear in our
minds what they really stand for, because sometimes the enemy of your enemy
turns out, in the long run, to be just another enemy.
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