![]() The London gathering took place at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, a church-qua-conference-center that serves as the home of an evangelical congregation founded in 1989. NatCon UK was convened by Hazony’s Edmund Burke Foundation, the latest in a string of conferences that have also occurred in Washington, DC, Brussels, Rome, and Miami. (The fact that many paradigmatic nation-states were also empires goes largely unremarked upon.) “The nationalism I grew up with,” he writes in The Virtue of Nationalism, “is a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” Though careful not to criticize bombastic leaders like Donald Trump, Hazony clearly wants to offer the emerging nationalist movement a more reputable intellectual pedigree-to provide the ascendant global right with a respectable ideological scaffolding it can take home to mother. Unlike empires, nations only want to maintain what is unique about their culture and heritage and are thus uninterested in conquest. Hazony goes so far as to argue that the Bible prescribes the nation-state as the optimal form of political community. Crucial to Hazony’s thought is the contention that the fusion of the nation and the state-an innovation often associated with 19th and early 20th-century European nationalism-represents a timeless ideal for all people everywhere. ![]() Political philosophers differentiate between the state as a form of government that can take many shapes, and the nation as an “imagined community” of people that are joined together through shared history, ethnicity, language, religion, or some combination thereof. His movement, which he has dubbed National Conservatism, attempts to redeem nationalism from its genocidal associations by juxtaposing it with imperialism and claiming that the latter is truly to blame for the bloody 20th century. Since publishing his landmark The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018 and founding the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF)-a public affairs institute named for the British statesman and philosopher largely regarded as a founding father of conservatism-in 2019, Hazony has emerged as a key ideologue of the new global right. But he has recently set his sights on something even larger than Zion. As a political philosopher, former speechwriter for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and founder of two right-wing think tanks based in Jerusalem-the Shalem Center (now College) and the Herzl Institute-Hazony has been a fixture of Israeli intellectual and political life since the early 1990s. ![]() The language of home was not a mere stylistic flourish, but indicated where Hazony believes political identity comes from and what it delivers: rootedness, belonging, and honor, a metaphorical roof over the head of otherwise atomized and troubled souls. a universalist conservative, that the term conservative could somehow be alienated from the idea of home, the idea of family, the idea of congregation, the idea of nation.” Liberal multiculturalism is a dead end, he argued, “ruining Western nations” and bringing “cultural revolution.” Like the jeremiads of the prophets of old, Hazony’s lament came with a glimmer of hope: A “homecoming” is still possible, but only if the wayward people accept that there can be no true conservatism without restoring the nation to a place of honor. this notion that somehow it’s possible to be a globalist conservative. Surveying the audience of a few hundred people, he began his address with a lament: Over the past few decades, Western democracies have been “flooded with. Indeed, with his tousled not-yet-gray hair and Harry Potter-esque glasses, the 59-year-old emits a sort of boyish exuberance. ![]() When Yoram Hazony took the stage on the first day of the National Conservatism Conference in London on May 15th, he beamed like the class valedictorian.
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