Everything that we call a freedom of the individual, or one of the individual’s liberties, is a traditional institution whose particular form is learned by imitation, maintained through honor and self-discipline, and handed down, in a given society, from one generation to the next. Every freedom emerges through a well-structured constraint, and so it is worse than merely misleading to say that our political freedoms come to us by nature, or that reason leads easily to them, or that nothing is needed to maintain them but for government to let us be. All of this mythology diverts our eyes from the difficult road that must be traveled in order for the necessary constraints to be instilled in society, so that even the most rudimentary freedom or right can become a reality.
Where do these constraints come from?
They can come from the laws of the state and the commands of its officials, of course. And indeed, this is the most common Enlightenment-rationalist depiction of constraint. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, fear of the government provides the constraint needed to bring peace and order to a society that would otherwise tear itself apart.
But constraint can also come from another source. In a free society, the principal constraining force comes not from fear of the government, but from the self-discipline of the people, who provide the necessary constraint themselves by upholding inherited relations and the obligations that attend them. This point was emphasized by the English political theorist John Fortescue in the fifteenth century, and taken up by Montesquieu, Burke, and the American founding fathers centuries later. Where nations can impose the needed constraints themselves, the government can be mild or moderate, offering them greater freedom to conduct their affairs without interference. But where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny....An individual who was guided by common sense enjoyed a broad range to think things through for himself. But his originality and divergences from the way others spoke and behaved were always constrained by a thick fabric of inherited relations and norms, which included the obligation to maintain and defend the place of God and religion, nation and government, family, property, and so on.
These inherited norms provided the framework (or “guardrails,” as we now say) within which reason was able to operate, yet without overthrowing every inherited institution as today’s adulation of perfectly free reasoning does. In our day, these inherited norms have been discarded in the name of the freely reasoning individual and his right to be rid of any constraint he has not himself chosen. God and religion, nation and government, marriage and children and caring for the aged—all these traditional ideas and institutions that once constrained the individual are now regarded as burdensome and difficult things, to be avoided because of the limits they impose on our freedom.
What would be required to build up this voluntary self-constraint rather than ceaselessly working to destroy it?
The propagation of such self-constraint depends on the honor that a given society is willing to award those who practice it. Indeed, the only known means of causing individuals to shoulder hardship and constraint without coercion or financial compensation is by rewarding them with honor.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp 164-166
When Donald Trump destroyed Jeb Bush in the (2016) South Carolina primary it inaugurated a seismic shift within the Republican party. One of the effects has been the rejection of a whole number of what we might call 'right liberal' commitments that centered on cosmopolitanism, individualism, free markets, free trade, and a defense of the rule of law. In its wake there has been a scramble to provide a reasonably coherent intellectual program that can unify its nationalist and Christian coalition and provide a governing philosophy. This is, in brief, the political context of Yoram Hazony's increased prominence Stateside during the last half decade.
Since 'self-constraint' and 'honor,' on one side, and 'Donald Trump,' on the other side, don't naturally go together in the same sentence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the precise contents of Hazony's vision are at odds with Trump's persona and his style of leadership and governance. In addition, if one reads Conservatism: A Rediscovery with some care one will discern a whole number of subtle rejections of what one may call 'Trumpism' in political life not the least is a clear distancing from racism and racialized hierarchy, but also from Trumpism's zero-sum winner-takes all understanding of politics.
Before I get to discuss the passage I quoted at the top of this post, I don't mean to suggest that Trumpism is irrelevant to Hazony's argument even if Trump's actual views are barely mentioned. At the start of the book, Trump's 2016 victory is briefly identified as evidence for the rise of 'nationalist conservatism' and nearer to the end, the talk of 'resistance' to Trump's 2016 electoral college victory is offered as evidence that his legitimacy was denied and that Marxism has taken over the central organs of the old liberalism (pp. 327-328). There is no critical scrutiny of Republican malfeasance, and so this limits the audience of Hazony's message.
Rather, a natural way to understand the role of Trump in Hazony's larger argument, is that he is a kind of symptom of a much wider social distress and inaugurates a period "when a major reframing of a scheme of ideas and the relations among them—a change in paradigm—becomes possible." (This echoes my own (recall) diagnosis back in December 2015.) In such periods, "we begin seeking the causes of our distress in earnest, and this search becomes the lever that pries the old paradigm loose. A period of open-mindedness is initiated, and proposed repairs that were once ridiculed are reconsidered. At this time, dissenting individuals who were once spurned and disreputable may grow quickly in importance, even as those who jealously protected the old consensus are diminished in stature and significance." (176)*
Okay, let me turn to the passage which is from the long third chapter, "The Conservative Paradigm." This paradigm is situated in a historical narrative about the theoretical and political roots of Hazony's position in what he calls 'The English Conservative tradition" and "American nationalism," with the latter understanding itself as a continuation, even restoration (a key word for Hazony) of the former in the wake of the 1787-1789 Constitution.
While self-discipline and constraints are not at odds with a liberal political worldview, a focus on honor is. Even liberal counterparts such as 'social credit' or 'recognition' or 'social approbation' all function differently than Hazony's account of honor. This is especially noticeable if one recognizes that those that (properly) perform the traditionally sanctioned role in a (traditional) hierarchy (parents, teachers, soldiers, political leaders, etc.) are to be honored. In addition, on Hazony's account obligations are the effects not primarily of consent, but rather of the existence of traditional relationships within this hierarchy (marriage, parenthood, childhood, membership in a clan, tribe, a nation, but also a corporation, a platoon, etc.). And so it is no surprise that this understanding of obligation is, in turn, repeatedly linked to loyalty, and that, as one can discern in the quoted passage, imitation is treated as praiseworthy. By contrast, there is no place in Hazony's scheme for (a celebration of) individual autonomy and authenticity.
So, while I think his account of freedom can be accommodated by certain republican liberals, on the whole Hazony offers a genuine alternative to liberalism, but he has no interest in facilitating, in his doctrines, what we might call Confederate irredentism. Rather, he celebrates "Edmund Burke in Britain and...the Federalist Party of George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton," who stood for a strong national government and rejected States' rights and slavery. Lincoln is treated as the great inheritor of this program, and Jefferson the exemplary misguided Enlightenment rationalist (and defender of slavery).+ And despite the emphasis on tradition and hierarchy, this Anglo-American conservatism is, thus, presented as not just as fully compatible with constitutional self-government, but as the true bearer of its tradition. I think this is, in fact, an improvement over the earlier (2017) presentation of these views (recall here) in an essay with Ofir Haivry at American Affairs. (Haivry seems to have co-authored the first two chapters of the present book.)
Since there are elements on the contemporary nationalist-Christian right, intoxicated by (natural law) Integralism and/or Schmittian decisionism and/or racialized hierarchy (the latter we might call the 'Jacksonian strain'), who seem little interested in constitutional and democratic self-government, it is actually to be wished that Hazony's position becomes the dominant element in Republican elite circles. For it would allow the possibility of the continuation of competitive elections that would permit alternative rule by different elites in the service of political coalitions and so the nourishment of hope that one can reverse a majority and policy. (Hazony claims that the cultural Marxist take-over of Liberal institutions will make that impossible.) In that respect, it's actually quite notable that at key moments in Hazony's narrative it is acknowledged that his favored tradition was a minority option. And unlike many other public facing thinkers on the nationalist conservative right, there is in Hazony no sign of rejection of scientific expertise. In a future post, I'll discuss his views on what a revived Conservative and Christian democracy would look like in greater and more critical detail. But here I want to close with an observation.
Hazony's road map from the present to the restoration of nationalist conservatism is, in fact, not centered on The Supreme Court or even electoral politics, even if the uptake of his views among Republican cadres will make him more influential. Rather, it is fundamentally ground in a "personal journey of repentance and return" and a rejection of "personal decadence." (p. 391) Not unlike his adversaries, Hazony believes the personal is political. And this means, for Hazony, in practice, building "family and congregation" dedicated to the passing on and honoring of tradition. (p. 393).
Given this self-transformative focus, I find it odd that Hazony barely touches on the nature and causes of contemporary celebrity and attention culture and the (consequent) frivolity of what passes for spirituality today.** For even if one grants (as I do not) that the vacuity of contemporary celebrity culture is the effect of liberalism, and evidence of its moral bankruptcy, it is also a rather effective block on the revival of a honor society he wishes for. In celebrity culture nurses and teachers and all lives dedicated to service, or any activity that provides social [what Hazony often calls] "cohesion," are simply not truly honored. This we have seen in a pandemic that should have caused a major cultural shift in attitudes. And within this celebrity culture, attention and success are its own ends and engage in a (if you will, vicious) mutually reinforcing cycle with financial rewards. And while some charismatic religious leaders may develop huge followings, they will do so in virtue of their charisma and success at attracting attention (and huge bank accounts) not because they have been touched by the divine.
There are passages that hint at a willingness to control the "corrosive effect" of capitalism on "traditional institutions," (and especially the off-shoring of good jobs abroad), but since celebrity culture now infiltrates our lives 24/7 on hour handheld, algorithmic networked devices introduction of (say) a number of tariffs will make no material difference here. That is to say, even if Hazony got his way and the "separation of church and state" would be abolished Stateside (p. 345) and Christianity would be restored to the centrality he wishes for it in our midst, the odds are it would be a repackaged Christianity fundamentally unmoored from its history and its sacred texts, in which resources are pooled to give fellow congregationalists a leg up in the social battle for attention.
*In fact, Hazony goes on to write. "Attend carefully to the following point: I have not said that such a crisis always leads to the adoption of an improved scheme of ideas and principles. A new scheme of ideas that comes to the fore in a time of crisis may prove worthless, and the consensus that seems to form around it can collapse within a short time. Frequently, a crisis will lead to the adoption of a series of different frameworks, which are tried and fail in rapid succession."(p. 177) I am suggesting that by implication Hazony treats Trump as agent of a new scheme of ideas that are not durable themselves.
**People are said to "pass the time with drugs and alcohol, pornography, video games, television, social media, and similar remedies, which suppress the pain, shame, anxiety, and depression that plague them." These ills are taken to be the effect of "liberal society," but the role of technology and what we might call techno-capitalism in reinforcing celebrity culture goes unexamined.
I note that it is significant that a Jew is pressing for the U.S. to be a Christian country--and not just the U.S. but also the various European countries to which he and his NatCons are connected. Does he even consider the impact of this on U.S. Jews? Or is he aware and just wants them to move to Israel (which will be a Jewish state with Jewish values)? When I hear the NatCons saying "Judeo-Christian" state, I wonder if Hazony truly thinks the "Judeo" part will last.
Posted by: Deborah Achtenberg | 09/28/2022 at 03:37 AM
It's an indication of desperation that someone who favors Lincoln over Jefferson should infer, now, that this means supporting Republicans. The phrase "party of Lincoln" is now used ironically more than seriously. As regards Jefferson, the Republican divide is between follows of Thomas Jefferson and those of Jefferson Davis.
And someone who wants to talk about honor should line up with a party for whom "elite" is the worst pejorative in the lexicon.
Posted by: John Quiggin | 10/07/2022 at 12:55 AM