Yesterday’s NYT contained a Ross Douthat interview with Yoram Hazony, a right-wing Israeli who is one of the intellectual leaders of the national conservative movement. His views regarding nationalism and right-wing antisemitism make for fascinating, if hardly persuasive, reading.
There are three enormous problems with his views on nationalism:
- Nations aren’t created; they evolve. America, the land of recent immigrants, is only an extreme example of this phenomenon. The UK, just to use one example, was created by Celts, Romans, Germans, Vikings, Normans, and immigrants from the British Empire. Its culture, language, and religious views are in a state of constant change. Trying to stop that process is a fool’s errand.
- Identifying a group of people within a nation as legacy members of a tribe means everyone else is, at best, a second-class citizen. Once you have established a right to discriminate against some members of the nation, there is no obvious place to stop. Not every nationalist movement leads to Hitler or Franco, but there is nothing except memory and self-restraint to prevent it from happening.
- A world of nations motivated purely by self-interest will, by definition, be violent and chaotic. Given today’s military technologies, the consequences of that are too grim to contemplate. That’s why we have the international institutions the national conservatives despise so much.