A Biblical Conservatism

What should a conservative think after the Civil Rights Movement? Every recognizably conservative political principle—localism, gradualism, reverence for tradition—would seem to have been on the side of the “white moderates” whom King targeted in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” So far as I can tell, this problem has driven conservative intellectuals for sixty years to try out ever-new iterations of “neoconservatism” (from Daniel Bell to Michael Novak to Paul Wolfowitz and beyond). They all want, reasonably, to oppose both the excesses of liberalism and the racial blindnesses of paleo-conservatism.

Yoram Hazony is the latest in this line of post-Civil-Rights conservatives. But he distinguishes himself from the neocons by arguing that most or all of them have conceded too much to the political theory of their liberal opponents. In his new Conservatism: A Rediscovery, he offers a fresh, bold, erudite, and emphatically non-liberal take on what American conservatives should believe and want for their country. It should be read in full by anyone who has wondered what, if anything, a “conservative” politics could look like in our post-2016 landscape.

Conservative Political Theory

Hazony is an academic political theorist. All of us in that profession try hard to show our fellow Americans that the years we spend poring over old books have not been wasted, or that ideas have (political) consequences. The late Harry Jaffa and his students have popularized one version of this academic sales pitch: John Locke’s political philosophy can explain what made our Founding great, while the Progressives’ deviations from that philosophy can explain what has since gone wrong with our country. Hazony takes this pitch and more or less inverts it, replacing “Locke” with “Fortescue” and “the Progressives” with “Locke.”

Hazony belongs to an older school of American conservatives deeply suspicious of Lockean individualism, of whom the best-known representative is currently Patrick Deneen. But where Deneen’s book mainly critiqued liberalism, Hazony articulates a positive alternative. For the first time in a generation or more, American readers are presented with a full-fledged and non-Lockean conservative political theory. (Deneen insisted that only the small postliberal communities of the unseen future will be competent to produce such a theory.)

Read here