A radical reframing of conservative tradition
by Marc Sidwell, Artillery Row:
It happens quietly, the renewal of generations. At my church last Sunday, the readings were given by a young girl — just stepping into her teens — with her parents and siblings all there to support her. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” she told our little congregation. “This is the word of the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God,” we chorused back.
Ancient rituals like these are, for Yoram Hazony, at the heart of what it means to be a conservative. An observant Jew himself, his new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery seeks to recover an Anglo-American conservative tradition that puts faith — as long as it’s Christian or Jewish — at the core of a healthy free society. It is all a very long way from wonks in bow ties offering tax incentives and policy papers on planning reform.
Hazony’s last book, The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), helped to launch National Conservatism, a growing influence on right-leaning intellectuals, both in America and Europe. National Conservatives like national independence, which puts them on the side of Brexit. But they are also keen to moderate the political right’s attachment to freedom. Individual liberty, liberal democracy, free trade: all are under suspicion. With this book, Hazony attempts to explain what his alternative looks like.
See also:
The nuclear family has failed, by Yoram Hazony, UnHerd:
“The time has come for us to consider retiring the ideal of the nuclear family, and replacing it with something that looks more like the [more extended] family of Christian and Jewish tradition.”
Families must play a bigger part in the lives of children in care, by Cristina Odone, Conservative Home:
A “reset” in the care system must tear up the social worker’s protocols that currently ignore the one element that distinguishes children in care from their peers: family.
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