Fifteen years ago, Yoram Hazony was a medium-size star in the small constellation of conservative Jewish intellectuals. He was provost of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, a conservative think tank he had founded in the nineties, and headed up its Institute for Advanced Study. He taught Jewish and conservative ideas to college-aged students during semester breaks, organized occasional academic conferences, and published his own brand of conservative biblical and political scholarship in books and blog posts. Most American conservatives, even in the activist class, had probably not heard his name, and surely could not have pronounced it if they had.
But today, Hazony is in the big time. He speaks less in classrooms and more in packed conference halls and rarified back rooms (smokiness unverified). National Conservatism, the political movement spearheaded by the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), which Hazony founded in 2019, is ascendant in the second Trump administration. “NatCon” is, in the words of its founder, “the intellectual substrate underpinning [this] nationalist movement.” You can hear traces of National Conservatism in the president’s executive orders and on the lips of government officials. It provides a framework that can justify Trump’s immigration bans and his tariffs; it is the foundation of the American retreat from multilateral organizations, and an ideological well drawn upon by culture warriors like JD Vance and Michael Knowles.
When Vance dismisses opponents as “childless cat ladies,” he is echoing Hazony’s dismissal of liberal political philosophy, which Hazony has called “a political theory made in the image of unmarried, childless individuals … the fantasies of the Enlightenment’s lifelong bachelors.” Hazony has also argued that we shouldn’t take Enlightenment’s bachelors seriously because “Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant never had children. Descartes’s only daughter, born outside of marriage, died at the age of five.”
Hazony has long seen his ascendance coming. In 2017, he spoke about the role conservatives ought to play in society: “Our job is to prepare an option that will be on the table when some big crisis hits.” And even when he said it, Hazony had already received his crisis, giftwrapped in bright red with bold white lettering. Donald Trump presented a profound crisis for a Republican establishment that advocated for free-trade, foreign-interventionism, puritanical moralizing, and fierce libertarianism, all of which were professed Republican dogma from Reagan through Romney. There was a whole network of think tanks, donors, and political strategists to push this traditional Republic agenda in policy and public opinion. As Trump gained popularity, former Republican power-players like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney fought back without much force, and were sidelined. Some think tanks, most notably the Heritage Foundation, eventually shifted their allegiances, while others, like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, stayed the course and consequently fell out of influence. But at the start of President Trump’s first term he didn’t have a replacement for the institutional network that he had so handily defeated. This was an ideological and institutional vacuum into which National Conservatism was birthed, along with a whole world of new institutions and ideologies racing to step in with their new social and political agendas.
Many of these ideologies, often referred to as “post-liberal,” question classical liberalism’s commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy—principles upon which the American mythos was built. Sensing opportunity in the upheaval, proponents of these post-liberal philosophies attempt to direct the power of MAGA towards their hierarchical, religious, volkisch, or authoritarian visions for America. There are the NatCons led by Hazony, but also Catholic Integralists like Adrian Vermeule, Protestant Dominionists (many of whom are affiliated with C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation), neo-feudalists like Curtis Yarvin, and a slew of online personalities further on the fringe. Of these overlapping ideologies, National Conservatism, with its centralized structure and buttoned-up aesthetic, has emerged as a likely successor to the old right. It is already deeply rooted in the Trump administration and the network of think tanks and policy institutes that dominate the 2025 Republican political landscape. It has influential supporters in Britain, Hungary, and the growing neo-nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe and around the world.
Hazony has long been fascinated by the ways that ideas and books impact the political landscape. In an instructive seminar from 2010, he developed “Yoram’s Law” of political change: Every major political shift depends on a book or essay that fought and won in the battle of ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that, per “Yoram’s Law,” Hazony is winning the day.
A decade ago the only sure-fire way to catch a glimpse of National Conservatism was on Hazony’s blog, but surveying the landscape of American politics in 2025, evidence of his influence abounds.
MAGA was a populist movement without a clearly articulated ideology, and National Conservatism an elite ideology with no movement. It was a match made in purgatory. The definition and history of American “greatness” was, in Trump’s 2016 campaign, largely left to the imagination and projection of his audience. But National Conservatism, founded on revolutionary ideas about society, liberty, religion, and history that Hazony advances in The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and, later, in Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), provides a definition and constructs a usable past to fill that gap.
The NatCon Statement of Principles, published in 2022, endorses the integration of church with state and demands a reordering of society to serve the Christian majority. “Where a Christian majority exists,” the fifth principle stipulates, “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” It proposes a reduction in the administrative state and judiciary, while signaling an openness to potential increases in social spending in order to improve “family and congregational life.” It calls for defunding universities that don’t align with their ideology, and advocates greatly reduced immigration, including a possible “moratorium.” In short, it provided the blueprint for the first months of this presidential term. Its language is couched in the federalist tone familiar to the “states’ rights” crowd, but it doesn’t hesitate to suggest that the “national government must intervene energetically to restore order” when states don’t conform to conservative moral prescriptions. The NatCons have successfully breathed life into a long-dead political body: the social conservative/fiscal liberal who is willing to use the tools and tax of government to advance a conservative agenda. This is far from a libertarian movement; Josh Hammer, a research fellow at EBF, went so far as to call National Conservatism “communitarian.”
The Statement of Principles is signed by several key Trump administration officials, including Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and a key figure in the development of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Department of Government Efficiency. Other signatories include ultra-conservative power-players and media personalities like Peter Thiel, Ed Corrigan, Michael Anton, Jim DeMint, Michael Knowles, and Tom Klingenstein–all of whom have also spoken at at least one National Conservatism conference.
The roster of speakers at the now-annual “NatCon,” which just saw its latest iteration this month in Washington, D.C., has included Josh Hawley and JD Vance for years (though the vice president did not attend this year), and as it reached the MAGA mainstream, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Roger Marshall, Eric Schmitt, Stephen Miller, Rick Scott, Nigel Farage, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, and many others made their pilgrimages to the conference. At last week’s conference, Russ Vought gave a talk about “deconstructing the administrative state,” and Steve Bannon about “getting America-First done.” Many elected and appointed officials of the U.S. legislative and executive branches addressed the conference. Hazony’s influence on contemporary American politics is as profound as it is clear.
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Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel, in 1964 and came of age in Princeton, N.J., where he was raised by his father, then a researcher at Princeton University’s engineering school. In Conservatism, Hazony describes a dislocated childhood in which the conservative values preached by his father, and still held by Hazony himself, were not at home in “liberal” Princeton. Even worse, his father preached such principles but didn’t live them: “My father had moved out of the house the year before, leaving my violent and mentally ill mother to fend for herself. That had been his second marriage, and he married for a third time before I graduated.” The “traditional family” that would become axiomatic in Hazony’s thought was self-consciously inspired by his “Aunt Linda” and “Uncle Isaac,” to whom Conservatism is dedicated. Hazony’s first extended experiences with Orthodox Judaism, Sabbath observance, and his ideal version of a home life came in the West Bank home of his aunt and uncle during a year Hazony spent in Israel after high school. “The most important influence on my road to a conservative life was that of my Uncle Isaac and Aunt Linda.”
Back in Princeton for freshman year, Hazony set out to construct a similar life for himself. He quickly found himself enamored with a student from far-away rural Pennsylvania. In Conservatism he writes: “Julie was as beautiful a girl as I had ever met in my life. Her smile lit up the moody gothic halls of the campus in a way that left me in awe.” They bonded over shared difficulties at home, and a mutual disdain for the majority-liberal student body and the “hard-partying eating clubs,” off-campus clubs in which many students take their meals and “where beer was on tap twenty-four hours a day.” What began as a crush developed into much more. “I had not known the warmth of my mother’s touch since I was a small child, and I experienced Julie’s care for me as something akin to deliverance.” Together they explored their roots—or rather, Hazony did, while Julie explored Orthodox Judaism alongside him, and eventually converted in time for their wedding in Prospect Gardens, right in the middle of campus. “Our wedding procession passed between the eating clubs, silently lining the street on either side.”
Hazony’s first extended experiences with Orthodox Judaism, Sabbath observance, and his ideal version of a home life came in the West Bank home of his aunt and uncle during a year Hazony spent in Israel after graduating high school.
While his romance was playing out with Julie Fulton (now Yael Hazony) on one side of campus, Hazony was developing another important relationship on the other side of the quad. The story of Hazony’s friendship with Daniel Polisar, then a student one year his junior, cannot be found in Hazony’s brief memoir in Conservatism, but this friendship would irreversibly alter the course of his life. Hazony and Polisar were a natural team; together they won a national debate title and, with funding from Irving Kristol’s Institute for Educational Affairs, they (along with Fulton and a few other friends) founded The Princeton Tory, a conservative journal that remains in publication to this day. This was the first of many times that Hazony’s desire and ability to create lasting institutions with money from ideologically amenable backers shone forth. While at Princeton, Hazony and Polisar also developed the shared dream of a college that would be, as Hazony later told Haaretz, “more receptive to tradition, nationalism, and religion.” This dream would animate their lives for nearly two decades.
After graduating, Polisar went off to Harvard for a Ph.D. in government while Hazony went up the road to Rutgers, where he would write his dissertation on political philosophy in the biblical book of Jeremiah. In 1988, while still in graduate school, the Hazonys moved to the West Bank settlement of Eli. Hazony wrote for The Jerusalem Post, and in the early nineties served as an aide and speechwriter to Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s foreign minister. (Haaretz reports that they are no longer close).
While at Princeton, Hazony and Polisar developed the shared dream of a college that would be, as Hazony later told Haaretz, “more receptive to tradition, nationalism, and religion.” This dream would animate their lives for nearly two decades.
By 1994, Hazony was in the orbit of the newly founded Tikvah Fund, established in 1992 by Zalman Bernstein, the founder of AllianceBernstein, a global wealth asset management company. Tikvah was evolving into a network of cultural and academic institutions that would one day form a whole ecosystem for developing new generations of Jewish conservatives. This was the perfect incubator for a young Hazony, who had a front row seat to observe the power money has in shaping institutions and communities. He saw the value of philanthropic and political connections. Tikvah affiliates include a who’s who of conservative political funders like Bernstein, Roger Hertog, and Sheldon Adelson, as well as neoconservative political veterans like Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, and Elliot Abrams, the chairman of Tikvah’s board of trustees, who was himself involved in some of the most controversial (and illegal) foreign policies of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush. Hazony saw how, through them, Tikvah became the Jewish junior partner in a whole network of neoconservative institutions that had significant sway among the American Republican elite during the Clinton and Bush years. He would follow a similar playbook when he eventually spearheaded his own political movement some twenty five years later. In 2022, Hazony would write in Conservatism that this neoconservative constellation of people and institutions (what he calls “Cold-War Conservatives”) “suppressed American and British Conservatism” and ultimately “contributed to liberal hegemony,” something Hazony considers a generational tragedy. But from the late nineties through 2011, Hazony represented an important node in their network of influence.
It was from this well of Jewish neoconservativism that Hazony and Polisar drew the financial and institutional support to establish the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based conservative think tank, in 1994. This was to be the first step towards building their college, Shalem College. With millions in grants from Tikvah, Shalem grew in influence, and despite some cultural and financial hiccups, it inched ever closer to the long-held goal of its founders: the formation of a conservative college. Hazony served in a variety of senior roles at the Shalem Center for nearly two decades, including a term as president. He eventually served as provost and director of Shalem’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).
It is easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which Hazony stayed at Shalem and remained a Jewish educator with limited influence on day-to-day political happenings outside the walls of the academy. Hazony, who argued that major political shifts depend on academic work that impacts the war of ideas, would have been comfortable there. But in 2012, on the cusp of its accreditation as a college, Hazony abruptly left Shalem. The precise nature of his departure remains officially undisclosed (neither Hazony nor Shalem were willing to comment), but in 2016, Israeli journalist Roni Dori reported that four years earlier, Hazony had been “removed from his life’s project.” When speaking to Dori, Hazony recounted that his split with Shalem was over “ideological differences,” and in a 2016 interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly he described the separation as a result of “substantive disagreements over policies.”
Dori reports on the specifics of the split: a fissure emerged as the Shalem Center underwent its evolution towards Shalem College. In the interest of getting accreditation from Israel’s Council of Higher Education, Polisar and Daniel Gordis (a relative newcomer to Shalem) decided to shift the college towards the political center. This was untenable to Hazony, who held steadfast to his uncompromising conservatism. Polisar sided with Gordis, and Hazony was apparently pushed out. Publicly, the split was amicable, but people have described it to me as a messy divorce—one that marked the end of his collegiate dreams and his decades-long partnership and friendship with Polisar.
Mark Gottlieb, Tikvah’s educational director, speculated to me that the reason that Tikvah and its associated donors declined to fund Hazony’s projects in the years following his departure from Shalem was “less ideological” and more a result of “the contingencies of how relationships develop.” He went on: “After there was a separation between Dan and Yoram, we tried not to take sides, but we definitely were institutionally still supportive of Shalem to this very day.” On the other hand, when talking about some of Hazony’s more recent work under the banner of National Conservatism, Gottlieb hypothesized, “I think when it comes to [the] Burke [Foundation], that is much more an ideological separation or an ideological distancing” on the part of senior Tikvah leadership.
The split between Hazony and Tikvah’s wider network was never formalized or publicized, and unlike his break from Shalem, it was not total. This has proven advantageous for both sides, who have since collaborated on limited projects. Hazony has occasionally spoken at Tikvah events, and, according to the 2021 National Conservatism Conference brochure, Roger Hertog, a major donor to Tikvah and Shalem, donated $50,000 to the conference. While a small contribution relative to his commitments to Tikvah, it is nonetheless significant that Hertog, who has historically championed libertarian causes, would donate anything to NatCon at all. From public records and NatCon publications, it seems that Hertog is the only person to ever make a donation of that size who never addressed the conference. The Hertog Foundation declined to comment about the personal or ideological implications of this gift.
But that gift was still nearly a decade away. Meanwhile, the year 2012 was the nadir of Hazony’s professional life. He once again found himself dislocated. He’d lost his close friend and collaborator, gotten sidelined from Shalem, and was cut off from the pipeline of funding from Tikvah. Hazony would later write of this period that “the last few years have been trying ones for me and my family.” Nobody then could have predicted that he would rise so quickly on the back of an ideology that he had yet to articulate.
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Hazony’s genius is not for systematic thought or historical synthesis, but for timing. And for finding willing partners to foot the bill for his ambition.
“Hazony is a terrible economist,” Suzanne Schneider, a fellow at Kellogg College in Oxford and a scholar of the new right, told me. “He’s a terrible historian. He’s a theological thinker. And really, he’s an activist. His genius is institutional and organizational. It’s bringing these people into the rooms together and … moving the needle on the conservative discourse.” The maneuvering brilliance present when he established The Princeton Tory, and through his eighteen years as a leader at the Shalem Center, was on full display in the wake of Hazony’s ideological and financial isolation from Shalem. Showing impressive agility, he planted his foot and pivoted away.
In 2010, two years before he left Shalem, Hazony received a fellowship from the John Templeton Foundation, a large, historically conservative foundation that funds religious studies. The fellowship was created to establish an inter-faith project alongside the University of Notre Dame and the University of Innsbruck. It included a $1.1 million grant to study philosophical methods of biblical exegesis; in practice, this allowed Hazony and Ofir Haivry (then affiliated with Shalem’s IAS) to produce distinctly conservative biblical scholarship specifically geared to appeal to Christians as well as Jews. In 2012, on his way out of Shalem, this is what he took with him. In 2012 Hazony founded yet another institution—the Herzl Institute—this time with Haivry. He simultaneously established an American 501(c)3 non-profit, The Jewish Philosophy Fund, which would allow American donors to receive tax benefits for donating money. He leveraged his relationship with Templeton to secure a $2.2 million grant to the Herzl Institute to continue the work he had been doing at Shalem’s IAS. The Herzl Institute organized several conferences, published a few books in the spirit of Christian-Jewish coalition building, and pumped out scholarship that sought to refashion politics in the image of religion.
In 2016, Hazony’s Herzl Institute convened a conference co-sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a small but mighty Christian think tank devoted to “strengthen[ing] and reform[ing]” the role of Christianity in public life. Entitled “Christian-Jewish Alliance: Reclaiming and Rebuilding Conservatism,” the conference’s big draw was a keynote from famed conservative media personality Dennis Prager, and it welcomed many who would prove to be thought leaders on the anti-liberal right, including R.R. Reno (editor of First Things), Patrick Deneen (an influential academic), and Hazony himself, who would later recount that this was “the first meeting of what became the National Conservative movement.” It was a precursor to the National Conservatism Conferences that would come a few years later.
It was with his 2018 publication of The Virtue of Nationalism that the movement began to gain momentum, and Hazony suddenly found greater access to a new network of donors. The movement was received with gusto on the nationalist right, recently empowered by Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump. Alex Cranberg, a Texas oil man, takes credit for introducing Hazony to Kevin Roberts, now president of The Heritage Foundation, then heading up the Texas Public Policy Foundation. At NatCon 4, with a childish grin and a Trump impression, Cranberg told how he and Hazony got the gang together. Cranberg was a very well-connected booster who became enamored with the book, and invited Hazony to Texas to show him off (and around). First they visited Roberts, then Colin Moran, a wealthy investor who would go on to sponsor NatCon. They recruited Chris Demuth to chair NatCon 1, the first official National Conservatism conference, which took place at the Ritz-Carlton Washington, D.C., in July of 2019 under the auspices of the newly incorporated Edmund Burke Foundation. The EBF was headed by Hazony with an executive board of like-minded politicos and academics: David Brog, a former executive director of Christians United For Israel, Rafi Eis, a rabbi and Jewish educator, Chris DeMuth, a fellow alum of the old right and one-time president of the American Enterprise Institute, James Lucier, a Republican political strategist, and Ofir Haivry, Hazony’s long-time friend and collaborator.
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Yoram Hazony is a man of contradictions. An Orthodox Jew and a Christian Nationalist. An American ideologue who lives in Israel. A product of the old right and a paragon of the new. A theologian who claims moral absolutism is “pagan” but insists that his conservative vision is derived from “God and Scripture.” He is a philosopher who engages in reason and argumentation, but like Judah HaLevi or Al Ghazali insists that reason and argumentation can’t dependably lead to truth. “Human beings are capable of exercising reason and yet arriving at almost any foolish, destructive, evil, poisonous thing.” So, continues Hazony, “conservatives give primacy to inherited traditions, beginning with those descended from Moses.”
Painting an intellectual portrait of Hazony amidst these contradictions is often confounding. In a 2019 debate with Bret Stephens, Hazony quipped, “My views are ridiculously stable …. I haven’t learned anything” since being a teenager. But he proves to be ideologically slippery. His commitment to stability, tradition, and authority prevents him from claiming any novelty, so he couches his revolutionary ideas in the language of restoration, not revolution, hence his book title: Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In our conversation, Schneider described Hazony as a radical in the wool of a traditionalist, especially when it comes to his views on nationalism, religion, and state. “This idea, a classic idea, is that the state reflects a kind of religious order. The state needs to reflect [the] religious proclivities of the people if it’s going to have legitimacy in their eyes. And I think what Hazony is doing is something very different. It’s not that the state is a reflection of the kind of authentic moral sensibilities of the people, but the state is a vehicle to refashion those sensibilities and to actually create the people that he claims already exist.”
Hazony uses words and concepts idiosyncratically. Where others talk about the “Judeo-Christian” religious tradition, he talks only of the “Anglo-American” national one. In a brazen attempt at redefinition, Hazony insists on the diametric opposition of “nationalism,” which he sees as good, to “imperialism,” which he sees as bad. Nationalism, he says, is a “principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course.” This definition justifies the isolationism of JD Vance, but it is unable to reconcile President Trump’s antipathy towards multi-lateral bodies with his imperialist ambition to annex Canada, Greenland, or Panama, or his plan to take over the Gaza Strip. Trump, an avowed nationalist, is only the latest and most obvious counterexample. Hazony’s idea folds before the long history of nationalism, colonialism, and the mess of twentieth century geopolitics. The crushing of foreign nations in the name of your own national empire is a historic course down which nationalism runs—nationalism often produces imperialism—and Hitler is surely primus inter pares in this regard. Hazony seems unbothered by history’s refusal to conform to his prescription. In an apparent effort to rebrand the ideology to make it more palatable for himself (a Jew) and the public (who know, of course, of Nazism) he asserts that “Hitler was no advocate of nationalism.”
Painting an intellectual portrait of Hazony amidst these contradictions is often confounding.
Overcoming his distaste for the childless philosopher, Hazony adopts Kant’s ethical axiom that “ought implies can.” For Kant and Hazony, one can only be said to have a particular obligation if it is actually possible to fulfill it. So when Hazony writes, in Conservatism, “Men are born into families, tribes, and nations,” “Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchically structured,” and “This [hierarchical] structuring of the political world is natural and inevitable,” he is, in effect, arguing that there can be no obligation to mitigate hierarchy or advance political equality because, in his view, that is impossible.
Hazony takes it further, now abandoning Kant and confusing “is” with “ought”: the fact that political structures are hierarchical instead of equitable is not merely to be accepted, it is to be embraced and reinforced as a source of our obligations to bow to authority. “In a conservative society, then, young men and women … wish … to preserve intact and advance within the hierarchy into which they were born.” They are not to challenge the hierarchies and traditions they inherit, and change may be implemented in rare cases, and only if it “will bring honor to their forefathers.”
Throughout his work, Hazony confuses historical facts for moral obligations. The fact that particular people have risen in these traditional hierarchies is, according to Hazony, reason enough to give them deference, if not outright obedience. In Conservatism, he writes, “Political obligation is a consequence of membership in families, tribes, and nations …. Political obligation, whether to one’s family, tribe, or nation, does not arise from consent.” Hazony argues that we are (and ought to be) beholden to these hierarchies regardless of our consent. He claims to support democracy, but his preference for hierarchy, skepticism of individual reason, dismissal of equality, and rejection of government-by-consent undermine the most basic principles upon which democracy rests.
Hazony is aware that this line of reasoning is dangerous. Apparently recognizing that not all hierarchies are just, he introduces a caveat. “Slavery,” he writes in Conservatism, was an “unspeakable digression from the course of English constitutional history.” But, to Hazony, slavery was not wrong because chattel slavery is universally despicable, or because government discrimination is wrong—as we can see, he is in favor of government-sanctioned national and religious discrimination—it is wrong because it is a “digression”; it is not an authentic part of the tradition (this allows him to draw parallels between slavery and other digressions, referring for example to “the twin evils of atheism and slavery”).
But Hazony doesn’t have a robust system that can differentiate the authentic parts of the tradition from the inauthentic. A great many conservatives defended slavery as traditional. Some have carried this habit into the twenty-first century, including Doug Wilson, a pastor and podcaster with whom Hazony shared a stage at NatCon in 2024. Wilson, a self-styled “paleo-confederate,” gained notoriety for his 1996 tract entitled “Southern Slavery as It Was,” which tries to refute criticisms of the antebellum South. On pages in which he denies his own racism, he also claims the “South was correct about the central issues of that War” and abolitionism was “a rebellion against God.” In the years since, he has doubled down on his defense of “the [southern] system as a whole” and the myth of the happy slave.
In a chapter in Conservatism titled “Tradition and Truth,” Hazony tries to develop a system for evaluating which parts of the tradition are authentic (and good) and which are not, but this ethical system is circular. “Sensations of attraction and exhilaration” are enough to presume ethical truth, and feelings of “aversion and anger” imply falsehoods. Then those presumptively true ideas are put to the historical test so we can see their “truth” or value. But both the ideas and our metric for judging them must emerge out of the “Anglo-American tradition.” Hazony’s dog chases its own tail on a path of moral confusion, and we are left with a system of hierarchy based on inherited tradition. So the interpreter and upholder of tradition becomes the arbiter of right and wrong in the political world. “The only way to resist this [liberal] outcome is by means of a tradition carried forward through the medium of human hierarchies, which propagates to the extent that those who uphold it are honored for doing so.”
Hazony rejects inalienable rights. “Too many believe that the freedom of the individual is a gift that is ours by nature. But there is little truth to this.” He denies that proper government derives its power from the consent of the governed—“as a general matter, political obligation has little or nothing to do with consent”—and mocks the idea that “all men are created equal.” To Hazony, the challenge of creating a more free and fair society is pointless, because political equality is an utterly fanciful chimera. To those who say that all people ought to be equals, Hazony retorts that “one might as well say that they all ought to sprout wings and fly to the moon and back at least once each year.”
Hazony’s dog chases its own tail on a path of moral confusion, and we are left with a system of hierarchy based on inherited tradition.
For a supposed American nationalist, Hazony’s dismissal of the tenets of the Declaration of Independence seems jarring, but it lines up with the National Conservative version of the American founding promoted in Conservatism. “Neither America nor Britain has ever been a ‘creedal nation,’” Hazony writes, “defined primarily by an abstract formula as found, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence. Conservatives regard this as a myth promoted in the service of liberal dogma.” This revisionist retelling of the American founding is at the very center of the National Conservative movement. In JD Vance’s address at NatCon 4 last year, he declared that “America is a nation.” Eric Schmitt gave a similar speech to this year’s conference; at NatCon 3 in 2022, Michael Knowles gave a sermon saying the same.
For years conservatives beat the drum of “American exceptionalism.” They claimed that America’s founding ideas made it uniquely virtuous. But for NatCons it is not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution that makes America great, it is the nation, the volk. In Nationalism, Hazony defines a nation as “a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises.” In Conservatism, he approvingly quotes John Jay, who defines the “American Nation” as “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
With this definition in place, Hazony finds himself in a bind. He has built a philosophical system that promotes nationhood and hierarchy, but he apparently cannot abide that this would inevitably promote tensions between in-groups and out-groups, and most likely lead to a racial or national caste system. He insists that his theories will lead to “conservative democracy,” in which the high degree of societal cohesion among the “dominant culture” will give the dominant group the confidence to be tolerant of minority groups of a different national origin or religious persuasion.
His willingness to gamble the rights of minorities is of particular note given the special attention he pays to Jewish exclusion in his work. Jewish organizations across the political spectrum have been fighting against the idea that there are some Americans that are “more American” than others, that Jews are in any way less American than Christians, that Semites may be less American than Anglo-Saxons, for more than a century. There hasn’t been much in the way of organized Jewish pushback against National Conservatism, but that may be because the movement isn’t well-known within mainstream Jewish circles. When we met, Elliot Abrams, Tikvah’s chairman and himself of the right, asked rhetorically, “What percentage of American Jews have ever heard of national conservatism?” He went on, “[National Conservatism] doesn’t exist in the Jewish world, except as a danger,” and he’d like to keep it that way. “It reeks of tolerance” he said, referring to the NatCon Statement of Principles; it is reminiscent of “a kind of antisemitism that is really a return to toleration, in a sense that Jews do a lot of good things, they’re not really Americans.” Abrams is most bothered by “the apparent supposition that America is a Christian country and the government should reflect that.” People in the NatCon community who take this position too far should be “out of bounds,” he told me. As of yet this concern has not bled into criticism of Hazony himself, whom he knows personally from the Tikvah-verse. Abrams doesn’t imagine Hazony is part of this dangerous element. “That’s certainly not Yoram. I mean, who lives in Israel as a faithful, observant Jew.”
But Hazony is at the forefront of precisely this way of thinking. In fact, for Hazony, Jewish Americans are not part of the body politic at all, not members of the “American Nation.” Jews are not part of that “one united people … descended from the same ancestors;” rather, Jews constitute a separate nation united by “the Jewish religion and law, the Hebrew language, and a history of unifying in the face of adversity extending back thousands of years,” he writes in Nationalism. Under Hazony’s definitions, Jews are a non-American minority on American land. They are not true members of his imagined “American Nation,” nor are they to be treated as such. And in Hazony’s telling this is a good thing. It is not in the interest of American Jews to defend liberal democracy as the source of their good fortune, nor need they protect the right to asylum or the tired immigrants who seek precisely what Jews found in the United States of America.
America is not the golden land because of its commitment to liberal democracy, which granted unprecedented political freedom to all her inhabitants, including Jews, but despite this liberalism. Hazony, in Conservatism and the NatCon Statement of Principles, imagines a political reality in which, wherever a Christian majority exists, “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” Jews and other minorities who are not members of the “American Nation” would, he pledges, be “protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children.” This political predicament would hardly be novel. Jews living in Hazony’s America are to be excluded from public life and reliant on a benevolent Christian ruling class; they would occupy the precarious position in society familiar to their old-world ancestors. A position that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to the rise of “The Jewish Question” and the final solution thereof.
Perhaps in a nod to his particular concern for American Jews, however, he reimagines the American founding to include Jewish ideas, if not Jewish people. In his telling, the American founders (or at least, the good ones) were Hebraists who, contrary to popular belief and scholarly consensus, rejected the rational liberalism of Locke or Rousseau, and rooted the American Project only in British constitutionalism and a narrow Christian conservatism. In his telling, a little-known seventeenth-century Christian Talmudist and constitutional scholar named John Selden is the true intellectual godfather of the American founding. Selden was influenced not only by the Bible and British constitutional history, but also by the rabbinic legal tradition as found in the Talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin, on which he wrote a commentary. Selden’s supposed dependence on biblical and Talmudic principles in developing his Christian constitutionalism allows Hazony to reconcile his Orthodox Jewish practice with his Christian Nationalist beliefs. Hazony believes that his political positions, like Selden’s, arise out of the Jewish tradition; in fact Hazony wrote a whole book to that effect.
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Critics on the left and in the center argue that Hazony’s philosophy can be used—and is being used—to replace American democracy with something more theocratic and autocratic. On the libertarian right, some have made parallel arguments about the ways Hazony’s vision would impinge on their freedoms and promote authoritarianism. Libertarians have taken to calling him a member of the “woke right,” drawing a parallel to what they perceive as the authoritarian and anti-liberal tendencies of the left. But Hazony is often criticized most fiercely from the far right, especially for his insufficiently enthusiastic embrace of ethnicity, race, and land as the basis of the nation. To outside observers, this is a peculiar gripe. Hazony seems quite comfortable with an ethnic definition, “a people descended from the same ancestors,” etc. Even his earlier and more general way of speaking about nationhood, as a product of shared tradition, shared language, shared religion, and shared projects, has significant overlap with descriptions of an ethnic group. So what then do these people take issue with?
Some proud racists, fascists, and antisemites are surely motivated by their antipathy to Jews. They hate him for being Jewish, and they target the lip service he pays to protecting minorities. They presumably have a problem with his recent attempt to differentiate himself from the “kooky Nazi right.”
But there is also an ideological critique from the far right, even among those you might expect to be Hazony’s natural allies. Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute (a cosponsor of NatCon) criticized Hazony at length for ideological and philosophical inconsistencies. In particular, he ascribes to National Conservatism the moniker of “Internationalist Nationalism” (I doubt he hears the dogwhistle, and in this case I suspect it was unintentional). The NatCons are more concerned with a global order of independent nation-states than with the nation itself. Kesler is unashamed in his nationalist preferences, unlike Hazony and the NatCons who, in his words, “seem wary of the love of one’s own that is a natural root of nationalism.” Hazony’s attempt to bind nationalism to tradition and religion over and above blood and soil is anathema to this more traditional nationalist.
Others are pure populists who see National Conservatism as an elitist ideology, and reflexively distrust it although National Conservatism seems to have made some inroads here. Hazony has been making the rounds on the right-wing podcast circuit, and in an apparent effort to make himself more palatable to the conspiratorial right, he recently took down a video on his YouTube channel in which he harshly criticizes the January 6 rioters, and the president for encouraging them. Steve Bannon, among the most prominent members of the populist wing of MAGA, addressed the National Conservatism Conference for the first time last week, signaling that National Conservatism may be even more influential than previously imagined.
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How then, did Hazony overcome these ideological and political challenges? How did National Conservatism, so at odds with the founding mythos of America and the principle of individual liberty, come to dominate a Republican Party built on such myths? And how did an academic in Jerusalem, ideologically isolated, and recently deprived of funding, go on to build an international movement around his radical and eccentric ideas?
Part of it, surely, was impeccable timing. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Hazony recounted that he started writing The Virtue of Nationalism in February of 2016, “before Brexit and before the election” of Donald Trump. He saw an opportunity emerge and he dropped everything to seize it. Insofar as National Conservatism is attractive, I suspect that its true appeal stems from its accord with a growing belief that sometime, somewhere, something went very, very, wrong in the world, and that things are only going to get worse unless something changes. While economists, political scientists, and sociologists often root this malaise in wealth and racial disparities, and their concomitant inequalities, Hazony takes an opposing view. It is not too much hierarchy that is the cause of our problems, but too much equality; not economic problems but theological ones; not the existence of an “elite” but the particular (liberal) people who currently constitute that elite.
Despite internal inconsistencies, and its disregard for equality and democracy, Hazony’s program holds immense appeal for people like Peter Thiel, JD Vance, President Trump, and others who have displayed an openness to entrenching (or at least an indifference to upending) unequal hierarchies. National Conservatism provides a veneer of ideological legitimacy to what may otherwise be seen as a naked power grab. It does so while still managing to appeal to the populist right with its anti-immigrant push and its critique of a particular “globalist” elite. It is not the truth or rigor of Hazony’s philosophy that explains the rise of National Conservatism, but rather its utility for the political project of an already powerful new class of conservative leaders.
Hazony doesn’t develop a precise National Conservative economic vision. In Conservatism he expresses admiration for mercantilism (what he calls “economic nationalism”), a long dormant economic system that favors a strong central bank, subsidies for key industries, and sweeping tariffs. But he doesn’t get into the details of a contemporary NatCon economic program. Later in the book he describes “property rights and the free enterprise system” as “indispensable.” But he also notes that “the free market can have a corrosive effect on traditional institutions,” and warns against “[a]n excessive accumulation of power by private enterprises and cartels” that could threaten the nation. Elsewhere he argues that we should create “economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life.” He doesn’t offer any metric for weighing what accumulation might be considered “excessive,” nor does he offer a vision for how to balance these competing principles. The ambiguity of National Conservative economic vision allows for populists to speak to the dangers of concentrated power, while the same ideology is used to concentrate ever more power and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. NatCon’s justification for hierarchy, and its deference to those in positions of power, is naturally of great use to those who would use economic means to seize greater power in the name of nationalist conservatism and efficiency.
To those who say that all people ought to be equals, Hazony retorts that “one might as well say that they all ought to sprout wings and fly to the moon and back at least once each year.”
In 2019, on the first day of NatCon 1, Yoram Hazony proclaimed: “Today is our Independence Day.” He continued, “We declare independence from Neoconservatism, we declare independence from Neoliberalism, from Libertarianism, from what they call ‘Classical Liberalism.’” It was also a personal Independence Day for Hazony. It marked another stage in his transition from the smaller world of Jewish conservatism into a much bigger, more powerful, and far more Christian network.
As is their legal right, EBF does not disclose its funding sources, but public records and old NatCon brochures offer an outline of Hazony’s new system of patronage. Cranberg and Moran, conservative businessmen, as well as Tom Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute and a major Republican donor, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the EBF in its first half-decade. Publicly available tax documents show that the National Christian Charitable Fund (NCCF), a massive Christian donor-advised fund (DAF), channeled more than $400,000 to the EBF in 2019, accounting for more than 40 percent of the EBF’s budget in its first year of operation. The NCCF has provided several more six-figure donations in the years since. Donors Trust, a conservative DAF to which Peter Thiel regularly donates millions of dollars, has directed more than half a million dollars to the EBF, as has the Common Sense Society, a group trying to reshape public education around the world. These sums, small when compared to the expenditures of super PACs and political campaigns, have proven to be sufficient to fund the explosive growth of the NatCon movement. In 2024, EBF relocated its American headquarters to the organizational center of the MAGA universe—300 Independence Avenue, home of the Conservative Partnership Institute—signaling Hazony’s entry into the MAGA elite, and the institutionalization of National Conservatism. The National Conservatism Conference has been cosponsored by Claremont, the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and many other organizations in the ever-growing superstructure that supports the MAGA Republican Party.
Hazony’s most profound success, however, has been in shifting the window of acceptable talk and action. A world of possibilities opens up to an executive branch uncommitted to equality, liberty, or religious freedom. We may never know if Hazony’s ideas have directly swayed the president, but there can be little doubt that it has affected a great many of his staffers and advisors.
Hazony opened NatCon 5 last week by declaring victory. “I think that the Trump Administration is the best administration I’ve ever seen …. We’re in power, our friends are in power.” But the rest of his speech had a much more sobering message for the crowd gathered at the downtown Westin in Washington, D.C. NatCon could still “lose,” Hazony lamented, before he begged the conference attendees to work together for the future of the movement. “This coalition was built by Donald Trump. This coalition is broad enough to be able to win the next election, and the next one, and the next one. If you take it upon yourself to drive members of the coalition out … you’re destroying [JD] Vance’s prospects, you’re destroying [Marco] Rubio’s prospects, you’re destroying America’s prospects.”
In his moment of victory, Hazony realized that the National Conservative accession from opposition to government is exposing fractures within the movement. These faultlines were on display at many of the speeches and panels at the conference. A disagreement is brewing over the promise and danger of Artificial Intelligence. Josh Hawley, a NatCon par excellence, spoke out against the disruptive and destructive potential of artificial intelligence for American workers, while NatCons like Peter Thiel and Russ Vought are simultaneously contributing to ideological, legislative, and governmental trends that work in favor of these very technologies.
The NatCon (and Trump Administration) approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and America’s financial and military support of Israel, is a subject of even more discord within the movement. Hazony is a Zionist hardliner, and Schneider has argued convincingly that his far-right Zionism is an animating force behind the National Conservative movement. But at the same time, National Conservatism built a natural home for “America First” isolationists, many of whom are pushing for America to cut support to Israel.
Hazony, who wants the National Conservatism Conference to be the forum where these internal disagreements can be worked out, spoke about this in his address to the conference last week. “Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon you had to love Israel, Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon you had to love Jews … it’s not a requirement.” But he is evidently worried and surprised that Jews aren’t welcome in many parts of the American nationalist right that he helped build.
From his books and speeches it is clear that he doesn’t see the causal chain that leads from nationalism to antisemitism and xenophobia; the nationalists who have gone in this direction have done so “for reasons that I don’t necessarily understand,” he told the conference last week. Perhaps Hazony does worry that his political program could pose a threat for Jews and other minorities in America, and he may hope that his presence on the vanguard of the new right will protect Jews. Perhaps he believes that a brighter Jewish future lies in Israel, and not America. In any case, his concerns—such as they are—have not affected his commitment to the national cause, and he did not respond to requests for comment.
The ambiguity of its economic agenda allowed the National Conservative movement to coalesce primarily around culture-war issues while leaving the thorny material economic questions unsettled. This was a more viable strategy when NatCon was in the opposition, but now that it is in power, the policy particulars need to be addressed. The tensions and contradictions within National Conservatism threaten the movement, but Hazony is a masterful tactician and he is working hard to keep it together.
Yoram Hazony wants to be the Yoram in “Yoram’s Law.” He wants to win the battle of ideas and see a world rebuilt around his philosophy. He once tried to write books that would shift the ideological landscape only of world Jewry. When he forayed into the Jewish political battlefield, he wasn’t so much defeated as sidestepped. His books were widely reviewed, but they never left the stratosphere of ideas; they were never brought to bear on the real world by a willing army. So he moved on, and then up in the world. When Hazony published The Virtue of Nationalism, he found himself a generalissimo, commanding his own squadrons in the battle for the soul of America. For now he sits among the most powerful ideologues this country has seen in a generation; he hopes to stay awhile.