Stephen and Thomas are joined by Yoram Hazony to discuss his latest book Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

Hazony argues that conservatism has failed to conserve much of anything and that liberalism has failed on its own terms. He contends that it is time to promote another vision: Anglo-American conservatism or “national conservatism”. 

What must we conserve and how should we do it?

• Conservative principles:
• “Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty. 
• Individuals, families, tribes, and nations compete for honor, importance, and influence, until a threat or a common endeavor recalls them to the mutual loyalties that bind them to one another. 
• Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchically structured, their members having importance and influence to the degree they are honored within the hierarchy. 
• Language, religion, law, and the forms of government and economic activity are traditional institutions, developed by families, tribes, and nations as they seek to strengthen their material prosperity, internal integrity, and cultural inheritance and to propagate themselves through future generations. 
• Political obligation is a consequence of membership in families, tribes, and nations. 
• These premises are derived from experience, and may be challenged and improved upon in light of experience.”

Three means of political process:

• Reason, Experience, Will:

Reason

• Rationalists, revolutionaries, puritans, liberals, universalists, globalists
• Utopian future, jettison the past, immediate change, damn the consequences, mathematical certainty, applies to all mankind, overrides particular peoples, traditions, customs, nations  
• Stoics
• Hugo Grotius
• John Locke
• Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Karl Marx
• Liberals and Conservatives

Experience

• Anglo-American conservatives, old guard political arts
• Careful accumulation of wisdom spanning ages of men in a given nation, imperfection over perfection. Preserves nations, customs, and peoples with unique laws drawn from universal principles. 
• Nationalism as a political way to overcome the small stock of wisdom and experience of our own lifetimes or eras. “…by consulting the accumulated experience of the past, we overcome the inherent weakness of individual judgment, bringing to bear the many lifetimes of observation by our forebears, who wrestled with similar questions under diverse conditions.” Pg 47
• John Fortescue
• Richard Hooker
• John Selden
• Edmund Burke
• Founding Fathers

Will

• Tyrants, emperors, usurpers, some kings, dictators
• Might makes right, triumph of the will, overcome the will of the masses and their life ways. 
• James 1, Charles 1, queen Mary, Nietzsche, Thrasymachus
• No place for religion or God, “beyond good and evil”, atheism

Some quotes:

“...a conservative political theory begins with the understanding that individuals are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by mutual loyalty. This means that a conservative recognizes the nation is an ineliminable reality. Political reality, as the conservative sees it, is full of...