Haivry and Hazony’s bizarre attempt to repurpose federalism for their nationalist narrative.
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You know what, I’m done with Yoram Hazony. I’m not responding to anymore of his nonsense writings. I’m done because I can quit anytime I want, I promise:
“The truth is that America produced a great, home-grown nationalist political tradition, and indeed a ruling nationalist party: the Federalist Party, which advanced a set of principles and policies that were obviously nationalist, and in fact can serve as a model and an inspiration to nationalists today.”
*Sigh*, I’m Ephrom Josine and I’m an addict.
Yes, Yoram Hazony and Ofir Haivry are at it again. This time, in an essay for The American Conservative, they argue that nationalism has been a United States tradition since our nation’s founding.
To go over and properly debunk every part of this 13,000 word essay would take the length of a small book, as well as a team of researchers. However, considering it takes the basic concept of what they’re arguing for this essay to hang itself, I’ll just hit the main points.
The first thing to note is that Hazony and Haivry are making the ideology of nationalism so vague as to be meaningless. Here is how Hazony defined nationalism in the PragerU video that first caused people to find out about him:
“A nationalist believes that the world is governed best when nations are free to chart their own independent course, cultivating their traditions and pursuing their interests without interference.”
However, the anti-federalist seemed to agree. Except they wished not for a centralized federal government to “chart their own independent course” but instead for state governments to do so. After all, the colonies later turned states had already acted as independent nations for decades up to that point, and continued to for almost a century afterwards.
In fact, the federalists were much more the globalists of their day than the nationalists.
Seriously, think about what the federalists proposed: A series of previously independent nations sacrifice their sovereignty in order to be ruled by a centralized government, which can nullify its laws, force it to fight in wars, and much more. If somebody proposed this at any other point, conservatives in the ilk of Hazony would be declaring them globalists attempting to create a New World Order!
How do I know this? Well, when President Wilson attempted to create the League Of Nations, which he hoped would stabilize the world like the federal government stabilized the United States, nationalist conservatives, led by Republican Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge, blocked it.
When Truman created the United Nations in the late 1940s, the nationalist John Birch Society warned that it was a plot to implement communism.
And can we forget Hazony’s hatred of the European Union and support for Brexit? Even to the point where Brexit was the first example of nationalism given in his PragerU video on the topic.
But the Brexit of its day was not the founding of a national government. If anything, it was when states decided to leave that federal government in the early 1860’s. Which side of the Civil War would Hazony have been on?
If Hazony wants to argue America should be a nationalist nation, that’s fine. If he wishes to point to examples in United States history of nationalist policies doing good, I’ll listen. However, if he wishes to weasel himself into the founding of this nation through misrepresenting his own ideology, that is where a line has been crossed.
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