The assertion by Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony that these battles against Communism and socialism are won is demonstrably false, and little more than an excuse to embark on their nationalist endeavors.
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One essay that seems to be the founding document of all of nationalism (their Genesis if you will) is a 2017 article from American Affairs titled What Is Conservatism? by Ofir Haivry and-sigh-Yoram Hazony.
The article goes after people conflating European conservatives with classical liberals. Of course, what never crosses the mind of these authors is that “conserve” is a relative term, not one set in stone. The communist hardliners who tried to hold a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the final days of the Soviet Union were conservatives by the standards of communist Russia. They wished to conserve the communist system put into place by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
Many of Hazony’s friends are monarchists, but what time in US history are they trying to conserve? America never lived under a monarchy. Even when we were the colonies, King George was giving large amounts of power to the House Of Commons over in Britain.
This is why I tend to not use the term “conservative” all that often when talking about my political views, it doesn’t actually tell people anything. For instance, you would assume a conservative would be interested in defending the Democratic-Republican ideas of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Deceleration Of Independence. Yet, another nationalist commentator, Sohrab Ahmari, once said one of the best parts about being Catholic was how he no longer had to defend Jefferson.
The ideology of nationalism is not so much conserving America as it is regressing it. Many of these men have a hatred of free trade. Yet trade, for all intents and purposes, was American foreign policy for the vast majority of the nation’s early days. I’m currently waiting for a First Things article making the case for re-creating Pangaea, with strict borders of course.
However, my wish to write about this essay arose from a section shared recently by Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles on Twitter. It read the following:
“There may have been genuine advantages to soft-pedaling differences between conservatives and liberals until the 1980s, when all the strength that could be mustered had to be directed toward defeating Communism abroad and socialism at home. But we are no longer living in the 1980s. Those battles were won, and today we face new dangers.”
I would like to remind you that Hazony, one of the authors of this article, considers his home country of Israel to be socialist according to his interview with Ben Shapiro. Yet he claims the capitalists have won?
I’m also not entirely sure Hazony would have fought the Cold War. Considering he also told Shapiro he considers “the end of nationalism” to be George Bush Sr. fighting the Russian-backed Iraqi army out of Kuwait.
However, let’s consider the argument of Hazony: that it is okay to ally with liberals and libertarians as long as socialism is threatening us. Under this logic, Hazony should still be okay with alliances.
After the Soviets fell, those leading Soviet bloc states did not just disappear. Some of them remained in power for decades on end, in fact.
The Economic Freedom Index lists 22 countries as “Repressed.” Meaning they have an Economic Freedom Score of less than 50. For reference, China has a score of 58.4, Vietnam has one of 55.3, and Afghanistan has one of 51.5.
Here are the populations of every repressed country according to the World Bank:
Chad: 15,477,751
Liberia: 4,818,977
Central African Republic: 4,666,377
Burundi: 11,175,378
Mozambique: 29,495,962
Turkmenistan: 5,850,908
Suriname: 575,991
Sudan: 41,801,533
Sierra Leone: 7,650,154
Kiribati: 115,847
Djibouti: 958,920
Ecuador: 17,084,357
Algeria: 42,228,429
Timor-Leste: 1,267,972
Bolivia: 11,353,142
Equatorial Guinea: 1,308,974
Zimbabwe: 14,439,018
Republic of Congo: 5,244,363
Eritrea: 3,213,972
Cuba: 11,338,138
Venezuela: 28,870,195
North Korea: 25,549,819
Grand total, that is 284,486,177 who live in a repressed economy. That’s just shy of the population of the United States at 327,200,000. That alone should be reason to concern ourselves with these countries.
And notice the nations that just barely do not count as “repressed.” For instance, I name-dropped China earlier in the article. There’s a reason for that.
You see, I thought the reason the biggest nationalist in the Senate, Senator Josh Hawley, was so angry at China that he tried to ban federal employees from using TikTok was because they are an authoritarian communist state. Same reason we’re not allowed to use medicine from them related to an illness that started in that nation.
Well, China is the only country on the planet to have more than one billion people. And its leader, Xi Jinping, is the General Secretary Of The Communist Party. Yet, these people want us to believe communism is no real threat anymore?
Is Hazony ignoring the threat of communism because he is sympathetic to it? More than likely not, although we do know that Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, has said he’d take communism over capitalism if communism could reach his goals of-whatever his goals are this week, I don’t know.
To put it simply, where are the anti-communists I grew up with? When Nikki Hailey, former governor of South Carolina and Ambassador to the UN, said that we should not go soft on capitalism when a socialist has a good shot of becoming president, she was insulted as a fake conservative for trying to, well, conserve the attitude Yoram was talking about.
Wait a minute, I can’t help but recall Yoram, Hammer, and Cass all going after that article. Yet, the only difference between what Yoram and Hailey said was that Yoram was talking about international threats while Hailey was talking about domestic ones.
So what I think I’m getting is that we are allowed to fight socialism internationally, but domestically we have to sit back and take it. Odd that someone who claims he’s so against socialism he’d team up with his enemies would take that view, but okay.
This room is spinning and my head feels weird. I swear, this happens every time I write about Yoram Hazony.
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