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Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony

Although many members of our forum will balk reading this with it having been written by an Orthodox Jew, this book is probably the most intellectually forceful history and defense of conservatism since at least Buckley.

Hazony has four main thrusts with the book:
1) Outline a history of Anglo-American conservatism that begins predominantly with John Selden and John Fortescue, continues with people such as Hume and Edmund Burke, and is passed down to America predominantly by Washington and the Federalists. He also devotes time trying to determine what “went wrong” with American conservatism and why it has not been particularly successful “conserving” anything since the 1960s (his thesis: Buckley’s fusionism, while well-intentioned and probably necessary for the defeat of the Soviet Union, was predominantly a liberal philosophy rather than a conservative one).

2) Contrast the differences between what he sees are the three major political philosophies (conservatism, liberalism, and Marxism). His main critique of liberalism is that, in his view, it is inherently unstable because of its reliance on a Cartesian/Lockeian model of “reason” - if everyone can use their “reason” to deduce the ideal political system, there must be only one (1) kind of political system, and therefore it is the responsibility of liberalism to attempt to “spread” its conclusions even in cultures that exist in entirely different sociological contexts. Its reliance on reason alone and bold pronouncements also renders it vulnerable to fringe ideologies like Marxism that undermine it by pointing to isolated instances of inequality which liberals then interpret as a systemic problem rather than a one off (Yarvin’s ‘Leviathan always moves left’ phenomenon). Hazony argues that some aspects of Marxist critique of liberalism are correct: (1) that liberty, equality, and rights-based systems are insufficient for understanding the political domain (because people inherently do try to exploit one another), (2) unregulated capitalism generally leads to undermining of a culture as the elite disconnect from the wider society at large. However, he also notes that Marxism offers no tenable, non-utopian solutions to its critiques - all experiments in Marxist government have failed.

He views conservatism as an empiric philosophy and outlines six basic premises of conservatism:
1) Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty
2) Individuals, families, tribes, and nations compete for honor, importance, and influence until a threat or common endeavor recalls them to the mutual loyal ties that bind them to one another.
3) Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchy, and importance is dictated by the amount of honor they have accrued within the society.
4) Language, religion, law, government, and economic policy are institutions of tradition rather than reason and are designed not only to strengthen material prosperity but to stimulate internal cohesion.
5) Political consequence is a consequence of being a member of a group, not something that is strictly drawn from individual consent
6) The above premises are derived a posteriori rather than a priori, and may be challenged and improved upon in light of experience, although change should proceed slowly and orderly, and downstream effects should be considered carefully.

3) Posit solutions out of Clown World and envision what a conservative society would look like. This area of the book is shorter, and the lack of detail here is probably my main critique of the book. The primary remedies he suggests are (1) amending the Constitution to explicitly label America as a predominantly Christian, Anglo-descended nation that honors religion (and tolerates dissenting creeds provided they do not adversely affect wider society as a whole, (2) failing that, using SCOTUS as a battering ram to try to reverse some of the wall of separation of church and state, (3) strict immigration policy, (4) participation in religious congregations and homeschooling, (5) capitalism with strong rule of law and regulatory safeguards that heavily penalize special interests trying to undermine the system.

4) Discuss his own life’s trajectory from the time he was in college through the present day, elaborating on what perhaps individuals can do to live conservative lives at a micro level.

Arbitrary said:

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Harassment Architecture is what you get when a millennial channels American Psycho, Fight Club and Ted Kaczynski but instead of being a full novel it's just all the main character's rantings one after another. It was really, really funny and the audiobook didn't overstay its welcome at 4.5 hours. It took me more than one try to get through American Psycho and by the time that one was over I was really glad it was over. This was the opposite.

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Haha, so glad someone here ran into Mike Ma's stuff. There is some real Right Wing fiction writing right there.