The American right has been having a heated, high-stakes debate about the appeal of antisemitic ideas among younger conservatives. And to my mind, a crucial question is whether this was inevitable: Across the Trump era, the “America First” right has turned against immigration and globalization and become skeptical of foreign military commitments, including the U.S. alliance with Israel. So was it only a matter of time before nationalism opened the door to antisemitism?
I wanted to put that question to Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist and one of the leading advocates for political nationalism in America, in Israel and around the world. He’s also the founder of the “national conservative” movement, whose conferences have attracted a who’s who of right-wing figures, including Tucker Carlson and JD Vance.
Now his coalition is suddenly being fractured by debates over Israel, Zionism and antisemitism. So we’re going to talk about why this is happening, how potent antisemitism really is on the right, and what conservative leaders can do about it.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Yoram Hazony, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Yoram Hazony: Thank you, Ross. These are interesting times. [Chuckles]
Douthat: I always like to get people to say that. It’s good for the promotional trailers, so thank you for that.
I want to start with a broad but basic question. You’ve just been in Washington, D.C., having exciting meetings. I’m sure there’s a lot of talk and argument in the air about the growing influence of figures like the white nationalist and antisemitic online star Nick Fuentes.
Just how bad, really, is antisemitism on the American right, right now?
Hazony: Well, I think it’s pretty bad.
The context for American Jews — and for others who care about antisemitism — is, first of all, a dramatic increase in radical Islamic and leftist antisemitism, which is such a powerful force that many of my Jewish friends have come to the conclusion that in the Democratic Party, there’s no future there for them. The question is whether the Republican Party is actually going to be a party that has an appropriate future for Jews. That is a very big question.
Now, that wasn’t a question for a number of years. People have accused Trump of antisemitism, but it turns out that that was pretty much hot air. Donald Trump gave a very, very clear answer to this. He likes having Jews in his coalition. Trump turns out to have probably the most pro-Jewish administration that there’s ever been.
At the same time, it’s very clear over the last year, certainly over the last six months, that important figures in this coalition — Tucker Carlson is the most obvious example, Candace Owens is a less obvious example — but they and others were kind of mainstream, normal conservatives a few years ago. Now they are reigning over a part of the online right that is sharply veering toward a wide variety of aggressive anti-Jewish messages.
Douthat: Let’s talk about who we’re talking about beyond the specific media figures and influencers. My friend Rod Dreher got, let’s say, a lot of attention for quoting someone telling him that 30 to 40 percent of younger Republicans working in politics in Washington, D.C., like Nick Fuentes. I have a little skepticism of that statistic. The fact that half of Republican Capitol Hill staffers are women, I think, alone should give you some reason to be skeptical. But do you see this as a phenomenon of younger conservatives and right wingers? Do you see it as a phenomenon of an audience that wasn’t antisemitic being activated or drawn in a particular direction? What are we talking about in terms of the scale of interest in antisemitism?
Hazony: I think the numbers are wrong, but I think the analysis is basically right. It’s young people who are subjected to savage antisemitic messaging all the time.
Douthat: On the internet?
Hazony: On the internet. That’s new in this generation. A generation ago you had to look for this stuff. There’s no looking for it 1763633985. All of them know people who are strongly anti-Jewish. All of them have people in their circle of friends that are like that. As part of the podcasts that they watch and the media that affect them, they’re confronted with powerful anti-Jewish — and by the way, also anti-Christian Zionist — messaging all the time.
Does that make them antisemites? No, not at all. It might make them people who are thinking about these things and saying: You know what? Gosh, I don’t really know.
Douthat: So it’s essentially a normal part of the mix of arguments that are in their ecosystem.
Hazony: It is. Absolutely. There’s a clear generational divide not just on this issue, but on many issues. The Republican Party over 45 is a completely different Republican Party from the Republican Party under 45. And the under-45s are, among other characteristics, very, very much online. In terms of their worldview, they’re in a rebellion against the previous generation — and there’s a good deal of resentment, some of it quite justified. Part of this rebellion is also theological. Much of the nationalist right, the NatCon right, is looking for a more authentic form of Christianity.
One of the most powerful characteristics of this new generation’s Christianity is rebellion against the old dispensationalist — I don’t know if that’s exactly the right word, but let’s say the forms of evangelicism that have a clear place for the state of Israel in the end times that are unfolding.
Douthat: Right. There are longstanding evangelical Christian schools of thought that both have a narrative of the end of the world or the apocalypse in which the state of Israel plays a concrete role, and also a theology, often where it is assumed that the new covenant with Christians and the old covenant with Jews run in parallel. I just wanted to clarify that, but go on.
Hazony: Exactly. So they’re rebelling against that.
All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended? — all of those questions are on the table, and I would say, even more than that, this is parallel with a general evaporation of Old Testament knowledge.
This age group is looking for a stronger connection to older traditions, and they don’t necessarily know how to find that.
Douthat: And many of those older traditions have a history of antisemitism within Christianity. The Catholic Church’s relationship to Judaism changed substantially in the 1960s. Eastern Orthodoxy’s relationship to Judaism has been complicated, to put it mildly.
So you think there is a sense of like, reaching back toward resources of the past and finding Christianity’s antisemitic past there? Its anti-Judaism?
Hazony: No, I think they’re reaching into the past and coming up with all sorts of resources. You’ve heard the word “resourcement” — that’s a word that they use a lot — is reconnecting to the sources. But when you’re restoring a tradition, you always have to interpret it. There’s no such thing as restoring exactly what it was before. And so there’s a struggle among groups, but also a struggle in the soul about what aspects of what’s being restored are things that are appropriate.
Just a couple more characteristics about this age group: Unlike the older generation, they don’t really know Jews. They know liberal Jews, but —
Douthat: Why not?
Hazony: Because the entire Trump movement — MAGA, the NatCon, the entire thing — is itself a rebellion against established elites. So if you were being brought up in the old established elites in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, it was just kind of normal that all those people went on AIPAC trips or federation trips to Israel. And you got a lot of contact with Jewish members of the coalition and it was normal.
There’s new elites in town. The right has thousands of young people, hundreds of them have gone into the administration, and they are new to a lot of things. One of the things that they’re new to is sitting around and talking to religious Jews or nationalist Jews.
So this has not been an important part of my job description for decades — running trips to Israel is not what I do — but in the last year, I’ve started experimenting with this, together with friends And I don’t want to be too optimistic, but my experience with this so far is that many of them are open and interested to learn more.
I feel that much of what’s missing right now is making relevant educational experiences available to those people who want it. I think that that would be much more effective than a lot of what’s going on in the public debate right now, where there’s all these accusations of: It’s the 1930s. It’s Weimar — I think that’s not accurate.
Douthat: But, I think some of those accusations come out of what has been the dominant narrative about how Jews should think about nationalism ever since the 1930s and the Weimar era, which basically takes for granted that while maybe Jewish nationalism is good for the Jews — because it’s enabled the establishment of the state of Israel — nationalism writ large is almost always bad for the Jews.
And I think there’s a lot of people — mostly left wing, center-left liberal, but also some people on the center right — who would look at your work, your arguments, the fact that you defend nationalism, that you run a conference organized around nationalist principles, and they would say: Of course he has ended up with antisemites in his coalition. How could anyone have ever been surprised about that?
Hazony: Well, I’m not completely sure that I’m going to end up with antisemites in my coalition. I have discovered that a small number of people who were trusted members have defected to a somewhat different worldview. They don’t have the same worldview in 2025 that they had in 2022. I’m really not entirely sure what the causes of that were, but I think that the assertion that national independence leads to some kind of Nazism and antisemitism is intellectually fallacious.
I think what is true is that Marxists and liberals and nationalists all have their own ways of coming to find it useful to hate Jews and to make the hatred of Jews a helpful political maneuver. And the nationalist conservative movement is certainly not immune to it.
The people who are in charge at this moment are not antisemites and they’re not sympathetic to antisemites. So we’ll see whether five years, 10 years, 25 years from now, whether American nationalism is going to be fundamentally like the movement that Trump built, which is very welcoming to Jews, or whether it’s going to be something very different.
Douthat: Tell me about the virtues of nationalism. You were saying it’s good if we can get nationalist American Christians and nationalist Israeli Jews together. What is the good thing that they share? What’s good about nationalism?
Hazony: OK, so there’s kind of a set pattern of the way political order is thought about that goes all the way back to antiquity. You see this in the Hebrew Bible, but you see it in many other sources.
You can say the natural way for humans to live is in a society of families and tribes and clans. Every family has its own foreign policy, basically. Every family’s a militia. Every family—
Douthat: [Chuckles] My 9-year-old son would very much endorse this view.
Hazony: But there is a state of nature in which families and tribes are in constant motion of allying and disallying. That’s probably the way that human beings live through most of our existence on earth. And the imperial state, the state without limits, that’s familiar from the ancient Middle East, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and then on into Alexander and the Romans, these empires with a mission to conquer the world is not just because they get stuff out of it, but in order to bring peace and prosperity to mankind, because the constant agitation of a world in which every family or every clan has a foreign policy, that’s what imperialism is supposed to put an end to.
Empire in the Hebrew Bible is seen largely as an evil — I could temper that, but largely it’s seen as an evil. And if you have a king that’s from your own people, and prophets that are from your own people, and borders that you’re not supposed to cross because you don’t have an ambition to go conquer the world — that world will be more just and also more peaceful.
But the idea that there is a freedom centuries later that people would call national self-determination — that’s part of the inheritance of the Hebrew Bible.
Douthat: So in the Old Testament, God creates the Jewish nation. He calls Abraham, he establishes Abraham, he promises him limitless progeny. And then the story of the Hebrew Bible is the story of that divinely ordained nation’s relationship to God.
So in a sense, nationalism is from the Jews. But does God create other nations in the same way?
Hazony: Yes.
Douthat: Say more about that. Because, from your perspective, God has not given every nation a Scripture and made a covenant with every nation. He’s done something special for the Jewish nation.
Hazony: For sure. Everything you’re saying is true, but it’s also a more complicated subject — I don’t know how deep we want to go into it.
First of all, the use of the term “nation” in the old biblical traditional sense has an aspect of kinship, but it also has an aspect of language, and it also has an aspect of law, and religion.
There’s the Tower of Babel story: All the world is unified — one speech, one way of looking at things — and God doesn’t like that. God likes diversity for whatever reason. He doesn’t want mankind to be unified and getting ideas.
The bottom line is that God creates the nations. And the idea seems to be, from the beginning — or close to the beginning, at least since Moses — that there’ll be one nation that has a better way of life and a better relationship with God, and that its job is going to be to teach that to the nations of the world.
It raises the question: Was the Torah really only given to the Jews only at Sinai?
And the simple answer is: You can get away with saying yes, but when you know Scripture, you know that it’s not quite so,
Douthat: Well, let me imagine then an argument that some of the younger Christians you’re talking about might be interested in. It’s something along the lines of: Judaism has this national identity, but Christianity is universalizing. It comes on the scene. It takes a revelation given to one nation and takes it to all people, and inevitably yields a more universalist world.
America has elements of this universalism, this sense of: We are a nation, but we are welcoming of all peoples. We do not have an established church — all of these kinds of things.
And from my perspective, I think of America as a country that has both imperial universalizing tendencies and nationalist tendencies. And I think you would acknowledge some of that, and you would say: Right now, America needs more nationalism. What kind of nationalism does America need now?
Hazony: I think America is suffering terribly. Or at least significant portions of America. Certainly these young people that we’re talking about on the right. Let’s start with something very basic.
After World War II, there’s a project to replace the old America — the old Protestant America — to replace that framework with what we today call liberal democracy. It was going on before that, but came to its dramatic moment when God and Scripture were removed from the public schools in the 1960s.
There they grew up in a world where every choice that you make is up to you, and all the choices are equal. Where even their parents, even in church or synagogue, were told: Do what makes you feel good. Generate the values from yourself. Do whatever you think is right for you — which it’s not inherently a bad thing to say, obviously, but in a context in which nobody’s saying: Listen, kids, marriage is better than not being married. Having children is better than not having children. Going to serve in the Army is better than not going to serve in the Army — all of these kinds of very fundamental moral and political guardrails that give you a direction, it’s all been shot away. And once it’s all shot away, you don’t have the basis for a common national culture, and you don’t have the basis for continued existence of a nation. It is palpably tottering in the direction of dissolution and civil war all the time.
The only way to improve that situation is to reassert some kind of cultural center. That doesn’t mean you have to hate anybody who’s not included, but there has to be some kind of cultural center.
In America, in that cultural center, there aren’t too many choices. It has to be Christianity, it has to be the common law inheritance, it has to be the English language. There are things that exist in the tradition that can be restored and can be used in order to find a center again. If that’s not done, then America — it’s just a matter of time before it disintegrates into pieces, or until you have some horrific, horrific dictator who rises to impose order by force.
Douthat: So, I’m trying to push toward a more American nationalism now means what? It means slower immigration — not no immigration — with more emphasis on assimilation and the English language. Is that fair?
Hazony: OK. So first, a slogan. The nationalist conservative movement has got a few slogans. One of them is: National independence, national interests, national traditions. We don’t have an official committee for adopting slogans. We do have a statement of principles that was negotiated painfully over many years. But I think if you want to simply understand what this movement stands for, that’s pretty straightforward.
“National independence,” meaning that the various nations of the West need to shake off the oppressive international organizations, whether it’s the E.U. [European Union] or the United Nations, and to resume something that looks much more like nations determining their own destiny. “National interests” is referring to the purpose of national government. Its purpose is, like Trump says, “America First” — to look out first and foremost for the interests of these people. And then the religion part enters into the national traditions. “National traditions” means both constitutional and religious traditions. You can add linguistic and others.
These discussions are happening in many countries, but in the United States, concretely the most obvious policy issues have been, number one, to dramatically reduce immigration or possibly end it for a period. This is a framework that allows Americans to make sense of demands like: Over 15 percent of the population is foreign born. We need to take a break. We have a right to, because we want to be able to preserve what was good about our society before large-scale immigration.
This framework allows people to understand why it’s morally justifiable to think that way.
Douthat: In order, to go back to your prior point, to encourage assimilation rather than to encourage racial purity, right?
Hazony: Yeah. This has nothing to do with race. There’s strong reasons when you study Scripture to notice that God is really unhappy with the idea that people should be unjustly persecuted because they belong to some other people.
One of the things that’s endlessly frustrating about these discussions — again, on the podcasts — is that they talk about the Old Testament as though it doesn’t have, “Love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt,” or any of many other such passages.
Douthat: What does this mean in foreign policy? What does the American alliance system look like under conditions of nationalist revival, for instance?
Hazony: OK. It’s important to emphasize I’m skeptical of big political answers that are supposed to solve our problems. The argument is that, in general, we’re better off if we have to choose whether we want to pursue world empire. Do we want America to be in part about sending its armed forces to Afghanistan in order to help make sure that the Afghans have a constitution and a worldview that looks like ours? My view is: No, that’s terrible for Americans. It’s not good for Afghans either.
And that shouldn’t be the framework. The framework should be a world of independent nations, where first of all, each nation looks after itself. Does that mean that those are all going to be nations that I would want to live in? No, of course not.
The principle of national independence can be a good principle without having this deductive, “Because nationalism in general is good, that means there are no bad nationalists” — well, that’s ridiculous. I mean, our topic is antisemitism. Of course there are nationalist antisemites, but there are also Marxist antisemites. There’s lots of liberal antisemites, which is something that strangely keeps getting left out of this conversation. I mean, the idea that being a liberal — an enlightenment liberal thinker — makes you immune to antisemitism, that’s absurd.
Douthat: Can you say something about why people who are liberals or people who are on the left would be tempted toward antisemitism? I think there are listeners and viewers for whom the narrative of nationalism yields to antisemitism is just much more intuitive than the narrative of left-wing politics leading to antisemitism.
Hazony: Right. That’s a post-World War II phenomenon, like an intellectual spin to think: Oh, Hitler was a nationalist. Therefore, nationalism leads to antisemitism. But, liberalism has a lavish history of antisemitism.
The liberal Enlightenment — the Encyclopedists, Voltaire — is rotten with antisemitism. The German enlightenment — Kant, Hegel, and many, many others — is just horrific. And it’s—
Douthat: Because the Jews are seen as this pre-modern holdover that resists liberalism? What is the —
Hazony: All the Enlightenment rationalists — all of them — think that what they’re doing is they’re moving the world toward reason. They’re dropping tradition, they’re dropping God, and specifically, they’re dropping the Bible. For all sorts of reasons, they’re extremely aggressive against the Hebrew Bible and against the Jews, whereas they’re more careful with how they handle the New Testament and Christianity.
What you get is — I mean, this should sound familiar because these people are still around today — you get the view that the Old Testament is about genocide. It’s about tribalism. It’s about war. It’s about vengeance. It’s about an obsession with the land. It’s about the claim of specialness and superiority of particular people.
And the Enlightenment, they hate particularism — they hate it. It drives them completely bananas to have a particularistic religion. So the hatred of Jews is because the Jews are the classical example of a particularism, and they want particularism destroyed. They think you can’t get close to God if you don’t drop your particularism and use reason to get to a universal truth that’s accessible to everybody.
Douthat: And then this is transferred to contemporary debates where Israel, as a particularist nation, is seen as an affront to liberal left-wing universalizing sentiments?
Hazony: Absolutely. So I’m not trying to solve all the problems with this idea of a world of independent nations. I’m trying to solve some problems.
Douthat: Let me editorialize at you for a moment.
Hazony: Please.
Douthat: I think that whether or not a listener is persuaded by your case for nationalism, the reality of nationalism right now — the reality of a nationalist turn all around the world — is just overdetermined by tons of different forces, so I think it’s tremendously important to figure out what a virtuous nationalism looks like, because we’re going to have nationalisms in the 21st century.
But I also pretty much take it for granted that an effect of a more nationalist world and a more nationalist America is a deep change in the relationship that the U.S. has had with Israel for the last 50 to 70, 25 [years] — whatever period you want to suggest.
Protestant Americans looked at Israel and saw a country that had a similarly biblically-rooted religion. We were both settler societies and so on. There were these commonalities of nationalism, but a big part of the U.S.-Israel bond was some of that universalism that you were talking about after World War II that was related in revulsion against the Holocaust and Hitler, that was related in a sort of evangelical Christian universalism that went beyond American borders.
And I just don’t see how you can have a world or an America that retreats from universalism, retreats from liberal empire, without having a lot more skepticism about the U.S.-Israel special relationship. Am I wrong?
Hazony: Well, I think that the relationship is going to change for the reasons that you’re saying. I don’t think that it’s — I’m not sure it’s exactly correct to frame it as: Americans had faith in the relationship, and now they have skepticism.
I think we are in a transitional time on many, many issues. And one of the issues is the way America conducts foreign policy. America’s old way of conducting foreign policy for two generations was to see itself as kind of a global policeman with responsibilities to everything in the world.
And specifically with regard to countries that were labeled “liberal democracy” — whether they were correctly labeled or not — but once they got labeled that way, then there was an attitude of “America’s in charge.” And there have definitely been benefits to Israel of this, but it’s worth emphasizing that since right now there are all these people saying Israel could never survive without the United States. But it’s not true.
Israel and America have an extremely special relationship for the reasons that you said. But nobody should be thinking that Israel has to be an American protectorate forever. I’m not only talking about the feelings on the American right, where the aid to Israel has been an issue for forever. Since I was a kid that’s been an issue for the American right.
I’m pretty sure that after the Biden administration, most Israelis have figured out that the aid is a two-edged sword, and I don’t think Israelis want to be told what to do forever, down to the level of which street in Gaza should you send troops to from across the Atlantic. I think it’s a disaster for America to be involved in other people’s wars at that level.
Douthat: So, I’m not going to say how much of what we’re seeing on the American right, right now, is driven by the Gaza War, but clearly it’s not irrelevant to the story. And you have a number of American conservatives, nationalist politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, standing up and saying: I think that the war in Gaza is unjust, or: I think Israel is committing war crimes — and things like that.
How do you navigate that kind of tension, I guess, from the point of view of America or Israel?
Hazony: Well, if the United States feels that war crimes are being committed, I think it’s pretty normal for ambassadors to protest and, if things are bad enough, to take steps to try to change things. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at the antisemitic right.
Let me just give it a label, because antisemitism certainly doesn’t cover the entire entirety of what’s going on. There’s always been an alt-right. I don’t know always, but ever since there was an internet, there was an alt-right. Everybody knew what it was. It’s not a coherent ideology — it’s a bunch of different ideas and different movements. In general, some of them are sick of the American Constitution. They want us to overthrow it. Some of them are sick of God and Scripture. They want to overthrow that. And some of them are sick of having Jews involved in coalition politics in the United States, and they’d like to end that. But that alt-right was always pretty peripheral for all the years that I’ve been involved in this, up until 2023.
OK. Now, 2023, as you say, it’s overdetermined. Obviously that’s when Oct. 7 happened, and that was the beginning of Israel’s war and it affects everything. But other things were going on. Tucker Carlson didn’t leave Fox News in early 2023 because of the war, which started in October. Tucker’s move into sort of the alt-right space preceded this war. So there are other things going on.
And I’m not — well, let me say this somewhat forcefully. I have not discovered that the openness to antisemitic messaging on the right, under the age of 45, I have not noticed that it is a reaction almost at all to supposed Israeli genocide or accusations of war crimes in Gaza.
When you talk to the actual people, the relevant people that we’re talking about, honestly they have no interest. It’s true that Carlson’s program and Dave Smith and a whole bunch of other online people are importing the arguments of the left. I mean, they’re basically reading Haaretz — they’re reading Israel’s Bolshevik lefty-lefty newspaper, which is strange to have people who are supposed to be conservatives learning these things from Bolsheviks. It’s a little bit weird.
But the actual people that we’re talking about, the people we’re worried about, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, these elites that are going to be in government in the United States — those people, as far as I can tell, do not buy the Gaza line. They do have openness to Jewish skepticism and to possible antisemitism, but it’s not about Gaza.
Douthat: See, to me, that’s a very pessimistic reading from my perspective, because it seems to suggest the Gaza War is hopefully a temporary foreign policy crisis that has yielded all kinds of concerns about the U.S. relationship to Israel, all kinds of concerns about Israeli policy. But those concerns could be time bound. They could be removed from the stage.
And if I’m being optimistic about the trajectory of antisemitism on the right or left, I would say remove the Gaza War and the arguments about its justice and injustice from this debate, and a bunch of people who are not hard-core antisemites, but are peripherally drawn to those arguments — the kind of people who might read about Jeffrey Epstein and say: Oh, this Jewish financier who people were saying was blackmailing the U.S. Maybe that explains why the U.S. isn’t doing more to stop the Gaza war — that’s a train of thought. You cut off some of those trains of thought, and you change the foreign policy dynamic, and antisemitism doesn’t go away, but it diminishes.
If that’s not the case, then it seems to me that we’re talking about something that’s more fundamentally rooted in the culture of the internet, maybe the culture of parts of my own religion. You’re suggesting what seems to me to be a darker narrative, a reason to be more pessimistic, that you can, I don’t know —
Hazony: I’m sorry I wasn’t —
Douthat: I know you weren’t trying to be optimistic, but—
Hazony: No, I was just trying to be factual. This tremendous hurricane of a fight that we’re seeing on the right, between Jews and Zionist Christians, against an emerging faction that is hostile to Jews and Zionist Christians being part of the coalition — this fight is not about foreign policy. I don’t think it was ever about foreign policy, but it doesn’t matter. It’s very easy to see that it’s not about foreign policy, because when the issue was: Trump is about to start World War III because the Jews are dragging him into war with Iran. The United States is going to occupy Iran. Thousands of people are going to die. China’s going to enter, Russia’s going to enter, we’re going to lose — those were very, very prominently stated views about what was going to happen up until June 22 [when American airstrikes were carried out in Iran].
After June 22, if this were a foreign policy issue, then what should have happened is that people should say: Wow, this isn’t the old neocon foreign policy. It’s not about conquering the whole world and turning it into liberal democracies. It’s something else. It’s much more realistic. It’s about surgically placing some American power into play in context in which American allies have been doing most of the fighting themselves.
June 22 could have happened. It could have been June 23, and all the people who said these totally crazy things about World War III could have just said: I was wrong. The Trump admin—
Douthat: Nothing ever happens that fast, in fairness, in political debates.
Hazony: No, but fine, it could have been three weeks later — whatever, a month later. Something did happen that was fast. What happened was, instead of saying: Oh, the Trump team, they’re actually pretty good at this. They actually know what they’re doing. They’re not the old neocons — instead of saying that, the same complex of podcasters immediately switched to Epstein. They immediately went to —
Douthat: So doesn’t that — but part of that —
Hazony: Wait, wait. It just got much worse. The anti-Jewish messaging over the summer was much worse than before the Iran attack. Because it went to Epstein, and after Epstein it went to Charlie Kirk and did the Jews kill Charlie Kirk?
There has been all year long a nonstop anti-Jewish campaign, to differing degrees in different podcasts. And that campaign is not about foreign policy. Foreign policy is one of the tools in its arsenal.
Douthat: But then I feel like you are in a way making a version of what would be the typical liberal argument about the problems of nationalism, because these podcasters who you’re talking about — not all of them, but many of them — a lot of people would say they are part of the constellation of nationalism and populism and American politics. Certainly, Carlson himself was a speaker at NatCon.
So aren’t you then left with the conclusion that if it’s not foreign policy that’s doing it, then a resurgent nationalism in America was always just going to develop an antisemitism problem? Do you estimate the liberal critique of nationalism slightly higher, I guess?
[Both chuckle.]
Douthat: Do you give it any more credit than you would have three years ago? And then I’ll ask what you do about it.
Hazony: No, I’m sorry. I mean, I really want to help with that, but I can’t. I don’t, um (pause)
As I said before, I think that hating Jews is a useful tool and ideologically makes sense for some people, within the Marxist framework, within the liberal framework, and within the nationalist framework. The Jews are never going to stop being a potentially useful target. It’s a small group of people with a lot more influence than their numbers suggest, which is annoying to people that that’s the fact.
The specific context of Western history in which Jews continue to represent the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament as a living religion, which lots of Christians admire — lots of Christians feel like we’re brothers, and I feel that way — but many people are always going to say: No, this religion is challenging to my Christianity. I’ve got to suppress it somehow — I don’t think that that’s intrinsic to nationalism.
Douthat: But maybe it’s this: Each form of politics has specific things intrinsic to it that are picked up by antisemites.
Hazony: Yeah.
Douthat: So maybe liberal and left-wing antisemites say: Jews offend against our cosmopolitan universalism by remaining particularist — but within the context of nationalism, it turns out to be Christianity, a certain kind of conspiratorial anxiety about elites, and then the internet supercharging it. That’s how I’m interpreting what you’re saying.
So what will end here? What do you — not just you, but what do leaders of a nationalist conservatism who aren’t anti-Semites do about it? What do you think Donald Trump or JD Vance should be doing about what you’ve just described as a roiling battle?
Hazony: Look, Trump already gave us a model. He already did something. He built a nationalist coalition, which had many different groups in it, and he very skillfully made sure that the different parts of the coalition were honored and to a large degree giving honor to one another.
A political coalition like this is a lot like a marriage. The husband and wife, they’re always going to have different opinions and to a certain extent, different interests. And if they honor one another despite the differences, then you can get through it, and you can have a beautiful marriage.
If they’re not willing to honor one another, and instead, each side feels like: I’ve just got to say everything I think about you. No, now sit and listen. I’m going to tell you all about what I think — OK, so that’s what’s happening on these podcasts.
The Trump coalition was built on trying to give honor to everybody, which meant that everybody’s unhappy at certain moments, because you can’t honor everybody equally all the time. You have to honor one group and then another group. But he made it work. Trump made it work.
What’s happening on these podcasts is an exhortation to a completely different kind of politics. Let me give just a few examples quickly so that it’s clear what I’m talking about. Podcasts that say repeatedly that the Old Testament is about violence and genocide, or the repeated claim that Jews are demonic, that Jews are a demonic force in history, or the repeated claim that Jews are trying to kill every Christian in the Middle East and they have a plan to do it, or the repeated claim that the Jews rule the American government or that the Jews shot Kennedy — I mean, you could just keep going on and on, that Zionist Christians are heretics and that it’s idolatry.
All of these messages — fine, people have a right to their opinion — but they’re abusive, wild slanders. And in a context in which the political coalition is constantly having to absorb these attacks on one or another part of the coalition, you’re not going to be able to maintain it.
Douthat: That’s placing the agency with people offering antisemitic arguments online. But presumably, Candace Owens is probably not going to listen to this podcast and say: Ah, Yoram Hazony has convinced me to stop saying that Israel was involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Hazony: Right.
Douthat: The people who are listening to you, presumably, are the leaders of conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation, which has been in the news for its difficulty navigating this, but also Donald Trump, JD Vance, and would-be future leaders of the Republican Party.
And I will say, one thing about Trump is that he has a unique charisma that I have come to appreciate reluctantly over his years. But Trump got people to vote for him in 2024 who wanted the U.S. to do more to support Israel and its war in Gaza, and who wanted the U.S. to stop the war tomorrow. He got Arab Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., and right-wing Jews in greater New York City. That’s a unique political talent, and maybe it creates tensions that are just really hard to manage for his successors.
So, I want you to give advice — just give advice to JD Vance. What should JD Vance do about antisemitism in his coalition?
Hazony: OK, look —
Douthat: Not tomorrow, but over the next two years.
Hazony: I deliver my advice to JD and to other people in Washington not over the airwaves, and they might not appreciate it —
Douthat: A hypothetical leader of a hypothetical right of center party —
Hazony: Let’s say in general —
Douthat: Put it this way: Is it more about vocal condemnation? That you need people to draw a bright line? Or is it more about institutional gatekeeping? Like, making sure you are making decisions about who is occupying leadership positions, who you’re hiring?
Hazony: The basic, fundamental skill that you and I are admiring in Donald Trump—
Douthat: God help us.
Hazony: No, but he’s got it. He does. He has that skill. We’re hoping to see — in JD or whoever is going to be the next Republican or conservative leader — a similar skill.
What exactly is that skill? That skill is the skill of determining what the boundaries of the coalition are. That means it has a boundary to the left, it has a boundary to the right — every coalition has boundaries. There’s no such thing as a coalition that’s just open on one side. It doesn’t exist. So it means determining who’s in and who’s out. This is not the same thing as canceling them or making them illegal.
The question is: Who’s sitting at the table when you’re making decisions? Nick Fuentes does not have to sit at the table when you’re making decisions. Part of that job of deciding who’s in and who’s out is giving honor, but part of it also is laying down the law.
It means that if particular individuals or politicians or streams look like they could be in — they’ve been in before, and they could be in again — but if they’re causing too much trouble, then the person who’s heading the coalition, the person who’s building it and maintaining it every day, has to be able to say: Look, I need your help. I need you to knock it off. Here are the things I want you to stop doing, or, here are some things that I want you to do in order to make it possible for this coalition to survive.
Douthat: Do you think it’s hard for Republican leaders — again, generic Republican leaders — to do that right now? Do you think that they’re afraid of the forces?
Hazony: Yes. But part of what we’re seeing — and this is a crucial point — they didn’t understand until very, very recently that this dynamic exists at all. Most of the people in the administration and other significant figures — the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, all these other big pieces of the nationalist right — many, many of them — almost all, in fact, of the leaders — have been silent so far, in trying to navigate this summer’s explosion of anti-Jewish messaging. It is a hurricane.
And I already said what their job is, but I didn’t say anything about timetable. Kevin Roberts from Heritage is a close friend. He stepped forward to try to make order in this and destabilized his institution because the hurricane forces are too strong, and he didn’t completely understand what it was that he was stepping into.
Now, Kevin, like virtually everyone else that I know in Washington, is fundamentally ecumenical in his worldview. He wants to see a coalition that’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews working together to make America great. And he’s got all these people attacking him and saying that he’s an antisemite.
It’s extremely unnerving. It’s unnerving for everybody. I think it’s going to take some time.
Look, I know that many people — many, many people — feel such terrible things are being said: “JD’s got to speak up. Kevin’s got to speak up. The leaders have to speak up. Trump has to speak up.”
I understand it. I sympathize, but that’s not the way it works. What needs to happen is for an appropriate set of decisions to be made, over time, responsibly, about who’s going to be in the coalition, who’s going to be outside of the coalition. That means hearing people out. That means learning about this crisis, which most of the relevant players didn’t know until a few weeks ago that there was such a crisis. So now they’re learning for the first time that they have this problem.
And I assume that Heritage is going to solve the problem. I know a little bit about what steps they’re taking, and I think it’s very, very likely that Heritage is going to get on an appropriate and excellent path. And I think that’s true for the other institutions we’re talking about.
People need to learn this subject. Nobody thought that antisemitism on the right was going to be one of the top three or four things that American political leaders had to think about six months ago.
So now it is, now they have to think about it. There’s a lot of good people — really, really good people — who are in the administration and in these think tanks, and they’re working on it. And from what I saw in the last two weeks in Washington, I believe that they will eventually come to appropriate conclusions.
Douthat: All right, I imagine we’ll have chances to revisit this argument in the not too distant future. But for now, Yoram Hazony, thank you so much for joining me.
Hazony: Thank you for having me. My pleasure.
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This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Raina Raskin, Andrea Betanzos and Victoria Chamberlin. Associate produced by Emma Kehlbeck. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Isaac Jones and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury and Arpita Aneja. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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