This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got.
Vance was accepting an award from the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank. And not just any award — an award for statesmanship. Vance in this speech sets himself a few tasks. One is to understand the nature of the left.
And I’m going to be honest, I don’t give him high marks for where he ended up.
Archived clip of JD Vance: The radicals of the far left, they don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for because they know very well what they’re against. What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites and big pharma lobbyists? It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left.
Something I’ve always found interesting about Vance is that if you read “Hillbilly Elegy,” one of the things he’s struggling with in that book is a sense of being othered. Vance reads his own audiobook. You can hear him saying this:
Archived clip of Vance: I realized that in this new world, I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager: Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America’s elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different?
You could imagine that guy going on to build a politics of tolerance, a politics to ensure other people don’t feel that way. And yet he goes on to build a politics all around othering.
Maybe it’s a calculation — what he thought he needed to do to get ahead. But it feels more like projection.
Archived clip of Vance: We are effectively run in this country — via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs — by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
I listen to him, and I wonder if he imagines that everyone who disagrees with him feels as he does — is motivated by the emotions that pulse within him, and that’s why he finds it personally convincing to say that his opponents are driven by hate. Because it often seems like there’s a lot of hate driving him.
But explaining what motivates his political opponents is not the only task Vance sets for himself. He wants to diagnose something deeper, a more fundamental rot beneath Western society.
Archived clip of Vance: Every Western society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal — or at least socially parasitic — that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left.
And what is that something? What is the parasite here? A few sentences later, Vance makes it clear.
Archived clip of Vance: America in ’25 is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that take this incredibly diverse country and form culture are weaker than they have ever been. While our elites tell us that diversity is our greatest strength, they destroy the very institutions that allow us to thrive and build a common sense of purpose and meaning as Americans.
That’s the problem, Vance thinks: too much diversity.
What we have broken is our definition of belonging, how we define who is an American. And the way we have broken it is we’ve made it too broad, too capacious, too accepting, too diverse.
The problem, Vance thinks, is that we have come to believe a story, a fiction, that says Americanness is about what you believe — rather than who you are and where your parents were born.
Archived clip of Vance: If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow?
I watch that, and I think: No one is suggesting we should.
But Vance knows that. He’s setting up a straw man in order to make his real argument work. He’s creating a fake position — that Americanists should be built on nothing but fealty to the Declaration of Independence — in order to argue his real position: that Americanists should have nothing to do with the ideals and the Declaration of Independence.
Archived clip of Vance: If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the A.D.L. would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd — and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this — to saying: You don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.
It’s so interesting that JD Vance chose to illustrate that argument with the Civil War — a war in which one side wanted to dissolve the United States of America in defense of slavery.
What he’s saying here is: Since then we have increasingly identified Americanness as believing what the victors of the Civil War believed — that we are a country dedicated to realizing what was written into the Declaration of Independence.
But Vance is saying: No, that was wrong. What matters is not what you believe about America. It is how long your family has been in America.
You could see Vance as in conversation here with Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass — trying to rebut their vision of citizenship. But Vance is a man of his time. The person he’s rebutting here is Barack Obama. Obama with his funny name, his Kenyan father. With his belief that America is an unfinished project and that the language of patriotism belongs to those who seek to finish it, who seems to some like the fulfillment of the American experiment and to others seems like a betrayal of it.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: I just say, very simply: Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? Why has he spent over $2 million in legal fees to keep this quiet and to keep this silent?
There’s a reason so many, including Donald Trump, were so obsessed by the question of where Obama was born. Vance is not inventing the intellectual challenge here.
Obama and others have made something like the reverse of the argument Vance is making. Here he is marking the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery:
Archived clip of Barack Obama: And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? [Applause.] What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people — unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this? What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished? That we are strong enough to be self-critical? That each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals? [Applause.]
The view on the right is that this vision of patriotism and citizenship is acid for the bonds that hold a country together. Countries are about people, not ideas. They’re about a shared past, not an imagined future.
In 2018, Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, released a book that became a sensation on the right. It was called “The Virtue of Nationalism,” and it sought to build a right that could withstand the challenge that liberals like Obama had posed. It sought to make a right that would reimagine belonging not around the ideals that won the Civil War but the people who fought it.
Hazony became the founder of a movement. Year after year, he would host NatCon — short for National Conservatism — conferences. And year after year, one of the people who would come to those conferences and speak at them was JD Vance. That’s part of the ferment in which he developed the politics we know him for today.
So if you want to understand that politics, that speech and this administration, Hazony and his book are a good place to start.
Ezra Klein: Yoram Hazony, welcome to the show.
Yoram Hazony: Thank you for having me.
I want to ask about the central triptych in your book: families, tribes and nations.
People know what families are. But how do you define tribes? And how do you define nations?
What most of us are raised on is a view of politics that’s, first of all, based on the individual, and then individuals agree to create the state. One of the central points in my books is that this is not, for most purposes, a helpful way to think about things.
So what is a helpful way? Part of the argument is that there is such a thing as human nature. Obviously, there’s a great deal of variation, and people have choices, but there are certain things that constantly recur when you’re talking about human societies. The most basic thing is that human beings are sticky.
I have toddlers. I know that.
[Chuckles.] Right? But even when they get older, put human beings in almost any setting, in almost any kind of social context — you can be at a party or at a conference or something on the street — and within minutes, you have this feeling with somebody, like somehow you’re part of something together. That, I think, is absolute bedrock — this feeling, which I call “mutual loyalty.”
From this perspective, children are born into families. They’re not born free and equal because they’re born into families where they’re not free — their parents tell them what to do. And they’re not equal — there are also brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles.
But that means the first nature that human beings have is not one of freedom and equality but of being part of a little tribe of people who are loyal to them, and they grow up being loyal to their family.
These families can also be loyal to one another. And there are words — like a “clan” is kind of an outdated word, so is “tribe” — but if you look at the way that the tribes are built in the Bible or other ancient texts, you’ll see that families join with other families into clans, and clans form with other clans into tribes, and tribes with other tribes into nations, and then there are families of nations.
Mutual loyalty, I think, is the fundamental human building block for everything that happens in societies.
So the story you’ve just offered is: We are born into families — that’s where our first loyalty lies. Families band together — you can call that a tribe. Tribes band together — you can call that a nation.
Living in the United States with 300 million plus people, I would not describe the organization of the United States as: A bunch of families got together and created tribes, and a bunch of tribes got together and created the modern U.S.A. We’re clearly something else.
Or do you think I’m wrong about that?
I think you’re right and you’re wrong.
[Sighs.] Always!
No, I’m sorry. [Chuckles.] I’ll try to be more unequivocal and unreasonable as we go along.
[Chuckles.]
I think if we’re talking about the United States the way it was 50 years ago, then I think it was much, much more clearly a nation the way that I’m describing it —
In 1975, you would say it was a bunch of families that had come together to create tribes, and the tribes had come together to create a nation?
Sure. Well, listen. This is not necessarily a consensual process. I’m looking at human societies, and I’m saying everywhere in human history, there are these concentric circles of loyalty.
In the 1980s, when I was on a university campus in the U.S. and first becoming interested in these questions, I think there was almost nobody in the United States who doubted that it was a nation. It was certainly divided into streams and parties and different religious denominations. But the idea that it was a unity that was held together by mutual loyalty and almost everybody was part of it — maybe some people were left out, but most people were part of it — I don’t think there was much question. Today, there’s a question.
But when you say nobody doubted it was a nation, was that your definition of a nation? Mutual loyalty, dependent on mutual affection? I think I just garbled that a bit for you.
No, no.
What is the definition of the nation?
OK, so a nation is a collection or a group of tribes that are bound together by mutual loyalty and that share certain characteristics. Usually it’s a language, often it’s a religion. In most cases, it’s a common history of joining together against common enemies. So that’s a nation.
And it’s known — you can look at the symbols: Does it have a flag? Does it have a passport? Does it have borders? But all of those things, I think, are peripheral. There were nations in history before anybody had passports or flags. It’s a natural grouping of human beings.
You said a minute ago — and I think this gets to the core of your project and argument — that in 1975, go anywhere in America, and people say: Yes, we’re part of this nation, we are bound together, we are this entity. And it sounded like you don’t think that is true today.
What is the position you’re arguing with?
Well, I think there are lots of people on both the left and right who read my book and say: That doesn’t sound like America. There can be different reasons for people saying that, but I think that the main thing that’s bothering them — which I am very sympathetic to: Is the division of the United States into tribes that don’t feel a strong loyalty to one another? We are deteriorating in that direction.
There is more and more talk of civil war. There’s more and more talk, on both the left and right, saying that the others are not legitimate, that they need to be driven from the political landscape, driven from the country.
It’s an extremely aggressive view of your competitors and rivals, who are supposed to be your conationals.
It’s funny, as a liberal reading your book, I would not take that as the argument you’re having.
We can go back in U.S. history and find many times when we were divided. We’re quite divided now, but we’ve had a civil war in this country. When you look at the 1970s, there’s a string of political assassinations. There were urban riots in the street. We are not a nation that has always been at calm or at peace with each other.
What I understand you — and some of the people coming up with you, like JD Vance and others — as arguing: This liberal idea that the nation is a commitment to a set of fairly abstract values — that you can’t really build a nation on that. That what gets called creedal nationalism — this nationalism of a shared story — that’s not, for you, a real nation. That it won’t hold together.
Am I misrepresenting you?
A little bit. Because I do think that many nations do have inherited religions, philosophies, perspectives on different things. The question that maybe you and I are disagreeing about is whether people can be loyal to ideas independent of the tribe, the nation, that they’re part of.
My argument is not that the Torah isn’t crucial in defining the Jews, and that the American Constitution is not crucial for defining Americans. My argument is that children grow up giving honor to the things that their parents honor. And then they become teenagers and they rebel, so then they switch over to honoring what their aunt and uncle honor, or maybe the other tribe in the nation. But they almost never invent, out of whole cloth, a completely new set of things to be loyal to.
So, let me take my old friend Bill Kristol as an example of the other point of view, somebody who will say: Look, if you embrace American ideas, then you’re effectively an American. It’s just a technicality whether we make you a U.S. citizen.
I disagree with that completely. I think that it’s true that some people, in adulthood, convert to a different religion from the one they’re raised with or they immigrate and they go to a different country. And there are many immigrants who adopt their new country and they’re completely loyal to it.
So there isn’t always a minority of people who switch loyalties by choice at some point in their lives. But the fundamental thing that’s going on is always that most people are loyal to the things that they’ve inherited from their family and their society.
In the book, you quote a philosopher who says that these big multicultural nations have become “lifeless monstrosities.” You quote him approvingly as making a good argument about what cannot hold nations together. What are some examples of the lifeless monstrosities that you’re trying to warn your readers against embracing or believing in?
There are lots of examples, but the most striking examples are the ones from the Middle East: Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. All three of them were countries founded around the same time that Israel was, around the same time that India was. They were given a flag, they were given an anthem, they were given passports. They were given all of the formal trappings of what many people call a nation, like membership in the United Nations — that kind of thing.
But by my definition, none of those political entities were ever a nation. Maybe Lebanon, when it still had a Christian majority, had sufficient internal cohesion so that you could say that it was a nation. But Syria and Iraq have been warring tribes suppressed by overwhelming might, usually by a minority that seizes power in order to defend itself forever. They were never nations before, and they’re not nations now.
So when people say to me: Yoram, what do you see happening in the United States that’s so troubling and dangerous? My answer is: What really worries me is that the United States is moving in the direction of becoming Syria or Iraq, a country in which only brute force will be able to hold it together.
Lay that case out for me. What do you mean when you say that we are becoming Syria? Which is a country created by mandate, by other empires — jammed together. We have a somewhat different history. So walk me through your fear.
Well, you’re right that America has a somewhat different history, despite the fact that all nations are internally diverse. The United States at its founding was able to come together mostly voluntarily because of the fact that, although the 13 colonies were very different from one another, they were still pretty similar. It was 95 percent or something Anglo-Protestant. And even though there are many different kinds of Protestants, that was sufficient to be able to make the argument that it was one nation, as John Jay writes in The Federalist Papers.
Still the differences were sufficiently great that the United States fought this horrific civil war — 70 or 80 years, whatever it was, after the founding. After that, I agree that there have been many stresses, but I don’t think anything has come close to the Civil War — except today, in which the move is to say the other side is not legitimate.
Let me unpack that for a second. The basic assumption in democracy is we come from different tribes and different worldviews and different perspectives. We would be killing each other if we didn’t get tired of it and finally say: Look, we’re brothers in a sense, and so we shouldn’t be killing each other. Let’s decide that we’re not going to keep killing each other. When we have a disagreement, we’ll have elections, and then we’ll have peaceful transitions of power. And when you win the election, I’m going to honor you. Meaning I’m going to say: Yes, you’re the legitimate president, you have the right to make decisions. I’m not going to agree with all your decisions, but I’m also not going to pick up weapons and start shooting you.
If you look at any of the presidential debates televised in the ’60s or the ’70s or the ’80s, you’ll see exactly this. I’m sure Nixon and Kennedy must have detested each other, but you don’t see that in the debate. In the debate, it’s all about “my honorable opponent.” It’s not just politeness.
I don’t understand what this has to do with the argument, to be honest. You have a book about nationalism here that has been picked up by a lot of people in the Trump administration.
The Trump administration and Donald Trump himself are like the apex predator example of politicians and a movement that, when it loses elections, does not say: My honorable opponents have won the election. We are excited to work together for the good of our shared national project.
If you’re positing your nationalism as somehow a balm to the post-election divisions and the delegitimizing of the other side that we’ve been seeing — there’s some contradiction there that you’re going to have to unpack for me.
Yes. There may be more contradictions. There are questions of political theory, which I think apply everywhere and all the time, pretty much. And then there are questions of current affairs, which is about personalities, to a very large degree.
And look, if I have to take a position on whether I am happy about the Trump administration and the people serving it, the answer is: Yes. I don’t want to hide that from anybody.
And if you ask: Are Donald Trump, or for that matter — if you don’t mind my bipartisaning this for a moment — Donald Trump or Barack Obama — are these politicians of the old mold who thought it was really important to cultivate mutual loyalty between the different parties and tribes? No, they’re not.
That’s part of the era that we live in that it’s even a question. I bet that if President Trump were sitting here and we were talking to him about it, he would say: Of course, you’re right — for those days — but now you can’t get anywhere being a nice guy, because nobody is going to be a nice guy back to you.
All right, so look, I hope you don’t mind my saying it: I consider this to be a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that the United States has reached the point in which, in order to be a successful or even a great political figure of either party, you get there by being incredibly divisive.
Two things on this. One, I do consider the Obama–Trump comparison there to be — I feel like we get lost in that, but I consider it to be fallacious.
For instance, Barack Obama did not say that the elections were wrongly decided. When you’re talking about delegitimizing, I think you’re looking at very different people. And I would say that Obama’s rhetoric was —
Hillary Clinton did say that the elections were stolen, right?
I don’t believe she ever said the election was stolen.
I believe she said explicitly —
There was nothing like the long-running post-2020 effort under Barack Obama, who’s the other person you named here.
But the thing I’m trying to do is apply this to your book and your theory. Here’s what I think you are saying to me: that America was an Anglo-Saxon nation formed together by Anglo-Saxon families that came together to become tribes. It became the 13 colonies, which became a nation. And that there was a long period when America grew in such a way that the clan structure was dominant — and that somewhere in the last 50-ish years, it has begun to lose that structure. And now we are coming apart, and maybe that is creating the level of division you’re fearing.
That we were a nation based on this structure of tribal affinity, and we are now a nation that is too much trying to hold things together through multicultural storytelling. And that is creating irresolvable differences, and the answer is to sort of double-down on the tribal affinity.
Is that how the nationalism fits into this?
No. Multiculturalism is also based on tribal affinity. It’s also based on tribal loyalty. America in 2025 is also a society that’s based on tribes. The question isn’t whether it’s internally diverse and based on tribes. The question is: Are those tribes loyal to one another? Or are they saying: Look, the other guys are evil — we’ve got to destroy them?
There’s a difference between saying: I don’t like the other guys. They’re leading us in the wrong direction. We really need to win this election, but we’ll respect the outcome of the election. And what’s happening now, which is a constant drumbeat, both on the Democratic side and on the Republican side, saying that elections have been stolen. That’s something that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
All right, as I said, I don’t agree with the symmetry there, but let’s take it as a premise.
I think the place where you’re finding my confusion here — because I’ve read “The Virtue of Nationalism,” and it would sound to a listener like I am interviewing a liberal who is saying to me: Listen, America is this grand experiment, and what holds that experiment together is the liberal tolerance of division, disagreement and difference. And that the people in that experiment need to be committed to one another, to our shared institutions, to elections and the peaceful transfer of power — and that what is going wrong is a dissolving commitment to that. In a way, Joe Biden could be making that argument to me.
But national conservatism is making some other argument than that. It’s not making an argument that we need more decency from our politicians or we need just more commitment to the abstract institutions of democracy and the other political party — because I agree with all that.
Tell me where you don’t agree with me. You’re a factional movement trying to change both the Republican and the Democratic parties. Who are you arguing with?
OK. In every democratic country with which I’m familiar, from the United States to India, there is the consolidation of political parties in the last 15, 20 years that are explicitly committed, to one degree or another, to trying to break the particular nation away from and out of the unfolding global system.
From the perspective of all these different nationalist parties and movements that are sometimes quite different from one another but which share certain things in common, the first thing they share in common is that they look at supernational institutions — like the European Union or the World Trade Organization or the International Criminal Court — whose purpose is to try to take all the independent nations in the world and put them under a single rule of a single law.
The basic argument is: The independence of nations — their freedom to chart their own course — is extremely important to all of these nationalist movements, including the Trump movement and the Brexit movement and so on.
In order to understand national conservatism, the most important thing you need to understand is that it’s the product of a time in which people are saying liberal internationalism has wonderful ideals, but it is destroying our nations and our societies.
A second part of national conservatism that’s important to try to understand what’s happening is that most national conservatives think that the old liberalism has collapsed or is collapsing into something that is vicious and intolerant and really should not be called liberalism anymore, even if it uses the term.
Let me just recap what you said. You can tell me if I’m getting you wrong.
The first impulse here is the defense of national sovereignty against these multilateral, global organizations that, as you say, are trying to bring nations under a single rule.
Yes.
And second is a feeling that, for all the high ideals that liberals express about tolerance, the left of the political spectrum was evolving in a way that was deeply intolerant of many of the traditions, groups and ideas that characterize the right — which is part of the splitting apart.
That’s fair so far?
It’s completely fair. Let me just add that — I mean, people are always arguing about what these political terms mean, but most people on the right agree that there is a thing called woke, and most of them agree that it’s a strain of neo-Marxism.
I’m always confused about what neo-Marxism is.
First of all, Marxism is a view that — since Marx and before him — sees liberalism as kind of a big sham. It’s a big lie. As far as Marx is concerned, liberal society is based on a lie, because you convince everybody that it’s about freedom of exchange and freedom of expression, all the rest of that. But the truth is that society is built out of competing groups — he calls them classes, we can call them groups — and that the stronger always exploits the weaker. That’s an iron law, a bedrock assumption of Marx.
So if your assumption is that the only way that you’re going to get justice is through the destruction of the ruling group, the strongest group, then the liberal democratic idea that we’re going to have peaceful competition and peaceful transitions of power — to people who are actually serious Marxists, they look at that and they say: That’s a joke. That’s part of the brainwash, that we’re all supposed to work according to this liberal system. But the truth is that there’s an elite, and they always win, and they always exploit everybody else.
Today the feeling is that liberal institutions, especially after the summer of 2020, gave way to a neo-Marxist younger generation whose commitment to tolerance and to the old system is simply much weaker than the previous generation’s.
You are talking about this movement, this re-embrace of nationalism, as being motivated by the perceived rise of an illiberal left: a left that is canceling people, pushing people with more traditional views to the margins of society, getting people fired from different businesses because of speech crimes. And if you begin throwing people out of the tent for not believing everything liberals do about L.G.B.T.Q. issues or race issues or something else, then you begin breaking down the bonds of affinity.
So you might imagine, on the other side of that, a conservatism that is very committed to the idea that we don’t do that. That we are a pluralistic big tent, and the most important thing is that people from all sides and all views in this country feel welcomed in.
But that is not what I see at all. I do not see a more — what I would call from this perspective — liberal right. I see a much more illiberal right. Where there was, in society, such a thing as cancel culture, people did get fired from different jobs — now I see the institutionalization of that at the federal level.
I see much more effort to police speech crimes, particularly of immigrants who are getting rounded up by ICE because of what they might have said about this or that issue. And also sending in people to go through every grant to see if the word “diversity” is in it.
So I guess I do not really understand — if the problem is what sounds to me like you’re describing — an illiberalism that does not sufficiently take into account that we are a big, diverse country. People are going to have arguments.
This is not a countermovement — JD Vance and Donald Trump and so on — that is saying that. This is a countermovement that is moving much more aggressively to use the power of the state to enforce its vision of what America should be and to make it more dangerous or impossible to be in opposition to that vision.
I think that’s true. Again, I said at the beginning that we’re going to find contradictions, and that’s the way it is. If you’re holding multiple principles, they need to be balanced in some way.
I do think that the current American right — I would really prefer not to use the term “illiberal” for a very simple reason, which is that “illiberal” takes conservatives like me and puts us in the same bucket with the kooky Nazi right, and there’s no need for that. People like me used to be called conservatives.
The actual thing that’s going on is that we have a government that is less liberal, a Republican Party that is less liberal — I completely agree with you. It is moving away from libertarianism, and it’s becoming more conservative and more nationalist.
Well, before you make that distinction, do you think it’s weird then that the “kooky Nazi right” feels more of a home in this more nationalistic conservatism? You look at the groypers, you look at Nick Fuentes, you look at people who are by any measure white supremacists and people we would have called the kooky Nazi right, with their Pepe the Frog memes — they all felt very ill at home in Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. They feel much more at home in Donald Trump’s more nationalistic Republican Party.
Sure.
So you want to create this distinction with the kooky Nazi right, but it seems to some degree like this renewed nationalism has been a way in for them. It hasn’t pushed them out.
There may be some truth to it, but not enough. When you’re in the opening stages of something, there’s a lot of working out that’s still going on, and it’s not exactly clear what the candidate stands for and what his people stand for and who’s actually supporting him.
I think that in the last decade, there’s been a lot of clarification. You mentioned Nick Fuentes, who, I think, is really a small minority figure and not particularly important — but he’s well known.
So let’s just take him for a moment. Nick Fuentes is not — first of all, I don’t think he’s comfortable with Trump at all.
Trump had dinner with him. Romney would not have had dinner with him.
Trump once in history had dinner with him, and then never had dinner with him again. I think that tells you everything you need to know — that he never had dinner with him again.
OK. [Laughs.] I feel like it’s the “once having dinner with him” that tells me what I need to know. But I take your point.
I don’t think that’s completely fair. Because look, I’m speaking just for myself — not for the president. I’m speaking for myself.
There are different styles of how to do politics. My style of how to do public affairs is I basically am willing to meet with anybody and talk to anybody. Maybe you have a little bit of that, too. So I will never blame — I don’t think I ever have, and I don’t think I will — blame a political leader because once he sat with somebody.
The reality of Nick Fuentes is — and I’m sorry that your listeners need to be made familiar with Nick Fuentes, because there’s much bigger fish that we have to fry in this conversation if we want to. Nick Fuentes, a young Holocaust revisionist, kind of Catholic, made himself famous on the web for his incessant attacks on Jews. And is he comfortable with the Trump administration? No, he is not comfortable with the Trump administration.
There are all sorts of weird things on the American political right. They are getting stronger. I don’t want to pretend: Oh, no, they’re totally irrelevant. We shouldn’t be worried about them.
That’s not true at all. They’re getting much stronger. But the idea that they’re comfortable with Trump — I mean, just look at what’s been going on for the last few —
The point I’m making about this, which I do think goes to the real fish we’re frying, to use your metaphor, is: JD Vance just gave a speech on the need for statesmen, and he builds that speech around the definition of Americanness.
What he says is that when you divorce Americanness from the chains going back across the country’s past, back to the tribes, the families — something that’s more like the Americanness of familial ties that you’re talking about — that there are a lot of people who don’t believe in high forms of political equality, or who would say things that the Anti-Defamation League thinks are bad, but they are American. They are part of this project, and they are more American than these immigrants coming here who claim to believe in the Declaration of Independence.
The first time I heard the vice president give his riff about proposing to his now wife and telling her he doesn’t have much, but he’s got this graveyard plot, and he’s got generations of his family buried there, it was not at the Republican National Convention. It was at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference where he gave that speech:
Archived clip of JD Vance: When my wife and I got — when I proposed to her, we were in law school, and I said: Honey, I come along with $120,000 worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky. And that’s what you’re getting.
For a lot of these groypers — Nick Fuentes is one example, but there are a lot of people on the young right who feel this way to varying degrees and with varying levels of Holocaust revisionism — a definition of Americanism is more about your history here, your ethnonationalism, your connection to an Anglo-Protestant culture. It’s not the expansive multiculturalism of, say, Barack Obama or Kamala Harris.
That is much more congenial to them. It’s not because it is more tolerant of the other people who are here, but because it fits their sense that America should be more about blood ties and history.
This is a new, contested definition of Americanism that is very suspicious of immigrants and outsiders — this is a magnet for them.
I don’t think so. I mean —
I feel like it’s a little bit denying what we know the new right is.
No, I think that because I run nationalist conferences, and have been doing it for most of a decade — I’m sorry, but I do think I have a little bit more information than some other people do —
You can definitely pull rank on me on this —
It doesn’t mean that I know about everything. I’m not going to compete with you about knowledge of Barack Obama. But I happen to actually know, from the inside, that the National Conservatism Conferences, which are — just to make it clear to the listeners: MAGA is a very broad alliance. I would say, roughly, it’s the alliance of different groups that came together to make it possible for Trump–Vance to win. But those are not all national or nationalist conservatives.
There are all sorts of people. There was Elon Musk, and there’s R.F.K. Jr. —
That’s why I keep zooming in on Vance, because I do think Vance comes from the national conservative wing.
I do. And I would think that there are many others, just to not only make him the issue.
Marco Rubio spoke at several of our conferences, and I think he explicitly sees himself as a national conservative.
Archived clip of Marco Rubio: This realignment that’s happening in American politics is not ideological. It is largely the divide between people who work for a living — who live in the real world, who have to raise their children — and people who live in a fantasy world.
Josh Hawley has spoken at a number of the conferences.
Archived clip of Josh Hawley: Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation, and so I am. [Applause.] And some will say that I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do.
Let’s talk about other people in the administration. There are important people like Mike Anton at the State Department; or David Goldman; Elbridge Colby at the Defense Department; Stephen Miller.
All of these people are, to one degree or another, NatCons. They come to our conferences, and they contribute, and they’re a part of it.
Now notice who’s not a part of it: If you look at the flyer that we circulated from the very beginning, we distinguished ourselves in two directions — from the Libertarians, which is basically the liberal Republican wing at the center, who were basically to our left, and from racialist and anti-democratic movements that are to our right.
Both sides — there’s been friction constantly. And by the way, I don’t mean that every single person who came to our conferences exactly fits that. We have a statement of principles — you can read it. People know what we stand for. But the key to what we’re discussing now is: Is there a border between national conservatives and what’s to the right of national conservatives?
I think that the border is clear. I’m not saying that we never make a mistake or there’s never confusion about some —
What is the border?
OK, the border is: From the beginning, we have said we do not admit, we do not invite, people whose platforms are racialist.
So there was a big — in our circles, anyway — fight with a publication called VDARE, which is —
I would call it a racist publication.
It’s certainly, at a minimum —
It is a racialist publication. Let’s definitely call it that.
At a minimum. VDARE is happy to publish people who are racialists. So that’s a minimum. I think maybe you could say more, but for us that was too much. We did not want to have people who are trying to base politics — you used the word “blood.” We should probably come back to it.
“Blood and soil” is literally a Nazi term, meaning the Nazi flag is red and black because it’s blood and soil. The same is true of other quasi-Nazi parties in Europe, that they use those same colors. We are not interested in a nationalism of blood.
But your debate with people to the right, which I take to be real — and I understand that national conservatism is not racialist — I think the thing I’m trying to tease out is more your debate with people to your left.
The reason I keep mentioning these JD Vance speeches is because, to me, he is the country’s most prominent ideological national conservative. Trump is an intuitive national conservative, but Vance is more of an ideologist.
When Vance gave the NatCon speech, he said that the values of America are important but that Americanism is ultimately about a presence here on this soil — that it is more about being part of the tribe.
I understand national conservatism as trying to shift us toward the idea of the tribe — and away from something like the more Barack Obama or multicultural view that Americanism is about a commitment to all people being created equal.
The thing I am trying to pin you down on here is that, if what you all were really worried about was too much — what I would call, illiberalism — too much pushing people away for holding views you’re not allowed to have — I’d think the movement would be more interested in not doing that.
But I understand the argument of NatCon — I’ve watched the speeches, I’ve come to see you before, and I take it seriously — as an argument that the Democrats, the multiculturalists, the “woke” left, the neo-Marxists have given up on the bonds that hold countries together, and that the direction they are taking the country in will not leave it with enough cohesion — “cohesion” is a word that comes up a lot in your book — to be a country.
Yes.
That it cannot absorb this many new people. It cannot be this broad in its ideas. It cannot be this dismissive of its traditions. That the core of this country are the people who have other people buried in the graveyards. And that’s an argument made explicitly.
If you think I’m mischaracterizing you, tell me. But I think this is the thing I’m trying to get at, because this, to me, is a very live argument in America right now.
No, not only are you exactly right, but I think you said that very eloquently. If you feel like coming and speaking at NatCon and delivering such a speech, you might get a lot of applause.
I’m just not sure I understand what’s so terrible about it. Because, look, you keep bringing up JD. JD is a man who, true, his family has been here for a long time, but he’s a convert to Catholicism. He’s married to a woman who’s a child of Indian immigrants. And I just think it’s a little bit strange to be trying to make him into some big threat to pluralism.
Fifteen percent of the American population is foreign born, and in general, NatCons think that is the maximum that is possible for the country to take before it literally starts falling apart. They really do believe in the possibility of factional and tribal violence.
And the impulse to restrict, to deport, or to have a moratorium on immigration — for most, it’s not an “in principle” argument that there should always be a permanent moratorium on immigration. It’s literally a reaction to what is seen as, at this point, 60 years of abusive immigration, which has spun out of control and is threatening the cohesion.
I don’t want people to think it’s a mysterious word. “Cohesion” is just — first of all, it’s a John Stuart Mill word. Lots of liberals have used it in history —
I wasn’t suggesting “cohesion” is a bad word.
No, I’ve heard people say that “cohesion” is like a fascist term. Never mind, you didn’t say that.
But when we’re talking about cohesion, what we’re talking about is just the mutual loyalty we were talking about. When there’s an external pressure on the polity, on the society — like an attack from the outside, a revolution from the inside, hatred and contempt internally, financial crisis — when there are pressures on the society, do people pull together to rise up to face the challenge because they feel like they’re one and they need to circle the wagon, then come together? Or do they fly apart blaming one another? That’s what the word “cohesion” is referring to.
So I haven’t yet said it’s bad. I do think it can go in bad directions. But take, for instance — you’re Israeli. There was a huge amount of social division in Israel before Oct. 7. There were constant protests of hundreds of thousands of people against where Netanyahu and his coalition were taking the country. Then Oct. 7 happened, and it brought an immediate shift in that.
You’re nodding. I don’t think you would contest this narrative.
New York City is a city of immigrants, with more than 15 percent foreign born. New York City after Sept. 11 had an extraordinary cohesion of identity.
National identity coheres — identity, in general, coheres — under threat. I think this would look very different if America was actually being invaded. Not invaded in the way that the Trump administration talks about it, but an actual invasion.
That shows you that solidarity and cohesion — they wax and wane. They’re situational. They loosen in times of peacetime and harden in times of war.
I think that’s true, but let me add a caveat: I don’t think it’s true that all identities, all loyalty groups or identity groups, that all of them become stronger under external pressure.
There’s a difference between a strong identity and a weak identity. It’s a spectrum, obviously. The reason that I write in terms of family, tribe and nation is because those are very often the kinds of things that, under duress, strengthen. But not always. Divorce within families is an indication of the weakness of the underlying cohesion.
So let’s bring this down a level of political organization in a way that I think helps make it more legible.
New Hampshire and Massachusetts are part of the original colonies. In terms of having a continuous physical legacy of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans there, and just having a continuous connection to the American story, you can’t do much better than Massachusetts and New Hampshire. New York, actually, too.
I’m Californian. My state was formed more recently. My state is far above 15 percent foreign-born. My state is a very diverse state compared to others.
Is California less cohesive? Does it have less political identity? Is it lesser? Is it not working? Is becoming California — which, in a lot of the trends we’re talking about, is far more advanced in the nation as a whole — something to fear?
For national conservatives, definitely. But my impression is that the identity of the states, at this point in American history, is in general very weak.
The question here is: Right now, in America, is there such a thing as a Californian identity of the kind that would, for example — and this is something people are talking about all the time. The federal government sends in troops to Los Angeles. And people ask the question: Is the California National Guard going to obey the orders coming from Washington?
I’m sure you know better than I do, but my impression is that they will, that we’re not likely to see, in the foreseeable future, any kind of anti-American violence from the —
But you’ve moved off the comparison I actually offered, though.
OK, I’m sorry. Not on purpose.
I’m familiar with New York. I’m familiar with Massachusetts. I’m familiar with states that have this longer lineage. And I am saying that I do not believe that is what creates or separates solidarity. I think my identity as a Californian is as strong as anybody’s from New Hampshire that I’ve met — and New Hampshire is tiny, so it’s much easier to be solidaristic there.
Texans also have this dynamic. Texas is also a younger state. Texas is also a very multicultural state. I think Texans would tell you — and frankly, I think JD Vance would tell you — that they fit that vision of nationalism and cohesion better than Vermont does.
The thing I am poking at is whether or not this more soil-based, lineage-based vision of identity is actually stronger. The political claim being made by your movement, by your book, is that this is a stronger, safer way to construct a nation, and that nations like America have gone badly off course and are getting into more and more dangerous territory.
The Trump administration is built on the idea — Stephen Miller is executing on the idea — that what they’re trying to do is save our national identity by doing some very violent and aggressive things to definitely make America less like California. Stephen Miller is from Santa Monica, and he did not like what Santa Monica was growing up. He was famous for that.
And I just don’t think it’s true. I don’t think America would be more successful if it built itself like that. I think that we have dramatically outcompeted other nations that are far less open than we were — than we are, even. We have dramatically outcompeted nations that are much less creedal than we are.
This vision that the nation will better hang together and be stronger by being less of this universalistic nationalism and more of this particularistic nationalism — I want to hear the argument for it.
Well, I think I should ask a clarifying question, because you graciously allowed me to assert what I think is true, that the “blood and soil” is not a relevant slogan for us. You let me off the blood part. Are you focusing on JD’s very moving discussion about where his ancestors are buried in Kentucky in order to make an argument that nationalism is about the soil?
I’m trying to say quite explicitly that I think national conservatism — that I think JD Vance, that I think this movement that you have been a leader in — is trying to make a move that is much more focused on the people who have been here — Donald Trump often talks in terms of “real Americans” — that you are all the ideological superstructure for a thing that is happening.
I’m taking the ideological arguments here very seriously. But I am saying that I don’t buy them. And I don’t buy them because I come from a part of this country that is different. And I think my parents — my father is a Brazilian immigrant, my mother is a couple generations back from Eastern European Jews on both sides. I don’t think I am less American than people who can trace themselves back to the Mayflower.
The implication of a lot of these arguments is that I, or people like me, are or should be viewed with more suspicion. And I think people don’t always like to defend that, but if they’re not going to defend that, I actually don’t know what they’re saying.
OK. You’ve mentioned multiculturalism a few times, so let me just address that directly.
Multiculturalism — I don’t know how far it got in the general public, but as an academic theory, it was very popular in the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. It’s a very optimistic theory, because what it assumes is that there’s going to be lots of internal diversity.
Notice that nationalist conservatives also think there’s going to be lots of internal diversity. The arguments between them is whether there has to be a center in order to hold the thing together, in order for a society to be able to endure over time.
Much more important than the question of how many generations have the people been here is the question: Is there a dominant culture that consists of a group or groups that have a strong loyalty to one another? If there is such a thing, then there can be lots of minority groups that have very different approaches. They can be closer or further. They can feel more a part of it or less.
But it was possible to have a successful relationship with all sorts of small minority groups when you could count on there being a center. That center recognized that America was founded by Anglo-Protestants, recognized that it was also a nation that brought in Catholics and Jews in large numbers and succeeded — I think very well — in bringing them into this Anglo-Protestant country. Not without problems — but it worked.
The fact that it was a Christian country, that up until the 1930s the Supreme Court still referred to Americans as a Christian people, that it was legally a Christian country, that it was culturally run by Protestants — that didn’t prevent it from being, despite its many flaws, something that was really beautiful and superior to many other countries in the world.
The question then — and I think this is really the argument between you and JD, or you and me — is whether you can learn from the success of that enterprise, that the center — the central place of Anglo-Protestantism in America, with a strong Old Testament taste, the English language, the common law — I don’t expect everybody to be common lawyers, but I do expect people to say: Yes, the jury trial is not a universal dictate of reason. It’s an Anglo tradition, and it does what it does because the people here believe in this Anglo tradition — not all of them, but a core. So if you have that, then you can bring in lots of immigrants and you can get them to adopt those ways.
If you don’t have the center, then it becomes possible for immigrant groups — but also other groups, not just immigrants — for secessionist groups of different kinds — religious, sectoral, whatever — to say: Well, actually, we live here, and we have rights here, but we detest the inheritance of this country, and we’re going to do whatever we can to overthrow it and end it.
That’s what JD is reacting to. He’s not reacting to, like, there shouldn’t have been Catholic immigrants. That’s absurd. He’s —
But isn’t the history here an inversion of this? This is really helpful — I think we’re really getting to the core of this.
I look back on American history, and you’re saying: Well, this is what creates the risk of civil war.
But what created the risk of civil war was a lot of states that would sign on to everything you’re saying — there was a profound disagreement over whether or not there should be slavery and whether or not the people in this country should have any form of equality, and they tried to secede.
It feels like a lot of places that are highly nationalistic are not actually that stable. They become imperialistic. That’s a lot of Europe in the 20th century. The modern, more nationalistic right does not feel to me more tolerant and more interested in making sure the bonds between us are strengthened.
So it just feels to me like when you output it to the real world, I sort of understand the argument here, but it doesn’t hold together — the idea that we would have a stronger nation on the other side of this vision.
This is why I brought up places like California. I agree that our national identity is, at this point, stronger than our state identities, but our states are still meaningful to us. I can tell you it’s meaningful to me.
California has less of that American center that you are describing, that Vice President Vance is describing, than New Hampshire does. It has less of that center than a bunch of older states. It’s more diverse. It’s more creedal in that way. And it’s a very successful polity. The people on the right can say what they want, but the reason we debate California is that it matters. It invents the future. It’s a remarkable place.
It seems like a lot of our history in this country speaks to the value of openness. The success of places like Texas and California speaks to the value of openness and the ability to hold people together at incredible scale.
When we’ve had secessionary problems and we’ve had people actually trying to storm the Capitol, it has come from people who say that they’re part of that Anglo-Saxon background — that all they’re trying to do is hold the country together.
There is just, to me, a contradiction in this. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be arguing it with you.
Yes, I understand. It seems like we’re looking at overwhelmingly the same set of facts, and we have different frameworks. That’s completely legitimate.
A lot of the issues that, for whatever reason — and this is not you, in particular — JD Vance has captured America’s imagination in good and bad ways, in a lot of ways. But Marco Rubio has been around for a long time. He’s also a superb person, and I’m very impressed with the work that he’s doing and his presence on the American stage. But even though he’s somebody who was part of the much more liberal Republican Party for a long time, now people are accusing him of being the executioner for doing things like restricting the free speech of people, of immigrants or people on student visas and punishing them if they say the wrong thing.
Now I think from a liberal perspective, that’s a completely legitimate description of what’s going on. But I don’t think that is what Secretary Rubio thinks. What he thinks is that the general over-openness — not the fact that there is openness, but the fact that the openness has gotten to such a point that political movements — in particular, they’re focusing on political movements from the Middle East, which you can agree with or disagree with — but he’s saying: We don’t want the violence and the values of radical Middle Eastern political movements, so we’re going to use the powers that the law allows us in order to reduce that.
He’s not saying: If you’re a Muslim, you can’t be a loyal American.
This is the NatCon project in America. It’s to rebuild a dominant center.
Yes.
People may not like it, but the view is that is what keeps a country strong.
Yes, and that in the end — and I understand, you’ll say: Come on, Yoram, when is the end?
But the argument is that, in the end, the discipline of strengthening the center will be able to make the country confident and tolerant. And that is a characteristic only of countries that have a strong center.
How about those of us who look at this and say: We weren’t having a problem being confident and tolerant under Barack Obama? If two percentage points of the vote had gone the other way in swing states, Harris would be in charge.
My view is not that the country would have dissolved, nor that we did not have the confidence to figure out an immigration compromise — people were working on that in 2023 and 2024. And that it’s you all who don’t have the confidence and tolerance.
This is why I keep bringing up places like California or, for that matter, New York City, where we are: We’re not having a problem. I mean, there are places with problems, but I would take our problems over the problems of a lot of other places.
You keep saying that this is necessary, but to a lot of us, we come from places that are beautiful and strong and successful and do not seem to be hurting so badly without this much more defined Anglo-Saxon center and this vision that we need a much higher level of compatibility than we currently have with the people coming here.
Just put us in charge, we’re fine with it. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Right, right. I understand. I think that the question, which is completely reasonable, of: NatCons are being pretty aggressive in government — is it possible that they can actually be tolerant? Let’s say that they keep winning. Will they actually be tolerant?
Now obviously, listen, that kind of crystal ball prediction — I don’t want to promise anything about what’s going to be in 50 years. I don’t know the answer, and I don’t think anybody does. But let me just say, as I’m eyeballing it, that if Trump and Vance and Rubio and Pete Hegseth and their 30 closest allies and advisers, if they were in charge of America for the next 12 years, then I think that they would, in the end, succeed in convincing a lot of people — I don’t know if you, but maybe you — not that all their values are correct, but that they are people who look for tolerance, they’re capable of it, they want to build an America that’s tolerant and that not everybody has to accept —
The way they’re acting now, to you, is evidence of tolerance?
No. The way they’re acting now, to me, is the evidence of the opposite. It’s the evidence of an extreme resentment and horror at a Republican Party that had become politically inactive and inert over an entire generation.
So they have to use the power of the state in what I would call an intolerant way to rebuild the center, in order to rebuild the national strength, such that we can be tolerant again?
That’s what they think they’re doing, yes. They are thinking: If you take aggressive actions to halt immigration and decrease the size of the illegal immigrant population; if you take aggressive actions to halt the hemorrhaging of American industry to other countries and reverse it through aggressive trade negotiations; if you take aggressive action to to withdraw primary American responsibility for security arrangements in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and put other people who are allies of ours in charge — those three things. I hope one day you’ll get to interview President Trump yourself, but my guess is that he would tell you if we can do these three things, then we’ll be so much stronger, and then we’ll be able to get to other things.
And he would say that then a beautiful America would be in range.
We’ll leave it there. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Now, I’m assuming that you don’t want me to start talking about books of the Bible or whatever it is.
It’s your books. You get to decide.
Well, OK. [Laughs.] I did decide, but I —
I’m a liberal pluralist. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Thank you. I’m going to name three books that are important for understanding the national conservative movement, since that’s been our topic.
First of all, there’s a book that was really pivotal that most people haven’t heard of, called “The Demon in Democracy” by Ryszard Legutko. Has anybody ever recommended it before?
Not recommended on the show, but I know of it.
OK. So Ryszard is a philosophy professor who became a politician — lovely, lovely man, and a serious intellectual — who wrote this book. And it was really a cornerstone for national conservatism in different countries, including the U.S. His question was: Why is it that when Communism was dismantled in his country, Poland, many of the Communists became liberal internationalists? And he’s got all these stories about what actually happened in Poland. It’s fascinating. I highly recommend it.
The second book I thought to recommend is Elbridge Colby’s “The Strategy of Denial.” I think that, again, Colby doesn’t speak for President Trump, but he’s, on foreign policy, one of the leading thinkers in the administration. Colby’s book answers the key question that the media keep asking: Is Trump an isolationist? Or is he an interventionist? Or is he a liberal internationalist? What is he? Is it just random compromises?
It’s very readable, and it’s very much not what most people think. Like, when you open this book, what you find is something very different than what you get from the media: People talking about isolationism all the time.
And the third book is a new book by Josh Hammer, who’s a young Jewish NatCon, called “Israel and Civilization.” I think a lot of people want to know: How can you be a Jewish NatCon? Especially now that Jews in Israel have lately become quite controversial on the right, in many ways. And he wrote this book, which I think is really beautifully done. It’s a really, really good, thorough, well-assembled explanation of what he thinks Jews should be doing as part of the polity here in the United States.
Yoram Hazony, thank you very much.
It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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