Let me start by saying that I don’t think that Yoram Hazony is an ideological hack, even if he's associating with hacks that I think diminish his credibility with the non-hack community. Nevertheless, I think he's writing in good faith, and his ideas have to be taken seriously if for no other reason that they are likely to provide the superstructure for the regime that ideological hacks on the Right want to establish. I don't think it can work for reasons I've explained before and that I’ll go into in more detail as we go forward. But first I want to make the effort to understand the case that Hazony is trying to make. I think that especially his Conservatism: A Rediscovery should be thought of as a fairly interesting utopian imagination of a plausible future. Of course, as the subtitle suggests, he sees it rather as a restoration of something lost. Whatever. I think he deserves a fair hearing, which is what I’d like to give him in the next few posts.
But before I do that, I want to frame it by saying that I think we're going through something huge right now, and whatever we think about what's happening is likely more wrong than right because it’s discontinuous with most of what we have come to understand as normal in the now-collapsing Liberal consensus reality. We don’t have the concepts to think about it yet. None us has the map, so we’re all bushwhacking. There are no experts; the persons who present themselves as eperts are those who are least trustworthy. there are only people who are exploring the new terrain and reporting on what they see. Some are better fitted to see more clearly than others.
So who, imo, are the better fitted to see clearly? Well let’s stipulate that the people who see clearest are those that have the best interpretive lens for bringing into focus what’s most relevant and blurring what’s less so. To oversimplify for the sake of brevity, let’s stipulate that there are two primary camps with two very different lenses—Continuists and Discontinuists.
Continuists are people who think that life in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is basically ok, that everything’s gonna work out because it always does, and that there’s reason to hope that an Obama-style politics is still a possibility and something to work for. People like Ezra Klein and Rachel Maddow—and Obama himself—are among the most prominent Continuists among our public-facing intellectuals. But Continuism is pretty much the ethos for the entire Liberal establishment, and everybody who still hopes that a big blue wave next year will get things back to normal, i.e., continuous with what they thought Obama represented for the American future.
The Discontinuists are those who, obviously, think that what’s happening cannot be understood through the Continuist lens. They see the Continuists as foregrounding and backgrounding the wrong things, and the Discontinuists believe that they are foregrounding and backgrounding the right things. Most Discontinuists embrace the discontinuity and so in this moment are leaning toward the Right. They are Trump friendly because whatever they might think of him as a human being, he is a world-historical agent of discontinuity. My guess is that’s how Hazony perceives Trump, and probably J.D. Vance as well.
I think that a historical discontinuous moment is like a jump-ball—the future is up for grabs, and whoever grabs it sets the agenda. I look at 2016 as such a historical jump-ball moment. The Red Team chose discontinuity in Trump, and the Blue team chose continuity in Clinton. The Blues could have chosen discontinuity if they had chosen Bernie, but they didn’t. Electing Biden in 2020 seemed to be a restorationist victory for the Continuists, but it turned out not to be. Biden absorbed much of Bernie’s program, but he did it in a way that felt continuous at a time when the electorate was hungering for Discontinuity, and there was nothing that Harris and Walz could do about their being perceived as Continuists, because that is what they were.
The Democrats in ‘24 bet that most Americans wanted continuity and normalcy, and they bet wrong. Or they misperceived themselves as the party that was offering anything most Americans wanted to be continued. Trump, whatever else he might be, is a blazing bonfire of discontinuity that met the public hunger for it in a way that most Continuists Liberals still don’t understand. 1
In which camp do I fall? I would say that I was a tepid Continuist until last November, and now I’ve come to recognize that the Discontinuists have a better grip on the historical reality than the Continuists, but that doesn’t mean that conservative theorists of the current Discontinuity—people like Yoram Hazony or Patrick Deneen2—have the only or the best interpretation of the meaning of this moment. But I do think they’re more right than the Liberal Continuists in understanding the shift in the cultural substructure, and so they are in possession of the jump ball, and will run with it until someone tries to take it away from them. I no longer think the Continuists can take the ball; the challenge has to come from an alternative Discontinuist faction yet to emerge. So I identify as a Left-leaning Discontinuist, but there aren’t many people prominent in the public eye I can point to as allies.
So, given these presuppositions, how do I perceive this moment? We're in the middle of a huge historical discontinuity. The economic or material substructure is shifting in ways that we are only slowly coming to grips with, but I think its fair to say that the emergence of Donald Trump—and his alliance with the Tech oligarchs—is perfectly in alignment with the shifting underlying material substructure and with its radically Libertarian (aka, Social Darwinian) ideological superstructure. The Obama Continuists want to embrace technological change, but don’t seem to understand how misaligned it has become with Liberal Democracy.
This shift in the material substructure is accompanied by a shift in the cultural or spiritual substructure that expresses itself primarily as a rejection of Neoliberal Globalism and embrace of Nationalism in different benign and malign configurations.3 This, of course, is in contradiction to the radical Libertarian superstructure of the oligarchs. That’s what makes this interesting. This second shift is the one that, imo, Hazony and Deneen are the sanest articulators of in the counter-Enlightenment—anti-Libertarian—stream, and for now they see Trump as an ally because of the way he’s smashing Liberal institutions and norms to clear a space for the emergence of new institutions and norms. Or so I speculate. Neither sees himself as proto-fascists, but it’s likely they see Trump’s destructiveness as a short-term necessity for a longer-term good.
Are they right? I doubt it, but I think since they have possession of the ball, it’s incumbent on us to understand where they want to run with it—what’s their vision and what do they hope for? Some version of it is more likely at this point than anything that Continuist Liberalism or the mushy Left has to offer.
Hazony and Deneen interest me because they are looking at events through the same counter-Enlightenment Rationalist lens that I've been viewing things through pretty much since the inception of After the Future in 2003, but from a more Left standpoint. My purpose in spending so much time in the last couple of weeks talking about Hamann and Herder was to situate conservatives like Deneen and Hazony in that counter-Enlightenment stream. The goal here is to help educated Liberals, especially those among you who have a quasi-hippy or counter-cultural sensibility (i.e., who mistrust the "system", i.e., big corporate and state bureaucracies and the technocratic elites who run them; who celebrate the organic, the local and particular; who are concerned about environmental degradation; who are concerned about the disgusting amount of power and wealth accruing to the oligarchs; who celebrate cultural diversity) that you have more in common with this conservative counter-Enlightenment stream than you think. It's important that we not let our Blue-team loyalties prevent us from seeing where we share common ground.
My guess is that most listeners to Hazony's debate with Ezra Klein a few weeks ago were rooting for Ezra Klein because Klein is on the Blue Team and Hazony is on the Red. But the thing to understand about Klein is that he's very much on the pro-Techno-Capitalist team. He's an extraordinarily thoughtful, decent human being, but he's very much someone who, from my pov, is still in the Continuity Camp. He still thinks that the old Obama Liberal normal has a future. He, imo, doesn't understand yet that the superstructure he's defending is no longer supported by the techno-capitalist substructure. He's doing as good a job as anybody to keep the two together, but it cannot hold.
Hazony and Deneen have to be taken seriously as people theorizing about the new discontinuous reality, and for now they are aligning with the Right because there’s nobody on the Left with whom they can caucus. Where I eventually want to go with this is to take a close look at Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Liberation Theology as providing the raw materials from which to build a competing superstructure to the ones offered by Hazony and Deneen or the Anything-Goes Libertarianism that provides the ideological superstructure for the TCM. I don't know this for sure, but I'm inclined to think that Pope Leo would be more positively disposed to a Liberation Theology movement should something like it arise again, certainly more so than his predecessors who with Ronald Reagan quashed it in the ‘80s. It sounds crazy, but we’re really in terra incognita here, and crazy is our future. All the old stereotypes are meaningless. Especially young people who know nothing about history and have few of the old prejudices.
But for now I see the Right is more "progressed" in theorizing the post-Obama discontinuity, at least in any way that is influencing thought in the broader American society.4 Nothing on the Left is doing anything comparable, so in the interests of understanding the moment, I think we need to make the effort to understand Hazony's theory.5
Hazony I think it's fair to say is a paleo-conservative, which means that he aligns more with a guy like Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon, and Sam Francis than with Dick Cheney neocon wing or the Paul Ryan/Grover Norquist/Ayn Rand Libertarian wing of the GOP. He works hard to try to separate himself from the dark side of the ethno-nationalism that these other paleocons at least flirt with. I think he sincerely believes that his nationalistic ideal need not be racist or xenophobic. So let's hear him out, and then you can judge for yourself.
But not today. In the next post I’ll talk about his ideas about hierarchy, honor, and loyalty and why they are for him critical components in building a cohesive society as a corrective to the meaninglessness, alienation, and atomization of the collapsing Enlightenment Liberal Order.
By discontinuity I don’t mean simply wanting change in the politically commonplace sense. I’m talking about a deep strustural shift in the material and spiritual substructure of a society.
Deneen’s two books Why Liberalism Failed (2019) and Regime Change: Toward a Post-Liberal Future (2023) are both important texts to read if you want to understand the emerging ideological superstructure on the Right. Deneen, like Hazony, is not a hack, and especially the first book is worth your time.
I don’t want to get into the technical weeds here, but I think there’s both a material and spiritual aspect to any society’s substructure. Both articulate themselves consciously in the superstructure, but what I see as interesting, if not unique, in this moment is how the shift in the cultural or spiritual substructure provides the energy, if theorized correctly, that can lead to shifts in the superstructure that could effectively counter the hegemony of the the TCM. The question is who is going to capture that energy? As suggested in the main text above, I think Liberation Theology provides a possible Discontinuist model to compete with the Hazony model. Though it would be difficult to effect, I think a rapprochement between the Hazony Right and a Liberation Theology Left could be effected if the right personalities emerged who could work it out as an alliance against the TCM. Again, I don’t think it’s completely implausible that Pope Leo could play such a brokering or intermediary role.
I think that the role that Compact Magazine is playing here is interesting. While some of the stuff they publish is pretty silly if not vile, they are the one publication that is all about trying to understand the Discontinuity of this moment. And they are open to thinking from both the discontinuous Left and Right.
I think that Hazony’s vision for a possible future is more developed than anything in Deneen, although Deneen’s ideas about ‘Aristo-Populism’ probably need to be discussed at some point. (Can one give such a concept a Leninist spin?)