The MAGA New Right

Yoram Hazony

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Yoram Hazony

Israeli-American political philosopher; born Rehovot, Israel; Princeton undergrad; Rutgers PhD 1987; West Bank settler at Eli; Netanyahu adviser 1991–1995; founder of Shalem Center 1994; forced out 2013; author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018); founder of Edmund Burke Foundation; organizer of National Conservatism conferences; “this was a Christian nation… and it’s going to be a Christian nation again” (NatCon 3, 2022)

Who He Is

Yoram Hazony is the chief organizer and intellectual architect of National Conservatism as a formal international movement. More than any other figure, he transformed “nationalism” from a term of opprobrium on the American right into a respectable intellectual position — and in the process built a coalition that, Field argues, could not effectively contain the racist and white nationalist energies that nationalism inevitably attracts.

Biography

Origins and education: Born in Rehovot, Israel. Attended Princeton for undergraduate, where he founded The Princeton Tory, a conservative campus publication. Received his PhD from Rutgers in 1987 — overlapping there with Patrick Deneen, who was also at Rutgers in this period.

Religious-political extremism: Hazony eulogized Rabbi Meir Kahane when Kahane was assassinated in 1990. Kahane was a Jewish ultranationalist whose movement Kach was designated a terrorist organization by the US and Israel. This placed Hazony at the extreme right of Israeli politics from the start.

Israel: Hazony settled in the West Bank settlement of Eli — placing him squarely in the Israeli settler movement, which asserts Jewish sovereignty over Palestinian territory through demographic and military facts on the ground.

Netanyahu years: Served as an adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu from 1991 to 1995.

Shalem Center (1994): Founded the Shalem Center in Jerusalem (later Shalem College), a right-wing think tank and college. He was eventually forced out of the institution he founded in 2013.

Edmund Burke Foundation (post-2018): After The Virtue of Nationalism attracted donors, Hazony created the Edmund Burke Foundation to organize National Conservatism as a formal intellectual movement. Hazony became chairman; David Brog (Princeton/Harvard Law; formerly executive director of Christians United for Israel) became president; Christopher DeMuth (AEI president 1986–2008; Reagan’s “deregulation czar”) became conference chairman.

The Virtue of Nationalism (2018)

Published September 2018. Selected as Conservative Book of the Year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Translated into a dozen languages. Shortly after publication, Trump at a Houston rally (October 22, 2018) embraced the term “nationalist” directly: “I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist.” Bannon was reportedly pleased.

Core argument (Manichean):

  • Political order can only take two forms: nation-states or empires
  • Nation-states allow distinct peoples to self-govern; they are morally superior
  • All alternatives to the nation-state are imperial — including liberal internationalism and the EU
  • The Hebrew Bible is the philosophical foundation of the nationalist tradition, which Hazony calls “the Protestant Construction of the West”

Field’s critique: The framework is entirely binary — any multinational arrangement becomes “empire” by definition, any nationalism becomes virtuous by definition. This is intellectual sleight of hand that avoids the historical record of nationalist violence.

The Palestinian omission: Hazony’s framework implies that Palestinian self-determination is either not warranted or not relevant. He writes: “what is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.” Applied to Israel/Palestine, the answer is forcefully implied: Palestinians are not robust enough of a nation to deserve self-determination. Field: “the entire intellectual artifice of The Virtue of Nationalism comes into focus as little more than a reason-giving exercise in the denial of human rights, or worse, to the Palestinians.”

Critic Schneider: “What Hazony offers as a global template is none other than the blueprints for the Jewish state in its most reactionary and exclusionary form… cast from the mold of religious Zionism.” She further: Hazony “understands better than most that international support for Israel’s status quo cannot be secured other than by contesting the virtues of liberal democracy itself. National Conservatism is one of the engines behind this global project.”

International far-right embrace: Javier Milei of Argentina and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands (who has spoken of creating “a Zionism for the nations of Europe” since 2013) have been outspoken supporters.

NatCon Conferences

NatCon 1 (Washington DC, July 2019): Peter Thiel keynote. Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College had strong showings. Michael Anton spoke on imperialism. Charles Kesler: “Nationalism, Creed, and Culture.” Patrick Deneen voiced reservations about nationalism as a guiding principle (he did not return as a speaker at subsequent NatCons, though he became more nationalistic). Julius Krein made a pitch for “national development” and gave a scathing critique of conservative economic policy. Oren Cass debated libertarian Richard Reinsch on industrial policy — the resolution passed 99-55. Tucker Carlson straddled culture-warrior/economic-populist divide. JD Vance: “Getting Beyond Libertarianism.” Culminating speech: Josh Hawley, youngest senator — “cosmopolitan class” as bogeyman, concluded with Horatius/Macaulay poem, standing ovation. Hazony mildly corrected: better to cite Abraham and Israel than Horatius and Rome.

The conference opened the day Trump tweeted that the Squad (“Progressive Democrat Congresswomen”) should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Media asked NatCon: what do the nationalists say about that?

The Brimelow rejection: Hazony had rejected Peter Brimelow (founding editor of the white nationalist anti-immigration site VDARE) and his wife from the conference. Brimelow wrote an essay expressing shock, citing The Virtue of Nationalism and saying “Of course, I think this is wonderful. It sounds exactly like positions we have argued for years.”

Amy Wax incident: Law professor Amy Wax was invited to speak. Her speech — one of few not publicly available on NatCon’s YouTube channel — made controversial claims about racial effects of cultural immigration preferences. Vox journalist Zack Beauchamp covered it as racist. Hazony defended Wax on Twitter at length; she has not appeared on the NatCon speaker list since. Wax had spoken at the white nationalist-friendly HL Mencken Club, organized by Paul Gottfried, where Peter Brimelow was also a regular.

Paul Gottfried, in his 2019 Mencken Club presidential address, sarcastically described NatCon as organized by “a Zionist philanthropist, David Brog, and to an Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony” and praised the academic luminary (Wax) who “said what speakers were not supposed to mention.”

NatCon Rome: Guest of honor was Viktor Orbán, interviewed by Christopher DeMuth. Orbán on Syrian refugees: “In Hungary, we have this number of Muslim migrants” [gestured zero] — the crowd erupted in applause.

NatCon 3 (Miami, 2022): Hazony’s speech “After the Revolution — What Happens Next?” He declared 2020 a “watershed year” in which “hegemonic liberalism came to an end” replaced by “woke Neo-Marxism.” For Hazony, 2020’s crisis was the George Floyd protests — not January 6. His answer: “The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity.” He called America “a Christian nation, historically and according to its laws” and declared it was “going to be a Christian nation again.” Field: explicit Christian nationalism, arrived at by using the George Floyd summer to justify the movement’s “slip into white supremacy.”

Contradictions and Field’s Critique

Field invokes MLK’s words about Goldwater — that his philosophy gave “aid and comfort to the racist” and would serve as “an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand” — as proven true of Hazony and National Conservatism.

Hazony’s project has a fundamental structural tension: his nationalism is framed in terms of Jewish peoplehood and the Hebrew Bible, but the American nationalist movement he organized has significant white nationalist and now explicit Christian nationalist elements. The “Protestant Construction of the West” thesis requires Hazony — an Israeli Jew — to argue for a Christian political culture he does not himself inhabit.

Ukraine

In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hazony sided with Ukraine — breaking with dominant MAGA isolationist/pro-Russia tendencies. Field called this a “dizzying ideological switchback” for the overall New Right movement.

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