Liberalism vs. Nationalism
2018-12-22 · Guest: Yoram Hazony (Israeli philosopher and biblical scholar) · 51:18
The Virtues of Nationalism and Political Theory
Bob Zadek interviews Israeli philosopher and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony about his book, The Virtues of Nationalism. They explore the definition of nationalism as a principled alternative to imperialism and globalism, arguing that a world of independent nations is more conducive to freedom and stability than a single “New World Order.” The conversation covers the history of American foreign policy since the Cold War, the limitations of “liberal imperialism,” and the importance of national cohesion in addressing immigration.
Topics: Nationalism, Imperialism, Foreign Policy, Liberalism, Federalism, Immigration, Yoram Hazony, Donald Trump, European Union, Globalism
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Yoram Hazony
The “Why” Behind Political Theory [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. And that, my friends, is a large universe. Thank you so much for listening this winter, now winter, Sunday morning. We are always, this morning and always, the show of ideas, never, ever, ever the show of attitude.
This morning, I get to use my favorite word. My favorite word is “why.” Now, what is there about that word that gives me so much pleasure? I find myself always curious about how others feel about certain issues of economics, public policy, international relations, and the like. Everybody else’s opinion is always of interest to me. But it is far less interesting than why they feel that way, how they got there. One can just say, when you hear an opinion, “I don’t agree with you.” And that’s not much of a conversation; it’s not very interesting. But once you look under the hood and learn why, now you get a chance to, on an intellectual level, understand how the person you are speaking to or listening to, how they got there. And it is the “why” that might induce you to think or to reformulate your point of view and to learn something.
So this morning, we get to use “why” a great deal. And the reason we are going to use it so much is because we are talking to this morning Yoram Hazony. Yoram is an Israeli philosopher, he’s a Bible scholar, and the rarest of all intellectual pursuits: a political theorist. Everybody seems to have an opinion on politics, but the “why” is kind of shallow, vacuous, or nonexistent. With Yoram, the “why” is what makes it so interesting, and his “why” will perhaps induce you to think quite a bit.
And of particular importance, we are talking about Yoram’s new book, The Virtues of Nationalism. Now, to many of our listeners, that title, The Virtues of Nationalism, seems itself to be an oxymoron. With the Trump administration, with all of the fire and attention the Trump administration has been getting with his so-called “America First” foreign policy, which has been a alternative or a placeholder for nationalism, and with Trump’s—with so many people angry at Trump the person and his policies, nationalism, if it had any kind of a good name, if you will, before, sure doesn’t now. Well, to kind of balance the conversation and to really understand what nationalism is and why it is so core to an American, our political ethos, with that introduction, I welcome Yoram to the show. Yoram is speaking to us from Israel. Yoram, good morning—well, for you, good evening.
Yoram Hazony: Good morning to everybody on the West Coast. Thank you for having me on.
Defining Nationalism vs. Imperialism [02:29]
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much. Now, The Virtues of Nationalism. Now, because there is so much misunderstanding with labels—isms are profoundly understood. I don’t care what the ism is; isms have folklore, misunderstanding, and so people can debate any ism without knowing what it is exactly they are talking about. So the conversation is not very interesting and doesn’t get very far. So since it is the title of your book, we will presume you have an idea of what nationalism is. So we can get into the conversation, your title is The Virtues of Nationalism. Help us understand what nationalism is as you use the concept and what’s virtuous about it.
Yoram Hazony: Nationalism is a principled standpoint that sees the world as being governed best when nations are allowed to chart an independent course, to develop their own traditions, to pursue their own interests. And traditionally, this point of view has been opposed, has been seen as the opposite of an imperialist or a universalist—today we say globalist—point of view, which says, “No, no, actually the world would be governed best if there were a single regime of law, of political enforcement as much as possible, that would govern all the nations.” This is a very, very old distinction. It goes back not just centuries, but thousands of years between a view that says the world will reach justice and freedom when people can have independence, and others who say, “No, no, that just leads to unnecessary war and conflict. Let’s have one rule for everyone.”
Bob Zadek: So there is this dichotomy with those who are sometimes nicknamed as “one-worlders,” or to take a more contemporary label, perhaps we can borrow from George H.W. Bush, “New World Order” in the early—when Bush was president, the New World Order was going to be: we want to export as an exportable intellectual commodity our way of living, our way of doing business, our way of organizing our government, because we for sure have figured it all out. And the only difference between Third World and First World is they haven’t learned how we do business. Is that somewhat simplistic but accurate comparison and explanation of one-worldism?
Yoram Hazony: I think it’s exactly accurate. I can still remember the chill that went down my spine the first time I heard on the radio George H.W. Bush talking about the New World Order. This was in 1991. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, we just finished the Cold War. I thought the whole point of the Cold War, all those decades of struggle, was that America and its allies were the free nations struggling against the imposition of one world, of a New World Order that the Marxists wanted to impose.” And if you’re the free nations, I thought, that would mean that there isn’t going to be one world order. There’s going to be many different orders, many different countries, many different kinds of governments, and each nation is an experiment in what it means to be human. That’s what I understood.
And I was shocked. And I have to say that having seen now a whole generation of American presidents, both Democrats and Republicans—and you can add the European political parties of both the right and the left for an entire generation—pursuing this New World Order, I don’t think it’s a very good idea. And I don’t think it’s improved in the implementation. And so I think that the virtue of nationalism begins with the kind of humility that says, “You know, we think, we here in America or in Britain or wherever, we think our way of life is best. But if other people want to imitate it, that’s fine. But the idea that it needs to be imposed by force, that there needs to be a world law with world courts and somebody’s going to have to be the world’s policeman, that’s a completely different idea.”
The Shift to “Liberal Empire” After 1989 [09:14]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you mark as a seminal event, both politically and as a timeline, the removal, the destruction of the Berlin Wall. And what I thought of when I learned that concept from you in your writing and in your presentation was: we first had an imperialist enemy, if you will. It was in World War II, Nazi Germany, of course, which although the word “nationalist” was in their title of their movement, they were by no means nationalist; they were imperialist, as you pointed out to us.
So we had another group, another country, quite imperialist, trying to impose their worldview. And we fought them because, of course, we were not going to allow that worldview to succeed. And instead of merely stopping their attempt at imperialism by defeating them, we went one step further, it seems to me—and I’ll ask you to correct me if I’m overstating this—that we replaced their imperialism, their bad imperialism, with our good imperialism. So rather than stopping halfway and saying, “Okay, we have put back an imperialist movement, now we can relax,” we went them one better and replaced their imperialism with ours. Is that too simplistic, reasonably accurate?
Yoram Hazony: I’d want to be a little bit more hesitant about it, because I think that’s a very good description of what happened after 1989. When—the reason that I focus on the fall of the Berlin Wall is that at that point, there weren’t any other world imperialisms that the United States needed to fight. If you’re talking about the 1940s and the 1950s, then somebody could say—and in fact, my friends who were in government, for example, in the Reagan administration, this is what they say—is, “Look, we never thought of ourselves as trying to take over the world, to impose our order. We thought of ourselves as trying to defend free countries from communism.”
Now, somebody could come and say, “Look, okay, but in the competition with communism, the United States ended up establishing a presence all over the world.” And I don’t want to object to that necessarily. But when you get to 1989 and the Soviet Union disappears, and there is no more imperialist communist threat—it’s gone. There’s no more imperialist Nazi threat, and there’s no more imperialist communist threat. Then I think the whole question is at that point, what do you do?
And there were voices, like Margaret Thatcher is an important example, who had this idea of a world of free nations. But the utopian fantasy of “now we’re going to have a liberal empire that’s going to cover all of Europe and then the rest of the world,” that fantasy is something that was so powerful that the British dumped Margaret Thatcher because she wasn’t willing to go along with it and she wanted to see an independent Britain.
So if you think about World War II from the perspective of the allies, they called themselves the Allied Nations, right? And their radio broadcasts into Europe were all about this, about how there’s enslaved nations in Europe and our goal is to free them. To free them doesn’t mean that we’ll impose our way of thinking on them; it means that unlike the Nazis or the communists, we’re going to let each nation be free. So I think 1989 is the moment where you really get to see for the first time, what is this about? And there were people like Irving Kristol or Jeane Kirkpatrick, if you remember, in the 1990s who were saying, “All right, the war is over. Let’s bring the boys home. Let’s take care of the many terrible problems that afflict American society. Let’s take care of ourselves.” But that’s not what happened.
The Hubris of Reshaping Foreign Cultures [13:52]
Bob Zadek: And so we ended up finding ourselves with a positive motive, not to obviously take over the rest of the world, but we weren’t content to allow them the freedom to evolve into a more open society, a more small-d democratic society with a market system and stable currency and all the good stuff that comes with it. We weren’t content to sit back and let them get there or not on their own, but we felt somehow we owed a duty to them to, like a parent with a young child, we had to push them towards what we knew was best, and they could not reach that realization on their own. So didn’t we in effect, and aren’t we, denying them the self-determination that we had in our history? So isn’t we—denying them the self-determination to either get to a society that we think is the best, and we are impatient and we will simply say, whether you like it or not, that’s where you’re going. Is that a summary of our foreign policy today?
Yoram Hazony: I think that’s exactly right. I think if you ask people in Serbia or Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan how they see the United States, I think you’ll find very few people who will say, “Well, you know, the Americans and the Europeans, their interventions were kind and gentle and ended up liberating our country and doing good for the world.” You may find some people who say that, but I think that on the whole, people tend to look at these wars—I mean, if you’re living in such a place—and see these wars as horrific and devastating and not necessarily as liberating.
A foreign policy that says, “We in Washington or in Brussels, we know how every country in the world should live, and if they don’t live the way we think that they should live, then well, we’ll make them live the way that we want them to live,” I don’t think that’s a way to bring people to freedom, and I don’t think it’s a way to make friends. I think we’ve seen enough of it. It is well-intentioned, but you know what they say, right? I mean, you can get to all sorts of places with good intentions.
Bob Zadek: So of course, what should be our relationship to a struggling group of countries who are living in poverty, who can’t get it right, who have oppressive, tyrannical governments? Do we sit back and as a mere observer and somewhat feel superior and go about our life? What do we do? I know you have discussed this in other of your talks, but our friends out there in my show haven’t heard you yet comment. What comes to mind, of course, is events like genocide: Rwanda, Cambodia. Do we sit back and say it’s not our business, or do we—in your view of nationalism, how do we deal with those issues? And most importantly, because you have such an interesting view of it, what are the rules, the core moral standards which govern how we behave vis-à-vis atrocities going on in other countries that do not represent any threat whatsoever to our country?
Yoram Hazony: I think if you take these very extreme examples like Rwanda or Cambodia, you’re talking about places where the Americans had solid information about atrocities on a vast scale, on the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people being slaughtered. I think that if you have the military capacity to go in quickly, put an end to it, and then get out without ending up being yourself the government of the country for the next 50 or 100 years, then I think I’m pretty much with everybody else that if you can do that and you have the ability to do that, then it seems like you really should. I mean, it seems like that’s a pretty basic moral obligation.
But I don’t think that those extreme genocide cases describe American foreign policy over the last generation. I think we’re talking about a completely different framework which assumes not that genocide needs to be stopped, but that any kind of bad government needs to be stopped. And I think that that view is, as I said before, I think it’s utopian, meaning I think it is well-intentioned but it is simply not realistic. I don’t actually think that the United States has the ability to enter a foreign country that it does not understand very well and to reshape its culture in such a way as to make it a democracy in America’s image.
Democracy in America’s image is something that developed in the English-speaking world for the last 800 or 900 years. And even in places that we consider to be very advanced and very civilized, like France or Germany—people don’t remember that the French state collapsed in the 1950s and a military intervention took over the government and reestablished a new constitution. And that was in the 1950s in France. And if you ask the question, have the French and the Germans succeeded in being self-determining independent democratic nations since then? I look at the European Union not as a very democratic institution. I mean, basically as an autocracy that—a bureaucracy, excuse me, that autocratically imposes laws on countries that haven’t asked for those laws.
And so it seems to me that the French and the Germans have not been very good at maintaining what Americans or British would consider to be democracy at all. So if the French and the Germans aren’t capable of maintaining a self-governing independent nation, then why should we expect that countries in all sorts of foreign civilizations in other parts of the world, that they should necessarily do things the way we do? So we look at them, and maybe we’re right to object to various indecencies or to the violence with which they conduct things, but that doesn’t mean that the United States, even if it’s right in that kind of negative judgment, that it has any power to actually change it. I mean, it’s kind of—there’s this hubris, this arrogance to think that Iraq has just been sitting around for the last 4,000 years—Iraq has been governed by dictatorships since before England or America existed. For thousands of years, Iraq has been governed by dictatorships. And they’re just sitting there waiting for the United States to invade and conquer it and set up liberal arts colleges and help them write a new constitution, and then they’re going to be just kind of like Americans. I think it’s a little bit crazy, no?
Bob Zadek: We’re going to go to break in a moment for 30 seconds. But before we go to break, so I’ll give you 30 seconds to think about your answer. You said America doesn’t have the ability—we simply don’t know how to do it—to go into another country and reorganize them in our image. And what I found myself wondering—and we’ll discuss this, if you will, after the break—is, what if we did have the ability? What if we built a template so we know how to do it? Is that the only barrier, we don’t do a very good job of it? What if we knew how to do it? Should we still go into Iraq and say, “Okay, we have the template right here, here’s the kit, pass these laws, and now you’re on your own”? Isn’t there a morality that says even if we know how to do it, we should not go in to do it? And I’m focusing, Yoram, on the comment you made: we don’t know how to do it. So we’ll respond to that question, Yoram, in 30 seconds when we come back. Bob Zadek spending a wonderful morning talking with Yoram Hazony, who wrote The Virtues of Nationalism. Does nationalism have a virtue? More about that in 30 short seconds.
The Arrogance of Universalism [26:10]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio, the show of ideas, never, ever, ever the show of attitude. This morning, we are spending an hour speaking with Yoram Hazony, who has written The Virtues of Nationalism. Kind of interesting because Yoram’s book, The Virtues of Nationalism, was consistent with the book that you heard our announcer describe a few minutes ago. Nationalism is simply federalism on a global scale, I suspect. Before the break, I had asked Yoram whether or not the limitation or the reason we shouldn’t go in there and impose our way of doing business on other countries, whether we shouldn’t do it because we’re bad at it—and indeed, nobody can be good at it—and whether it is a practical limitation, or whether there is a moral reason we shouldn’t do it even if we are really good at it. Yoram, am I raising a point worthy of discussion?
Yoram Hazony: It’s certainly worthy of discussion. It’s a little bit theoretical. I mean, in practice, when you go into a foreign country, knock over its government, and then start trying to reshape it, it is extremely expensive in lives of the people who are killed in that country and wounded and the economy that is demolished by the war, and it’s extremely expensive in human life and material also for the invader. So it’s a little bit hard to say, you know, what if there were no obstacle, should we do it anyway?
Now, of course, I’m on your side on the idea of diversity and localism. I think that in general, the world is better off if there are many different experiments in what it’s like to run governments. So even if you could just sort of wave a magic wand and get everybody to be the same according to best practices of the United States in the year 2019, I would still think that that would be an arrogant playing the role of God, assuming that you know what’s best for the whole world already and that you wouldn’t want to do that. In fact, that’s kind of what God does at the story of the Tower of Babel is he looks at this aim of having all of humanity speak one language and have one way of thinking, and he says, “I don’t want that. I want a world of diversity.”
So it’s kind of asking that question. But let me try to steer a little bit in the direction of: do Americans really know what’s best? I mean, I think that the United States, although I don’t have any problem with people who say, “Look, America is perhaps the greatest nation that there’s ever been in many respects and in many ways,” surely people understand that the United States is not some kind of perfected country. I mean, when many more traditional societies look at the United States, the first thing that they see is the Americans right now have something like 40% of American children are being born outside of marriage. 40%, which is an astronomical number. I mean, it speaks to a wholesale destruction of the framework of the traditional family.
Now, I understand some listeners might say, “Okay, that doesn’t sound like it’s very important.” But maybe others can at least sympathize with another country in Asia or in Africa or someplace else that looks at that and says, “We don’t want to import that. That’s a social ravaging and destruction whose consequences we don’t even know yet, and we don’t want to bring that in. We want to do things some other way.” And so when Americans hear people in more traditional societies saying, “Look, your framework for democracy and civil liberties and free markets, we’re sure it has lots of good things about it, but we want to try something that is somewhat modified. We don’t want to do it your way.” How can people be—to me, it’s hard to understand how one could be so arrogant not to admit, well, maybe other people have some insights that we don’t have.
And I think that’s basically what the virtue of nationalism comes down to: is being willing to say, “Okay, I think our society is the best, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be so certain about it that I believe that the right thing would be for me to just cause the whole world to be like me.”
Washington’s Farewell Address and “America First” [31:23]
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting is you have more than once in our talk this morning pointed to the phrase that it is utter hubris, it is arrogance, it is undeserved self-confidence in your position that causes us to say we are so confident that our way of doing business is the right way that we have a need, we are put on this earth to export by force that way of doing business. And for sure, we have used force in the Middle East, we have used force in Africa to some degree, we have used force in Eastern Europe to impose our way of doing business. And it is the use of force that to me is where you profoundly cross a moral line. It is perfectly okay if you think you’re onto something in terms of governance, then go ahead, make the case and persuade if you can, and help if requested, help other countries to learn how we have built our institutions that have served us so well. But to impose it upon them, coercion and force, that is as anti-libertarian as one can possibly be.
And also, Yoram, so much as you and I have spoken about before, so much of what I’ve heard you say, it is reminding me of Washington’s advice, his sage advice, his accurate advice when he left the presidency in 1796. He gave his farewell address in September of 1796, but it was your words and his words. So Yoram, you’re in pretty gosh-darn good company.
Yoram Hazony: Thank you.
Bob Zadek: Donald Trump has labeled his policy, his foreign policy, as “America First.” That’s he has said that over and over and over again. I don’t think those two words aptly describe what you are describing in your book. I don’t think—but I’ll ask you to speak to this—whether we should aspire to look after ourselves first. It is not a competition; it is rather to be somewhat passive as to how others behave. So do you sign on to the concept of “America First,” or is that kind of inaccurate description of what you are proposing?
Yoram Hazony: I’m not sure it’s an inaccurate description of what President Trump is proposing. In his United Nations speech, I think he made it absolutely clear that he considers the different nations of the world, each of them to have a government that is supposed to be concerned with its own people first. So “America First” is not, as far as I understand it, intended to mean “America first on earth.” It’s intended to mean that as opposed to this kind of Macron, the President of France, saying, “Really, none of us should be selfish. We should all pool our government and pool our interests and have kind of like one big central pot that determines what’s good for everybody,” I think President Trump is resisting that and he’s saying, “No, a government is supposed to be responsible to its own people.”
And I completely agree with him that in the last generation, there has been a drift in America and in Europe where the idea that politicians are responsible to the well-being of their own people has been replaced by this kind of pooled sovereignty and transnationalism thing. And this is something that John Stuart Mill wrote about, by the way, already almost 150 years ago. He said that this is completely impossible because what happens when local governments give up caring about their own needs, which they understand best, and they send upward, they sort of relegate upward the responsibility so that there’s some kind of central power that then is supposed to be rationally making all of the decisions? What ends up happening is that that central imperial center, instead of actually working out what’s for the best for everybody, it works out what’s for the best for itself and ends up doing good for nobody.
And that principle, which says government has the responsibility to care for its own people—if it can do good for others, then it should, and sometimes that’s the case—but its first responsibility is to do good for its own people. And I don’t think there’s any other possible way of doing things. I think the other alternative that we’ve seen is these world empires. And if you can just imagine the European Union trying to run the entire planet, that’s what it would be like. The first few years it seems real nice, and then it starts to turn out that they’re telling the English what size apples they need to manufacture, and they’re telling the Italians, “No, your budget is rejected, and oh by the way, here’s who’s going to be—we’ve decided in Brussels who your finance minister is going to be.” And then the Poles want to change their judicial system and the Germans tell them, “No, you’re not allowed.” And the Hungarians want to have immigration policies that favor Christians because they feel like they’ve been a Christian country for a thousand years, and people tell them, “No, you’re not allowed.” I don’t think it’s possible. I think it’s simply impossible to have some kind of central brain that figures out what’s right for everybody.
Nationalism and the Knowledge Problem [39:23]
Bob Zadek: And that, of course, is pure Hayek, who reminds us over and over again that the marketplace, the unfettered marketplace with millions and millions and millions of human beings making independent, thoughtful for the most part decisions, will dictate the value of any good or any service. And central planning, the arch-enemy of the free markets, simply—you aren’t smart enough. So again, Yoram, we’re back to a basic tenet of your point of view, the correct point of view, is that we simply—putting aside whether we should do it even if we are smart enough—but for sure, we are not smart enough. Nobody is smart enough to replace the function of millions and millions of people operating in their own self-interest.
And your point is exactly that: people simply—putting aside whether they should usurp the freedom of choice, putting that aside, the moral issue—as a practical matter, you just aren’t smart enough to do a good job at it, and it cannot be done. And your point is of course true with respect to the, in my opinion, somewhat failed experiment in the European Union. And of course, it is true in our own country, which is simply nationalism one notch down, if you will: federalism. States should have much more of the power; the power should not have been ceded to Washington over the hundreds of years of our life, because Washington doesn’t know enough. They can’t manage each and every state. And we are suffering on the national level within the United States the same problem that Yoram points to on the international level. It’s exactly the same conversation with the same limitations.
Now, Yoram, you embrace of course the concept of nations and borders. And your views are quite interesting with respect to immigration. The United States, following the principle of nationalism, should look after its own citizens first. Starting with that point of view, where does that lead you in so far as adhering to the principle of nationalism? What should be our country’s approach to the very important issue, the one that’s being fought about so painfully in our country and around the world, of immigration? How should a nationalist country approach the issue of immigration, letting others join in the benefits of America?
Immigration and National Cohesion [42:31]
Yoram Hazony: I think the main problem that is not discussed enough with respect to immigration is the fact that diversity, which has all of these benefits that we talk about—people who see things in different ways and people who come up with different kinds of ideas—I think that the benefits of diversity are very clear. But people tend not to notice, or at least to discuss, the fact that that’s only true up until a certain point. Beyond a certain point, diversity creates tension, and if it’s unresolved, it can even be violent.
And those countries which are domestically quiet and at peace tend to be countries—not countries that are homogeneous, where everybody’s the same, because there’s no such thing, there are no such countries—but rather countries that have one very dominant culture. Countries like England or France or the United States, which are the countries that people tend to point to and say, “Look, historically those are the countries where freedom was at its most successful, the countries where people would most likely want to live, where the Industrial Revolution took place,” and so on, that are the most advanced in science and ideas. Okay, fair enough. But those countries are also countries that were for centuries internally cohesive to a very large degree. The population was mutually loyal. That meant that if the government decided to do something, you didn’t immediately fall apart into some kind of civil strife in the streets or even, God forbid, a civil war. Obviously, there were some civil wars, but in general, these are very cohesive societies.
Now, the way that the United States succeeded in being a very successful immigrant country over centuries was through a kind of back and forth of allowing foreign immigration and then toning them down, and then allowing more and then toning it down. Nobody’s ever, as far as I know, in American history, the United States has never surpassed the level of immigration that it’s at right now, where 15% of the population is foreign-born. And I think that it’s important, even for those of us who are in favor of diversity and believe that immigration can be a good thing, to understand that you can’t bring a country up to 30% immigrants or 50% immigrants and have the country not fall apart. And when I say fall apart, I mean that the groups that are coming in, they’re not just play-dough in your hands. They have their own ideas and their own aspirations and their own understanding of how you do things. And maybe for better and maybe for worse, but the point is that no country can sustain above a certain level of immigration without it deteriorating in such a way that it can’t hold itself together anymore. And I don’t want to see that kind of violence in the United States or any other country that I care about. So I think that immigration cannot be dealt with as though it’s an absolute. It’s not an absolute. It’s something that can be very good, but it has to be dealt with prudently. And if you see that you’re causing social friction, then that’s a signal to you that you may have to move more carefully.
Bob Zadek: Of course, I have two thoughts on that, and regretfully we’re starting to run out of time, but this is an important topic. I have two thoughts on that. First of all, when we achieve a higher level of diversity than you feel is the right level, when we get into the yellow zone—not the red zone, but the yellow zone—it seems to me that there are two kinds of diversity. Number one is the diversity that comes from a different background, perhaps racial and issues such as that, that are external areas of difference. But if these people looking different, speaking different, with other differences in their belief system, but if they sign on to the American system of freedom, individual rights, personal property, do no harm to others and be protected from people harming you, if they sign on to the Declaration of Independence, to be a bit simplistic, then that diversity that exists is kind of irrelevant. They’re in the program.
And as to that kind of diversity, people who sign on to the Declaration of Independence but look differently and have some learning to do, cannot be a source of strife. And we may disagree on that, but I just am so pro-immigration, I don’t fear—maybe it’s uninformed, maybe I should be—but I don’t fear a wave of immigration of immigrants from anywhere in the world who are here, whether they know it or not, because they simply want to participate in the principles in the Declaration of Independence. Am I being a bit naive?
Yoram Hazony: Yeah, a bit. It’s the same principle as you can’t just go into Iraq and believe that 4,000 years of their extremely rich and sophisticated history and civilization and religion is simply going to evaporate because you come and read them the Declaration of Independence or, you know, the advanced course in Lockean political philosophy. It won’t happen, and it doesn’t work. Now, I’m just saying the same thing again, but over here. If you bring some number of Iraqis over here, there’s a really good chance that they’ll fit in just great. But you can’t say that 100,000 is the same thing as a million is the same thing as 10 million is the same thing as 100 million. That’s impossible. Because there’s a certain point at which what you’re doing is you’re just picking up Iraq with everything that’s good and everything that’s evil about Iraq and you’re placing it within the boundaries of your country. And it doesn’t make any difference that somebody tried to teach them the Declaration of Independence, because human beings don’t simply just change their software that way. In small numbers, I think it’s fine.
Bob Zadek: There’s one core difference: when immigrants come here, they are doing so voluntarily. When we go there, we’re imposing it upon them. The difference is one has coercion, one is purely voluntary. That’s the only difference I would make. Yoram, we’re running out of time. I want my audience to know how to follow your writings and how they can find the book and the other books you have written. You have a minute left. Please share with our audience how they can get to know you better.
Yoram Hazony: The book The Virtues of Nationalism is available on Amazon and on all of the other online booksellers. You can also go to my website, yoramhazony.org—Y-O-R-A-M-H-A-Z-O-N-Y.org—and there you have all my books and all my writings, and you can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested. Thank you so much.
Bob Zadek: Thank you, Yoram. Please enjoy what is left of your weekend. And it’s Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back again next Sunday for another hour of libertarian ideas, no attitude.