The Mind of MAGA
Yoram Hazony, the Princeton-educated Israeli-American who has Trump’s ear
As the country talks about polarization, the far right versus the far left, and so on, it’s worth looking at the intellectual scaffolding around these positions. And I don’t know that anyone has written a better profile of Yoram Hazony, founder of “National Conservatism,” than this piece that ran in Arc this morning. It begins:
Fifteen years ago, Yoram Hazony was a medium-size star in the small constellation of conservative Jewish intellectuals. He was provost of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, a conservative think tank he had founded in the nineties, and headed up its Institute for Advanced Study. He taught Jewish and conservative ideas to college-aged students during semester breaks, organized occasional academic conferences, and published his own brand of conservative biblical and political scholarship in books and blog posts. Most American conservatives, even in the activist class, had probably not heard his name, and surely could not have pronounced it if they had.
But today, Hazony is in the big time. He speaks less in classrooms and more in packed conference halls and rarified back rooms (smokiness unverified). National Conservatism, the political movement spearheaded by the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), which Hazony founded in 2019, is ascendant in the second Trump administration. “NatCon” is, in the words of its founder, “the intellectual substrate underpinning [this] nationalist movement.” You can hear traces of National Conservatism in the president’s executive orders and on the lips of government officials. It provides a framework that can justify Trump’s immigration bans and his tariffs; it is the foundation of the American retreat from multilateral organizations, and an ideological well drawn upon by culture warriors like JD Vance and Michael Knowles.
When Vance dismisses opponents as “childless cat ladies,” he is echoing Hazony’s dismissal of liberal political philosophy, which Hazony has called “a political theory made in the image of unmarried, childless individuals … the fantasies of the Enlightenment’s lifelong bachelors.” Hazony has also argued that we shouldn’t take Enlightenment’s bachelors seriously because “Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant never had children. Descartes’s only daughter, born outside of marriage, died at the age of five.”
Hazony has long seen his ascendance coming. In 2017, he spoke about the role conservatives ought to play in society: “Our job is to prepare an option that will be on the table when some big crisis hits.” And even when he said it, Hazony had already received his crisis, giftwrapped in bright red with bold white lettering. Donald Trump presented a profound crisis for a Republican establishment that advocated for free-trade, foreign-interventionism, puritanical moralizing, and fierce libertarianism, all of which were professed Republican dogma from Reagan through Romney. There was a whole network of think tanks, donors, and political strategists to push this traditional Republic agenda in policy and public opinion. As Trump gained popularity, former Republican power-players like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney fought back without much force, and were sidelined. Some think tanks, most notably the Heritage Foundation, eventually shifted their allegiances, while others, like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, stayed the course and consequently fell out of influence. But at the start of President Trump’s first term he didn’t have a replacement for the institutional network that he had so handily defeated. This was an ideological and institutional vacuum into which National Conservatism was birthed, along with a whole world of new institutions and ideologies racing to step in with their new social and political agendas.
Many of these ideologies, often referred to as “post-liberal,” question classical liberalism’s commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy—principles upon which the American mythos was built. Sensing opportunity in the upheaval, proponents of these post-liberal philosophies attempt to direct the power of MAGA towards their hierarchical, religious, volkisch, or authoritarian visions for America. There are the NatCons led by Hazony, but also Catholic Integralists like Adrian Vermeule, Protestant Dominionists (many of whom are affiliated with C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation), neo-feudalists like Curtis Yarvin, and a slew of online personalities further on the fringe. Of these overlapping ideologies, National Conservatism, with its centralized structure and buttoned-up aesthetic, has emerged as a likely successor to the old right. It is already deeply rooted in the Trump administration and the network of think tanks and policy institutes that dominate the 2025 Republican political landscape. It has influential supporters in Britain, Hungary, and the growing neo-nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe and around the world.
Hazony has long been fascinated by the ways that ideas and books impact the political landscape. In an instructive seminar from 2010, he developed “Yoram’s Law” of political change: Every major political shift depends on a book or essay that fought and won in the battle of ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that, per “Yoram’s Law,” Hazony is winning the day.
MAGA was a populist movement without a clearly articulated ideology, and National Conservatism an elite ideology with no movement. It was a match made in purgatory. The definition and history of American “greatness” was, in Trump’s 2016 campaign, largely left to the imagination and projection of his audience. But National Conservatism, founded on revolutionary ideas about society, liberty, religion, and history that Hazony advances in The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and, later, in Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), provides a definition and constructs a usable past to fill that gap.
You can read the rest here.
Should self-driving cars be banned?
This week, Missouri senator Josh Hawley—whom former senator John C. Danforth, moderate Republican, regrets ever supporting, as you can read here—proposed banning self-driving cars. His reason seemed to be that self-driving cars will take jobs away from Teamsters. To a normal human, this is a reasonable point—a well-paid livelihood doing meaningful work would seem to be more important for human flourishing than automating stuff for the sake of automating it, or to drive prices down. To Nellie Bowles of The Free Press—whose founder I wrote about yesterday—this is utter nonsense. She wrote in her newsletter today:
→ Luddites gather: Senator Josh Hawley wants to ban self-driving cars. “I think we ought to ban autonomous vehicles,” he said, calling the growth of driverless cars “not safe” and “terrible, terrible for working people.” Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said he plans to introduce legislation on the issue soon. A draft of his “Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act” was obtained by Business Insider—it would mandate the presence of a “human safety operator” in every self-driving vehicle, effectively requiring by law that all cars have. . . drivers. He said: “If AVs become the norm, the Teamsters won’t exist anymore.” You’re telling me that if we replace hard, annoying jobs like long-haul trucking with computers, we also won’t have bloated, corrupt unions? Don’t threaten me with a good time, Mr. Senator! Republicans, the party of small government and the free market, weirdly don’t like either one when it comes to their reliable constituents. But think of the Teamsters.
And here we get at something I don’t like about The Free Press (since I spent yesterday’s newsletter giving Bari Weiss one, maybe two cheers): they are pretty well in the tank for AI, Silicon Valley, etc. Whereas I see Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen as agents of the devil, they seem them as interesting conversation partners whose intellects must be respected.
I’ll put it another way: to Nellie Bowles, “Luddite” is clearly an insult. But to a lot of us, asking smart questions about whether any given technology serves people or masters them is just smart.
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“It was a match made in purgatory.”
“To a lot of us, asking smart questions about whether any given technology serves people or masters them is just smart.” I will give this a full three cheers!