A Theory From the Right

As I start typing this week’s column, both Gaza and Ukraine appear threatened by an even bigger war, and India continues to witness deeply troubling anti-democratic thrusts. I will put these matters to one side, however, and focus instead on a recent (August 1) conversation on “nationhood” on a New York Times platform. 

Ezra Klein, the paper’s well-known commentator and columnist, was in discussion with Yoram Hazony, an Israeli American political theorist who evidently possesses high standing among the world’s “nationalist conservatives.” These “nationalist conservatives,” more simply known as “natcons,” are now influential in many countries and decisive in a few. They also seek to coalesce across continents. 

The impact of Donald Trump, their best-known global icon, doesn’t require underlining, but both Hazony and Klein seemed to agree that Vice President J. D. Vance is the most influential proclaimer in the U.S. of natcon’s philosophy. Not that Vance is merely a theorist: he is one of maybe four or five Republicans currently spoken of as their party’s candidate for president in 2028. 

Still, Vance has articulated the natcon position more consistently than others. Moreover, in his own life Vance has personified a powerful driver of the Trump movement: a feeling among white Americans that a diverse coalition of liberal whites, blacks, Asians and Latinos has cheated them of their right to run the United States. 

Whether spontaneous or injected by persistent propaganda, this feeling has been noticeable for some time. Its presence prompts some aspirants for high office in the U.S. to make declarations such as “Yes, I stand for a white America,” or “Yes, I am a Christian nationalist.” 

FAMILIES AND TRIBES

Those managing to tune in to the 80-minute Klein-Hazony discussion will find that its tone is calm even when the difference in viewpoints is sharp, which it is, from start to finish. In a theory to which Vance too may subscribe, Hazony holds that nations are created by families who form clans who form tribes that come together to form a nation. In his view, the U.S. as a nation was formed by Protestant Anglo-Saxon families and tribes which in course of time, and not without tension and friction, aligned with communities of European Catholics and Jews from eastern Europe, who were later immigrants, to form the “core” or “center” of the U.S. 

Hazony did not name, separately or as a collectivity, the rest of the U.S. population, be they native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Americans of Arab, Turkic, or Iranian origin, or something else. He is aware of course that the aforementioned groups exist, but in the August 1 conversation he said nothing to suggest that they played a role beyond providing volume around the “core.” 

I found it striking that a theorist could coolly speak about America without once mentioning any of its nonwhite races. Hints of their existence were recognized, however, as when Hazony acknowledged that the creation of a nationalist state has not been “a consensual process.” The unspoken assumption was that coercion of at least some outside the core was unavoidable. 

Klein informed Hazony and the conversation’s viewers that he himself was a Californian with genes from European Jews and Brazil. He was unable, added Klein, to separate his picture of American nationhood from something quite different from “families, clans, and tribes.” That something was the Declaration of Independence of 1776. We can look again at the Declaration’s lines, even if we’ve heard them a thousand times before: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government...” 

LOYALTY TO THE “CORE”

Hazony raised a rhetorical question. If America was primarily about liberty and equality, was everyone in the world who loved those values entitled to enter the U.S. and become a citizen? Since the answer was clearly in the negative, it was equally clear, Hazony seemed to contend, that American nationhood was based not on a foundational idea but on the dominance of a “core.” These are not Hazony’s words but that seemed to be his argument. Not equality, not liberty, but loyalty to the “core” is the cement that would strengthen the U.S. 

These again may not be Hazony’s precise words but that was the implication of one who spoke of “clan, tribe and mutual loyalty” as a nation’s “building blocks.” Others will see Hazony’s reasoning as a defense not of stability but of supremacy. Troublingly, moreover, his reasoning possesses almost exact counterparts in country after country. 

It was most interesting, though hardly surprising, to find Hazony bracketing Israel and India a number of times and contrasting these two countries with three others: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Recalling that Israel, independent India, and the three Arab nations were created more or less at the same time – after the end of World War II --, Hazony suggested that there was a strong sense of nationhood in the first two countries but not in the other three. As long as Lebanon, one of these three, had an unchallenged Christian majority, said Hazony, it was a stable nation. Now it has gone to pieces. (Again, not Hazony’s exact words but what he conveyed.) 

I would gladly have a conversation with Hazony about today’s India, where Hindu nationalists think they form the country’s “core” and openly insist on their superior status and a diminished position for India’s Muslims and Christians, who together add up to 250 million individuals, or over two-thirds of the U.S. population. 

Viewing diversity as a problem, Hazony even seemed to admit that from his thesis a corollary could be drawn that “outsiders” could/should be driven away from a nation. Not equal rights but “how long your family has been here” should be the relevant question, he appeared to suggest. Doesn’t that imply a hierarchy, with ascending rights for those whose ancestors moved earlier than others to the U.S.? 

In the U.S. and in most democracies, you may legitimately distinguish citizens from non-citizens not entitled to all the rights that citizens enjoy. However, dividing “real” Americans or “authentic” Indians from citizens deemed less legitimate is to reproduce feudal polities/societies or imitate later polities/societies where belonging or not belonging to elite tribes, castes, or parties decides your status. 

In other words, “nationalistic” theories of nationhood that postulate a hierarchy of races, tribes, castes, and political or religious communities cannot swallow America’s Declaration of Independence or free India’s Constitution of 1950, assuring liberty and equality, and, in the latter case, fraternity too. Neither document has yet been repudiated or replaced, despite the frightening march of an exclusionary nationalism. 

If the status in the U.S. of J. D. Vance’s India-born wife Usha was to be derived from the number of years her forebears spent in this country, she would be a non-entity. Happily, that is not the case. However, theorists like Hazony do not seem to be bothered that in India, which he sees as a nation with a “core,” Muslims and Christians whose forebears made India their home for ten centuries or more are frequently denied basic rights by governments run by Hindu nationalists. 

STATE, CITIZEN, & DIVERSITY 

You are in poor luck when the criterion for enjoying rights is your “loyalty” as judged by “a nationalist” who claims to represent the “core.” Wouldn’t you rather have a pledge spelled out in a binding document? 

Does Yoram Hazony know, and if he knows is he bothered, that millions of Muslim voters in India could soon be disenfranchised if they cannot prove, through documents which because of expense and other hurdles are almost impossible to produce, that their parents and grandparents were Indian citizens? The probability that their forebears were Indians for centuries may be 95 percent or higher. Even so, if they cannot produce the required proofs, they could all be viewed as illegal immigrants freshly arrived from Bangladesh, or as Rohingyas expelled by Myanmar but managing to enter India illegally. 

India’s “natcons” dismiss the richness that diversity has brought over the centuries. Some see an illegal migrant in every Muslim in the land. Some resent the very existence of India’s Muslims. Some natcons occupy positions of great power. Frank conversations with them are called for.