Kesler on national conservatism

I have written before in this space and elsewhere on the American-Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony and his distinctive approach to nationalism and conservatism. A principal difficulty with Hazony's approach is that his defence of his purported national conservatism, as he calls it, is basically historicist, assuming that norms for political action are reducible to traditions specific to given national communities. This leaves him fundamentally unable to challenge injustices occurring elsewhere in the world and leaves him without any norms to judge these traditions.

My critique is echoed by Charles R. Kesler writing last year for Claremont Review of Books: National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism: The problem with internationalist nationalism. Kesler extends this critique to the larger community of national conservatives, or Natcons, of which Hazony is an acknowledged leader:

In any event, the Natcons need a standard of some kind by which to defend national traditions, and to judge among competing or contradictory traditions. That is, they need a standard whose validity is in principle external to or superior to tradition as such. [William F.] Buckley’s American conservatism looked for such a standard in the West’s “Great Tradition” of reason and revelation; indeed, as a young debater and journalist Buckley specialized in the arguments against value relativism. The Natcons bow to the virtues too, praising an eclectic list of them as “essential to sustaining our civilization.” Yet far from refuting relativism by argument, they praise tradition as the key to recovering needed virtues. . . .

Yet to [Hazony's] credit, he recognizes there are good traditions (e.g., American freedom) and bad traditions (e.g., American slavery), and hence there must be some standard by which to distinguish good from bad that isn’t simply reducible to tradition or inheritance as such. He calls that standard “general principles”—general, not universal; hoping that these can be apprehended by experience rather than by reason.

I treat Hazony briefly in my recently published Citizenship Without Illusions, suggesting that those claiming the conservative label typically have to adopt a qualifying adjective, e.g., fiscal, social, national, &c., to infuse the noun with some content.