How the Radical Right Remade Nationalism

In his groundbreaking 1983 book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the enigmas of nationalism, including one that is of particular interest today, namely the “philosophical poverty and even incoherence” of most thinking on the subject. Anderson writes:

[U]nlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers. This “emptiness” easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is “no there there.”

In the forty-one years since Anderson penned these words, though, something momentous has occurred: a new crop of conservative and neofascist intellectuals have focused their energy on articulating a comprehensive political theory of nationalism. I leave it to posterity to judge whether any of them will—like the list of thinkers Anderson cites—still be read hundreds of years hence. But the new theorists of nationalism have managed to achieve something very significant: they have created an independent ideological system centered around the sanctity of the national community and the role of the nation-state in its preservation. No longer the handmaiden of more robust ideologies or pragmatic political ends—self-determination, revolution, empire, war—nationalism in this century has attained theoretical independence, if not necessarily sophistication. And perhaps most strikingly, in making nationalism an end in itself, these theorists have jettisoned the democratic principles that were part and parcel of its earlier history, arguing instead that authoritarian options may well be preferable.

Among the most influential of these intellectuals is the Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony, whose books—including The Jewish State, The Virtue of Nationalism, and Conservatism: A Rediscovery—assume the weighty task of centering the nation as the preeminent concern for political philosophers and politicians alike. As I have explored at length elsewhere, Hazony’s foundational premise is that the nation is a divinely ordained entity—literally—that represents the optimal form of political organization. He sustains this argument by tracing a distinctly non-liberal genealogy of the political community, which in his view begins not with a voluntary agreement to obey the same laws but with obligatory, even coercive, familial and tribal bonds. Rejecting the possibility of multiracial democracies, Hazony echoes European philosophers like David Engels, who opposes the mixing of differing ethnic populations on civilizational grounds. As Engels writes in Renovatio Europae, “Without a common identity, it will not be possible to establish such social cohesion, and it has been one of the lessons of the migration crisis that such an ‘identity’ cannot be based on purely humanist and universal values; it requires a deeper anchoring in the cultural, historical, and spiritual subconscious of a common past shared for centuries.”

It is the nation, then, and not the state that occupies a place of privilege in Hazony’s political thought. Indeed, Hazony relegates the state to a vessel whose function is to protect the traditions and supposedly authentic ethnic, cultural, and spiritual character of the (ideally) singular nation against all that threatens to undermine it: immigrants (or, in the case of Israel, Palestinians) most obviously, but also anything (abortion, divorce, TikTok, queer and trans people) that runs counter to the reproduction of good nationalist children.

The National Conservatism (NatCon) movement, in which Hazony has played a foundational role, provides an institutional framework that channels the energy of the various constituencies of the New Right—the anti-woke and TERF camps; those opposed to immigration, abortion, and Big Tech; critics of “globalist” institutions like the EU and UN; and advocates for neo-Keynesian economics and natalist policies—toward this singular aim of protecting the nation and guarding its culture and values from further degradation. As the movement’s Statement of Principles reads:

We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. . . . We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.

It is this focus on cultural integrity and purity that lends the new nationalism its fascist tinge. “These are people whose ethos, whose way of life, is a danger to humanity,” proclaimed Hungarian Canadian scholar Frank Furedi in a speech at the 2024 NatCon Brussels convention. The “people” he was referring to included, unsurprisingly, “the LGBTQ mob” and other partisans of the culture war. Melding the mechanisms of state power with the idea that some people represent an existential threat to the nation results in a dangerous brew.