Blair: It sounds like these traditions can almost apply in different places. In India, there would be a different form of conservatism, maybe based around Hinduism and a national language like Hindi, whereas in France, it would be connected to Catholicism with the French language. Is that an accurate take?

Hazony: Yeah, I think so. Marxism and liberalism are universal theories. Like the Enlightenment rationalism that they spring out of, they claim to be true for all people in all times and places, without regard to how they grew up or what they were taught or what they believe.

Conservatives see that as being extremely unrealistic. They begin looking at the world empirically and come to the conclusion that human beings are born into families and tribes and nations and religious traditions, and that these are not the same, that they are unlike one another. Anglo-American conservatism is going to be different from conservatism in India or in Arabia or in Russia or in China.

Blair: The title of your book is “Conservatism: A Rediscovery.” Why does it need to be rediscovered?

Hazony: Americans have slipped, especially after the end of the Cold War, but maybe even earlier than that, have slipped into a worldview in which conservatism just is liberalism.

You hear these kinds of things in Washington and in conservative circles all the time, that “we American conservatives, what we’re conserving is liberalism,” or that conservatism is a branch or a species of liberalism, all sorts of things, whose purpose, in the end, is to sow confusion.

This wouldn’t be more than just an intellectual curiosity, except for the fact that the United States in the year 2020 has moved into a period in which the hegemonic liberal discourse that dominated America since World War II has collapsed.

Not to say that there are no more liberals running around, but the assumption that you could rely on when I was growing up and when you were growing up, we could rely on the Democrats and the Republicans to be some kind of liberal, and that assumption no longer holds.

The moment that The New York Times started firing senior employees for being liberals, the moment that Princeton University took Woodrow Wilson’s name, the great liberal icon, off of the buildings of the university, where Wilson had been president, America moved into a different world, in which liberalism is now a minority worldview. It has given way to a woke neo-Marxism, which is making its own bid for hegemony.

On the right, we see different kinds of ideas contending with one another to be the champion of what the right is going to say in response to this shocking cultural revolution that we’re living through.

At this point, I think it’s crucial to be able to distinguish between liberalism and conservatism, because if you think that conservatism is liberalism, then you are signing onto that ideology which just collapsed.

If there’s one thing that we know about liberalism at this point, is that in the two generations that liberals dominated America, they were completely unsuccessful in figuring out a way to transmit liberalism so that it would be conserved and transmitted across generations. We did that experiment. It failed. It’s over.

People who see what’s coming and want to know what went wrong, they need to say, “Well, maybe liberalism is what went wrong.” That certainly is a large part of my book on conservatism, is tracing the way that liberalism pushed conservatives out.

If you want to know anything about a life of conservation and transmission, either as an individual or as a family, at that level, or at the national level, you need to go back. You need to examine the great Anglo-American conservative tradition of thought, and you need to start applying it in your own life. This is going to require restoration because the things we’ve inherited are liberal, not conservative.

Blair: If we’re trying to restore an old conservative order, we’re trying to restore a lot of these things that have been lost, where do we start? You mentioned that people need to start doing this in their own life. Where would be a good place for them to start?

Hazony: I think people can ask themselves honestly whether the life they’re leading is a conservative life, whether it’s a life of conservation and transmission. For most people today, even if they identify with the word conservative, the answer is simply no.

I think you look around your immediate surroundings and you realize that most young people today are having trouble getting married, so they keep putting it off. They’re having trouble having kids. If they’re married, they’re having trouble staying married. They are not particularly impressed with the importance of things like studying Scripture, keeping the Sabbath. They don’t think that they need to be part of a congregation in which the great inheritance is actively being handed down.

If that’s the way you’re leading your life, then you’re a big part of the problem. If a society does not consist of individuals who devote their time and energies to conservation and transmission, then you can’t expect the nation to be able to do it. The nation just consists of the various groups of individuals within it.

The book is definitely a call for people to examine their own contribution to the cultural revolution. If you are not focused on, “What do I need to do in order to make sure that the great tradition is going to be handed down to my children?”, if you’re not focused on that, then you’re not really leading a conservative life. In the book, I offer suggestions for how to begin leading a conservative life.