Blair: To play devil’s advocate for a second, one of the things that the left will often claim about America is that we are this multicultural—I think the term now that they’ll use is a mosaic, where you have all these different cultures that interact with each other, and those people might come from various parts of the world.

There could be Indians from India, there could be Chinese people from China, there could be French people from France, and they all come together and form these things.

From what you’ve been saying, that there is a conservative faith tradition that exists in all those countries that are pretty disparate in terms of where they would come from, so is the concept of America, in the sense that it can exist in that form of, say, a mosaic, just fundamentally flawed?

Hazony: Well, it can exist, but the thing that you’re describing, a multinational entity which has many different nations and many different peoples living under a single government but without mutual loyalty binding them to one another, that’s called an empire. We have a lot of experience with empires in recorded history. Empires are always dictatorships.

There’s no such thing as a democratic empire. There’s no such thing as a dozen different nations, a dozen different peoples going to the ballot box in order to determine who’s going to get to be the president for the next four years, and then peaceably moving on.

In fact, I think when you look at the recent elections in the United States, at least the last two presidential elections have been contested in such a way that—I don’t know what the numbers are, but 30%, 40%, 50% of Americans thought that each of the last two elections were in some way illegitimate, that they were not free and fair elections, and they led to an illegitimate government.

This is rapidly moving into the situation that you’re describing, all sorts of groups of people who aren’t loyal to one another, don’t recognize the traditions of the country as being particularly important, and in the end, if nothing changes, that will decay into civil war and possible subversion from overseas, and it’s going to end up one way or another with a dictatorship.

Now, I don’t think that that’s inevitable at this point, but it’s inevitable if people keep pushing the idea that diversity is our strength.

Diversity is your strength when it’s diversity internal to a single nation bound by ties of mutual loyalty. All nations are internally diverse. Sometimes you can make it a little bit more diverse. The question is, do the bonds of mutual loyalty that tie these different groups in society together, are they fraying, are they exploding, or is there active work being done to strengthen them?

My book is basically about the question of restoration, repentance, and restoration, and the question of what you’d need to do if you actually wanted America to survive this. The simple answer is a national religious tradition of some kind. It can be tolerant, it can be ecumenical, but the bottom line is that there has to be something that is going to unite people.

Now, I understand that, at the national level, it’s going to be very difficult at this moment to get lots of Americans behind this, but at the level of the states, I think the situation is very different.

There are still many states in the United States where you could get a Christian majority or a pro-Christian majority, which could consist of all sorts of people who don’t necessarily see themselves as Christians, but they can take a look at the woke neo-Marxist government that’s coming and say, “Look, a biblical restoration, a Christian restoration is simply better for all of us, and so I’m going to lend a hand to making that happen.”

I think there’s lots of states where that could happen, and that’s the step that needs to be taken now, aside from people at the personal level.

When you get to the political level, we have to be thinking in terms of experiments at the state level of ending the separation of church and state and creating a Christian public life which offers a biblical moral and political framework that is powerful enough to oppose the neo-Marxism, which, otherwise, is just going to win.