On Hazony

Rome;  London

Yes, I made it to Hamburg in one piece, and in fact, survived the first weekend, here in the open air insane asylum.

A recent HW post over at OD made me think of another city where I was recently, and it also gives me the opportunity officially to register my assessment of the political question at hand.

Even if you don’t want to think that Hazony’s outfit is nothing more than a mass effort of political co-option, the main problem with it is that Hazony is trying to create a political sector and space, that is trying to split the uprights between three forces that want nothing to do with one or both of the others for varying reasons, if they’re all honest: Organized activist Jewish interests, proper nationalists, and official lamestream conservatives. People invested in one of them will bash and trash Hazony, his sector and anyone who associates with it, because it contains enough elements with at least one if not both of the others.

Consider:

(1)  Organized activist Jewish interests are doing well enough on their own.  They certainly hate proper nationalists, and, while there are plenty of Jewish lamestream conservatives, OAJI really have no need for official lamestream conservatism.  To put it another way, if OLC, Republican Party-ism in the United States, Toryism in Britain, Liberalism in Australia, Christian Democracy in Germany, etc., and their underpinning ideologies, totally disappeared at this moment, it wouldn’t matter to OAJI, and it wouldn’t affect them one bit.  So why would OAJI have any truck or need for a movement which is close enough to a sector they hate and another they don’t need?  There’s nothing in it for them.

(2)  Official lamestream conservatism doesn’t do nationalism, and, in their opinion, they’re doing well enough without it, even though they’re doing “well” in a pride-cometh-before-the-fall sense of speaking.  OLC obviously slobbers over OAJI, even though, like I wrote above, OAJI don’t need OLC, so the antipathy that OLC has toward Hazonyism has far more to do with it being “too close” to proper nationalism.  Of course, that was the point of the OD article I linked to at the beginning, the Tories thumping one of their own for going to Rome.

(3)  A majority of proper nationalists think that Hazony is nothing more than a deliberate con artist, trying to co-opt the growing popnat sector in order to keep it from hurting OAJI and/or OLC.  My assessment (a mere two paragraphs away) is not quite as uncharitable, and it’s probably the least mean and cynical you’ll find in our sector.  But still nowhere near laudatory or positive.  No matter what, proper nationalists maintain somewhere between bearish (at “best”) and not wanting to touch it with a ten billion foot pole (at “worst”) posture toward Hazonyism.

So, that’s why Hazonyism is unsustainable, because it’s trying to broker a compromise between three much more powerful sectors that don’t want or need the other two, and don’t like or need his OAJI-OLC-PN mashup ideology.

My take on Hazony, like I wrote above, is the least uncharitable you’ll probably find from our sector, the proper nationalist one.  He does not strike me as a deliberate con artist.  I think he’s just plain ole naive.  I think he happens to like some of the ground-level features and agenda of proper nationalism while not liking the gestalt (which literally translates to “shape” or “form”) of it.  To put it another way, he likes the lyrics, but not the melody.  So he’s trying to work the same lyrics around a different melody, but he won’t exactly wind up with a hit record.

If you think this assessment sounds a little familiar, then it should — This was similar to what I thought of Rand Paul.  I figured way back when, circa 2013, that his attempt to triangulate between his father’s right-libertarian “Dr. No” purism and invade-the-world invite-the-world neoconservatism was untenable, because both bookends hated the other, and weren’t interested in any compromise halfway house ideology between them.  Turns out that was spot on, if you want to use Rand Paul’s 2016 Presidential candidacy as proof.  Even though Trump getting in changed everything.  But, even if Trump didn’t, I still don’t think Rand Paul would have done much better than he did in the real world with Trump in.  In retrospect, the biggest problem with Rand Paul’s compromise ideology was that it was trying to triangulate between one bookend which was already a political cuss word (“neocon”) and another which could never punch through in a major political sense these days.  It would have been like trying to tie a rope between the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Note:  I could have gone to this shindig in Rome if I wanted.  It’s just that I’ve already been to Rome, so I feel no need to go back there this soon after having already been.  Hazony’s conference in Rome came too close to me getting ready to come here to Hamburg, and also happened at the same time when the soon-to-be Mrs. Blogmeister and I still have a lot of work to to to get ready for the wedding, in spite of just about all the important features being a done deal since just about the end of last month.  If I would have been able to go, I would have met Mr. Hazony, and therefore, would at this moment have an accurate direct personal first hand reading of him.  When I say that he doesn’t strike me as a deliberate con artist, it’s not because I have yet actually met him;  Meeting him might have changed my mind.