Yoram Hazony’s “NatConTalk”: Enlarging the Conservative Conversation

“NatConTalk is a recent entrant into the conservative conversation, or what remains of such under the hegemony of social media, our contemporary digital coliseum.”

The Anglo right is in a state of flux and has been since President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory and all the more so since his 2020 election loss. What it means to be on the Right, what the beliefs and principles of this side of the political spectrum are, is no longer grounded in firm foundations. Some see the American right as having drifted from its classically liberal roots towards a new authoritarianism as epitomized by President Trump, Brexit, and all the rest, while others see the Right as struggling to return to a truer version of itself after a sixty-year post-war deviation.

Yoram Hazony sits in this latter camp, and his YouTube discussion show, NatConTalk, is an effort to articulate and explore the new ideological landscape. NatConTalk is a recent entrant into the conservative conversation, or what remains of such under the hegemony of social media, our contemporary digital coliseum. The show stands at fourteen episodes as of the end of December, 2020. It features Hazony interviewing a range of political, sociological, and economic thinkers on the Right, who tackle some of the most pressing issues of the day. Most of these interviews are stimulating examples of earnestly conducted discussion with good faith questions and answers.

The themes discussed are filtered through the lens of what Hazony and his confreres at the Edmund Burke Foundation call “national conservatism.” As such, the main theme is the upsurge of national-populism since 2016, with President-elect Joe Biden’s victory less a repudiation of this and more a victory for dullness over crassness, leaving the structural changes that brought President Trump to power intact. This national-populism is given an intellectual explanation by Hazony, as the call from dispossessed populations across the West to reassert national sovereignty, cultural security, and economic stability. The supposed triumph of post-Cold War neoliberalism, as well as the post-Second World War consensus, is coming apart under the weight of its contradictions. The gap between promised salvation-through-liberty and the reality of perdition-through-serfdom is too big to ignore any longer.