"I didn’t think it would happen on the Right."

Yoram Hazony is a Jewish political philosopher who created the influential National Conservatism movement. Now he wonders why some fellow travelers on the Right no longer want to work with a Jew.

Yoram Hazony » Scenes from the Martyrdom of Robert of Bury (detail), about 1480–1490 (unknown artist): Promoted as a Christian martyr murdered by Jews, the story of Little Robert — a classic medieval blood libel — was likely invented by an abbot looking to garner support in an election year.

In 2019, I had a Twitter exchange with Yoram Hazony…

… who is an Israeli-American political philosopher, an Orthodox Jew, and the godfather of the National Conservatism movement, which in recent years has showcased people like this:

Here’s my exchange with Yoram:

I called Hazony’s ideas “dangerous” six years ago because I feared he was creating a movement that would soon come back to haunt him and his Jewish brothers and sisters in the Diaspora.

A week ago, in his opening remarks at NatCon’s 2025 gathering in Washington, DC, Yoram revealed something extraordinary and deeply disturbing (video here):

… Let me just say a couple of words about being Jewish here. I’ve never done this before. I’m not especially comfortable with it. It was very very easy for me to be a leader in the nationalist movement and to be Jewish up until a year and a half ago or so. It was great. It wasn’t just easy. It was great. It was really great. You know why? Because every time some lefty Jew or some lefty non-Jew would accuse one of our speakers of anti-Semitism, I got to be the guy who went out and said, You people, you’re completely out of your minds. You’ve never spoken to the guy. You’ve never talked to the guy. You have no idea what he’s saying. …

I got to do this for years, for seven years, and I have to tell you, it makes you really popular. Like, everybody’s really grateful. I’m the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism and it was fun and there were lots of people, especially when you do these things in Europe and each nationalist movement in Europe thinks that the other nationalists from some other country that they’re actually totally deranged. Why? Because they’re all reading the liberal media in their country.

So, it was it was great to have these conferences where the nationalists from different countries would get together and they’d say, Wow, you’re so normal. That’s not what it seems like from reading the newspapers. It was fun. It was fun. And many, many people told me, You know what? I would have thought twice about coming to a nationalist conference, but there’s like an Orthodox Jewish guy who’s like standing there. And so I felt confident that I could come and it was really my pleasure because the overwhelming majority of the people on the right, they really are good people. Doesn’t mean I agree with them about everything, but really really wonderful people that I’ve met over these years and and and now it’s not that easy anymore. Okay, it’s not that easy anymore. Now, there’s not just criticism of, you know, criticism of Israel, which is fine, obviously. I mean, that’s just a policy question. If you disagree about Israel, fine. All right, so we disagree on lots of things. We disagree on Israel, too.

But I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half. Like the left is long gone into a rabbit hole of hating Jews. I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken. We now have quite a few people on the right who in the last three years have made a really interesting transition. These are mostly people, some of them, people that I used to admire a great deal, some of them I still admire, who’ve made this transition. They used to think that Jews and Christians should be allied to try to save America. And now they think actually, for reasons that I don’t necessarily understand, they now think that saying good things about the Muslim Brotherhood and Islam and the Quran, that’s where they’re going. And they think Jews are a big problem. Okay. So that’s that is the reality. I hope it’s going to pass. …

Instead of saying, Listen, Yoram, we need to rethink the relationship between Jews and Christians a bit, let’s discuss it — I mean, I’m going to honor you, you honor me. If it’s not like that, if instead what we get is just a vile stream of accusations about what Jews did to Christians in the Middle Ages and all the rest of this stuff…

Uh oh. Suddenly, Yoram realizes he’s heading into dangerous terrain, so he quickly pivots in a safer direction — “the coalition built by Donald Trump” and the political future of J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio.

What went wrong, Yoram?

I could write volumes about Hazony’s predicament, but I’ll keep it short.

Yoram Hazony is a brilliant political philosopher. He’s a man of ideas who is in constant dialogue with the great thinkers of the past, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, René Descartes, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Selden, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Burke. Yoram has also been deeply inspired and shaped by the political philosophy that animates the Hebrew Bible.

But here’s the problem: Most people have no idea who all those guys are, what they wrote, or what they believed. And very few people are interested in learning about the political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible.

Yoram wants people to think like philosophers so they can rediscover the deep wisdom and spirit that are the keystones of Western civilization. But most people just want to hear a good story. Don’t yammer at me about how John Selden, in the 17th century, had an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish texts, which gave him a new way of understanding natural law and English jurisprudence. Instead, tell me a Story about the redemptive hand of G*d in History, and the exciting adventures of His Suffering Son.

Hazony has slammed into a wall that is more than 2,000 years old — a narrative about history and humanity that cannot make room for the Jew. It’s a Story about the past that insists everything hinges on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (or on the coming of Muhammad, the “final prophet” of G*d).

That wall is, in a word: Supersessionism (aka replacement theology).¹

The failure to find a narrative solution to the Jewish-Christian schism has haunted the Western world for two millennia. It has haunted me for the past 40 years. Now, it also haunts Yoram Hazony and his National Conservatism movement.

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See also:

1. Supersessionism, also known as replacement theology, is a Christian theological doctrine that asserts that the Christian Church has replaced or superseded the Jewish people as God’s chosen people. According to this view, the New Covenant established through Jesus Christ has rendered the Mosaic Covenant with the Jewish people obsolete. » Islamic supersessionism is the belief that Islam has perfected and replaced the previous Abrahamic religions — Judaism and Christianity.