The latest episode in the unmaking of the American Right came to us live from Jerusalem. The National Conservative conference, organised in the first week of October by the Israeli-American Yoram Hazony, showed how the breakdown of US society will change the American-Israeli alliance.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech from the Pnyx (the hill where Ancient Athenians debated and deliberated), warning that the end of the West is nigh unless it recovers its thumos, or warrior spirit.
“All the hopes that we entertain in the midst of the confusions and dangers of the present are founded, positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, on the experiences of the past,” Leo Strauss wrote in his 1950 essay Jerusalem and Athens. Western civilization, Strauss believed, is defined by the tension between Jerusalem (revelation) and Athens (reason).
The revelation in Jerusalem was that Israel, having lost the support of young left-wing Americans, is also losing young right-wing Americans, and especially young white men.
One panel, inauspiciously held on October 7, brought home this message of disaffection. It sparked an online furore and the traditional shooting of the messenger. Whether we like it or not, we should pay attention.
The speakers were Amanda Milius (Jewish documentary film maker who worked to move the US embassy to Jerusalem in Trump’s first term); Jonathan Keeperman (Jewish publisher of Passage Press, a New Right start-up); William Wolfe (a Southern Baptist who also served in the first Trump administration); and Matthew Peterson (a Catholic new media entrepreneur, also at the Strauss-influenced Claremont Institute).
Much of the quartet’s common message was inarguable. Americans are consumed by domestic discontents. They are disillusioned with running the world, and especially the Middle East. Young Americans are increasingly sceptical of Israel, if not hostile. It is in Israel’s interest and the interest of American Jews to change strategies while they can.
Milius and Keeperman warned that young white Americans are unmoved by invocations of the memory of the Holocaust and accusations of antisemitism.
They advised a shift to talking about Israel’s thumos and its utility to America. So did William Wolfe, but differently.
He told American Jews to “know their place” as a minority. Jewish liberals are a domestic enemy. Jewish conservatives should accept a minor role in a coalition led by Christian nationalists like him.
Yoram Hazony reckons that this kind of argument is now “mainstream” among Republicans. I don’t think it is. But it does represent a rising trend. When people tell you who they are, we should believe them. Especially when they’re telling us what we should be.
Wolfe went down better with the Israeli component of the audience.
Yoram Hazony is trying to build a broad religious-nationalist coalition in America, and an international alliance of nationalists acting freely on their own turf.
Yet most American Jewish conservatives are not going to rally to Wolfe’s bully pulpit. If this is the future of the Republican Party, then Jews will withdraw from the Republicans, along with many other members of the Trump 2024 coalition.
I took part in a panel on media with Matthew Peterson at the last NatCon conference. He’s a smart strategist. This time, he was the only panellist to get into the details.
We are, Peterson said, no longer in the Cold War, in which the American-Israeli alliance was forged, or the War on Terror, when defence and intelligence cooperation intensified.
Control of the Persian Gulf and a “strong Israel” should remain among America’s “core interests”, Peterson argued, but both nations should conduct their alliance from real-time assessments of their strategic interests. And those interests cannot, by definition, always overlap.
This is classical realist theory, and it differs little from Marco Rubio’s recent statements. It shouldn’t be contentious. But it is.
This raises questions that the panel didn’t address: How valid are the discontents, and how amenable to reason is their kind of revelation?
If the New Right want America to retrench from the Middle East and outsource its security needs, then there is room for a deal with Israel and its supporters. Since October 7, plenty of them, and not just on the Israeli right, would prefer that Israel had a free hand.
But if the New Right are scapegoating an imaginary “Jewish” foe and the “Epstein class” for dragging America into foreign wars and numbing young men with porn while offshoring jobs, imposing white guilt while pushing mass immigration, then there is not much to say. And this catalogue of fantasy is increasingly popular among young Americans of all stripes.
You cannot reason a madman out of his madness. He likes it. It lets him make sense of the world. But delusion leads to perdition. Jews are not obliged to applaud the self-destruction of reason.
Talking of sirens, perhaps the most useful outcome of the conference was that the speakers’ social media feeds exposed millions of heavily online young Americans to the real Israel. Children everywhere, and more thumos than an Athenian wrestling match. A revelation, even.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner and the Critic
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