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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
America’s Founders believed religion and liberty could not only coexist but be mutually reinforcing. Today, some influential intellectuals on the right are flatly denying that idea of alignment and arguing for society to be reordered around their vision of Christian orthodoxy.
In this episode,
, The UnPopulist’s senior editor, sits down with , research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs and, from 2016 to 2017, senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. The two discuss Copulsky’s book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, paying special attention to its chapter on the the current right-wing revolt—from groups such as postliberal Catholics and national conservatives—against America’s founding liberal ideals.We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: Jerome Copulsky, thank you for joining me today. Your book, American Heretics, is a play on the ideas of heresy and orthodoxy. “Heresy” is explicitly in the title, and heresy, of course, is conceptually reliant on the notion of orthodoxy. But figures you call American heretics aren’t heretics with respect to religion, are they? And the orthodoxy that’s implied doesn’t have to do with a religious orthodoxy, does it? Can you unpack the idea behind the book and how you are using these theological categories?
Jerome Copulsky: Yeah, absolutely. You’re correct that the American heretics I talk about in this book would all consider themselves to be religiously orthodox. Their shared heresy is their opposition to the American political project as they see it—and, particularly, their opposition to the constitutional structure that was set up in 1787, and to the political ideas and ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
Belvedere: Your book, very accessibly, covers the sweep of American history. So I’d like to ask: Which era, prior to our own, do you believe is most like our own? At least as it relates to contentiousness between dominant religious outlooks and the fundamental principles of liberal democracy.
Copulsky: That’s a really interesting and difficult question. Each of the moments and the “heretics” that I look at in the book, beginning with Church of England Loyalists who are opposing the American Revolution up into today’s postliberals and national conservatives, are opposed to what they see as a political order, or the idea of a political order, that is opposed to their notions of revealed truth. So each of these moments perhaps shares a different opposition to American politics.
If we start at very beginning of the book with the Church of England Loyalists, their opposition to the American Patriots was their belief that the American Patriots were rejecting a cosmic order. They were rejecting the placement of the king in the Great Chain of Being, the great chain of social and political being that was revealed in the Bible and the Christian tradition in the name of modern, what we now call liberal, ideas—but ideas that they believed were false and dangerous.
If we look at other moments in the book, for example, the Christian Amendment Movement in the post-Civil War era, there was a fear of diversity and pluralism. It was, in many ways, a nativist movement that saw Catholic immigrants, Jewish immigrants, and others as undermining the fundamentally Protestant nature of the nation and the Republic.
I think that we can see echoes of these different movements in contemporary political discourse.
Belvedere: You bring in Tocqueville early on to provide a kind of positive frame for how religion and liberalism can be mutually reinforcing, at least in an American context. Why is his thought so different, on this issue, than the thinking of all the other figures that you profile in the book?
Copulsky: Tocqueville in Democracy in America, his famous text where he describes the political and social mores and institutions of American democracy, argued that the reason why religion was such an important social factor in the American Republic was precisely because of the separation of church and state, precisely because the United States didn’t have an established church—that clergymen did not get involved directly in politics and focused on the development of what he calls mores and creating this shared democratic ethos in society. This idea is something that all of the “heretics” of the book reject.
So I actually begin the book with a quick sketch of Tocqueville’s description of religion in America as a way of presenting an American orthodoxy on this issue. And for the people that I’m looking at in this book, this is not a way of shaping a political society, but in fact a way of undermining a political society. That’s why think Tocqueville becomes, throughout the book, a kind of foil to these visions of a tighter bond between religion and politics.
Belvedere: You tell the story of the postliberal Christian right in the last decade or so. It’s not a static story. It’s a genuinely dynamic story. As the Trump phenomenon increasingly showed itself to be stronger, to be more durable, than initially thought, key figures within the postliberal Christian right adjusted their recommendations, their proposals, accordingly. There were significant developments in their visions for society, or rather in their visions for what place Christianity can come to hold in society.
And the shift really was remarkable. Not all of them, but some of them, some influential figures within the postliberal set, went from embracing a kind of exilic self-conception, the idea that the Christian faithful in America were but a small remnant adrift in a society that is unceasingly hostile toward their beliefs and values, to a sense that society could be reclaimed for what they took to be the cause of Christ.
This shift, from recommending retreat to recommending reconquest, I took to be a pretty seismic one. There was this tremendous energy behind the idea that society’s institutions, its policies, its laws, its very architecture, could be newly patterned, or patterned once again, after what they understood to be the demands of historic, orthodox Christianity.
I want to ask you to unpack this story some more for our readers and listeners. Your book does a phenomenal job of telling it. In fact, it’s only one small part of what the book covers. You go all the way back to the American Revolution. But this is the part that I think is most fascinating for those of us engaged day in and day out with postliberal religious conservatives.
So, you begin Chapter 7, the chapter on postliberals and national conservatives, with a Supreme Court decision, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, in which SCOTUS recognizes that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Why did you begin here?
Copulsky: Yeah, I think that that decision was in a sense a watershed on the part of Christian conservatives, a realization that they had lost the culture war that they had been fighting since maybe the ’60s and ’70s, and that this was really their Waterloo, so to speak.
Let me sort of step back and describe some of the things that you alluded to. The earlier question was: Which moments of the book are most resonant to our contemporary moment? And I talked a little bit about the critique of the Church of England Loyalists and the Christian Amendment Movement people who really wanted to make what they believed to be a de facto Christian republic a de jure Christian republic through constitutional change.
There’s another group that I talk about in the middle of the book, a Catholic group around a man named L. Brent Bozell Jr. who formed a magazine called Triumph. Triumph was, in a way, rejecting the idea that America had ever been a truly Christian nation. They believed for deep reasons that because America was founded on Enlightenment, liberal principles, it was founded on ideas that were a break from the teachings of the Catholic Church. In this, they were standing in opposition to Father John Courtney Murray, who famously in the late ’50s and early ’60s was attempting to show that the American Republic was deeply rooted in Christian political traditions, even if it didn’t realize it fully.
The people surrounding Bozell and Triumph believed that the problems that the nation was facing in the late ’60s were due to this bad founding moment. It was really the chickens coming home to roost. They believed that American liberalism was not only in decline, but in collapse. And they were beginning to describe a fully Christian, a fully Catholic, civilization that might emerge from this crisis, from the collapse of American liberalism. So, they didn’t really think about working within the system so much as creating or cultivating a vanguard, which would be in place when that crisis became fully apparent.
In a way, you can hear echoes of those ideas in the work of Rod Dreher in his Benedict Option, or the political theorist Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed. The idea is that America was originally established on liberal, Enlightenment principles—the idea is not for a restorationist project, which was the project of the religious right to say, “the Founders were really pious Christians, America was really set up to be a Christian republic, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that that was distorted by the Supreme Court and the rise of secularism.”
For Dreher and Deneen, the problem was really at the beginning of the founding. So the solution, at the high point of liberalism during the Obama administration, was essentially a form of strategic withdrawal—to create and maintain parallel institutions, intentional communities where the faithful could essentially wait out the flood. And then, when such a time came about that they can culturally and politically reassert themselves, step back onto the historical stage. But they didn’t see that happening anytime soon.
And then comes the election of 2016 and the advent of Donald Trump. All of a sudden, a whole new range of possibilities appear on the horizon.
Belvedere: I want to ask you about Dreher and Deneen. But before we get there, I want to ask you a question about one particular reaction to Obergefell that led the way for Dreher’s Benedict Option proposal.
Many religious conservatives, in the wake of certain SCOTUS decisions (most prominently Roe v. Wade a while back, and now Obergefell), along with their expectation of the continuing hegemony of the Democratic Party (Obama had won two terms in office and Clinton was expected to win in 2016), these religious conservatives came to believe, or came to more strongly believe, that authentic Christianity was being condemned to marginalization, even outright hostility, from society at large.
One model that emerged in response to this perceived cultural defeat involved, as the pollster Robert P. Jones put it, seeking a “conditional surrender.” What was that conditional surrender?
Copulsky: I think what we began to see in the 2000s and 2010s was the pivot of Christian conservatives to the discourse of religious liberty—that the constitutional protection of religious liberty in the First Amendment was essentially a shield against the onslaught of these liberal progressive ideas and policies. You’re still living within the liberal frame, but using the tools of liberalism to protect your values and your communities. You see this in a lot of the litigation, in certain debates around Obamacare and, famously, the case regarding the baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
This was the idea that religious liberty was the way to maintain one’s ability to function within a liberal American society. That’s still used today. Religious liberty, historically in the United States, was to protect religious minorities from the domination of majority traditions. And here there was a kind of shift that I was talking about and that we can see many of these groups being involved in.
Belvedere: And, for a lot of people on the right, you could start to see it being inadequate, where just begging for crumbs or requesting carve outs didn’t feel like it was enough. So it gave way to a more aggressive approach.
But immediately following the Obergefell decision, the conservative Catholic publication First Things ran a symposium bemoaning the ruling as a prime indicator of society’s descent into an anti-Christian decadence. Rod Dreher, who was at the time writing for The American Conservative, was one of the contributors to that symposium. And he used it to reiterate his call for a kind of Christian withdrawal from culture. He saw same-sex marriage as the decisive battle. You had mentioned earlier his quote—he saw Obergefell as “the Waterloo of religious conservatism.” Since the war, for Dreher, had been lost, he advocated for a retreat.
He wrote: “The cultural left, which is to say increasingly the American mainstream, has no intention of living in a post-war peace. It is pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation.” And he made his case in his book, The Benedict Option. Why did he pick that name? And why was Dreher so convinced that religious conservatism, and specifically Christianity, was being utterly suffocated by the culture at large?
Copulsky: Yeah, so, the Benedict Option for Dreher was a play on the rule of St. Benedict, the medieval monk who withdrew his troops, so to speak, from the Dark Ages in Europe, but maintained its learning and cultivated the Christian tradition until such a time that they could step back out onto the world stage.
It was also alluding to a line at the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, where the moral philosopher, looking at the collapse of a shared moral consensus in modernity, says, “Perhaps we were waiting for a new, doubtlessly different, St. Benedict to emerge on the scene to provide us with a new rule through which we can live together.” That was the background of his use of the term.
The idea was essentially to withdraw into these intentional communities in order to protect and maintain the faith. In The Benedict Option, Dreher looks at a number of different communities that are doing this. There’s not just one-size-fits-all—but the idea is that American culture is so hostile to religious traditionalists that some kind of distance needs to be created in order to maintain the coherence of those traditions. You could look at extreme examples like the Old Order Amish or certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that had been doing this, but also less extreme and more contemporary examples.
Now, the criticism—and a valuable and interesting critic was the Harvard Law Professor, Adrian Vermeule—was that all of that is well and good, but premised on the liberal regime allowing you to do that. The Old Order Amish or the ultra-Orthodox communities or these new Catholic, Orthodox, or Reformed Protestant pockets are all able to do this Benedict Optioning so long as the state allows and tolerates it. So you’re still not really escaping liberalism. You’re at liberalism’s mercy.
So Vermeule, in his critique of Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, said, “In a way, this is a perfectly strong diagnosis of the problem, but it’s really giving the wrong prescription for curing it. Rather than withdrawing and waiting it out, maybe there are opportunities to go in and assert yourself and take over.” That was Vermeule’s idea of integration from within.
Belvedere: My own read on Dreher is that his proposal was simultaneously one of the worst predictions anyone has made in recent memory and that he was unwittingly right—that is, right, but not in the way he expected.
So, looking back at his recommendation, just a few years removed from it, it seems utterly incredible that religious conservatives ever believed themselves to be so far from the levers of power that they would need to self-deport from mainstream society in order to survive. As a prophet, Dreher couldn’t have been more wrong. And his Benedict Option proposal seems so ridiculous now in light of the political and cultural ascendancy of the MAGA Christian right.
But here’s where I think, interestingly, he’s more right than he knows. Had Christians activated the Benedict Option in a genuine sense, rather than abandoned it in favor of merging the Christian faith with Trump’s political program, it could have genuinely helped Christians preserve their witness. Dreher advocated the Benedict Option as a response to progressive encroachments, as a way to preserve and strengthen the faith—but it’s Christians’ fusion with the MAGA political project that has eroded Christianity’s witness in society. Now all it is is theological license for the pursuit of political power, which has flattened the faith.
This is something that
points out in his recent book. Christians would have done well to be in retreat mode—at least better off than to sign onto a project this corrosive to their own tenets.You brought up Deneen, this erudite political theorist. What does he initially advocate in his surprisingly successful, and Obama-recommended, Why Liberalism Failed?
Copulsky: Yeah, so let me go back and maybe provide a little grace note on what you just said about Dreher, because I think it may provide some context for Deneen. Dreher is thinking about the Benedict Option years earlier than he publishes the book. One of things that was motivating that was the failure of some earlier iterations of Christian conservatives to get what they wanted when they were engaging with American political power.
So, you have the religious right in the late 1970s and 1980s becoming part of the Reagan coalition on the heels of Roe v. Wade and those other Supreme Court decisions that they disagreed with. Reagan comes to power and they think that this is going to be a moment of rolling back the liberal ascendancy—not only rolling back Roe v. Wade, but maybe reinstating prayer in schools or Bible reading in schools that had been ruled unconstitutional in the early 1960s, maybe rolling back some of the advances of feminism and gay rights. That didn’t come to play. So the Reagan administration in the end is seen as kind of a disappointment for Christian conservatives, for people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the like.
“For Dreher and Deneen, the problem was really at the beginning of the founding. So the solution, at the high point of liberalism during the Obama administration, was essentially a form of strategic withdrawal—to create and maintain parallel institutions, intentional communities where the faithful could essentially wait out the flood. And then, when such a time came about that they can culturally and politically reassert themselves, step back onto the historical stage. But they didn’t see that happening anytime soon. And then comes the election of 2016 and the advent of Donald Trump. All of a sudden, a whole new range of possibilities appear on the horizon.” — Jerome Copulsky
They had another moment in the early 2000s with the election of George W. Bush, who was seen as one of them, even more one of them than Reagan had been. Bush famously had a conversion moment and became an evangelical. At the same time, they did not get those achievements under his administration. Roe v. Wade still stood, gay rights was moving forward—it really seemed that even though they had this access to power and one of them was the president, liberalism was still ascendant. So that’s part of the background to Dreher and to Deneen.
Now Patrick Deneen’s argument in many ways echoes the arguments of L. Brent Bozell Jr. and people writing for Triumph, which is to say that America was always a liberal, Enlightenment project. And liberalism, as Deneen understands it, is really a break from a classical Christian conception of the world, a classical conception of what we are as human beings—of anthropology, our relationship to nature, what our goals should be in political organization. And that’s baked into the American project. He looks at the American Constitution and says, “This is a machine designed to deepen liberalism and a way to keep us from pursuing our common goods together.” He looks at the Madisonian conception of playing faction against faction as an attempt to undermine what he would consider to be bringing people together to their common ends. So insofar as America is founded as a liberal regime, it is becoming more and more liberal, more and more successful. But in its very success, it is bringing about its own failure, the alienation of people from their societies, from each other, from themselves.
This is where we get to his idea of, “Our way of fighting back is to cultivate intentional communities that can protect us from those coercive forces.” Of course, once Trump comes to power, well, maybe there are different options on the table for conservatives to take, rather than withdrawal, maybe a regime change.
Belvedere: I want to ask you about Deneen’s proposal. You had this really interesting observation. So, Deneen has this full-scale attack on the architecture of liberalism and how true religion is incompatible with it. But then his recommendation for what should be done in light of it seems really mild. You write: “Coming after such a furious indictment, Deneen’s rather modest proposal may strike the reader as anticlimactic.” How so?
Copulsky: Well, this is the end of the Why Liberalism Failed book. This is when he’s still in that withdrawal mode. And the proposal is really one that is compatible with liberalism: the idea that, well, liberalism allows you to have religious freedom; liberalism allows you to have freedom of association; liberalism allows you to withdraw to a certain extent from the larger society, if you’d like. He appeals to certain kinds of traditionalist communities like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. He doesn’t go into any deep detail about how these communities actually exist and about the lives of the individuals who live in them and whether they are living the kind of lives that he wants people to live. But at the end of the day, that book doesn’t end with a rousing call to arms and say, “We have to go out and take down this liberal regime and replace it with something else.” At the end of that book, the story is, “We need to find out ways to coping within it until such time that something else emerges.” And of course, that something else emerges in his book, Regime Change, which comes out a few years later.
Belvedere: Right, and it’s something that Vermeule picked up on as a fundamental inadequacy of the proposed solution. He agreed with the diagnosis, but not with the proposed solution. Deneen had presciently observed that, “Some form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems plausible as an answer to the anger and fear of a post-liberal citizenry.” But he had initially stopped short of recommending such a reaction, right? This is where Vermeule comes in. He, on the other hand, inched the postliberal project closer in that direction.
We know what his areas of agreement were with Deneen in his critique of liberalism, although I think Vermeule is more sanguine about the Constitution or aspects of the founding than Deneen was, but in what way did he break with and go further than Deneen’s initial proposal?
Copulsky: You know, it’s interesting, you read Why Liberalism Failed, and even Regime Change to some extent, by Deneen and you really have to squint to see what’s going on with his religious views. His religious positions are really not on the top of the page, so to speak. But I think they’re there and I think they’re driving his arguments and his proposed solutions.
Vermeule, as you said, sees this Benedict Option kind of strategic withdrawal as inadequate and maybe not courageous—and in a famous review that he wrote of Deneen’s book, says, “Rather than turn inward into intentional communities, what we really need to do is infiltrate the state and essentially make the state into an intentional community. If we restaff the bureaucracy with people who really believe in the common good, then we can begin to push liberalism out.” And he then develops this idea in an article in The Atlantic and then later in his own book, Common Good Constitutionalism.
The idea is rather than see the founding as being fundamentally a break from Christian civilization, which the Triumph people did and Dreher and Deneen did, Vermeule essentially says, “Actually, the founding is part of this larger, Christian classical tradition of the common good—and what we need to do is interpret the Constitution in those lines.” This is his move away from the conservative view of originalism—that we just interpret the constitutional text by trying to figure out the original public meaning, what the words on the page say. For Vermeule, we interpret the Constitution in light of our common good commitments.
That would allow for more flexibility and a more robust engagement by conservatives and a way of really changing the trajectory of the country. Rather than toss out the Constitution as a liberal, Enlightenment document and the founding as a liberal, Enlightenment project ... he’d say, “No, we can actually go in there and see this as in continuity with a classical Christian tradition and therefore restore those ideas and, in doing so, Make America Great Again, so to speak.
Belvedere: That legal doctrine that Vermeule developed, common good constitutionalism—his posture toward law and the Constitution and the state’s relation to society—would it be fair to say that it’s currently animating the MAGA right’s approach to governing? Or are they doing something different than what he proposed?
Copulsky: That is a good question. I think the jury is still out. We’d have to say, Who are we looking at? Who are we talking about? Are we talking about Supreme Court justices or ...
Belvedere: JD Vance seems like someone who is bringing this out with every press conference or with every 10-paragraph response he has to someone on X. I see traces of Vermeule’s legal approach in the background of what he’s saying.
Copulsky: Yeah, and I think Vance is perhaps one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters on the MAGA right today. Because he, in a way, is the person where a lot of these ideas and influences, often competing ideas and influences, are converging. So, we know that JD Vance has been influenced by the work of Deneen, of Vermeule, but also of national conservatives like Yoram Hazony. He spoke at the NatCon conference last summer in Washington, D.C. We also know that his career has been supported by Peter Thiel—and so there’s that kind of Silicon Valley futurism aspect to it. We know that he was trained at Yale Law School. He’s had experience in the Marines.
“For Hazony … the problem that he’s trying to confront really emerges in the mid-20th century when that Jeffersonian, Lockean, Enlightenment counter-tradition reemerges after World War II and begins to shape American politics and jurisprudence. Hazony is a restorationist—he wants to restore what he believes was originally a kind of conservative, Anglo-American, Protestant nation. That would mean, among other things, restoring the role of religion, particularly Protestant Christianity, in public life. And that meant that, for Hazony, other religious minority traditions, what he calls authentic religious traditions—Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, and so on—would be able to practice their religion, would be tolerated by the state, but in their private capacities. So he pushes against this notion of religious liberty that has been so dominant in American history. That’s a different kind of American heresy, so to speak, than what we were describing with someone like Deneen, even if the attack is on the idea of American liberalism, American pluralism.” — Jerome Copulsky
So there’s a lot going on in JD Vance. And I think it’s unclear at the moment which of these ideas—these Catholic ideas, these NatCon ideas, these Silicon Valley tech ideas ... yeah, in some cases, they share some co-belligerencies, particularly against woke progressivism, but I think they have very different visions of what they want American politics and American society to look like. And I think Vance is the person where these tensions might be working out to some extent. We’ll have to see how that plays out throughout his political career.
Belvedere: So Deneen appeared to realize pretty quickly after releasing Why Liberalism Failed that the assault on liberalism was, in a way, farther along than he initially thought. So he set out to write a new book, Regime Change. It’s not the most subtle title we’ve ever encountered. Still, why did he write it? What was its argument?
Copulsky: Well, Regime Change essentially is taking up Vermeule’s critique and describing what it would look like, from a political theorist viewpoint, what a revived American regime might look like. He calls it in some places “aristopopulism.” He wants to balance the rule of the few, the rule of aristocracy, with the rule of the many, like populism, and find a way of balancing the needs and interests of those groups in a new constitutional order.
Now, I think when you go and look at his actual proposals of what that would look like towards the end of the book, it’s also much more modest than one would expect from that title. He has a list of tweaks to American governance to achieve these ends—and they’re not radically revolutionary by any means. But there’s still a sense that the current liberal democracy is not orienting people to their common end, that the state could do more to cultivate the common good of its citizens. That’s what the book is trying to describe.
Belvedere: So let’s take stock of where we are. The book is American Heretics. It’s an excellent read. I recommend everyone go out and buy it. Within church history, we can name the heretics and the specific heresies that they promulgated. You had figures like Pelagius, Arius, Marcion, Nestorius, and they had a specific and narrow challenge to orthodoxy, whether it’s the divinity of Christ or the physicality and the humanity of Christ. When it comes to your rundown of American heretics, are there many heresies here or just one?
Copulsky: Well, I look at the postliberal Catholics, like Deneen and Vermeule. We sometimes hear talk of the integralist movement or neo-integralist movement, who want to have a closer connection between the state, the political order, and the Roman Catholic Church.
Then I describe another group, the National Conservatives movement that is headed by the American Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony. And they tend to have a somewhat different vision of what the original sin of the United States was and how to go about reforming it. For Hazony, the founding was not a break from Christian civilization, but was really in a continuation, what you can consider to be a national conservative founding by people like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. That meant that this Lockean Jeffersonian Enlightenment element of the American Revolution and the founding needed to be downplayed in its importance.
For Hazony, then, the problem that he’s trying to confront really emerges in the mid-20th century when that Jeffersonian, Lockean, Enlightenment counter-tradition reemerges after World War II and begins to shape American politics and jurisprudence. Hazony is a restorationist—he wants to restore what he believes was originally a kind of conservative, Anglo-American, Protestant nation.
That would mean, among other things, restoring the role of religion, particularly Protestant Christianity, in public life. And that meant that, for Hazony, other religious minority traditions, what he calls authentic religious traditions—Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, and so on—would be able to practice their religion, would be tolerated by the state, but in their private capacities.
So he pushes against this notion of religious liberty that has been so dominant in American history. That’s a different kind of American heresy, so to speak, than what we were describing with someone like Deneen, even if the attack is on the idea of American liberalism, American pluralism.
Belvedere: And national conservatism sprang up after some of these other developments. In a sense, it was only possible after Trumpism came to be seen as less a “miracle,” as his election in 2016 was sometimes described, and more a movement that could have enduring power and that needed a kind of intellectual backstop in order to produce a lasting impact and influence on American politics. And it’s arguably played that role more successfully than the individual postliberals have. It’s had a conference…
Copulsky: …a number of conferences, yeah. The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony’s own book comes out. There’s a number of conferences, both in the United States and also in Europe. On this point, there’s a wonderful new book coming out in the fall by Laura K. Field about these attempts to provide the MAGA world or Trumpism with the theory, the intellectual backbone, and she looks at a number of these groups, including the NatCons and the integralists and the postliberals, as well as people coming from the Claremont Institute.
So there’s a lot of intellectual energy following the following the election of Donald Trump—and an attempt to redefine what American conservatism might be. You can look at the manifestos that were published in First Things or the material coming from Claremont to get a sense of the kind of intellectual forces at play.
Belvedere: I want to get clear on this difference between the postliberals and the national conservatives. The postliberals are scandalized by a social configuration that puts at the forefront of its interest individual autonomy. Does National Conservatism have less of a problem with that? Are they more okay with that so long as other things can be readjusted and reconfigured? Why aren’t they just postliberals?
Copulsky: Well, I think maybe this is one way of getting into it. Hazony in his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is not a proponent of individual autonomy. In fact, one of the villains of the book is philosopher John Locke, who’s seen as one of the pioneering thinkers of liberalism. But for Hazony, the sort of fundamental building block of the social order, both domestically and internationally, is the idea of a nation. And in The Virtue of Nationalism, he argues why the national state is really the just right, Goldilocks position for political order. And he contrasts it to the social anarchy prior to becoming a nation comprised of families and tribes and clans, on the one side, and then the other side, an empire with universal pretensions, an empire that wants to essentially capture the world in its own image. And those empires can be empires like ancient Egypt or Syria, Babylon, Persia, or Rome, or they can be universalizing ideologies like Roman Catholicism, Islam, Marxism, or liberalism.
In The Virtue of Nationalism, he wants to argue that what we’re seeing now is a fight between those people who understand the importance and centrality of the national identity, both domestically and in relating to other countries, and those who are committed to a universalist, imperial project, whether that project is Marxism, Islamism, liberalism, incarnated in institutions like NATO or the European Union or American dominance. That’s really how he’s framing his book.
“I think Vance is … one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters on the MAGA right today. Because he, in a way, is the person where a lot of these ideas and influences, often competing ideas and influences, are converging. So, we know that JD Vance has been influenced by the work of Deneen, of Vermeule, but also of national conservatives like Yoram Hazony. … We also know that his career has been supported by Peter Thiel—and so there’s that kind of Silicon Valley futurism aspect to it. We know that he was trained at Yale Law School. He’s had experience in the Marines. … I think it’s unclear at the moment which of these ideas—these Catholic ideas, these NatCon ideas, these Silicon Valley tech ideas ... yeah, in some cases, they share some co-belligerencies, particularly against woke progressivism, but I think they have very different visions of what they want American politics and society to look like. And I think Vance is the person where these tensions might be working out to some extent.” — Jerome Copulsky
Now the difference also is that Hazony sees religion as an important component of national identity. In the United States or in Western countries like the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, that religion historically has been Protestantism. And there is a link between Protestantism and the political teaching of nationalism, which he sees as rooted in the Hebrew Bible—that Goldilocks thing that I described earlier, that kind of just right formation, is what ancient Israel is in his view. It is a national state with a group of tribes and clans that have come together with a shared language, a shared culture, a shared religion. They live within set boundaries. They don’t attempt to go out and conquer the world and impose their views on all the other nations. And this in contradiction to Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Rome—great enemies of ancient Israel.
So, in a sense, what Protestantism has that Catholicism perhaps lacks is a sense of this boundedness. Roman Catholicism believes that all the world should be under the canopy of the Catholic Church, where Protestantism emerges with the coming to be of national states.
Belvedere: You end the chapter with a fascinating invocation of George Washington by Hazony. Hazony essentially tries to claim Washington for his side. What did Hazony get wrong in his use of America’s first president?
Copulsky: Hazony sees Washington, Hamilton, and John Jay as the true Founders. For Hazony, there may have been this Declaration of Independence with this Lockean political theory justifying the Patriot action against the British during the Revolutionary War, but that’s not really what the founding was about. The founding was really a kind of reinstatement of a national conservative framework for the American project. And so he argues that we should pay more attention to Washington than we should to Jefferson.
Now, Washington was known for certain public pronouncements of the importance of religion in the new state. At the same time, Hazony argues that the Founders made a mistake with lasting consequences, which is to say that even though they believed in public religion, they failed to properly constitutionalize public religion, or indeed to constitutionalize public religion at all. The Constitution, unlike the Declaration of Independence, for example, has no mention of God. The Constitution, in Article VI, Section III, forbids a religious test for political office. In the First Amendment, the Constitution forbids an establishment of religion or the infringement of the free exercise of religion. And so it’s really creating what we now call a separation of church and state. And for Hazony, this was a mistake. This was undermining the religious element of the Republic.
So what is to be done if we’re going to try to rebuild America as a national conservative state? Well, there should be some kind of reinstatement of public religion. This would be a kind of public Protestantism, because America is historically and largely a Protestant country and religious minorities, or what he considers to be legitimate or authentic religious minorities, would be tolerated but would not enjoy the same kind of public status as Christianity would in his view.
I argue in the end of the book that this actually goes against what George Washington said. In an important document, a letter to the Newport synagogue on Rhode Island, Washington describes what this new system has brought about with reference to religious liberty. And it’s not toleration of religious minorities. It’s not that the state decides which religious groups are authentic and ought to be tolerated, but that all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs and practices, have religious liberty. And that is what distinguishes the United States of America from previous regimes.
So I think in this case, Washington’s position stands firmly opposed to what Hazony and the NatCons who are in favor of public religion are trying to put in place.
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