YORAM HAZONY is the author of “The Challenge of Marxism” – the Quillette article currently enthralling English-speaking conservatives worldwide. Given the present perilous state of conservative politics, the popularity of Hazony’s article is unsurprising. Indeed, the near-panic currently gripping so many conservatives is evident in just about every sentence Hazony writes. It’s hard to blame him. Without the life-saving alliance of conservatism and liberalism envisaged by the author, the long-term prospects of his reactionary, religious-nationalist, securitarian ideology are every bit as grim as he fears.
Hazony’s immediate political environment being Israel, the desperation so evident in his article makes perfect sense. Israeli politics has resolved itself into exactly the stalemated mess which his article urges Americans to create for themselves. In Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, conservatives and liberals are locked in an embrace from which neither can extricate themselves without the nation undergoing wrenching social and political change. What those grouped around Benjamin Netanyahu fear most is that Benny Gantz’s centrist coalition will break the stalemate by engaging seriously with the Arab-Israeli minority and what remains of the once-dominant Israeli Left. Or, as Hazony misnames them, “Marxists”.
Once its origins in Israel’s domestic politics is illuminated, Hazony’s article takes on a very different appearance. Given the pivotal role played by the United States in preserving Israel as a “Jewish State”, and how crucial conservative American voters are to keeping the bonds between the USA and Israel strong, Hazony’s interest in drawing moderate Democrats into a closer political relationship with Trump’s hard-core Republicans stands exposed in all its naked selfishness.
Not that Hazony has the slightest interest in allowing his conservative readers to get wind of his true intentions. Hence his use of the term “Marxists” to denote his reader’s designated foes. Along with the term “Communism”, “Marxism” is one of those words more-or-less guaranteed to trigger a visceral, fear-laced and anger-filled reaction among conservative Americans. That you could fit all of America’s genuine Marxists into a very small Mid-Western town matters not one whit. Historically, the American Right’s purpose in branding their political opponents “Reds” had never had anything at all to do with terminological exactitude. Indeed, an accurate definition of Marxism would almost certainly do more harm to the right-wing cause than good!
Not that Hazony’s definition of Marxism bears even the slightest resemblance to the ideology’s actual content. Suffice to say, his version of Marxism leaves out just about everything which has contributed to its extraordinary historical influence. Missing entirely is Marx’s key insight that classes are not – as Hazony seems to think – mere random “groups” thrown up by the idiosyncrasies of equally random “hierarchies”; but the social formations generated by the ever-increasing complexity and productivity of what Marx called the “means of production”. That this deeply-embedded politico-economic aspect of Marx’s system is wholly absent from Hazony’s definition, shows the perfunctory nature of his effort to understand the subject-matter of his article.
What he did get right, however, was the revolutionary implications of Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion, in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal”.
The radicalism of Jefferson’s assertion is attested to daily – and nightly – on the streets of 2020 America. Indeed, it has never ceased to challenge the reality of American life: throwing up against the walls of privilege and exploitation the ladders of hope and the grappling-hooks of action. It drove the Union soldiers forward at Fredricksburg in 1862, and inspired Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It provided the text for Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech to the quarter-million African-Americans gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Feminism, Gay Rights, Transgender Activism: every one of the new social movements of the 1960s and 70s can trace their lineage back to that gloriously hypocritical phrase penned by a Virginian slave-owner.
When young Americans chant “Black Lives Matter” they are not quoting Marx’s “Das Kapital”, they are reciting the deathless catechism of American democracy. The quest for equality is buried deep in America’s DNA. If Hazony wasn’t intoxicated with the ancient incense of the Jewish Torah. If he wasn’t obsessed with Jacob’s Ladder and all the other heavenly hierarchies so integral to his Orthodox Judaism. If he hadn’t sold his soul for a mess of Zionist pottage, then he would know that there is nothing more patriotic than an American citizen declaring:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Hazony calls his article “The Challenge of Marxism”, but it’s not the 160 year-old challenge of an angry, secularised Jew scribbling away in the British Museum that terrifies him. No, it’s the challenge hurled at the Israeli Right by the 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Arabs, and the realisation among a growing number of their fellow Israelis that if they are not brought inside the political tent, then the State of Israel has no future. Similarly, it is the challenge growing daily louder from a young, multicultural America: the America that stands ready to take the place of the fast ageing, steadily declining, portion of the USA’s population that is Protestant, Anglo-Saxon and White; that causes him to tremble. Because he knows that these challenges are not unrelated, that they share exactly the same political DNA.
The challenge that Hazony truly fears – to the point of advocating its effective elimination in Israel and the USA – is democracy itself.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please share it.