Yoram Hazony has earned a reputation on the American Right as a leading theorist of national conservatism, championing nationalism as a corrective to the deracinating forces of globalism. But that project has run into trouble. A string of antisemitism controversies in recent months has exposed the extent of the American Right’s “groyperfication” — most notably with Tucker Carlson’s decision to launder Nick Fuentes through his podcast.

This week, Hazony addressed the issue in a speech in Jerusalem at the second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism. “Where is the 15-minute explainer video that I can show my friends on the political Right, which proves that this very serious accusation against Tucker is true?” he asked. “There is no such 15-minute explainer video […] This is an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire antisemitism-industrial complex.”

In his speech, Hazony urged Jews to seize a “historic opportunity” by “building bridges with the dominant nationalist wing of the Republican Party that could last a generation or more”. In other words, Jews should do “everything they can” to understand how nationalist Republicans think and what they care about, and accommodate rather than denounce them.

Yet he would never entertain the mirror argument on the Left that finding common ground with anti-Zionist progressives or radical activists might be the best way to combat antisemitism within that camp. This asymmetry is telling. Tablet, a conservative Jewish magazine, accused Hazony of naivety for believing that “Republican nationalists” can be won over simply by making a better case for how “Jewish interests” are compatible with their own. Other Jewish figures on the Right appeared to agree.

The episode exposes ideological fissures not only among America’s Jewish conservatives, but also within the broader Right. Publications such as Tablet want the Republican Party to retain a conservative-liberal character grounded in individual rights, constitutional patriotism and assimilation. From this perspective, Hazony’s national conservatism is rejected as an intellectual legitimation for a political current seen as hostile to Jews, precisely because it shares that current’s hostility to classical liberal values.

There is something to be said for this argument. American Jews have flourished at every level of society, and benefit from the country’s provision of physical safety and material prosperity. That outcome is inseparable from America’s character as a propositional nation, grounded in classical liberal and Lockean principles rather than the Old World Herderian ideas which Hazony seeks to revive. Under the American model, Jews are not tolerated guests dependent on the goodwill of the majority, but fully equal citizens who are capable of sustaining dual identities without tension. One can be an American Jew precisely because the political order does not demand an exclusive or ethnic conception of belonging.

Nationalism is not intrinsically antisemitic. But in practice, an ideology that exalts the ethno-cultural majority as the true foundation of the nation is naturally prone to treating ethnic and religious minorities, who are regarded as not “of” the nation, as an alien pathogen in the body politic. The history of Europe bears this out.

One shouldn’t be surprised that a resentful nationalism which asserts America is the property of “heritage Americans” — the scions of white European Christian settlers who founded and built America — would exhibit hostility to Jews in this way. Just look at the anti-Indian racism from MAGA that mirrors the structure of antisemitism: a small “alien” minority rapidly gaining disproportionate commercial power, to the point that it is subverting the “natural” racial-economic hierarchy.

Hazony will say that Leftist and progressive Jews are useful idiots for insidious forces which will eventually eat them. The same charge should be directed straight back at him and his co-thinkers, who are laughably naive about antisemitism on the American Right. This is not a fight against discrimination, but instead the Right-wing version of suicidal empathy.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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