I just recently got around to reading the Winter/Spring Claremont Review of Books; this issues is worth a read more so than usual. It contains not just an introductory essay by the always excellent Charles Kelser- but an additional full essay critiquing the new public philosophy on the block, National Conservativism. I think Charles is right on the money about what they get right and the little bit that they get wrong.
Full disclosure: Charles was my dissertation advisor at Claremont, so I may not be completely unbiased. I am extremely pleased that the older grad students of Charles have recently published a festschrift in his honor- Leisure with Dignity, a Ciceronian appellation which perfectly describes Charles.
In my defense, Charles’ Natcon essay was also recently praised by Dan Mahoney in a great article also worth reading. Here’s a clip from that one:
…it is striking that the two greatest contemporary theorists of the nation and political forms, Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent—an Englishman and a Frenchman—both adamantly opposed the “denationalization” and “depoliticization” of democracy, and yet scrupulously avoided the term nationalism. For better or worse, they feared that term had become unrecoverably associated with pathology, as least as it is received in the contemporary world. It is better to have nations than not, but being a nation does not make something good—so how is one to defend “the idea of the nation” in a vacuum, without reference to any particular national affirmation? This is a conundrum well explored in Kesler’s essay. As he suggests, distinctions between good and bad forms of nationalism are unavoidable.
On the whole I have very much approved of most of what the Natcons like Yoram Hazony and especially Josh Hammer have written- but I like these insights from Charles and Dan even more. If you haven’t read these already- enjoy.
I was somewhat surprised by the essay. There's not much I disagreed with, but I didn't see the necessity for it or the worth of picking a fight, if that's the intent -- Kesler is writing a polemic, but he's an elegant man, not pugnacious.
Dan is right about Scruton & Manent -- but in their circumstances, talking about nationalism would have been incautious, as he suggests. That's certainly not the case in America. Dunno about Israel. Certainly not in Central & Eastern Europe.
If Kesler is uneasy about the nationalism discourse, because we cannot know the future, sure, that's right. A new departure... But on the other hand if the problem is that nationalism raises questions about what it means to be American -- well, aren't those questions in the backs of everyone's mind? Isn't politics supposed to deal with that? There's something that needs articulating, bringing to political decision. Nationalism must be constitutionalized as Kesler says, but how could one fail to notice that the kinds of political speeches conservatives, political or intellectual, make don't really speak to the people they are supposedly addressing?
I am more familiar with Josh Hammer's work than Hazony's. In his article "Common Good originalism", Josh split up the Founders- claiming that Hamiltonians adopted the common good approach, while Jeffersonians did not- adopting a libertarian, individualist approach. I think that is a classic historical mistake (one that prominent historians such as Gordon Wood have made for example). The correct historical interpretation on balance is that all of the Founders believed in the liberty/license distinction, with natural rights and the common good of morality as limits on the use of liberty. See Robert Webking and Gary Schmitt's devastating critique of Wood on this point- "Revolutionaries, Antifederalists, and Federalists: Comments on Gordon Wood’s Understanding of the American Founding"
https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jlpp/wp-content/uploads/sites/90/2021/06/Final-Hammer.pdf
https://politicalsciencereviewer.wisc.edu/index.php/psr/article/view/160