1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:11,220 Welcome, everybody, then welcome everybody to our fourth, fourth, fifth. 2 00:00:11,370 --> 00:00:14,550 Well, fifth week, fourth meeting, fourth meeting, fifth week. 3 00:00:15,600 --> 00:00:20,819 And I think today is going to be an extremely exciting presentation and conversation. 4 00:00:20,820 --> 00:00:28,050 So we have today Susanne Schneider, who is the deputy director and core faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, 5 00:00:28,470 --> 00:00:32,040 specialising in political theory and history of the modern Middle East. 6 00:00:32,920 --> 00:00:36,569 She's the author of Mandatory Separation Religion, Education and Math, 7 00:00:36,570 --> 00:00:42,570 Politics and Palestine and also the Apocalypse and the End of History Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. 8 00:00:43,170 --> 00:00:47,220 Her writing about contemporary politics, religion and violence has appeared in The New Republic, 9 00:00:47,610 --> 00:00:53,669 Mother Jones, The Washington Post, foreign policy and plus one in Iran, among other outlets. 10 00:00:53,670 --> 00:00:57,030 And she is currently a visiting fellow here at Muslim College, 11 00:00:57,030 --> 00:01:02,040 where she is working on her new book about the use of risk as a social and political tool. 12 00:01:02,670 --> 00:01:05,880 So we are very excited to have you here. Thank you so much. 13 00:01:06,450 --> 00:01:15,719 Kind of a fun to get pulled back into my old territory of Israel studies a little bit, which is a place I've been working less in the last few years. 14 00:01:15,720 --> 00:01:18,990 So anyway, but I'm going to just before I start, 15 00:01:18,990 --> 00:01:26,879 I also want to say that this is drawn from a research paper that I prepared with a colleague in Israel who is not here with us. 16 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:33,420 Obviously, you come from University of Haifa, but that basically anything that's really great about this article, 17 00:01:33,420 --> 00:01:37,290 you should direct that praise to me and any criticism. You just save that for your film. 18 00:01:39,630 --> 00:01:45,570 Okay. So now undeniable that liberal democracy is in some sort of crisis, right? 19 00:01:45,690 --> 00:01:51,360 This is kind of an axiom, axiomatic proposition at this point, signalled by the waning of the political, 20 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:55,830 social and even economic order that's ruled Western democracies since the end of the Second World War. 21 00:01:56,400 --> 00:02:02,880 The values associated with liberalism, from individual rights to democratic governance, equality before the law and free market principles, 22 00:02:03,120 --> 00:02:06,419 have been called into question not merely by intellectuals, 23 00:02:06,420 --> 00:02:11,280 but by political actors and institutions that are constitutive of democratic political systems. 24 00:02:12,030 --> 00:02:18,900 These challenges are best illustrated in the rise of right wing nationalist movements and parties the world over from the BJP in India, 25 00:02:19,170 --> 00:02:22,440 the Law and Justice Party in Poland, brothers of Italy. 26 00:02:22,440 --> 00:02:27,030 For those in Hungary, Trumpism, of course, the overwhelming rightward tilt of Israeli politics. 27 00:02:27,450 --> 00:02:30,599 Xenophobic political parties like national rally in France, Sweden. 28 00:02:30,600 --> 00:02:36,210 Democrats in its microcredit in Israel have increased in strength, increase their strength in electoral terms, 29 00:02:36,420 --> 00:02:41,250 as these ideas, which were once deemed beyond the pale, have increasingly moved mainstream. 30 00:02:43,020 --> 00:02:48,420 So if we look leftward, it's also possible to see a retreat from liberalism that's present in suspicion of the state, 31 00:02:49,110 --> 00:02:52,470 conceived by many as existing, only to serve the rich and powerful, 32 00:02:52,680 --> 00:02:59,400 accompanied by the growing sentiment that present institutions are ill equipped to provide for and more equal and justice social order, 33 00:02:59,910 --> 00:03:06,030 rather than in seeing entrenched racial, social and economic hierarchies as a glitch within a liberal political order. 34 00:03:06,300 --> 00:03:10,860 Such critiques argue that actually existing liberalism, as opposed to a theoretical facade, 35 00:03:11,130 --> 00:03:14,520 is a vehicle for human exploitation and ecological exhaustion. 36 00:03:14,940 --> 00:03:22,139 Within this framing, the left calls liberalism's bluff in critiques that expose how supposedly disinterested or neutral 37 00:03:22,140 --> 00:03:27,690 laws were designed to serve the interests of a particular class and perpetuate its privileges. 38 00:03:28,410 --> 00:03:33,360 Laws, norms, institutions are thus not regarded as the foundations of democracy, 39 00:03:33,630 --> 00:03:37,470 but as the means of restraining the democratic energies and aspirations of the people. 40 00:03:38,680 --> 00:03:44,670 So in short, serving the territory, we see liberalism under attack from these kind of two directions. 41 00:03:45,390 --> 00:03:49,890 On the right, the liberal order is regarded as advancing the scourges of multiculturalism, 42 00:03:50,130 --> 00:03:54,360 immigration, Marxism, the secularist entity toward religion, family tradition. 43 00:03:54,750 --> 00:03:58,460 And meanwhile, kind of progressives associate the same order with unrestrained capitalism, 44 00:03:58,470 --> 00:04:04,890 structural violence and the incapacity to address inequality, poverty, systemic violence and a dire ecological crisis. 45 00:04:05,520 --> 00:04:08,850 None of these critiques operate at a purely ideological level. 46 00:04:09,210 --> 00:04:12,840 Rather, they have developed alongside the unravelling of the post-war settlement, 47 00:04:12,840 --> 00:04:20,819 which assumed a high level of state intervention in the management of markets and the distribution of social goods attempts since the late 1970s to, 48 00:04:20,820 --> 00:04:24,870 quote unquote, free capital from democratic pressures have been wildly successful, 49 00:04:24,870 --> 00:04:30,690 resulting not merely in record levels of economic inequality, but in declining wellness indexes like life expectancy. 50 00:04:31,140 --> 00:04:38,400 The disintegration of liberalism as a political philosophy must be understood vis a vis this realignment of state and market forces. 51 00:04:39,570 --> 00:04:46,620 So liberalism is under attack from both sides. It is important to note that the vastly unequal nature of these challengers. 52 00:04:48,180 --> 00:04:54,569 Lest you think there is some sadism coming from it, that there is no organised far left, 53 00:04:54,570 --> 00:04:59,420 that even approach approximates the power of the right which has succeeded in winning. 54 00:04:59,510 --> 00:05:05,200 Elections in Brazil, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, Israel, Philippines, among many others. 55 00:05:05,590 --> 00:05:10,810 For both mainstream liberals and Social Democrats, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the organised political left, 56 00:05:11,020 --> 00:05:16,720 the liberal Democratic state is still largely viewed as a vehicle for tackling collective problems and creating a more equitable society. 57 00:05:17,050 --> 00:05:22,540 That is, these forces tend to regard government as a means to more fully realise liberalism's purported ideals. 58 00:05:22,960 --> 00:05:28,240 In contrast, the emerging right wing movements argue forcefully for rejection of liberalism's founding principles, 59 00:05:28,420 --> 00:05:32,440 particularly regarding individual liberty and democratic governance. 60 00:05:33,630 --> 00:05:41,250 With the waning of liberalism comes a new vision for the relations between the three fundamental political concepts of the law, 61 00:05:41,520 --> 00:05:47,010 the state and the people. And this is particularly what I'm going to drill down and talk about today. 62 00:05:47,940 --> 00:05:52,860 In particular, the champions of what is variously called post liberalism or elegant democracy 63 00:05:53,160 --> 00:05:56,760 offer an alternative that collapses the distinctions between these categories. 64 00:05:57,030 --> 00:06:00,450 The law becomes whatever serves the interests of, quote, the people, 65 00:06:00,750 --> 00:06:06,930 a rhetorical concept that need not correspond with an actual popular majority with the state charter to securing its implementation. 66 00:06:07,800 --> 00:06:13,830 So I argue that this vision is rooted in a particular political theology that regards nations as divine creations, 67 00:06:14,130 --> 00:06:18,960 and their preservation is a sacred act whose fulfilment overrides all other laws. 68 00:06:19,320 --> 00:06:24,870 The state in this schema is paradoxically required to support and sustain the supposedly 69 00:06:24,870 --> 00:06:29,550 organic and homogenous nation that precedes it and indeed that justifies its existence. 70 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:33,960 So I contend that understanding the theological dimensions of this post level vision, 71 00:06:34,230 --> 00:06:40,470 both acknowledged and implicit, is necessary both to grasping its appeal and offering a viable alternative. 72 00:06:41,010 --> 00:06:46,740 So two kind of explanatory notes I think would be helpful before we go any further. 73 00:06:47,760 --> 00:06:52,830 The first is what is political theology, which may not be a household term for everyone, 74 00:06:54,150 --> 00:06:59,320 and it's a term that I'm going to use here to convey both the overtly religious aspects of political life. 75 00:06:59,340 --> 00:07:05,760 So, for instance, you could say an argument against abortion that is based in a Catholic notion of life begins at conception. 76 00:07:06,690 --> 00:07:11,790 But there's also we use this term to talk about the far more subtle ways that religious concepts shape political institutions. 77 00:07:12,630 --> 00:07:19,800 Each of these three terms of analysis the law, the state and the people exist as a theological category in the Jewish, 78 00:07:19,800 --> 00:07:23,100 Christian and Islamic traditions that inform the modern political imagination. 79 00:07:23,820 --> 00:07:29,580 But we would be wrong to think that these terms maintain the same meanings or facilitate the same political orders over time. 80 00:07:30,000 --> 00:07:34,600 So both the divine right of kingship and popular sovereignty could be based on theological grounds. 81 00:07:34,860 --> 00:07:40,049 For instance, even though they represent competing political models, the German jurist Karl Schmidt, 82 00:07:40,050 --> 00:07:44,970 famously asserted that our modern political categories are secularised theological concepts. 83 00:07:45,420 --> 00:07:49,920 Schmidt argued that political power or sovereignty mirrors God's creation of the world, 84 00:07:49,980 --> 00:07:53,760 and fans found expression in the idea of the king as long giver. 85 00:07:54,330 --> 00:08:01,500 But in the 17th and 18th centuries, the scientific, scientific revolution and Enlightenment philosophy advanced as more deist understanding of 86 00:08:01,500 --> 00:08:05,910 God as the creator of the laws of nature rather than an active manager of human affairs. 87 00:08:06,600 --> 00:08:11,550 Once set in motion, the world was mechanised and can persist without divine intervention. 88 00:08:12,330 --> 00:08:18,600 Schmidt argued that this depersonalised notion of sovereignty no longer dependent on either God or an individual 89 00:08:18,600 --> 00:08:24,300 monarch paralleled the rise of the modern democratic state and the division of sovereign power into several parts. 90 00:08:24,690 --> 00:08:31,680 It reached its apex in the scientific management, not just of manufacturing and commerce, but politics and social life in the early 20th century. 91 00:08:32,640 --> 00:08:38,220 Schmidt understood the triumph of impersonal bureaucratic rationalism and the corresponding liberal legal order, 92 00:08:38,490 --> 00:08:43,740 which saw no situation that could not be accommodated under the law as the dissolution of sovereignty. 93 00:08:44,340 --> 00:08:49,920 It created, he argued, a fundamentally unstable constitutional order in which no one truly wielded power. 94 00:08:50,400 --> 00:08:57,570 He left on the Weimar Republic a fragmented parliamentary system, nothing less than a hollowing out of sovereign power as an alternative. 95 00:08:57,870 --> 00:09:02,870 Schmidt called for a reinvigorated personal sovereignty, and given these theoretical commitments, 96 00:09:02,880 --> 00:09:07,530 it was hardly surprising that Schmidt embraced Hitler's rise as the robot and celebrated it. 97 00:09:07,530 --> 00:09:15,060 Really, as the revival of German sovereignty concentrated once more in an individual rather than divided among unruly proletariat, 98 00:09:15,240 --> 00:09:23,280 parliamentarians and impersonal bureaucrats. So debates over the true nature of sovereignty had rage for court for centuries, if not millennia. 99 00:09:23,490 --> 00:09:30,990 Of course, by the time that Schmidt enters this fray with his own definition, famously sovereign, is he who decides on the exception? 100 00:09:31,980 --> 00:09:34,470 This definition includes two important features. 101 00:09:34,830 --> 00:09:40,890 First, its sovereign power is marked by the capacity to decide which mirrors on Earth the idea of divine authority. 102 00:09:41,190 --> 00:09:47,190 Second, the concept of the exception by which which by definition is outside the usual 103 00:09:47,190 --> 00:09:50,910 course of events in which Schmidt will compare to the miracle in theology, 104 00:09:51,150 --> 00:09:56,820 right? These instances when the kind of normal rule of the game can be suspended because of the overwhelming strength of divine authority. 105 00:09:57,750 --> 00:10:03,390 So that is to say, inherent in the sovereign's capacity to decide is the ability to overrule any existing law, 106 00:10:03,840 --> 00:10:06,190 particularly when declaring a state of emergency. 107 00:10:06,570 --> 00:10:13,830 And contrary to liberal legal theorists who envisioned a law for every scenario that would both guide and restrict the exercise of power, 108 00:10:14,220 --> 00:10:16,500 Schmidt did not regard the law as a cage. 109 00:10:17,160 --> 00:10:23,549 Any sense of objective or universal law was rather a legal fiction that the sovereign could entertain at times, 110 00:10:23,550 --> 00:10:26,550 but also overcome with brute force whenever necessary. 111 00:10:28,170 --> 00:10:32,650 So today, Schmidt is largely regarded as a notorious figure who expressed belief. 112 00:10:32,700 --> 00:10:35,610 In antisemitism were helping to construct the Nazi legal order. 113 00:10:35,970 --> 00:10:39,720 But understanding Schmidt's concept of political theology is important for two reasons. 114 00:10:40,230 --> 00:10:46,980 First, because it offers modern scholars a general toolbox for thinking about the religious and theological bases of even secular political forms. 115 00:10:47,310 --> 00:10:51,959 And secondly, because his ideas continue to influence the ways in which many right wing intellectuals 116 00:10:51,960 --> 00:10:56,370 and politicians think about sovereignty and the definition of the people in the enemy. 117 00:10:57,480 --> 00:11:03,300 The second introductory note relates to the political theology of liberalism itself, 118 00:11:03,720 --> 00:11:08,310 which we must better understand in order to see how Post Liberals positioned their 119 00:11:08,310 --> 00:11:13,320 oppositional project so associated with a group of thinkers from Hobbes to Locke, 120 00:11:13,410 --> 00:11:16,680 Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Right. 121 00:11:16,740 --> 00:11:19,830 Liberalism is broadly concerned with a very, 122 00:11:19,830 --> 00:11:28,350 very broad definition with reconciling the creation and maintenance of states with the preservation of individual freedom. 123 00:11:29,250 --> 00:11:33,300 Liberal philosophers envisioned a particular relationship between the state, the law and the people. 124 00:11:33,600 --> 00:11:37,499 And though they disregard it, they disagreed on the nature of human beings. 125 00:11:37,500 --> 00:11:42,600 They nevertheless traced the origins of the state to a group of people who bound together to 126 00:11:42,600 --> 00:11:47,160 create government and civil society as a means to better protect their bodies and their property. 127 00:11:47,580 --> 00:11:52,800 It is kind of the social contract or social contract theory through the mechanism of the social contract. 128 00:11:52,980 --> 00:12:00,390 Liberal thinkers conjured an order in which people agreed to abide by the same law overseen by a sovereign power tasked with enforcing enforcing it. 129 00:12:00,750 --> 00:12:08,730 Exiting the state of nature represented an act of consent that forms the basis for a rules based civil society and, in turn, self-government. 130 00:12:09,150 --> 00:12:11,610 The law was conceived as objective and universal, 131 00:12:11,610 --> 00:12:18,150 supposedly disinterested and applicable to all members of society and the political theological register. 132 00:12:18,180 --> 00:12:24,899 We could compare the social contract to the Israelites covenant with God lawgiver in Exodus, the Hebrew Bible Relief. 133 00:12:24,900 --> 00:12:28,590 The God spoke at Mt. Sinai not merely to Moses but to the entire people. 134 00:12:28,860 --> 00:12:34,740 An instance forth of mass revelation and acceptance of the terms outlined in the Divine Covenant. 135 00:12:35,310 --> 00:12:38,970 Here we find the law given by the ultimate sovereign, the people. 136 00:12:39,060 --> 00:12:42,540 The Israelites exist as clear, distinctive categories. 137 00:12:42,780 --> 00:12:47,310 And the third concept The state is soon created in the Torah by necessity. 138 00:12:47,730 --> 00:12:57,120 So Exodus in Chapter 18 relates how Jethro Moses, his father in law, helps build this juridical apparatus apparatus to adjudicate amongst the people. 139 00:12:57,390 --> 00:13:03,840 And I quote, But when Moses is father in law, so how much he had to to do for the people, 140 00:13:03,840 --> 00:13:07,370 he said, What is this thing that you are doing to the people? 141 00:13:07,380 --> 00:13:13,140 Why do you act alone as magistrates? Well, all the people stand about you from morning till evening. 142 00:13:13,200 --> 00:13:18,599 Moses replied to his father law. It is because the people come to me to inquire of God when they have a dispute. 143 00:13:18,600 --> 00:13:24,330 It comes before me and I decide between one party and another, and I make known the laws and the teachings of God. 144 00:13:24,810 --> 00:13:28,350 But Moses, his father in law, said to him, The thing you are doing is not right. 145 00:13:28,350 --> 00:13:32,700 You will surely wear yourself out. And these people as well. The task is too heavy for you. 146 00:13:32,760 --> 00:13:37,170 You cannot do it alone. Now, listen to me. I will give you counsel and God be with you. 147 00:13:37,440 --> 00:13:44,040 You represent the people before God. You bring the disputes before God and enjoined upon them the laws and the teachings 148 00:13:44,280 --> 00:13:48,360 and make known to them the way to go and the practices they are to follow. 149 00:13:48,720 --> 00:13:55,590 You shall also seek out from amongst all the people, capable individuals who fear God, trustworthy ones who spurn ill gotten gains. 150 00:13:55,980 --> 00:14:01,410 Set these over them as chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, and let them judge the people at all times. 151 00:14:01,800 --> 00:14:07,080 Have them bring every major dispute to you, but let them decide every minor dispute themselves. 152 00:14:07,110 --> 00:14:10,380 Make it easier for yourself by letting them share the burden with you. 153 00:14:10,740 --> 00:14:14,640 What is this other than the creation of a state, a state bureaucracy in particular? 154 00:14:15,330 --> 00:14:15,569 All right. 155 00:14:15,570 --> 00:14:23,280 So Jethro envisions this budding state bureaucracy bound by divine law, but charged with the impartial application of this law to the people. 156 00:14:23,970 --> 00:14:27,870 The application of divine law by the people and for the people may have been an ideal, of course, 157 00:14:28,110 --> 00:14:35,040 but in practice it existed in tension with a tendency in rabbinic sources to incline toward the people as the arbiters of the law. 158 00:14:35,460 --> 00:14:38,280 The mission of, for example, states one with whom men are pleased, 159 00:14:38,280 --> 00:14:44,820 God is pleased from pure canvass, associating popular approbation with divine favour. 160 00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:50,610 And one of the most famous Talmudic deliberations in Baba Messiah, the Torah is declared to be, quote, not in heaven, 161 00:14:50,910 --> 00:14:56,950 but rather in accordance with the view of the rabbinic majority to liberalism's vaunted and at this point kind 162 00:14:56,970 --> 00:15:02,760 of parroted ideal of an impartial and independent judiciary certainly isn't added to this biblical tale. 163 00:15:03,900 --> 00:15:07,740 The same tension that appears in rabbinic debates is also present in political ones. 164 00:15:07,980 --> 00:15:15,510 Only God could formulate such a perfect law in practice to be administered by functionaries who are themselves mere seeds of divine justice. 165 00:15:16,020 --> 00:15:20,990 Laws made and adjudicated by humans will always be subjective, right? 166 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:23,970 This is a susceptible kind of products of human interpretation, 167 00:15:24,270 --> 00:15:30,030 a fact that led Karl Marx to contend that the modern state was a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. 168 00:15:30,750 --> 00:15:37,010 How then, could the law ever be disinterested? Or differentiate it from the whims of the people and in truth, the powerful among them. 169 00:15:37,400 --> 00:15:41,870 So contemporary thinkers, both left and right, take aim at this idea of a disinterested law, 170 00:15:42,140 --> 00:15:47,150 albeit in different ways and with dramatically different implications for the future of democratic politics. 171 00:15:53,900 --> 00:15:59,630 Very general terms. First, liberals reject the social contract theory for conjuring a state of nature that never existed. 172 00:16:00,590 --> 00:16:04,190 It's very interesting. If you read these things, you say, Why is there so much time here talking about law? 173 00:16:04,220 --> 00:16:09,590 Why are they all obsessed with the kind of social contract it appears in almost every single one of these kind of, 174 00:16:10,120 --> 00:16:15,560 you know, critiques of liberalism from the right? And this is not a coincidence, right? 175 00:16:15,890 --> 00:16:20,810 Because in their thinking, it is not choice, they contend, that forms the basis of the political community, 176 00:16:21,110 --> 00:16:24,620 but the natural bonds and coercion stemming from the family and the tribe. 177 00:16:25,070 --> 00:16:30,350 So by tracing a genealogy of the political community to the Natal family, post liberals accomplish a great deal. 178 00:16:30,350 --> 00:16:36,140 In theoretical terms, the elevation of natal bonds is also the celebration of social ties that are unused, 179 00:16:36,380 --> 00:16:39,890 with the suggestion that choice itself might be detrimental to the nation's health. 180 00:16:40,400 --> 00:16:43,309 This element is subtle, but present in much of this thought, for instance, 181 00:16:43,310 --> 00:16:46,910 around abortion, which is not just a problem because of the moral status of the foetus, 182 00:16:47,210 --> 00:16:55,010 but because it implies a women's total agency over whether or not to enter a relationship of dependency with another life focussed liberals. 183 00:16:55,040 --> 00:16:57,590 This is an instance of runaway individualism, 184 00:16:57,740 --> 00:17:02,840 where selfish pursuits override any commitment to a broader social project and thus detract from the Commonwealth. 185 00:17:03,380 --> 00:17:08,090 In short, there's far more at stake in these arguments about the kind of nature of civil 186 00:17:08,090 --> 00:17:12,800 society than kind of trying to get it right in some sort of theoretical sense. 187 00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:15,110 Rather, for post liberals, 188 00:17:15,110 --> 00:17:21,320 this particular understanding of history and human nature demands a fundamental revision of political relations going forward, 189 00:17:21,620 --> 00:17:26,990 one that serves to dissolve liberalism's theoretical distinctions between the law, the state and the people. 190 00:17:28,000 --> 00:17:33,410 Okay, so we kind of having laid out some of the kind of broad theoretical ideas here, 191 00:17:33,440 --> 00:17:38,480 I'm going to talk about kind of two people in particular and then try to tie it all together. 192 00:17:39,290 --> 00:17:49,970 So in the year 800 of the Common Era, the section scholar Allison of York penned a letter to the newly crowned emperor of the Romans, Charlemagne. 193 00:17:50,600 --> 00:17:56,990 And those people should not be listened to who keep saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God. 194 00:17:57,620 --> 00:18:00,979 Vox populi. Vox de. Since the riot, 195 00:18:00,980 --> 00:18:08,059 iness of the crowd is always very close to madness here in this the scholar represented 196 00:18:08,060 --> 00:18:11,750 an elitist distrust of the masses that has informed not merely monarchists, 197 00:18:11,750 --> 00:18:17,870 but many liberals down to the present. It was a sentiment broadly shared by American founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton, 198 00:18:18,140 --> 00:18:21,830 who wrote, and I quote, The voice of the people has said to be the voice of God. 199 00:18:22,220 --> 00:18:30,320 And however, generally, this maxim has been quoted and believed it is not true to fact the people turbulent and changing, 200 00:18:30,410 --> 00:18:32,240 they seldom judge or determine. Right. 201 00:18:32,990 --> 00:18:39,830 In 1934, the American political scientist, Walter Sheppard, likewise expressed his growing dismay with the virtues of democratic governance. 202 00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:44,630 Serving an electorate he characterised as guided by sentiments of caprice and passion. 203 00:18:45,020 --> 00:18:49,879 Sheppard called for conditional suffrage based on, quote, educational and other tests, 204 00:18:49,880 --> 00:18:53,780 which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed and the anti-social elements. 205 00:18:54,170 --> 00:18:59,240 Political theorists, he added, should no longer believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. 206 00:19:00,350 --> 00:19:06,470 The conservative thinker Patrick Deneen takes up Shepard's case in his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Fails. 207 00:19:06,860 --> 00:19:11,269 A book that both diagnoses the substantive failures of liberalism to provide for mass human 208 00:19:11,270 --> 00:19:16,910 flourishing and proposes a reconstructed political order based on the revival of civic virtue. 209 00:19:17,420 --> 00:19:21,170 As opposed to other factions of the new right that idealised the Founding Fathers. 210 00:19:21,380 --> 00:19:25,760 Deneen rightly notes that the democratic deficit sits right at the heart of the American 211 00:19:25,760 --> 00:19:30,050 constitutional order as a by-product of a very profound mistrust of the public. 212 00:19:30,890 --> 00:19:35,480 What founders like James Madison desired was instead a citizenry that was individualistic, 213 00:19:35,600 --> 00:19:41,000 pursuing private ends divided amongst itself, and thus incapable of destabilising combinations. 214 00:19:41,450 --> 00:19:45,169 Deneen further notes that the same anti-democratic sentiment powered early 20th 215 00:19:45,170 --> 00:19:48,590 century progressive efforts to make government more mechanised through bureaucracy. 216 00:19:48,980 --> 00:19:51,710 Democracy was thus limited to the expression of preferences, 217 00:19:51,950 --> 00:19:59,060 the collection of individual opinions that could be then collated and inform expert crafting of appropriate policy expert administrators. 218 00:20:00,140 --> 00:20:01,010 According to Deneen, 219 00:20:01,160 --> 00:20:09,560 liberalism has gutted the populace of the necessary service civic virtues required for the pursuit of a collective good for a life outside of itself. 220 00:20:10,100 --> 00:20:16,639 Deneen extrapolates Madison's argument that government exists to protect the diverse faculties of men into the liberal demand, 221 00:20:16,640 --> 00:20:18,680 that the state protects marginalised persons. 222 00:20:19,010 --> 00:20:25,310 And importantly, such a plurality of individuals pursuing their own aims represents for Deneen a deadly threat to the greater good. 223 00:20:25,700 --> 00:20:32,780 Quote The idealisation of diversity in the form of personal identity was sewn into the deepest fabric of the liberal project, 224 00:20:33,050 --> 00:20:37,910 and with it the domination of a common civic and fostering of a common wheel. 225 00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:44,149 Now it's important to note that Deneen breaks with other new right thinkers in rejecting the strongman solution. 226 00:20:44,150 --> 00:20:48,440 In theory, but what he wants instead is a reinvigorated. 227 00:20:48,530 --> 00:20:56,990 Citizenry guided by virtue. But in order for that to occur, civic virtue must return to what he identifies as its roots in Christian liberty. 228 00:20:57,350 --> 00:21:03,230 If the people are once again to be the voice of God and enabled to make democratic decisions in a substantive way, 229 00:21:03,410 --> 00:21:10,280 they must first be made virtuous through a specifically Christian understanding of liberty as pursuing, quote, the just and the good. 230 00:21:11,000 --> 00:21:13,640 This understanding of liberty is not without constraint. 231 00:21:13,850 --> 00:21:18,560 It is certainly not the freedom to pursue one's own desires so long as it does not harm another. 232 00:21:18,800 --> 00:21:25,610 John Stuart Mill. On the contrary, Deneen argues that one of liberalism's most damaging fictions was the theory of consent, 233 00:21:26,120 --> 00:21:31,159 an imaginary scenario in which autonomous rational calculators formed an abstract 234 00:21:31,160 --> 00:21:35,540 contract to establish a government whose sole purpose was to secure rights. 235 00:21:36,560 --> 00:21:38,210 This view of consent regulated, 236 00:21:38,330 --> 00:21:47,390 relegated all unspoken forms of society and relationships to category of the arbitrary and thus suspect, if not illegitimate. 237 00:21:48,530 --> 00:21:49,939 Christian liberty, he argues, 238 00:21:49,940 --> 00:21:56,840 is not libertine and rather only exists within certain limits that should be articulated by the community and enforced by the state. 239 00:21:57,740 --> 00:22:01,790 Now, Deneen often cites Alexis de Tocqueville as 19th century observations about the 240 00:22:01,790 --> 00:22:05,510 centrality of local government institutions to maintaining American democracy. 241 00:22:05,750 --> 00:22:13,610 He's written on de Tocqueville extensively. According to Deneen, civic virtue can only develop in local and immediate contexts the guild, the ward, 242 00:22:13,610 --> 00:22:18,860 the congregation, shaped by a sense of interdependence, traditional values and restraints on individual freedom. 243 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:25,879 Quote What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focussed on the creation of new and viable cultures, 244 00:22:25,880 --> 00:22:31,970 economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life. 245 00:22:32,990 --> 00:22:34,100 There are, he notes, 246 00:22:34,100 --> 00:22:41,930 already intentional communities that reject liberalism's hegemonic norms and are creating self-contained counter cultures to inculcate such virtues, 247 00:22:42,200 --> 00:22:47,900 including among conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews, new homesteaders and, quote, radical homemakers. 248 00:22:48,990 --> 00:22:52,010 Now, the emphasis on the local may seem out of place, 249 00:22:52,040 --> 00:22:56,150 given the development of communication and media technologies that de Tocqueville could not foresee. 250 00:22:56,600 --> 00:23:03,020 From iPhones to CNN and Zoom calls and modern forms of transportation that tend to compress the sense of distance. 251 00:23:03,290 --> 00:23:10,950 Denise View of social relations is essentially static, and seemingly unrelated to changing material conditions becomes more understandable. 252 00:23:10,970 --> 00:23:16,310 However, once we shift to how he imagines a virtuous population might once again prevail, 253 00:23:16,610 --> 00:23:21,380 the president reality, he notes, is that Christians and those who share their traditional moral compass, 254 00:23:21,650 --> 00:23:29,540 a world of strong patriarchal families, healthy working class wages and robust structures of communal support do not constitute a moral majority. 255 00:23:29,810 --> 00:23:36,889 As Jerry Falwell once imagined, they are rather a minority element struggling to stay afloat in a world dominated by woke capitalism, 256 00:23:36,890 --> 00:23:39,290 elite technocracy and economic constriction. 257 00:23:39,830 --> 00:23:45,200 For some conservatives, the only possible manoeuvre is the so-called Benedict option outlined by Rod Dreher, 258 00:23:45,560 --> 00:23:50,990 namely to retreat from liberal, cultural and political spaces and ride out the storm in virtuous enclaves. 259 00:23:51,440 --> 00:23:55,760 But Deneen is not so sure that as Dreher holds, politics will not save us. 260 00:23:56,420 --> 00:24:03,350 Rather, Deneen understands that state power is absolutely required to mould a citizenry possessing the proper Christian virtuous. 261 00:24:03,650 --> 00:24:10,850 And I quote In the absence of a good polity, it is unlikely a healthy culture can be cultivated and sustained. 262 00:24:11,300 --> 00:24:14,090 The monastery is for not only religious institutions, 263 00:24:14,090 --> 00:24:20,900 but also served as the centre of political life for many medieval towns with abbots functioning a civic as well as religious leaders. 264 00:24:21,170 --> 00:24:25,310 The church was the source of Christian culture in no small part because she developed 265 00:24:25,610 --> 00:24:30,320 systems of law and courts in addition to rules and practices governing markets. 266 00:24:30,770 --> 00:24:35,900 Aristotle understood that long culture like ethics and politics must be mutually reinforcing. 267 00:24:36,230 --> 00:24:43,280 Christianity is inherently political, he insists, and there is no way to escape having to fight for its value on the political stage. 268 00:24:44,790 --> 00:24:53,520 Deneen thus offers a political, theological vision that rejects both the libertarian solution and the and the Benedict option of withdrawal. 269 00:24:53,850 --> 00:25:00,300 What is required is rather for the state to make the people virtuous through the mechanisms of law. 270 00:25:00,810 --> 00:25:08,700 The moral majority might not yet exist, but it can be coerced into being through state power as emphasis on locality. 271 00:25:09,090 --> 00:25:11,879 Quote We need to focus on our towns and city halls. 272 00:25:11,880 --> 00:25:18,750 Are neighbourhood associations seeking to foster the kinds of communities where our children can and will roam the fields again. 273 00:25:20,160 --> 00:25:24,990 This is also a pragmatic understanding of where American conservatives possess enough strength to push ahead their agenda. 274 00:25:25,230 --> 00:25:31,620 And indeed its at the city and state level that elected leaders have managed to ban abortion, forbid the critical teaching of American history, 275 00:25:31,770 --> 00:25:36,659 persecute trans people all the name of all in the name of preserving the cultural heritage 276 00:25:36,660 --> 00:25:43,590 and traditional integrity of the people that people thus conceived is at best a potentiality, 277 00:25:43,920 --> 00:25:49,620 at worst a rhetorical trope, but nowhere a concept that corresponds to an actual existing majority. 278 00:25:50,310 --> 00:25:57,840 That is why this form of right populism is authoritarian in nature, and why we might wonder whether we should truly call it populism at all. 279 00:25:58,410 --> 00:26:05,219 It requires state coercion via legal and cultural mechanisms to engineer a virtuous public with a corollary that only 280 00:26:05,220 --> 00:26:11,940 a virtuous public could be trusted with true democracy until the moral minority becomes a demographic majority. 281 00:26:12,000 --> 00:26:15,480 Janine's logic suggests that antidemocratic measures are necessary, 282 00:26:15,810 --> 00:26:21,330 which helps explain his strong support for US Supreme Court rulings that run very contrary to the Democratic will. 283 00:26:21,660 --> 00:26:26,340 It is not. I suspect his deep respect for the judiciary as an independent institution that guides this 284 00:26:26,340 --> 00:26:31,110 choice but more pragmatic calculations based on the substance of recent court decisions. 285 00:26:33,110 --> 00:26:40,399 Okay. Finally, it's worth noting that this kind of bifurcation of the people, the Indian participation into two groups, 286 00:26:40,400 --> 00:26:45,470 the moral minority on the one hand, and its kind of anti-American opposition on the other. 287 00:26:45,710 --> 00:26:50,270 So liberal social progressives, you know, elite forces, globalists, immigrants. 288 00:26:50,280 --> 00:26:57,140 Right. All this illustrates how central the friend versus foe dynamic has become to domestic U.S. politics. 289 00:26:57,680 --> 00:27:01,820 And the enemy in such telling is interestingly here not a foreign power, 290 00:27:02,150 --> 00:27:06,950 not a commercial driver rifle, not even right Islamic terrorism or something like this, 291 00:27:07,160 --> 00:27:12,740 but the moral forces that have kind of deeply lodged in cells in the in the in the centre of the body politic itself. 292 00:27:14,210 --> 00:27:19,490 Okay. So if the NIE presents this post liberal approach explicitly grounded in Christianity, 293 00:27:19,910 --> 00:27:27,320 the Israeli American scholar Yoram Husaini outlines a, quote, national conservative vision allegedly rooted in Jewish tradition. 294 00:27:29,180 --> 00:27:32,299 I don't know if many of you are familiar with his own work. 295 00:27:32,300 --> 00:27:41,810 He's much less known than Deneen and some of these kind of post liberals and the American right, which is for reasons which are, I think, 296 00:27:42,050 --> 00:27:47,720 much of his career, he kind of specifically was talking about Israel and kind of Jewish concerns, and he's kind of now taken the show on the road. 297 00:27:48,470 --> 00:27:53,030 And in particular his book, The Virtues of Nationalism, which is published in 2018. 298 00:27:54,270 --> 00:28:00,710 I kind of tried to outline a broader vision of the new far right that's very clearly grounded in a Zionist experience, 299 00:28:01,820 --> 00:28:08,780 but is presents itself as kind of a general political theory that national nationalist forces the world over can kind of use as a toolbox. 300 00:28:09,710 --> 00:28:17,540 He's you know, in terms of his own biography, it's probably important to note that he attended Princeton that great the proving ground for four, 301 00:28:17,590 --> 00:28:21,830 four, four, four, five, three figures in the United States. 302 00:28:22,520 --> 00:28:33,200 He moved in 1989 to the early settlements in central West Bank and throughout the nineties worked both for the Jerusalem Post and was a 303 00:28:33,200 --> 00:28:40,460 speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu and then of course created the Shalem College in the mid nineties where he where he still lives today. 304 00:28:41,480 --> 00:28:46,730 Hasan His national conservatism stems from the belief that the nation is a divine creation, 305 00:28:47,330 --> 00:28:50,420 the prototypes of which are already found in the Hebrew Bible. 306 00:28:51,260 --> 00:28:55,400 Thus he regards the Bible to be the basis of the Anglo American political tradition, 307 00:28:55,490 --> 00:29:01,040 with the Israelites serving as the original nation made of a homogenous group of people sanctified by God. 308 00:29:02,150 --> 00:29:07,490 Moreover, because God created separate people so quote unquote globalist attempts to forge a universal, 309 00:29:07,490 --> 00:29:13,370 multicultural society are a violation of the divine will, in addition to an expression of imperial intolerance. 310 00:29:14,300 --> 00:29:15,379 Indeed, throughout his work, 311 00:29:15,380 --> 00:29:22,490 he juxtaposes nationalism and imperialism as these two kind of competing and allegedly mutually exclusive political models. 312 00:29:22,790 --> 00:29:31,100 And under the imperial umbrella, he replaces contemporary institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, the International Criminal Court, 313 00:29:31,940 --> 00:29:36,290 as he argues for the right of nations to, quote, chart their own independent course, 314 00:29:36,290 --> 00:29:40,470 cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference. 315 00:29:40,520 --> 00:29:41,000 End quote. 316 00:29:41,570 --> 00:29:48,440 As is always the case with the theoretical abstractions made by these figures who seem constitutionally allergic to empiricism, historical analysis, 317 00:29:48,440 --> 00:29:50,360 or considering the influence of material conditions, 318 00:29:50,510 --> 00:29:55,040 it's useful to spell out just whose rights and lives will suffer in pursuit of national greatness. 319 00:29:55,370 --> 00:30:01,700 In practice has only tells us that protecting nations from imperial intervention means shielding Israel from international sanctions, 320 00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:06,350 asserting Hungary's right to discriminate against Muslims and people from the gay community, 321 00:30:06,350 --> 00:30:09,350 and shielding American soldiers from war crimes tribunals. 322 00:30:10,370 --> 00:30:17,510 Nations for Husaini are both a theological category and historical constants, a dubious claim that's largely disputed by historians. 323 00:30:17,540 --> 00:30:23,059 Nationalism who point to the necessary role of the modern states institutions from railroad networks to 324 00:30:23,060 --> 00:30:28,760 primary schools in facilitating new forms of national identity throughout the 19th and 20th century. 325 00:30:29,120 --> 00:30:34,040 So, too, he seems untroubled by the historical fact that many nation states have been imperial in nature, 326 00:30:34,310 --> 00:30:39,050 suggesting that the political binary, he suggests, does not hold up to any sort of empirical scrutiny. 327 00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:43,280 The historical veracity is far less important than theological claims to HALZEN, 328 00:30:43,400 --> 00:30:48,620 whose political vision is clearly indebted to religious Zionism of the most uninteresting and superficial kind. 329 00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:55,340 In his theocratic vision, there is no tension between Judaism and nationalism or the political prerogatives of the modern state. 330 00:30:55,820 --> 00:31:00,530 Rather, the state kind of harmoniously quote, upholds and honours God and the Bible, 331 00:31:00,530 --> 00:31:04,760 the congregation and the family and the religious practices common to the nation. 332 00:31:05,650 --> 00:31:11,630 Similar to Deneen. Then we see in his work a strong argument for the states to create through coercion and constraint, 333 00:31:11,810 --> 00:31:15,530 a type of idealised moral order and with regard to Israel. 334 00:31:15,620 --> 00:31:23,239 This no doubt corresponds to upholding mainstream orthodox positions and has only betrays no recognition of the difficulties either theological, 335 00:31:23,240 --> 00:31:26,210 ethical or political that such a vision represents in practice. 336 00:31:27,290 --> 00:31:31,970 Hayes only grounds this are arguments in a particular genealogy of the political community. 337 00:31:32,270 --> 00:31:38,240 States do not emerge from the social contract and its vaunted conventions rational deliberation, choice and consent. 338 00:31:38,600 --> 00:31:46,129 Rather, he locates the origins of the political community in the nuclear patriarchal family, which progresses somehow naturally into an imagined, 339 00:31:46,130 --> 00:31:53,870 homogenous and organic group of people a nation by extension, a nation state united by language, ethnic origin, history and religion. 340 00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:59,870 Just like families, national communities are maintained by bonds of loyalty and forces of constraint. 341 00:32:00,440 --> 00:32:04,250 He thus shares Indian contempt for liberalism's emphasis on individual freedom, 342 00:32:05,000 --> 00:32:10,610 viewing it as a centrifugal, centrifugal force that undermines the body politic and offers, 343 00:32:10,610 --> 00:32:17,720 quote unquote, collective freedom of the national group in its step by asserting the supremacy of the nation in all political matters. 344 00:32:17,780 --> 00:32:22,999 He pits national conservatives and liberal democracy against one another by explicitly 345 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:26,600 arguing that the collective freedom of the nation overrides individual liberty. 346 00:32:26,840 --> 00:32:30,140 He rejects the centrality of personal freedom within the political system. 347 00:32:30,560 --> 00:32:34,730 Embedded within the seemingly academic argument about the origins of political community is a 348 00:32:34,730 --> 00:32:39,710 degradation of the very principle of individual freedom that's alarming in its forthrightness. 349 00:32:40,370 --> 00:32:47,300 Since the nation incarnates the will of God, though in secularised form, the nation not only represents the idea of sacred peoplehood, 350 00:32:47,720 --> 00:32:51,350 it consumes the concept of the state and destroys the supremacy of the law. 351 00:32:51,380 --> 00:32:55,700 Because states are instruments for organising nations and the law is subordinate to the will of the nation, 352 00:32:56,090 --> 00:32:59,120 or, more accurately, the portion of it that is deemed morally sound. 353 00:32:59,570 --> 00:33:08,420 It is this effective collapse of the people, the law, and the states that best typifies illiberal democracies like Hungary under Viktor Orban, 354 00:33:08,690 --> 00:33:13,610 where the law becomes a vehicle for persecuting those who supposedly undermine the integrity of the nation. 355 00:33:14,570 --> 00:33:23,420 So to Israel's controversial 2018 Nation-State Law, which has only vigorously lobbied in support of makes legally explicit with long view. 356 00:33:23,420 --> 00:33:30,680 In practice, the state does not exist to serve its citizens equally, but gives precedence the portion of them identified with the Jewish nation. 357 00:33:30,890 --> 00:33:36,860 Under such a logic, those who are defined as outside the body politic are not entitled to legal protection or equality. 358 00:33:37,190 --> 00:33:40,190 Indeed, he says in a kind of different essay, 359 00:33:40,190 --> 00:33:46,219 it is that even the principle of equality as a we need to question whether the principle of equality is 360 00:33:46,220 --> 00:33:51,500 even something that we should fight for versus know kind of Jewish strength or liberty or continuity. 361 00:33:54,350 --> 00:33:58,360 The trio then of law stating people are thereby collapsed. 362 00:33:58,490 --> 00:34:02,600 The law is whatever. The people who control the state say this in theological terms. 363 00:34:02,750 --> 00:34:09,860 The people in rhetorical terms, again, if not in numerical ones, have usurped both God and the law as the supreme principle. 364 00:34:11,030 --> 00:34:16,850 Defining who within and inside and outside of the people is thus of central importance to this national conservative project, 365 00:34:17,150 --> 00:34:20,450 which helps explain his appeal to right wing constituencies worldwide. 366 00:34:21,170 --> 00:34:26,660 Because intra tribal loyalty, not commitment to a set of principles, is the stuff of political cohesion. 367 00:34:26,780 --> 00:34:29,660 All politics rests on the binary between friends and enemies. 368 00:34:30,110 --> 00:34:34,340 The latter are usually an ethnic or religious other, but may also include internal traders. 369 00:34:35,390 --> 00:34:36,620 Within such a framework, 370 00:34:36,620 --> 00:34:44,060 the state is less an institution for competing constituencies to further rival claims than a vehicle for managing insiders and outsiders. 371 00:34:44,720 --> 00:34:49,940 So in the state of Israel, we see these machinations most clearly at work and legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens, 372 00:34:49,940 --> 00:34:55,910 attacks on Palestinian civil society organisations and statutory provisions that reject Palestinian national rights. 373 00:34:56,360 --> 00:35:01,280 For his part, Hosseini defends such measures on principle, as he argues in the virtues of nationalism. 374 00:35:01,490 --> 00:35:07,550 To the extent that others may exist within a nation state is that it is on account of sufferance rather than right. 375 00:35:08,030 --> 00:35:11,059 He also concedes that the right to national service, 376 00:35:11,060 --> 00:35:17,780 to self-determination is not universal and must be weighed in the balance of moral and prudential considerations. 377 00:35:18,140 --> 00:35:21,860 Some groups, he contends, in an argument that seems tailor made for the Palestinians, 378 00:35:22,100 --> 00:35:26,480 should settle for, quote, a protectorate state with some measure of delegated authority, 379 00:35:29,180 --> 00:35:34,400 convinced then that the nation is a divine principle and that divisions among nations are part of the divine plan. 380 00:35:34,760 --> 00:35:39,380 His own, his political theory, stands ready to justify almost any measures carried out in the name of the people. 381 00:35:39,740 --> 00:35:43,310 Discriminatory and oppressive measures are necessary to preserve the nation, 382 00:35:43,400 --> 00:35:49,250 paradoxically viewed as both organic and eternal, and yet highly susceptible to contamination and dissolution. 383 00:35:49,760 --> 00:35:55,370 And for those who are convinced that another people's mere existence is a danger to their own, there is no amount of discrimination, 384 00:35:55,370 --> 00:35:59,570 oppression or even ethnic cleansing that cannot be justified for the sake of national survival. 385 00:36:00,740 --> 00:36:03,920 Having laid out these two different the overlapping views of the people, 386 00:36:04,220 --> 00:36:09,440 and I conclude this discussion by considering how Post Liberals conceive of the role of the States in context, 387 00:36:09,440 --> 00:36:16,940 ranging from United States to India to Israel and Brazil. Post liberals align themselves with either real for aspiring authoritarians. 388 00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:18,259 In Schmitt's terms, 389 00:36:18,260 --> 00:36:25,309 we can interpret these alliances expressing a desire for strong sovereign authority that will have the power to decide when the straitjackets win. 390 00:36:25,310 --> 00:36:30,260 The straitjacket of liberal democracy can be thrown off and with it, conventional laws and norms. 391 00:36:30,710 --> 00:36:37,490 Unlike conservatives who have in the past championed small government posts, liberals require strong states to further their purported aims. 392 00:36:37,790 --> 00:36:43,669 Indeed, the abiding paradox of the new nationalist is in particular is that they require the 393 00:36:43,670 --> 00:36:48,170 state to preserve and promote identities and social relations that are supposedly innate. 394 00:36:48,920 --> 00:36:53,300 This is one reason that many post liberals regard strength as the principal political virtue. 395 00:36:53,450 --> 00:36:59,150 A strong leader for a strong nation. I go back to the Likud slogan of 1999. 396 00:36:59,330 --> 00:37:06,590 Today, Donald Trump vows to make America strong again. This desire for a reinvigorated sovereignty, concentrated in the figure of the leader, 397 00:37:06,590 --> 00:37:12,350 sometimes bleeds into a kind of neo monarch ism as champion today by people like Curtis Ervin. 398 00:37:12,950 --> 00:37:14,629 So too, in a recent interview, 399 00:37:14,630 --> 00:37:22,250 the former journalist and parliamentary candidate Boaz Bismuth has stated that the prime minister of Israel is the king of the Jews. 400 00:37:22,340 --> 00:37:30,709 Israel, he says, is the kingdom among the other, a term laden with deep theological resonance and Hebrew Bible and Jewish liturgical tradition. 401 00:37:30,710 --> 00:37:35,000 Mummify is associated both with God's dominion over heaven and earth, right? 402 00:37:35,300 --> 00:37:40,040 Ricardo Nahum and God's Anointed Kingdom, led by the House of David. 403 00:37:40,970 --> 00:37:47,510 So while he claimed that his statement was just a metaphor, it reflects an important political impulse in contemporary Israel to regard the 404 00:37:47,510 --> 00:37:51,170 state as a manifestation of the divine will and indeed as a messianic vehicle, 405 00:37:51,680 --> 00:37:58,940 the state embodied by the strong leader in such a scheme. This demands nothing short of worship in political, theological terms. 406 00:37:59,090 --> 00:38:06,770 Obedience to the state replaces adherence to the law. The adoration of strength, however, is not restricted to the image of the leader. 407 00:38:07,820 --> 00:38:13,160 The Hebrew to the Hebrew to not turn to the Hebrew term. 408 00:38:13,550 --> 00:38:21,110 Ms. Governance or governance mentality, right? Introduced in recent years by key right wing actors in Israel aims to strengthen the 409 00:38:21,110 --> 00:38:25,190 capacity of the island to decide by neutralising those elements that restrain it, 410 00:38:25,340 --> 00:38:32,840 like the Supreme Court. In this vision, sovereignty transcends what the Austrian Jewish legal scholar Hans Kilson called the pyramid of 411 00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:38,420 norms that regulate political contact content because it receives its legitimacy from elsewhere. 412 00:38:38,630 --> 00:38:43,070 The divine domain or the one voice of the supposed, supposedly homogenous nation. 413 00:38:43,850 --> 00:38:48,020 Arguing for the power to decide is, however, not about conservatism or nationalism, per se. 414 00:38:48,380 --> 00:38:50,720 But it does suggest that in the destruction of democracy, 415 00:38:51,110 --> 00:38:58,400 it calls for a political order which is defined by an uncontested authority that facilitates the nation's identification of and fight against enemies, 416 00:38:58,920 --> 00:39:05,990 external threats or internal traitors. Yet for all its invocation of traditional religious morality, 417 00:39:06,170 --> 00:39:11,960 the new right is highly selective about its religious commitments and instrumentalists in its use of religious tradition. 418 00:39:12,440 --> 00:39:18,380 Many self-identified secular people invoke Christian or Jewish nationalism as a form of racialized identity politics, 419 00:39:18,650 --> 00:39:23,390 a matter of sorting who belongs where. Far more than a question of religious conviction or ethics. 420 00:39:23,930 --> 00:39:29,090 The fetishisation of the people. This place is not merely liberalism, but central religious tenets. 421 00:39:29,300 --> 00:39:35,330 So welcome to the stranger, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to recognise that all human beings are made in the divine image. 422 00:39:35,810 --> 00:39:42,590 Scholars have even noted a negative correlation between regular church attendance and anti-immigrant sentiment among American Christians, 423 00:39:42,590 --> 00:39:51,350 for instance, underscoring that the current battle is badly understood if it is cast between as one between religious conviction and secular freedom. 424 00:39:52,070 --> 00:39:56,299 As the sociologist Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry have recently argued, quote, Today, 425 00:39:56,300 --> 00:39:59,720 calling oneself a Christian or even an evangelical is sometimes just a way of 426 00:39:59,720 --> 00:40:03,770 claiming membership in an ideological or political tribe or defending a certain, 427 00:40:03,770 --> 00:40:12,680 quote, way of life. When post liberals claim a strong state is required to enforce traditional religious values to make the majority moral again, 428 00:40:12,950 --> 00:40:19,130 we must keep in mind that theirs is a particular, somewhat thin understanding of both religious identity and traditions. 429 00:40:20,360 --> 00:40:26,790 So in conclusion, why do we always cherish things like when they kind of just try to tie it together? 430 00:40:28,250 --> 00:40:34,520 We inhabit a world defined by unprecedented, an unprecedented amount of mobility, of finance, 431 00:40:34,520 --> 00:40:39,560 consumer goods, popular culture, and a global elite equally at home in Doha or San Francisco. 432 00:40:40,010 --> 00:40:43,610 Yet and as a corollary, ours is also a world where in the movement of people, 433 00:40:43,610 --> 00:40:47,260 immigrants, refugees and suspicious populations is obsessively restricted. 434 00:40:47,840 --> 00:40:52,219 A world of border walls and barbed wire fences, security checkpoints, military blockades, 435 00:40:52,220 --> 00:40:59,420 unprecedented surveillance and denunciations of foreign elements in the body politic appeals to the organic unity of the nation, 436 00:40:59,420 --> 00:41:03,230 however fictitious must be understood in the context of these material upheavals. 437 00:41:03,830 --> 00:41:06,560 Post liberals are sometimes described as traditionalists. 438 00:41:06,770 --> 00:41:13,970 But our analysis underscores that a mere return to earlier forms of political and social life are insufficient for their project. 439 00:41:14,330 --> 00:41:18,140 The need to distinguish the concept from tradition from that of conservatism 440 00:41:18,380 --> 00:41:22,620 requires perhaps a different discussion that exceeds what I can do with you today. 441 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:29,360 But it would, in any case, be wrong to succumb to the post liberal vision, not only of what tradition stands for, 442 00:41:29,600 --> 00:41:33,440 but also how to engage with what was handed down to us by preceding generations. 443 00:41:34,130 --> 00:41:41,510 Their new right wing mission, rather, depends on the advanced technologies of governance from state schooling and surveillance to criminalisation, 444 00:41:41,630 --> 00:41:46,920 to create a body politic that accords with the vision of the nation in asserting the primacy of the nation. 445 00:41:46,940 --> 00:41:53,749 They're also willing to dispense with much else that is valued by its actual members individual liberties, legal equality, free and fair elections. 446 00:41:53,750 --> 00:41:57,300 Even the peaceful transition of power. The three categories. 447 00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:04,100 The three categories of analysis. The people along the States collapse upon one another into a unitary whole. 448 00:42:04,430 --> 00:42:07,490 Ideally led by a strong leader with no plans to leave office. 449 00:42:08,690 --> 00:42:13,669 The post theological aspects of this worldview betray a yearning for a bold leader. 450 00:42:13,670 --> 00:42:19,430 A sovereign who equalling the divine will serve and protect his people from enemies, both without and within. 451 00:42:20,180 --> 00:42:25,850 In practice, we cannot summon the House of David to play such a role, and the Messiah is known to carry the post. 452 00:42:25,850 --> 00:42:31,640 Liberals are untroubled by this reality because they regard the nation as far more important than other aspects of divine creation. 453 00:42:32,060 --> 00:42:36,950 Its interests likewise overwhelm the demands of human decency and even explicit religious commands. 454 00:42:37,340 --> 00:42:42,560 The nation is what reigns. Supreme mentor Father LAMB now and forever. 455 00:42:42,990 --> 00:42:43,400 Think of.