Welcome, everybody, then welcome everybody to our fourth, fourth, fifth.
Well, fifth week, fourth meeting, fourth meeting, fifth week.
And I think today is going to be an extremely exciting presentation and conversation.
So we have today Susanne Schneider, who is the deputy director and core faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research,
specialising in political theory and history of the modern Middle East.
She's the author of Mandatory Separation Religion, Education and Math,
Politics and Palestine and also the Apocalypse and the End of History Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism.
Her writing about contemporary politics, religion and violence has appeared in The New Republic,
Mother Jones, The Washington Post, foreign policy and plus one in Iran, among other outlets.
And she is currently a visiting fellow here at Muslim College,
where she is working on her new book about the use of risk as a social and political tool.
So we are very excited to have you here. Thank you so much.
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.
So anyway, but I'm going to just before I start,
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.
Obviously, you come from University of Haifa, but that basically anything that's really great about this article,
you should direct that praise to me and any criticism. You just save that for your film.
Okay. So now undeniable that liberal democracy is in some sort of crisis, right?
This is kind of an axiom, axiomatic proposition at this point, signalled by the waning of the political,
social and even economic order that's ruled Western democracies since the end of the Second World War.
The values associated with liberalism, from individual rights to democratic governance, equality before the law and free market principles,
have been called into question not merely by intellectuals,
but by political actors and institutions that are constitutive of democratic political systems.
These challenges are best illustrated in the rise of right wing nationalist movements and parties the world over from the BJP in India,
the Law and Justice Party in Poland, brothers of Italy.
For those in Hungary, Trumpism, of course, the overwhelming rightward tilt of Israeli politics.
Xenophobic political parties like national rally in France, Sweden.
Democrats in its microcredit in Israel have increased in strength, increase their strength in electoral terms,
as these ideas, which were once deemed beyond the pale, have increasingly moved mainstream.
So if we look leftward, it's also possible to see a retreat from liberalism that's present in suspicion of the state,
conceived by many as existing, only to serve the rich and powerful,
accompanied by the growing sentiment that present institutions are ill equipped to provide for and more equal and justice social order,
rather than in seeing entrenched racial, social and economic hierarchies as a glitch within a liberal political order.
Such critiques argue that actually existing liberalism, as opposed to a theoretical facade,
is a vehicle for human exploitation and ecological exhaustion.
Within this framing, the left calls liberalism's bluff in critiques that expose how supposedly disinterested or neutral
laws were designed to serve the interests of a particular class and perpetuate its privileges.
Laws, norms, institutions are thus not regarded as the foundations of democracy,
but as the means of restraining the democratic energies and aspirations of the people.
So in short, serving the territory, we see liberalism under attack from these kind of two directions.
On the right, the liberal order is regarded as advancing the scourges of multiculturalism,
immigration, Marxism, the secularist entity toward religion, family tradition.
And meanwhile, kind of progressives associate the same order with unrestrained capitalism,
structural violence and the incapacity to address inequality, poverty, systemic violence and a dire ecological crisis.
None of these critiques operate at a purely ideological level.
Rather, they have developed alongside the unravelling of the post-war settlement,
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,
quote unquote, free capital from democratic pressures have been wildly successful,
resulting not merely in record levels of economic inequality, but in declining wellness indexes like life expectancy.
The disintegration of liberalism as a political philosophy must be understood vis a vis this realignment of state and market forces.
So liberalism is under attack from both sides. It is important to note that the vastly unequal nature of these challengers.
Lest you think there is some sadism coming from it, that there is no organised far left,
that even approach approximates the power of the right which has succeeded in winning.
Elections in Brazil, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, Israel, Philippines, among many others.
For both mainstream liberals and Social Democrats, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the organised political left,
the liberal Democratic state is still largely viewed as a vehicle for tackling collective problems and creating a more equitable society.
That is, these forces tend to regard government as a means to more fully realise liberalism's purported ideals.
In contrast, the emerging right wing movements argue forcefully for rejection of liberalism's founding principles,
particularly regarding individual liberty and democratic governance.
With the waning of liberalism comes a new vision for the relations between the three fundamental political concepts of the law,
the state and the people. And this is particularly what I'm going to drill down and talk about today.
In particular, the champions of what is variously called post liberalism or elegant democracy
offer an alternative that collapses the distinctions between these categories.
The law becomes whatever serves the interests of, quote, the people,
a rhetorical concept that need not correspond with an actual popular majority with the state charter to securing its implementation.
So I argue that this vision is rooted in a particular political theology that regards nations as divine creations,
and their preservation is a sacred act whose fulfilment overrides all other laws.
The state in this schema is paradoxically required to support and sustain the supposedly
organic and homogenous nation that precedes it and indeed that justifies its existence.
So I contend that understanding the theological dimensions of this post level vision,
both acknowledged and implicit, is necessary both to grasping its appeal and offering a viable alternative.
So two kind of explanatory notes I think would be helpful before we go any further.
The first is what is political theology, which may not be a household term for everyone,
and it's a term that I'm going to use here to convey both the overtly religious aspects of political life.
So, for instance, you could say an argument against abortion that is based in a Catholic notion of life begins at conception.
But there's also we use this term to talk about the far more subtle ways that religious concepts shape political institutions.
Each of these three terms of analysis the law, the state and the people exist as a theological category in the Jewish,
Christian and Islamic traditions that inform the modern political imagination.
But we would be wrong to think that these terms maintain the same meanings or facilitate the same political orders over time.
So both the divine right of kingship and popular sovereignty could be based on theological grounds.
For instance, even though they represent competing political models, the German jurist Karl Schmidt,
famously asserted that our modern political categories are secularised theological concepts.
Schmidt argued that political power or sovereignty mirrors God's creation of the world,
and fans found expression in the idea of the king as long giver.
But in the 17th and 18th centuries, the scientific, scientific revolution and Enlightenment philosophy advanced as more deist understanding of
God as the creator of the laws of nature rather than an active manager of human affairs.
Once set in motion, the world was mechanised and can persist without divine intervention.
Schmidt argued that this depersonalised notion of sovereignty no longer dependent on either God or an individual
monarch paralleled the rise of the modern democratic state and the division of sovereign power into several parts.
It reached its apex in the scientific management, not just of manufacturing and commerce, but politics and social life in the early 20th century.
Schmidt understood the triumph of impersonal bureaucratic rationalism and the corresponding liberal legal order,
which saw no situation that could not be accommodated under the law as the dissolution of sovereignty.
It created, he argued, a fundamentally unstable constitutional order in which no one truly wielded power.
He left on the Weimar Republic a fragmented parliamentary system, nothing less than a hollowing out of sovereign power as an alternative.
Schmidt called for a reinvigorated personal sovereignty, and given these theoretical commitments,
it was hardly surprising that Schmidt embraced Hitler's rise as the robot and celebrated it.
Really, as the revival of German sovereignty concentrated once more in an individual rather than divided among unruly proletariat,
parliamentarians and impersonal bureaucrats. So debates over the true nature of sovereignty had rage for court for centuries, if not millennia.
Of course, by the time that Schmidt enters this fray with his own definition, famously sovereign, is he who decides on the exception?
This definition includes two important features.
First, its sovereign power is marked by the capacity to decide which mirrors on Earth the idea of divine authority.
Second, the concept of the exception by which which by definition is outside the usual
course of events in which Schmidt will compare to the miracle in theology,
right? These instances when the kind of normal rule of the game can be suspended because of the overwhelming strength of divine authority.
So that is to say, inherent in the sovereign's capacity to decide is the ability to overrule any existing law,
particularly when declaring a state of emergency.
And contrary to liberal legal theorists who envisioned a law for every scenario that would both guide and restrict the exercise of power,
Schmidt did not regard the law as a cage.
Any sense of objective or universal law was rather a legal fiction that the sovereign could entertain at times,
but also overcome with brute force whenever necessary.
So today, Schmidt is largely regarded as a notorious figure who expressed belief.
In antisemitism were helping to construct the Nazi legal order.
But understanding Schmidt's concept of political theology is important for two reasons.
First, because it offers modern scholars a general toolbox for thinking about the religious and theological bases of even secular political forms.
And secondly, because his ideas continue to influence the ways in which many right wing intellectuals
and politicians think about sovereignty and the definition of the people in the enemy.
The second introductory note relates to the political theology of liberalism itself,
which we must better understand in order to see how Post Liberals positioned their
oppositional project so associated with a group of thinkers from Hobbes to Locke,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Right.
Liberalism is broadly concerned with a very,
very broad definition with reconciling the creation and maintenance of states with the preservation of individual freedom.
Liberal philosophers envisioned a particular relationship between the state, the law and the people.
And though they disregard it, they disagreed on the nature of human beings.
They nevertheless traced the origins of the state to a group of people who bound together to
create government and civil society as a means to better protect their bodies and their property.
It is kind of the social contract or social contract theory through the mechanism of the social contract.
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.
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.
The law was conceived as objective and universal,
supposedly disinterested and applicable to all members of society and the political theological register.
We could compare the social contract to the Israelites covenant with God lawgiver in Exodus, the Hebrew Bible Relief.
The God spoke at Mt. Sinai not merely to Moses but to the entire people.
An instance forth of mass revelation and acceptance of the terms outlined in the Divine Covenant.
Here we find the law given by the ultimate sovereign, the people.
The Israelites exist as clear, distinctive categories.
And the third concept The state is soon created in the Torah by necessity.
So Exodus in Chapter 18 relates how Jethro Moses, his father in law, helps build this juridical apparatus apparatus to adjudicate amongst the people.
And I quote, But when Moses is father in law, so how much he had to to do for the people,
he said, What is this thing that you are doing to the people?
Why do you act alone as magistrates? Well, all the people stand about you from morning till evening.
Moses replied to his father law. It is because the people come to me to inquire of God when they have a dispute.
It comes before me and I decide between one party and another, and I make known the laws and the teachings of God.
But Moses, his father in law, said to him, The thing you are doing is not right.
You will surely wear yourself out. And these people as well. The task is too heavy for you.
You cannot do it alone. Now, listen to me. I will give you counsel and God be with you.
You represent the people before God. You bring the disputes before God and enjoined upon them the laws and the teachings
and make known to them the way to go and the practices they are to follow.
You shall also seek out from amongst all the people, capable individuals who fear God, trustworthy ones who spurn ill gotten gains.
Set these over them as chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, and let them judge the people at all times.
Have them bring every major dispute to you, but let them decide every minor dispute themselves.
Make it easier for yourself by letting them share the burden with you.
What is this other than the creation of a state, a state bureaucracy in particular?
All right.
So Jethro envisions this budding state bureaucracy bound by divine law, but charged with the impartial application of this law to the people.
The application of divine law by the people and for the people may have been an ideal, of course,
but in practice it existed in tension with a tendency in rabbinic sources to incline toward the people as the arbiters of the law.
The mission of, for example, states one with whom men are pleased,
God is pleased from pure canvass, associating popular approbation with divine favour.
And one of the most famous Talmudic deliberations in Baba Messiah, the Torah is declared to be, quote, not in heaven,
but rather in accordance with the view of the rabbinic majority to liberalism's vaunted and at this point kind
of parroted ideal of an impartial and independent judiciary certainly isn't added to this biblical tale.
The same tension that appears in rabbinic debates is also present in political ones.
Only God could formulate such a perfect law in practice to be administered by functionaries who are themselves mere seeds of divine justice.
Laws made and adjudicated by humans will always be subjective, right?
This is a susceptible kind of products of human interpretation,
a fact that led Karl Marx to contend that the modern state was a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
How then, could the law ever be disinterested? Or differentiate it from the whims of the people and in truth, the powerful among them.
So contemporary thinkers, both left and right, take aim at this idea of a disinterested law,
albeit in different ways and with dramatically different implications for the future of democratic politics.
Very general terms. First, liberals reject the social contract theory for conjuring a state of nature that never existed.
It's very interesting. If you read these things, you say, Why is there so much time here talking about law?
Why are they all obsessed with the kind of social contract it appears in almost every single one of these kind of,
you know, critiques of liberalism from the right? And this is not a coincidence, right?
Because in their thinking, it is not choice, they contend, that forms the basis of the political community,
but the natural bonds and coercion stemming from the family and the tribe.
So by tracing a genealogy of the political community to the Natal family, post liberals accomplish a great deal.
In theoretical terms, the elevation of natal bonds is also the celebration of social ties that are unused,
with the suggestion that choice itself might be detrimental to the nation's health.
This element is subtle, but present in much of this thought, for instance,
around abortion, which is not just a problem because of the moral status of the foetus,
but because it implies a women's total agency over whether or not to enter a relationship of dependency with another life focussed liberals.
This is an instance of runaway individualism,
where selfish pursuits override any commitment to a broader social project and thus detract from the Commonwealth.
In short, there's far more at stake in these arguments about the kind of nature of civil
society than kind of trying to get it right in some sort of theoretical sense.
Rather, for post liberals,
this particular understanding of history and human nature demands a fundamental revision of political relations going forward,
one that serves to dissolve liberalism's theoretical distinctions between the law, the state and the people.
Okay, so we kind of having laid out some of the kind of broad theoretical ideas here,
I'm going to talk about kind of two people in particular and then try to tie it all together.
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.
And those people should not be listened to who keep saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Vox populi. Vox de. Since the riot,
iness of the crowd is always very close to madness here in this the scholar represented
an elitist distrust of the masses that has informed not merely monarchists,
but many liberals down to the present. It was a sentiment broadly shared by American founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton,
who wrote, and I quote, The voice of the people has said to be the voice of God.
And however, generally, this maxim has been quoted and believed it is not true to fact the people turbulent and changing,
they seldom judge or determine. Right.
In 1934, the American political scientist, Walter Sheppard, likewise expressed his growing dismay with the virtues of democratic governance.
Serving an electorate he characterised as guided by sentiments of caprice and passion.
Sheppard called for conditional suffrage based on, quote, educational and other tests,
which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed and the anti-social elements.
Political theorists, he added, should no longer believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
The conservative thinker Patrick Deneen takes up Shepard's case in his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Fails.
A book that both diagnoses the substantive failures of liberalism to provide for mass human
flourishing and proposes a reconstructed political order based on the revival of civic virtue.
As opposed to other factions of the new right that idealised the Founding Fathers.
Deneen rightly notes that the democratic deficit sits right at the heart of the American
constitutional order as a by-product of a very profound mistrust of the public.
What founders like James Madison desired was instead a citizenry that was individualistic,
pursuing private ends divided amongst itself, and thus incapable of destabilising combinations.
Deneen further notes that the same anti-democratic sentiment powered early 20th
century progressive efforts to make government more mechanised through bureaucracy.
Democracy was thus limited to the expression of preferences,
the collection of individual opinions that could be then collated and inform expert crafting of appropriate policy expert administrators.
According to Deneen,
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.
Deneen extrapolates Madison's argument that government exists to protect the diverse faculties of men into the liberal demand,
that the state protects marginalised persons.
And importantly, such a plurality of individuals pursuing their own aims represents for Deneen a deadly threat to the greater good.
Quote The idealisation of diversity in the form of personal identity was sewn into the deepest fabric of the liberal project,
and with it the domination of a common civic and fostering of a common wheel.
Now it's important to note that Deneen breaks with other new right thinkers in rejecting the strongman solution.
In theory, but what he wants instead is a reinvigorated.
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.
If the people are once again to be the voice of God and enabled to make democratic decisions in a substantive way,
they must first be made virtuous through a specifically Christian understanding of liberty as pursuing, quote, the just and the good.
This understanding of liberty is not without constraint.
It is certainly not the freedom to pursue one's own desires so long as it does not harm another.
John Stuart Mill. On the contrary, Deneen argues that one of liberalism's most damaging fictions was the theory of consent,
an imaginary scenario in which autonomous rational calculators formed an abstract
contract to establish a government whose sole purpose was to secure rights.
This view of consent regulated,
relegated all unspoken forms of society and relationships to category of the arbitrary and thus suspect, if not illegitimate.
Christian liberty, he argues,
is not libertine and rather only exists within certain limits that should be articulated by the community and enforced by the state.
Now, Deneen often cites Alexis de Tocqueville as 19th century observations about the
centrality of local government institutions to maintaining American democracy.
He's written on de Tocqueville extensively. According to Deneen, civic virtue can only develop in local and immediate contexts the guild, the ward,
the congregation, shaped by a sense of interdependence, traditional values and restraints on individual freedom.
Quote What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focussed on the creation of new and viable cultures,
economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life.
There are, he notes,
already intentional communities that reject liberalism's hegemonic norms and are creating self-contained counter cultures to inculcate such virtues,
including among conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews, new homesteaders and, quote, radical homemakers.
Now, the emphasis on the local may seem out of place,
given the development of communication and media technologies that de Tocqueville could not foresee.
From iPhones to CNN and Zoom calls and modern forms of transportation that tend to compress the sense of distance.
Denise View of social relations is essentially static, and seemingly unrelated to changing material conditions becomes more understandable.
However, once we shift to how he imagines a virtuous population might once again prevail,
the president reality, he notes, is that Christians and those who share their traditional moral compass,
a world of strong patriarchal families, healthy working class wages and robust structures of communal support do not constitute a moral majority.
As Jerry Falwell once imagined, they are rather a minority element struggling to stay afloat in a world dominated by woke capitalism,
elite technocracy and economic constriction.
For some conservatives, the only possible manoeuvre is the so-called Benedict option outlined by Rod Dreher,
namely to retreat from liberal, cultural and political spaces and ride out the storm in virtuous enclaves.
But Deneen is not so sure that as Dreher holds, politics will not save us.
Rather, Deneen understands that state power is absolutely required to mould a citizenry possessing the proper Christian virtuous.
And I quote In the absence of a good polity, it is unlikely a healthy culture can be cultivated and sustained.
The monastery is for not only religious institutions,
but also served as the centre of political life for many medieval towns with abbots functioning a civic as well as religious leaders.
The church was the source of Christian culture in no small part because she developed
systems of law and courts in addition to rules and practices governing markets.
Aristotle understood that long culture like ethics and politics must be mutually reinforcing.
Christianity is inherently political, he insists, and there is no way to escape having to fight for its value on the political stage.
Deneen thus offers a political, theological vision that rejects both the libertarian solution and the and the Benedict option of withdrawal.
What is required is rather for the state to make the people virtuous through the mechanisms of law.
The moral majority might not yet exist, but it can be coerced into being through state power as emphasis on locality.
Quote We need to focus on our towns and city halls.
Are neighbourhood associations seeking to foster the kinds of communities where our children can and will roam the fields again.
This is also a pragmatic understanding of where American conservatives possess enough strength to push ahead their agenda.
And indeed its at the city and state level that elected leaders have managed to ban abortion, forbid the critical teaching of American history,
persecute trans people all the name of all in the name of preserving the cultural heritage
and traditional integrity of the people that people thus conceived is at best a potentiality,
at worst a rhetorical trope, but nowhere a concept that corresponds to an actual existing majority.
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.
It requires state coercion via legal and cultural mechanisms to engineer a virtuous public with a corollary that only
a virtuous public could be trusted with true democracy until the moral minority becomes a demographic majority.
Janine's logic suggests that antidemocratic measures are necessary,
which helps explain his strong support for US Supreme Court rulings that run very contrary to the Democratic will.
It is not. I suspect his deep respect for the judiciary as an independent institution that guides this
choice but more pragmatic calculations based on the substance of recent court decisions.
Okay. Finally, it's worth noting that this kind of bifurcation of the people, the Indian participation into two groups,
the moral minority on the one hand, and its kind of anti-American opposition on the other.
So liberal social progressives, you know, elite forces, globalists, immigrants.
Right. All this illustrates how central the friend versus foe dynamic has become to domestic U.S. politics.
And the enemy in such telling is interestingly here not a foreign power,
not a commercial driver rifle, not even right Islamic terrorism or something like this,
but the moral forces that have kind of deeply lodged in cells in the in the in the centre of the body politic itself.
Okay. So if the NIE presents this post liberal approach explicitly grounded in Christianity,
the Israeli American scholar Yoram Husaini outlines a, quote, national conservative vision allegedly rooted in Jewish tradition.
I don't know if many of you are familiar with his own work.
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,
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.
And in particular his book, The Virtues of Nationalism, which is published in 2018.
I kind of tried to outline a broader vision of the new far right that's very clearly grounded in a Zionist experience,
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.
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,
four, four, four, five, three figures in the United States.
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
speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu and then of course created the Shalem College in the mid nineties where he where he still lives today.
Hasan His national conservatism stems from the belief that the nation is a divine creation,
the prototypes of which are already found in the Hebrew Bible.
Thus he regards the Bible to be the basis of the Anglo American political tradition,
with the Israelites serving as the original nation made of a homogenous group of people sanctified by God.
Moreover, because God created separate people so quote unquote globalist attempts to forge a universal,
multicultural society are a violation of the divine will, in addition to an expression of imperial intolerance.
Indeed, throughout his work,
he juxtaposes nationalism and imperialism as these two kind of competing and allegedly mutually exclusive political models.
And under the imperial umbrella, he replaces contemporary institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, the International Criminal Court,
as he argues for the right of nations to, quote, chart their own independent course,
cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.
End quote.
As is always the case with the theoretical abstractions made by these figures who seem constitutionally allergic to empiricism, historical analysis,
or considering the influence of material conditions,
it's useful to spell out just whose rights and lives will suffer in pursuit of national greatness.
In practice has only tells us that protecting nations from imperial intervention means shielding Israel from international sanctions,
asserting Hungary's right to discriminate against Muslims and people from the gay community,
and shielding American soldiers from war crimes tribunals.
Nations for Husaini are both a theological category and historical constants, a dubious claim that's largely disputed by historians.
Nationalism who point to the necessary role of the modern states institutions from railroad networks to
primary schools in facilitating new forms of national identity throughout the 19th and 20th century.
So, too, he seems untroubled by the historical fact that many nation states have been imperial in nature,
suggesting that the political binary, he suggests, does not hold up to any sort of empirical scrutiny.
The historical veracity is far less important than theological claims to HALZEN,
whose political vision is clearly indebted to religious Zionism of the most uninteresting and superficial kind.
In his theocratic vision, there is no tension between Judaism and nationalism or the political prerogatives of the modern state.
Rather, the state kind of harmoniously quote, upholds and honours God and the Bible,
the congregation and the family and the religious practices common to the nation.
Similar to Deneen. Then we see in his work a strong argument for the states to create through coercion and constraint,
a type of idealised moral order and with regard to Israel.
This no doubt corresponds to upholding mainstream orthodox positions and has only betrays no recognition of the difficulties either theological,
ethical or political that such a vision represents in practice.
Hayes only grounds this are arguments in a particular genealogy of the political community.
States do not emerge from the social contract and its vaunted conventions rational deliberation, choice and consent.
Rather, he locates the origins of the political community in the nuclear patriarchal family, which progresses somehow naturally into an imagined,
homogenous and organic group of people a nation by extension, a nation state united by language, ethnic origin, history and religion.
Just like families, national communities are maintained by bonds of loyalty and forces of constraint.
He thus shares Indian contempt for liberalism's emphasis on individual freedom,
viewing it as a centrifugal, centrifugal force that undermines the body politic and offers,
quote unquote, collective freedom of the national group in its step by asserting the supremacy of the nation in all political matters.
He pits national conservatives and liberal democracy against one another by explicitly
arguing that the collective freedom of the nation overrides individual liberty.
He rejects the centrality of personal freedom within the political system.
Embedded within the seemingly academic argument about the origins of political community is a
degradation of the very principle of individual freedom that's alarming in its forthrightness.
Since the nation incarnates the will of God, though in secularised form, the nation not only represents the idea of sacred peoplehood,
it consumes the concept of the state and destroys the supremacy of the law.
Because states are instruments for organising nations and the law is subordinate to the will of the nation,
or, more accurately, the portion of it that is deemed morally sound.
It is this effective collapse of the people, the law, and the states that best typifies illiberal democracies like Hungary under Viktor Orban,
where the law becomes a vehicle for persecuting those who supposedly undermine the integrity of the nation.
So to Israel's controversial 2018 Nation-State Law, which has only vigorously lobbied in support of makes legally explicit with long view.
In practice, the state does not exist to serve its citizens equally, but gives precedence the portion of them identified with the Jewish nation.
Under such a logic, those who are defined as outside the body politic are not entitled to legal protection or equality.
Indeed, he says in a kind of different essay,
it is that even the principle of equality as a we need to question whether the principle of equality is
even something that we should fight for versus know kind of Jewish strength or liberty or continuity.
The trio then of law stating people are thereby collapsed.
The law is whatever. The people who control the state say this in theological terms.
The people in rhetorical terms, again, if not in numerical ones, have usurped both God and the law as the supreme principle.
Defining who within and inside and outside of the people is thus of central importance to this national conservative project,
which helps explain his appeal to right wing constituencies worldwide.
Because intra tribal loyalty, not commitment to a set of principles, is the stuff of political cohesion.
All politics rests on the binary between friends and enemies.
The latter are usually an ethnic or religious other, but may also include internal traders.
Within such a framework,
the state is less an institution for competing constituencies to further rival claims than a vehicle for managing insiders and outsiders.
So in the state of Israel, we see these machinations most clearly at work and legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens,
attacks on Palestinian civil society organisations and statutory provisions that reject Palestinian national rights.
For his part, Hosseini defends such measures on principle, as he argues in the virtues of nationalism.
To the extent that others may exist within a nation state is that it is on account of sufferance rather than right.
He also concedes that the right to national service,
to self-determination is not universal and must be weighed in the balance of moral and prudential considerations.
Some groups, he contends, in an argument that seems tailor made for the Palestinians,
should settle for, quote, a protectorate state with some measure of delegated authority,
convinced then that the nation is a divine principle and that divisions among nations are part of the divine plan.
His own, his political theory, stands ready to justify almost any measures carried out in the name of the people.
Discriminatory and oppressive measures are necessary to preserve the nation,
paradoxically viewed as both organic and eternal, and yet highly susceptible to contamination and dissolution.
And for those who are convinced that another people's mere existence is a danger to their own, there is no amount of discrimination,
oppression or even ethnic cleansing that cannot be justified for the sake of national survival.
Having laid out these two different the overlapping views of the people,
and I conclude this discussion by considering how Post Liberals conceive of the role of the States in context,
ranging from United States to India to Israel and Brazil. Post liberals align themselves with either real for aspiring authoritarians.
In Schmitt's terms,
we can interpret these alliances expressing a desire for strong sovereign authority that will have the power to decide when the straitjackets win.
The straitjacket of liberal democracy can be thrown off and with it, conventional laws and norms.
Unlike conservatives who have in the past championed small government posts, liberals require strong states to further their purported aims.
Indeed, the abiding paradox of the new nationalist is in particular is that they require the
state to preserve and promote identities and social relations that are supposedly innate.
This is one reason that many post liberals regard strength as the principal political virtue.
A strong leader for a strong nation. I go back to the Likud slogan of 1999.
Today, Donald Trump vows to make America strong again. This desire for a reinvigorated sovereignty, concentrated in the figure of the leader,
sometimes bleeds into a kind of neo monarch ism as champion today by people like Curtis Ervin.
So too, in a recent interview,
the former journalist and parliamentary candidate Boaz Bismuth has stated that the prime minister of Israel is the king of the Jews.
Israel, he says, is the kingdom among the other, a term laden with deep theological resonance and Hebrew Bible and Jewish liturgical tradition.
Mummify is associated both with God's dominion over heaven and earth, right?
Ricardo Nahum and God's Anointed Kingdom, led by the House of David.
So while he claimed that his statement was just a metaphor, it reflects an important political impulse in contemporary Israel to regard the
state as a manifestation of the divine will and indeed as a messianic vehicle,
the state embodied by the strong leader in such a scheme. This demands nothing short of worship in political, theological terms.
Obedience to the state replaces adherence to the law. The adoration of strength, however, is not restricted to the image of the leader.
The Hebrew to the Hebrew to not turn to the Hebrew term.
Ms. Governance or governance mentality, right? Introduced in recent years by key right wing actors in Israel aims to strengthen the
capacity of the island to decide by neutralising those elements that restrain it,
like the Supreme Court. In this vision, sovereignty transcends what the Austrian Jewish legal scholar Hans Kilson called the pyramid of
norms that regulate political contact content because it receives its legitimacy from elsewhere.
The divine domain or the one voice of the supposed, supposedly homogenous nation.
Arguing for the power to decide is, however, not about conservatism or nationalism, per se.
But it does suggest that in the destruction of democracy,
it calls for a political order which is defined by an uncontested authority that facilitates the nation's identification of and fight against enemies,
external threats or internal traitors. Yet for all its invocation of traditional religious morality,
the new right is highly selective about its religious commitments and instrumentalists in its use of religious tradition.
Many self-identified secular people invoke Christian or Jewish nationalism as a form of racialized identity politics,
a matter of sorting who belongs where. Far more than a question of religious conviction or ethics.
The fetishisation of the people. This place is not merely liberalism, but central religious tenets.
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.
Scholars have even noted a negative correlation between regular church attendance and anti-immigrant sentiment among American Christians,
for instance, underscoring that the current battle is badly understood if it is cast between as one between religious conviction and secular freedom.
As the sociologist Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry have recently argued, quote, Today,
calling oneself a Christian or even an evangelical is sometimes just a way of
claiming membership in an ideological or political tribe or defending a certain,
quote, way of life. When post liberals claim a strong state is required to enforce traditional religious values to make the majority moral again,
we must keep in mind that theirs is a particular, somewhat thin understanding of both religious identity and traditions.
So in conclusion, why do we always cherish things like when they kind of just try to tie it together?
We inhabit a world defined by unprecedented, an unprecedented amount of mobility, of finance,
consumer goods, popular culture, and a global elite equally at home in Doha or San Francisco.
Yet and as a corollary, ours is also a world where in the movement of people,
immigrants, refugees and suspicious populations is obsessively restricted.
A world of border walls and barbed wire fences, security checkpoints, military blockades,
unprecedented surveillance and denunciations of foreign elements in the body politic appeals to the organic unity of the nation,
however fictitious must be understood in the context of these material upheavals.
Post liberals are sometimes described as traditionalists.
But our analysis underscores that a mere return to earlier forms of political and social life are insufficient for their project.
The need to distinguish the concept from tradition from that of conservatism
requires perhaps a different discussion that exceeds what I can do with you today.
But it would, in any case, be wrong to succumb to the post liberal vision, not only of what tradition stands for,
but also how to engage with what was handed down to us by preceding generations.
Their new right wing mission, rather, depends on the advanced technologies of governance from state schooling and surveillance to criminalisation,
to create a body politic that accords with the vision of the nation in asserting the primacy of the nation.
They're also willing to dispense with much else that is valued by its actual members individual liberties, legal equality, free and fair elections.
Even the peaceful transition of power. The three categories.
The three categories of analysis. The people along the States collapse upon one another into a unitary whole.
Ideally led by a strong leader with no plans to leave office.
The post theological aspects of this worldview betray a yearning for a bold leader.
A sovereign who equalling the divine will serve and protect his people from enemies, both without and within.
In practice, we cannot summon the House of David to play such a role, and the Messiah is known to carry the post.
Liberals are untroubled by this reality because they regard the nation as far more important than other aspects of divine creation.
Its interests likewise overwhelm the demands of human decency and even explicit religious commands.
The nation is what reigns. Supreme mentor Father LAMB now and forever.
Think of.