Modern Rashi on: The Perils of National Conservatism

One man’s poor attempt to wield antisemitism to beat us back into neoliberalism

In a poor attempt to drag the right back into the exhausted frame of neoliberalism, Benjamin Kerstein wrote an article that is as detached from reality as it is reliant on insinuation. The piece is not a serious engagement with ideas, but a retrieval operation, using the language of antisemitism to discipline the nationalist right back into acceptable neoliberal submission. Kerstein directs this maneuver at Yoram Hazony, one of the most influential political theorists of the nationalist revival, not because Hazony is wrong, but because he is dangerous to the managerial consensus. In classic Modern Rashi fashion, let’s take this concern-trolling exercise apart!

In his (Hazony’s) view, the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole are now divided into liberal, nationalist, and alt-right wings….

Correct.

Hazony names as “liberal” politicians like Lindsay Graham, who has been a dedicated supporter of President Donald Trump and MAGA since Trump was first elected in 2016.

Here Benjy decides to conflate ideological support with political support. It is well-known that Lindsay Graham is quite liberal and his extensive voting record reflects that.

Now, there are numerous issues with Hazony’s claims, not least of which is his use of vituperative language like “rubbish” and “disgrace” to describe people who are simply trying to fight antisemitism as best they can.

Hazony is not “trashing” people who are fighting antisemitism. He is criticizing an industry that deploys antisemitism selectively as a political cudgel, only insofar as it can be leveraged to smuggle neoliberal norms back into a movement that explicitly rejected them.

The truth is that, increasingly, there is no clear division between the nationalist and alt-right wings of today’s conservative movement.

What Benjy is doing here is not analysis but association laundering. By insisting that the nationalist and alt-right wings are indistinguishable, he avoids engaging national conservatism on its actual claims, and instead indicts it through faux-proximity. His objective is to tie the nationalist camp to the alt-right in order to disparage National Conservatism, not on its merits, but on invented associations.

I know you might be thinking that I am unfairly asserting bad faith to Benjy, but he’ll come through for me, don’t worry:

Carlson, for example, is not an alt-right figure. He has welcomed and promoted the alt-right, but is not of them. He is wholly of the nationalist wing.

Tucker Carlson used to operate within the nationalist camp until he discovered that antisemitic signaling was significantly more profitable than grounded political theory. Kerstein falsely asserts that Carlson is not a member of the alt-right (despite a long public record of rhetoric and associations that Benji chooses to ignore).

Vice President J.D. Vance, has openly refused to purge antisemites from the party and recently faced serious criticism after refusing to mention the word “Jew” in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

By Kerstein’s logic, Vice President J.D. Vance’s omission is proof of nationalist antisemitism. By that same logic, Governor Josh Shapiro’s identical omission would place him in the same nationalist antisemitic camp. Obviously neither of them wrote those statements personally…

From this, one could conclude that it is not the liberal wing that started this fight, but the nationalist wing, and thus the nationalist wing—not the liberals—bears responsibility for it.

Google Translate: Y’all non-antisemitic nationalists should revert to neoliberalism because muh feelings.

I think part of the reason for Hazony’s somewhat desperate rhetoric may be that he does not want to face the fact that antisemitism may be, to an extent, “baked in” to the kind of American nationalism he seems to admire and has done much to promote.

This is asserted without evidence because evidence would require engaging Hazony’s actual work rather than impugning motives. Kerstein needs antisemitism to be intrinsic to nationalism, because without that premise there is no argument left for abandoning the retvrn, and instead submitting ourselves, once again, to the neoliberal order we explicitly rejected.

Sadly, American nationalism appears to find it increasingly difficult not to decide that the Jews, among others, are “the alien.”

Largely because elite Jewish neoliberal figures insist on pathologizing national identity, a posture that predictably corrodes trust and then moralizes the backlash it helped generate.

The enemies of antisemitism deserve better than to be called a disgrace for remembering this simple fact.

Benji here styles himself an “enemy of antisemitism,” but what he is actually practicing is elite concern-trolling in its purest form. Antisemitism is invoked not to be eliminated, but as a tool used in service of enforcing neoliberal boundaries.

Here we will now see the awesome intellectual prowess of Benjamin Kerstein!

Antisemitism is always the fault of the antisemites

Ironically, in criticizing the anti-antisemites in order to get the nationalists off the hook, Hazony becomes what, in another context, he most despises.

It is literally in the next paragraph. The mental pretzels this man ties himself in to push neoliberalism…

He is on a quest to save nationalism for the Jews, but it is increasingly likely that this cannot be done.

Benji should have titled this piece “An Ode to Neoliberalism” and spared everyone the moral theater. Instead, he cloaks ideological nostalgia in the language of traditional Jewish fear, hoping no one notices that the remedy he offers is the very framework that led us to this very place. If this is the best defense neoliberalism can muster, it is not worth the servers it’s hosted on. Hazony does not need saving from nationalism. Neoliberalism needs saving from irrelevance, and this whiny concern-trolling reads like a panic response to that realization.