Yoram Hazony is up against two problems. As an American nationalist, MAGA intellectual, and advisor to J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, Hazony looks out at a Trump movement in political freefall. As an Israeli nationalist and former speechwriter to Benjamin Netanyahu, he sees support for Israel waning on the American right, with a growing number of young conservatives parroting the antisemitism of influencers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. There are fewer avowed nationalists than there were at the start of Trump’s second term, and a growing percentage of those who remain are outright Nazis.

Both the decline of nationalists and the increase of Nazis are baleful trends, according to Hazony, and both flow from a surprising source: the failure of American Christians to seriously engage the Old Testament. On the Monday evening before Tuesday’s landslide midterm elections, Hazony delivered First Things magazine’s prestigious Erasmus Lecture, making the case to a largely Christian crowd that it is only the Old Testament that can restore America. “I want to see America a strong Christian republic,” said Hazony, an orthodox Jew. But without the Old Testament, American nationalism will continue to weaken and struggle to maintain Christian cultural dominance. 

When Christian conservatives in the United States narrow their focus to the New Testament, Hazony theorized, they may secure the eternal salvation of their souls, but they learn little about securing the “political salvation of their nation in the here and now.” Hazony has long argued that Hebrew scripture presents the definitive defense of strong-borders nationalism. Wherever it has been seriously studied, Hazony insists, individuals have pressed for national coherence and strength.

Seen in this light, rising antisemitism on the nationalist right is all just a big misunderstanding. Those who partake in it have not been taught that their own conservative nationalism is an inheritance of the Hebrew Bible. The nationalism of the Old Testament, Hazony suggests, was the core influence on the Anglo-Protestant conservative nationalism of Edmund Burke and John Fortescue, a tradition today’s MAGA right-wingers proudly carry forth. The politics of the Hebrew scripture just is conservative nationalism, the patrimony of both King David and George Washington, both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

What’s so sorely needed in American politics, Hazony argued, is for students to receive a strong education in the Old Testament. It was a notably long-term prescription for a key figure in a U.S. political movement that controls—albeit not for much longer—all three branches of government. Success, Hazony mournfully granted, “may not be likely.” 

I attended the Erasmus Lecture in Manhattan this year because I wanted to check in on the state of conservative intellectual life at a moment of crisis for the Trump project. Donning a mandatory blazer, I rounded the corner of Park Avenue and 37th Street, passing by two cops shoving a howling homeless man into a van, and strode into the safety of the Union League Club, an opulent social venue of some historical import—J.P. Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt were members—where the elevators can take you directly to the squash courts. Once seated, I listened to Hazony bemoan the decline of the West.

The lecture was, in structure, standard conservative fare. In the 1960s, Hazony insisted, something went very badly wrong in America, and unless we recover older traditions, social disintegration and moral decay will continue apace. According to Hazony’s version, the beginning of the end was the Warren Court’s 1963 decision Arlington School District v. Schempp, which prohibited public schools from sponsoring prayer and scripture reading. But Hazony’s concern is not just the generic conservative one about faith’s forced disappearance from public life; it’s that the disastrous decision helped separate Christians further from the Old Testament.

The Hebrew Bible has a particular political lesson conservative Christians forget at their peril. Namely, Hazony believes that God gives divine sanction to the idea of a national state (“I will make of you a great nation”). The comprehensive defense of this view comes in his 2012 book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, where Hazony reads the biblical history of Israel as a source of universally valid political and philosophical truth. What God revealed to Israel about politics applies to the nature of political order itself, at all times and places. 

In delivering Israel from Egypt, Hazony argues, God rejects imperial political authority— the rule of those men, such as the Pharaohs, “whose self-worship is such that there is no limit to the evil they may be moved to do.” The Book of Judges highlights an opposite risk, describing Israel’s devolution into a form of political anarchy where “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The costs of anarchy—idolatry, moral depravity, civil war—eventually become so great that the Israelites beg the judge Samuel for a king and God tells Samuel to acquiesce. “The Jews,” Hazony writes triumphantly, “are to have their state.” 

Charting a middle path between empire and anarchy, this model of political order features a centralized authority, the state, that acts in the name of a nation, understood as a collection of families and tribes united by language, religion, and history. While the nation-state was revealed in a special way to the Israelites, this revelation is, ultimately, for all humankind. It inspired European thinkers, especially Anglo-Protestants, to envision a world of free and independent nation-states. 

Among its other inadequacies, Hazony’s nationalism rests on a questionable interpretation of Hebrew scripture. In 1 Samuel, God describes the Israelites’ demand for a king as a result of their failure to recognize God’s own kingship: “For it is not you they have rejected, but me,” God tells Samuel, “whom they have rejected from being king over them.” The important point is that all human kingship in the Hebrew Bible, even when permitted by God, has at its root a rejection of God. And the men who subsequently ruled Israel regularly violated God’s covenant and aroused his wrath. It’s no accident that Hazony concludes his account of the politics of the Hebrew Bible with the book of Kings—that is, before the books of the major and minor prophets, those sent by God to call worldly power to account. 

Notably, the God of the Hebrew Bible also places demanding limits on Israel’s kings. To his credit, Hazony mentioned in his lecture the portion of the Mosaic law from Deuteronomy that regulates the conduct of rulers: 

[The king] shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply in horses…. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his thoughts not be turned away. Neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. And it shall be, when he sits upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write himself a copy of this Tora… and it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life…

Trump is, of course, a perfect photo negative of the Mosaic law’s vision of a just ruler. Who is  more eager to multiply to himself wives, money, or power? Who less likely to write himself a copy of a divine text and consult it all the days of his life? Hazony says that nationalism, for him, is all about respecting strong borders between countries. So, what could justify Trump’s policy of barreling violently across the globe, assassinating and kidnapping the leaders of foreign states? What could justify Netanyahu’s constantly expanding territorial ambitions?

One of the things that’s maddening to liberals about Hazony is his tendency to hold forth about nationalism’s commitment to tolerance, peace, and even love—commitments which seem rarely in evidence among Hazony’s political allies. In an interview with Hazony, Ezra Klein spent an hour attempting to pin him down on a basic question: If nationalism is about mutual tolerance and peace, why does MAGA nationalism appear in practice as a ceaseless war against internal and external enemies? Hazony eventually fesses up. Nationalism, in his view, cannot be peaceable and tolerant unless the nation is strong. The United States will never see stability and freedom until it becomes, as he wrote in 2018, a “nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.” 

The United States’s foreign-born population is a threat to that cultural dominance. So, too, are the machinations of Hazony’s political enemies, nearly all of whom he manages to cast as “imperialists,” from “neo-Marxist” college students to pencil-pushers in Brussels to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Kidnapping abuelitas, assassinating the Ayatollah, levelling Gaza—all these acts of war are, Hazony ruefully concludes, justified in the name of peace. 

A few weeks prior to the Erasmus Lecture, Hazony was in Jerusalem, hosting one of his “National Conservatism” conferences, which facilitate intellectual exchange among right-wingers from around the globe. “NatCon Jerusalem” aimed to build connections between the Israeli far-right (the fascist Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich was in attendance) and young American conservatives, a cohort increasingly embracing explicit antisemitism. 

Will Hazony’s effort to bring young conservative Christians back from this particular brink succeed? There’s reason for doubt. In a fight with the high-octane antisemitism of a Nick Fuentes, Hazony shows up with some biblical exegesis (but 1 Samuel!) and an argument about early modern intellectual history (but Fortescue!). I can practically hear the Groypers responding: Who gives a shit?

Speaking of low-octane: Hazony’s Erasmus Lecture ended with something of a whimper. He inveighed against the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt’s model for the German research university, before offering a more measured critique of James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo’s two-thousand-page history of “the Western tradition.” Twenty-four hours later, American voters would deliver MAGA nationalism its most staggering rebuke. When the First Things audience rose at the conclusion of Hazony’s talk, I couldn’t tell at first whether it was to offer him a standing ovation or move swiftly for the exits. 

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