Few people have had as significant an impact on modern American politics as President Donald Trump, and his intellectual allies are looking to keep it that way.
Ten years after he descended the escalator to announce his presidential run, the one thing Trump’s many supporters and detractors can agree on is that he has completely reinvented conservatism in the United States and altered political coalitions to an extent not seen since former President Richard Nixon. The sudden shift in conservative ideology in the U.S. left many on the traditional, intellectual right reeling, but others quickly filled the void.
Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher, has made it his recent mission to create the intellectual infrastructure to support the shift in Trump’s movement. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, won the attention and praise of many Trump allies.
His impact has been noted across the board, including by influential liberal thought leaders such as Ezra Klein.
In Hazony’s eyes, Trump’s main impact on U.S. politics has been shifting conservatism away from a focus on liberalism, specifically individual liberty and equality, and toward nationalism. While bemoaned by some old guard conservatives, Hazony views this as a positive change.
“Liberalism is useful for some things, but it is immensely destructive to try to run a country using only individual liberty and individual equality as the ultimate determination for policy and success,” Hazony said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, arguing that this focus was “destroying” the U.S., United Kingdom, and West more generally.
“What happened in 2016 is that the English-speaking world, both in the U.S. and Britain and beyond, rediscovered that you can’t think about national government or national policies without knowing what a nation is, and replacing universal individual liberties with concern for our nation, for the nation that we were elected to represent. That’s a tremendous change,” he added, describing it as a “revolution” in how right-wing parties saw themselves.
In Hazony’s account, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s removal from the leadership of the Tories and former President George H.W. Bush’s declaration in 1990 of a “new world order” inaugurated a liberal and globalist order, “in which the world was going to be wrapped in a single framework of law that America would enforce.” This order lasted until Trump inaugurated the nationalist world order in 2016.
“From 1990 until 2016, we had an entire generation in which America and Britain, and other Western countries, forgot that democracy requires government to be responsive to a particular nation. Trump led the transformation to turn the Republican Party back into a party that represents a particular nation. And it’s been crucial. It’s been needed, and so far succeeding,” he said.
While signs of a nationalist turn were evident before Trump’s election, such as in Brexit and nationalist electoral victories in Poland, Hungary, and India, it wasn’t necessarily inevitable.
“Trump is a unique personality, and his willingness to think outside of the existing boxes, and to brave attacks from … almost the entire political spectrum in order to try to force a shift in the way that public debates are handled, and what the topics are, that’s an extremely unusual personality,” Hazony said.
He argued that the three major pillars of Trump’s politics are immigration, trade, and noninterventionism. His strong, previously unorthodox stances on these matters stem from “thinking about the nation, instead of thinking about the entire world, or thinking about individual liberties as the main issue that a politician, or the leader, needs to think about.”
In Hazony’s view, the nationalist moment may have been primed to surface eventually, but the strength of Trump’s personality pushed it up by a generation.
The concept of a “political order” is defined by historian Steven Fraser as a durable system of ideas, institutions, policies, and coalitions that dominates public life. Historian Gary Gerstle has divided recent U.S. history into the new deal order, comprising the period of the 1930s through its collapse in the 1970s during the Carter administration, and the neoliberal order, beginning with the Reagan administration in the 1980s and collapsing with Trump’s victory in 2016. Unlike Hazony, Gerstle doesn’t believe there is a current order, characterizing it instead as a moment of transition.
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Hazony took issue with Gerstle’s characterization, as laid out in his 2022 book, Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, particularly the argument that former President Ronald Reagan was a neoliberal in the modern conception of the term.
“I think Gerstle has his history a little bit twisted, because Ronald Reagan was a nationalist, and there’s no chance on earth that Reagan or Thatcher would have gone along with the new liberalism that Bush and the European leaders, the EU Leadership, went on to create,” Hazony said. “Neither Reagan nor Thatcher would ever have agreed to it, and they never advocated it either.”
Given Trump’s unparalleled ability to shape national politics on a whim, concern has naturally begun to focus on what will come after him. After 10 years of his omnipresence, the new order without Trump is quickly approaching, with his last term set to expire in 2028.
In Hazony’s view, the order shaped by Trump will continue unimpeded after 2028. Trump has molded all the prospective leaders, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), into fellow nationalists.
“They disagree on various things, and particular policies, and [personalities] are different. But the Republican Party looks like it has been really reoriented as a nationalist Conservative Party,” Hazony said. “And it’s the nature of these things that unless some major catastrophe rearranges things, this could go on for a generation or two. So the most likely scenario is that the Republican Party will continue in this direction for at least the next generation.”
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Among the centerpieces of a political order is an intellectual foundation to support its legitimacy. Trump’s supporters hold that he mainly acts on his instincts and pragmatism, leaving the intellectualizing to others. Hazony said the intellectual foundation of the new order is already being laid by a variety of thinkers, including R.R. Reno, Ryszard Legutko, Oren Cass, Elbridge Colby, David Goldman, and Mike Anton, among many others.
Hazony hopes his annual National Conservatism Conference will play a valuable role in supporting the ideological infrastructure being formed by these thinkers and more.