THE CALL TO TRIBALISM:

The notion that liberal democracy destroys human relationships is jarring to contemporary ears, but it draws on ideas that are very old. The core political tensions today's illiberal reactionaries describe--between conservative traditionalists and innovative, freedom-loving progressives--are nothing new. Early on in his History of the Peloponnesian War, for example, Thucydides shows how a similar dynamic shaped affairs in ancient Greece. At one point a Corinthian envoy is trying to draw Sparta into the war, but rather than provoke the Spartans with tales of Athens's strength, they raise the specter of her relentless dynamism. The busybodied Athenians, we learn, are "addicted to innovation," "adventurous beyond their power," and "daring beyond their judgment." They are something like the world's first neoliberals: selfish, restless, "ever engaged in getting," and never comfortable at home. The Spartans, in contrast, suffer a "total want of invention." They are fatalistic and slow to act, content with the peace of their rustic life. The Corinthians argue that Sparta is in danger of underestimating imperial Athens. Slowly but surely the Spartans come around.

In February 2020, Yoram Hazony stepped onto a sterile auditorium stage in Rome and gave a rather Spartan speech about loyalty to one's own. Hazony is an Israeli-American scholar, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), and a key organizer for the emergent national conservatism movement. The purpose of the Rome conference was to build solidarity on the new illiberal right (Hungary's Viktor Orbán was the conference's star speaker). Hazony clearly views himself as sounding a wake-up call to imperiled conservatives across the globe, and, like the Corinthian envoy, offers a Manichean vision of two fundamentally different tribes.

Hazony defines conservatives as those who understand the world of deep familial bonds and obligations:

A conservative knows that one's first loyalty is to one's parents, even though we didn't choose them, and to our children, even though we didn't choose them. . . . And to your grandchildren, who you didn't choose, and to your parents and to your grandparents. . . . A conservative knows that these obligations are fixed, and that beyond the family . . . there are obligations to the local church and religious community, to the clan, and beyond that to the tribe and the nation.

Hazony contrasts this deep, unquestioning loyalty with "enlightenment rationalist liberals" in the starkest of terms. While conservatives are capable of real human love and are loyal to the last drop, liberal internationalists are subject instead to Hobbesian individualism and selfishness, and are full of contempt for the ties that bind: "They believe that the world can be reduced to free and equal individuals undertaking obligations only on the basis of consent." Again and again, Hazony asks "What kind of people are these?" in reference to the liberal foe. "Can you be a decent human being if you have no loyalty? If you build your political theory from--on a structure, on a basis in which no one is loyal?"

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