So says Steve Bannon, speaking with me on the second day of the latest National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC. The former Trump strategist and MAGA firebrand was scheduled to address the gathering at the Westin Hotel the following day — but he shares his fiercest lines offstage in conversation with UnHerd. “These people aren’t fighters,” he says. “They have achieved nothing.”

The comments open a window onto the civil war roiling the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement. Despite President Trump’s victory in 2024, the mood at this year’s conference was a curious mix of triumph, defiance, and outright dismay. There were, of course, rote speeches about the radical Left, DEI, and Islam. But the bromides failed to mask the growing divisions elsewhere in the coalition. Especially on foreign policy, and doubly on Israel.

The Jewish state’s multiple wars in the Middle East have exposed deep fault lines within NatCon between pro-Israel hawks and those who call themselves realists, restrainers, or prioritizers — advocates for pivoting toward China and the Pacific over other adversaries. At a moment when NatCon seems at the peak of its influence, these internal divisions threaten to unravel the movement from within.

Founded in 2019, NatCon styled itself as the intellectual engine of Trumpism. Its early speaker lineups spanned the full spectrum of the Trumpian Right: neoconservatives, establishment Republicans, Christian post-liberals, and MAGA populists, from John Bolton to Tucker Carlson to the Claremont crowd. It was like the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, gathering, but with more brains and less Botox.

As the conference gathered strength and attention, the New Right’s various factions found common space — and a common cause in opposing the then-culturally ascendant Left and in promoting a conservative vision rooted in national sovereignty. The movement quickly went global, staging conferences in London, Rome, and Brussels (that last iteration was shut down by the Belgian capital’s mayor last year, handing the NatCons a perfect illustration of the censorious progressivism they sought to overthrow).

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All along, however, the movement was haunted by a question: Did NatCon represent a genuinely new and positive vision for the Right? Or had it merely reconstituted the old “fusionist” conservatism — resting on the triple foundations of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and cultural conservatism — only now under a banner of “nationalism” and with woke substituting for the Soviet Communism that galvanized its predecessor?

This week was the sixth installment. With National Guard troops patrolling the streets above, Washington’s conservative elite descended two floors beneath the Westin Hotel to debate the future of the movement. As interns from the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation buzzed around between stalls, orthodox Jews rubbed shoulders with portly academics from the country’s lesser-known campuses.

The dress code, ostensibly business casual, featured an astonishing range of windowpane suits and winklepicker shoes. If this was the “terrifying” face of the American Right that New York Times columnist David Brooks once warned of, I must have wandered into the wrong hotel.

The event began with a heartfelt plea from the organizer, the Israeli academic Yoram Hazony, urging participants to “feel gratitude” for this “unbelievable moment”. He added: “We’re doing so much winning that we say, ‘Please Mr. President, no more winning! I can’t take it anymore.’ There are an awful lot of people among us who are outraged — it’s like howling rage. Many of us can’t stand the idea” of actually being in power.

In short: Stop bickering — we’re in charge now.

If this was a call for unity, the next three days proved it a failure. Notwithstanding a parade of crowd-pleasing tub-thumpers railing against wokeness, lingering tensions on foreign policy spilled out into the open. In a breakout session, the pro-Israel hawk Max Abrahms mocked realists as Tucker Carlson-loving “MAGA isolationists” who had gone “insane” in their push to disengage from the Middle East. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, a restraint organ, shot back: “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why should we accept ‘America First’ — asterisk Israel? We shouldn’t.”

Reconciling staunch pro-Israel advocates with realists were always going to be an uphill battle. But it wasn’t until the wars in Gaza and then Iran that this fragile coexistence became more strained. Hazony had promised to provide a “balanced” conference and the Mills-Abrahms fracas certainly lived up to that ideal. Elsewhere, though, it was more disappointing. During “the Trump doctrine” talk, for example, speakers mostly spoke past each other, expressing vague platitudes (“you screw with us, we’re going to finish you”) and making limp attempts at triangulation (“realists and interventionists are a false dichotomy”).

The tensions carried into the evening. At the upstairs bar, a handful of realists in their 30s vented their frustration over cocktails: “Why do we keep coming to this conference expecting something different?” “It’s the same baby boomer Old Guard, which is totally blind to what is happening in front of us. Netanyahu has been to the White House more times than Melania.” “Yoram [Hazony] didn’t offer a solution to these divisions. Strategically, if you want a rapprochement, one side has to give something — and he hasn’t offered any olive branches.”

To be sure, the realists were given a bigger platform at this year’s conference. In previous years, Israel had been largely relegated to the sidelines. This time around, the Jewish state and its wars couldn’t be avoided. “Nobody said to be a good NatCon, you have to love Israel or you have to love Jews,” Hazony announced in his opening remarks. “That’s not what NatCon is for. It’s for restoring America and the spirit of national independence, interest, traditions, and God.”

If only the realists agreed. As members of the group swilled the last remnants of their cocktails, some plotted more extreme measures. “This alliance is becoming untenable,” said one. “If we end up supporting [Israel’s] military occupation of Gaza, we are going to be pulled into another Middle Eastern quagmire.”

I put these comments to Steve Bannon, who expressed sympathy for the position. “National conservatives are very neoconnish,” he said. “We saw through it at the beginning. It was neocons trying to make sure this new populist movement was still backing the American empire…. The only reason they exist is because they were worried about the rise of President Trump and wanted to nullify the populist tendencies of the movement.”

Bannon, who has taken an increasingly dim view of the Israeli leadership in recent months, came out swinging in his NatCon speech. The War Room podcast host laid into familiar targets in front of a sparse crowd: China, broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and impending civil war in Britain. But then he tackled a topic that he warned would be “unpleasant” to members of the audience. “Israel is a sideshow,” he boomed. “And Israel’s greater expansion [in the Middle East] is a sideshow to the sideshow… The existential threat to Israel is not in Tehran — it is in New York City.”

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He was referring to the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and likely shoo-in) Zohran Mamdani. “Mamdani is a Marxist and a jihadist,” Bannon fumed. “He’s a better-programmed version than Barack Hussein Obama” (emphasizing Obama’s middle name as if he were providing a clue in a puzzle). “He’s going to win in November and have control of the most important city in the world. Do you think he’s going to give it back? Do you think Sadiq Khan is giving back London? Or is Paris going back to France?”

The audience did not applaud or react to these remarks. But fears of Islamization, spurred by the asylum crisis in Britain, the rise of Mamdani, and events in the Middle East, were more pronounced at this conference than any before. As Jack Posobiec, a conservative activist, summed up in his speech: “These people are not American, and they don’t want to be American. If they don’t want to be a part of this country, they can go home.”

It felt, once more, like a desperate search by conservatives to find a new enemy that would allow them to paper over their own internal differences. After all, woke is on the wane, and at least in 2025, the Democratic path to national power looks arduous. The siege mentality that defined earlier conferences — when conservatives were being censored, corporations were bending the knee, and Trump was facing years in prison — had evaporated. 

Today, America’s most powerful institutions — universities, banks, Big Tech — bow to Trump, not Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi. This perhaps explains why so much of this year’s gathering rang hollow. A speech denouncing white guilt (“worse than any problem America faces today”) or one in which the literal Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, griped about the deep state, simply lacked the punch these topics carried in 2021.

Wielding enormous power and with their Leftist enemies on the backfoot, the NatCons failed to overcome their divisions, much less articulate a positive account of nationalism in the 21st century. But this time around, they had a new license to say “retard” — a privilege they exercised with gusto.

Anyone doubting that this remains the case need only consider the now resurgent debate around nationalism. Recent works by Yoram Hazony and Rich Lowry among others have addressed the case for nationalism, yet for all the strengths of their arguments, they all face one giant hurdle: the past.

Across the world nationalism is rarely seen as a problem in and of itself, let alone the worst political problem of all. Throughout Africa, the Middle East and Far East nationalism has been a mixed blessing, but aside from some religious conservatives (who have their own beef with it) it is rarely seen as the locus of bad ideas.

Only in Europe does nationalism ring differently, with something like a feeling that Europeans cannot be trusted with the stuff.

And yet it isn’t quite the case that nationalism is forbidden in Europe: the British are allowed some of it; the Scots certainly have a dose, and so do many other parts of the continent. The real problem is Germany. Even three-quarters of a century after the Second World War, it remains the case that the deepest problem with nationalism is that people are concerned about whether the Germans can be trusted with it. Try it for yourself: “Resurgent German nationalism”. How does it look to your mind’s eye? How does it poll in your personal barometer of political acceptability?

It is one of the reasons why, when you survey the moving political landscape in Europe, Germany is the country that is still different from all the others. The horrors of the 20th century are so well known that even mentioning the fact is a form of cliché, yet still, even in 2020, the country’s politics remain haunted by the mid-century crime scene.

The feeling remains that it was something in the blood, or the water, or the air, or the ideas or the philosophy or all of these and more. The feeling that even after all this time, all this study and knowledge, we’re still not completely certain why the country did what it did. And a feeling that in the meantime we have to keep an extra close eye on developments there.

This close attention was exemplified by the news in May that a sergeant-major in the German army had been arrested by police commandos at his house in Calw. There the officers found a cache of arms and explosives plus a quantity of Nazi memorabilia, including SS magazines.

While the foreign press might have got a tad over-excited, talking about the Calw arrest as though it was the start of a Robert Harris novel, the whole thing rings obvious warning bells. A potential Nazi in the ranks of the German army is more concerning than a potential Nazi in any other nation’s army, for reasons too obvious to be spelt out.

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A similar sensitivity exists in German politics. Where other countries might be trusted with Right-wing and even nationalist parties, the political consensus here is policed more strictly than anywhere else. Right-wing economics may be accepted, but on all cultural issues the borders of acceptable belief are strictly patrolled, and those that step over the line face the consequences.

No party has demonstrated this more clearly than Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), only founded in 2013 on the back of a movement involving a number of journalists, lawyers, academics and others. At that stage its manifesto and platform were centred almost entirely on criticism of the fiscal policies of the eurozone, the flatlining of the Mediterranean economies and the vast bailouts that resulted from the financial crash of 2008 and resulting eurozone crises.

Throughout this period the feeling was growing that Germany was constantly having to bail out its irresponsible southern partners, and so the potential was there for a fiscally separatist movement to arise.

But once it formed into a political party the AfD became explicitly anti-euro, losing those founding figures who favoured a constructive-critical attitude to the currency. Perhaps it was inevitable that a party defined by a policy that was still so far from the political mainstream would attract a certain number of the politically homeless and even malcontent, but the number of skins, and people, that the AfD shed throughout its formative years was striking by any standards.

This was also a result of the party’s extraordinarily swift growth. Within months of its founding the AfD was represented in all 16 German states, and in the Federal elections it won just under 5% of the vote, only just missing out on entering the Bundestag. But the party did manage to enter state parliaments for the first time, and the following year the European Parliament with seven members.

Over the following years this upward trajectory continued, and there was one factor — as in other countries across the continent — which particularly contributed to this: the 2015 European migration crisis partly created by German chancellor Angela Merkel.

By the time of the crisis the AfD had already begun to shift its focus, its eurozone-scepticism taking a back seat to a wider set of priorities which the American scholar of modern European political movements Daniel Pipes has characterised under the umbrella of “civilisationist” parties. With the election of Frauke Petry to the leadership of the party, the AfD was increasingly keen to talk about immigration, Islam and issues of identity.

Of course, Germany being Germany, every millimeter of this terrain was fought over with exceptional bitterness. The media here had already come to expose and condemn the statements of the most minor members of the party, but with each fresh scandal the core of the AfD was reduced, as a concoction might reduce over a sustained flame.

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Each accusation of xenophobia or right-wingery had the same effects seen in other countries in Europe; some moderate conservatives were chased away for fear of being associated with anything even accused of being “far-right”, while people who were genuinely far-right tried to migrate towards what they believed or hoped could be their home. People who were already in the party had to judge where their own personal political limits might lie.

In the aftermath of the migration crisis the AfD’s poll performance made a set of predictable leaps. In regional elections in Pomerania in September 2016 the party beat Merkel’s CDU into third place, while in Berlin it entered the state capital’s Parliament for the first time after receiving a 14.1 per cent share of the vote. Within four years of its founding the AfD was represented in most of the country’s states.

Of course this did not go unopposed. The day before the AfD’s success in Berlin the city’s mayor, Michael Müller (of the centre-left SDP) declared that a double-digit percentage return for the AfD would “be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the right wing and the Nazis in Germany”.

Despite such warnings, and increasingly fractious internal wrangles, the party continued to do well. Their success culminated in September 2017 when voters gave Merkel’s Christian Democrats their worst result since 1949 and the AfD became the third largest party in the Bundestag, with 94 seats. By any standards it is one of the most extraordinary political rises in recent European history: from nowhere to the official opposition in the Bundestag in just four years.

An hour after the Bundestag results came in the AfD’s joint leader, Alexander Gauland, declared that he would “hunt down the government, Mrs Merkel, and get our country and people back”. It was not exactly the sort of overheated declaration that would ease worries about the rise of the party, and that discomfort has grown since, both at home and abroad.

Outside of Germany this alam stems from a range of factors, one of which, without doubt, is sheer laziness. Then there is opportunism, so that in April 2019, when Jacob Rees-Mogg retweeted a speech by Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD’s deputies in the Bundestag, criticising the Merkel government’s handling of the Brexit negotiations, it was seized on by Labour MPs, who sought to paint the AfD as an out-and-out racist and even Nazi political party.

This is simplistic and incorrect, based on a very limited knowledge of the situation in Germany, yet there are certainly individuals near the top of the party who cause concern not only to outsiders but to party members themselves. For instance, I have spoken to several figures in the AfD who have expressed concern over the views of the leadership in Thuringia, in the former East Germany.

Bjorn Hocke in particular has become a lightning-rod of such concerns, not least after a 2017 speech in which he appeared to minimise the Holocaust. In contrast, in most of the statements of a figure like Beatrix von Storch there is nothing that would not be deemed perfectly normal political sentiment in the Conservative Party or Ukip in the period of Nigel Farage’s leadership.

Within the party there seems to me a knowledge that the whole thing could go in any number of ways, towards the more mainstream right or further towards and beyond the boundaries. A party in such flux and on such a swift trajectory as the AfD has been is worthy of serious psychological analysis, yet such analysis has been almost completely lacking in the German media, let alone in the wider international one.

The story of “far-right on the rise in Germany” is simply too potent — and legitimately potent — a force to be responded to by a phrase like “It’s more complicated than that”. But it is more complicated than is currently assumed, and a huge amount will be riding on whether Germany can cope with the complexities involved.

This will include the question of whether sentiment against mass immigration is permissible in Germany, as it has become permissible across the rest of the continent. It will rely on whether the right to defend or speak up for European identity are considered respectable in 21^st Century Germany or not. And hardest of all (and this is something that people can reasonably feel torn over) whether any defence of German cultural identity is possible in the wake of the 20^th century and the painful, jarring ringing that such calls inevitably cause for very many people.

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Personally, I remain torn on these questions. From my many visits to the country I have come to think that there is something not just wrong but cruel about saying to young Germans that they should in some way be treated with suspicion, or deprived of the right to feel pride in their culture, because of the reprehensible things that went on in their country before their birth.

And yet, like many others, I also feel nervous. Can anyone say with total confidence that they know what could and could not bubble up in an era such as the one we are entering? Could anyone honestly put their hand on their heart and say that they are as willing to allow the Germans to be nationalistic, as other nations are allowed to be? The question remains almost impossible to answer in the affirmative, and yet Germans must also be allowed to feel pride in their culture and wish to protect it.

These are not just civilisational issues: they are issues of deep, practical, day-to-day political concern. A concern that the AfD has the opportunity to answer, or to blow apart.

The intellectual fuel for this movement comes from Yoram Hazony, an Israeli academic and Orthodox Jew who came to the fore two years ago thanks to his book The Virtue of Nationalism.

As is often the case with much-discussed non-fiction books, the work ended up having two functions: the first was to provide a scholarly and well-thought-through counter-blast to a prevailing orthodoxy. In recent decades there has been something like a consensus around the idea that nationalism is a problem — indeed that for states in Europe it is perhaps the problem. Hazony’s book carefully and persuasively sought to blow apart this consensus. Nationalism is a force for good, he argues, and rather than being the cause of instability is, in fact, the best prerequisite for stability.

Which brings us to the second function: to be used by those who have not read it as a weapon to beat back a prevailing wisdom.

Hazony turns out to have been at the head of a distinct intellectual wind. His book has been succeeded by a number of equally thoughtful works around the same theme, all of which help to bolster the argument. Last September, Rich Lowry, the editor of the American conservative magazine National Review, published The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United and Free. And this was followed, a month later, by Return of the Strong Gods: nationalism, populism and the future of the West by RR Reno, the editor of the conservative religious journal First Things.

So why is nationalism be causing so much intellectual excitement now? The obvious explanation is that it comes after a period of liberal — indeed globalist — overreach.

During recent decades, the presumption among those in positions of power in western Europe, in particular, leant in a clear direction. This was often summed-up as the Davos worldview: the presumption that the future was inevitably one of greater integration, where states would be giving up ever-more sovereignty, borders would be less and less important, and the world presided over by a benign, internationalist, NGO-like political class. If this view has taken a battering, it is less because of the success of any intellectual counter-punch but, rather, because of events.

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The Eurozone crisis made visible what some economists had warned about for decades: it is difficult, if not impossible, to ever fully meld Greek and German fiscal habits (or in other ways to impose the behaviours of northern Europe on the continent’s south). And then there was the migration crisis of 2015, when even some of those who advocated most volubly for a borderless world began to balk at the reality of hundreds of thousands of people moving at speed into countries that could not accommodate them — and which in most cases did not want them.

These two events — among others — demonstrated that perhaps the internationalists did not quite know what they were doing. And it restored the idea that states needed to stand up for themselves and perhaps even go their own way on major issues of the day. The sentiment was in place, and had been acted on by a number of European governments, before the intellectual groundwork was laid, or re-laid.

And yet a certain odour remains around the term — an odour whose origins ought to be honestly acknowledged.

Last year, Hazony hosted a National Conservatism conference in Washington DC and the difference between the speaker line-up and content in that event, versus the one in Rome presents a demonstration of the problem which “nationalism” will always have when it moves. For while there are certainly figures in America who would wish to take nationalism to its worst possible ends, in general, American nationalism remains a reasonable and odourless political force.

America has asserted its nationalistic — and one might point out, unilateralist — tendencies under Democrat and Republican administrations. Under both parties, it has remained suspicious of those international institutions which require a giving up of sovereignty — such as the International Criminal Court. This is not to say that American nationalism could not go bad, only that it hasn’t done so in anything like a European manner.

In Europe, of course, the story is different. Contra at least one of the speakers at the conference in Rome, it is undeniable that for European countries in the previous centuries, there were at least two world-engulfing conflicts in which nationalism played a part, even if not the defining one.

It is entirely uncontroversial and true to state that nationalism led Europe to war in 1914. And while there is a get-out that the war that began in 1939 was — like its predecessor — caused not by nationalism but by German expansionism, nevertheless it is an intellectual overstretch to claim that nationalism played no role in either conflict.

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As I told the conference, in my remarks made at a sceptical distance on Tuesday, there is an answer to this. For to claim that nationalism causes conflict is to make an assertion that is far too simplistic. Nationalism can cause conflict and it can keep the peace. To that extent, it is like every other force in nature: it is able to be used for good and for ill, can lead to triumph and disaster. There is nothing unique about this.

Contra the sort of people who like to think that we can wage war for “peace” or wage campaigns against “hate” (what other human emotion will they come for next one wonders?), even love can cause wars. The Trojan Wars were caused by love; countless acts of violence are still committed each year in the name of love. To date, nobody has called for the eradication of that instinct.

But with nationalism, there is a residual sense that if only it could be eradicated, the world would not experience wars. It is a sentiment that is additionally simplistic because before Europe was wracked by the wars of nation-states, it was wracked by centuries of wars of religions — a fact the current generation might do well to remember.

In any case, the difference in the manner in which “nationalism” is heard in Europe and America is a problem worth contending with. The proximate distance in Europe between what one might regard as healthy nationalism and unhealthy nationalism is undeniably closer than it is in America. And the fall-off from a reasonable attitude towards nationalism to its ugliest elements is a cliff which European history has unarguably made vertiginous.

To me, at any rate, this is the aspect of the National Conservatism Conference which was most interesting. There have been efforts in parts of the press to pretend that the entire conference was filled with unacceptable far-Right elements and the like. Certainly some of those who were present are from parties which have far-Right pasts and other new parties who may well be a cause for concern in the present.

But to dismiss all of these — let alone figures like Chris de Muth, John O’Sullivan and Hazony himself — as somehow engaged in far-Right politicking is so ignorant as to be embarrassingly revealing of the person asserting them. The idea that a conference organised by an orthodox Jew should have been in any way anti-Semitic is ridiculous. The idea that a conference addressed by several well-known gays was homophobic is equally lazy.

But there is a reason why such anathematising occurs. Not every complainant is directed by ignorance or short-term political point-scoring. For the fact remains that across the continent of Europe there are dragons; there are movements like Casa Pound in Italy which would seem to want to replay the fascist past.

There are groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece whose members have indulged themselves in the ugliest attempts to simultaneously deny and replay the brutalities of the mid-twentieth century. Anyone concerned to keep such things in history would be motivated by the most legitimate imaginable fears.

And yet there is an over-reach happening — an over-reach caused by the cordon-sanitaire having been subtly but seriously wrongly placed. There are papers and politicians across Europe and America who look at swathes of Europe and claim them to be — and claim their governments to be – “far-Right” or otherwise unacceptable. Is everything “far-Right” once anyone says so? If there is a reason why such claims are rarely interrogated it is because there is so little reward – and some considerable risk – in carefully interrogating them.

Calling people “fascists” is easy and bestows on the accuser the instant breastplate of “anti-fascist”. But European politics is more complex than that. The simplistic analysis that believes that we are condemned perpetually to replay the 1930s and ‘40s is past usefulness and is indeed hampering any attempt to understand who to deal with across Europe. Not least because governments and parties are being called ‘far-Right’ when they are not, and whole countries and movements are being anathematised when they will — must, in fact — be partners in the years ahead.

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The principle reason why I attended the National Conservatism conference in Rome was to listen, and to work out a little further for myself the complex question of who one is comfortable with and who one is not. It is part of an ongoing research effort on my part — one in which I have been engaged for some years. All in the knowledge of one irrefutable fact.

The UK has now left the European Union. Outside of it — as inside — we will have to deal with the parties and governments who run Europe. It is simply not sustainable to expect that the only parties we can deal with are a small number of leftist and centrist parties, beyond which we should be ignorant and insulting. That isn’t to say we need to be moral relativists.  Very far from it. The point of paying close attention will be to make fine but crucial judgement calls.

Which is why in the coming months I plan to use this space to write at greater length and in greater depth about this subject. A subject which is one of the most fascinating and — for the writer — perilous jobs of political analysis in town.

That is to try to sketch out what the realities on the continent of Europe actually are. Not as we are told they are by people, publications and pressure groups who have a dated and prejudiced view of the present, but what they actually are in the round. I can think of no more interesting or perilous writing role. I look forward to bringing you along with me.

As some Remainers have rightly pointed out, we are, and have long been, a nation of immigrants. And the idea that we can or should be protecting something ethnically pure and unique about our society is not just a fantasy, but a form of racism that must rightly be called out for what it is.

What I want to explore is whether there is also a largely unacknowledged racism in one of the intellectual tributaries to the Remain instinct, and one that, because largely unacknowledged, is dangerously insidious — not least because it is often dressed up as a positive thing. I will call this instinct ‘universalism’.

In writing about the racist traditions in his own country, the French Marxist philosopher, Etienne Balibar, tries to explain what he describes as “historical fact that is difficult to admit”:

“There is, no doubt, a specifically French brand of the doctrines of Aryianism and biological geneticism, but the true ‘French ideology’ is not to be found in these: it lies, rather, in the idea that the culture has been entrusted with a universal mission to educate the human race. There corresponds to this mission a practice of assimilating dominated populations and a consequent need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of their greater or lesser aptitude for — or resistance to – assimilation. It was this simultaneously subtle and crushing form of exclusion/inclusion which was deployed in the process of colonisation and the strictly French (or ‘democratic’) variant of the ‘White man’s burden’.”

In other words, just as there is a racism of wanting to maintain some sort of ethnic distinctiveness and difference, there is also a type of racism implicit within universalism too – that all the peoples of the earth ought to submit to a common set of moral and political standards. One might put it this way: there is a racism of over-emphasising the importance of cultural difference and distinctiveness, but there is also a racism of wanting to obliterate difference in the name of some common universal framework: be it ‘democracy’ or ‘Western values’.

When I spoke to the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony for Confessions, he made the point that the God of the Jews is unique in not imagining universal peace to come about through a process of conquest. All other gods in the ancient world, he maintained, thought that universal peace would come about when everybody else in the world thought the same way they did. Nebuchadnezzar and his god did not seek to conquer enemies because he believed in war but because he believed in peace though sameness. To use a more modern formulation, they believed in a ‘world order’. Their armies wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Today we might call it ‘liberal interventionism’.

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In contrast, Hazony maintains, the God of Israel believed in borders. Not as a form of ethnic exclusivism — there is much in the Hebrew scriptures about welcoming the stranger and those in need — and nor as a way of maintaining that ‘my people are better than your people’, but rather more as a type of political humility. In a world of borders, distinctiveness is maintained. In a world without borders, distinctiveness is obliterated. And the obliteration of difference, even if done with the best of intentions, easily amounts to the domination of a backward people by an enlightened one.

And I write enlightened advisedly, because nothing has given the universalising instinct more impetus than the enlightenment. Kant is a case in point. He imagined ‘Perpetual Peace‘ as the implementation of enlightenment values. But these values also carried within themselves clearly racist estimations of those who did not share these values. He maintained, for instance, that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the indigenous peoples of America were incapable of doing philosophy. Here is one example among many:

“The race of Negroes .. [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the extent of servants, i.e they can be trained.”

It is because of examples such as this that Kehinde Andrews, another Confessions guest, has described the Enlightenment as “white man’s identity politics”. But these days we know better, the universalist maintains. Well, tell that to the woman on the beach in France arrested for wearing the burkini, thus offending against western values. Or those banned from wearing a headscarf in school.

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Religion is often at the root of the trouble. Critics of religion of the Dawkins school often maintain that it counts against religion that faith in God is subject to so much local colour. They point out that those born in one particular place are likely to believe in the gods of that place, as if this is some sort of gotcha observation, clearly undermining the claims made by that religion.

But this is a gotcha only by the standards of modern, i.e. post enlightenment, notions of universalism. Faith does not aspire to the same sort of universalism as mathematics, for instance. Faith is stubbornly rooted in place and time. It grows out of shared experience. It is an expression of local forms of imaginative solidarity. That, to me, is not a weakness; it is precisely its strength.

I write these words sitting in a café in Tel Aviv, a relatively new town that is an expression of the desire of the Jewish people to maintain their distinctiveness. The way I see it, part of the reason the Labour party in Britain gets Israel so wrong, and the reason it continually falls into anti-Semitism despite its repeated protestations of anti-racism, is not so much that it wants to protect Palestinians from Israeli occupation, but that it refuses to recognise that the desire to maintain religious and cultural distinctiveness is a legitimate aspiration in the modern world.

Suggested reading

The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

To return to Balibar, Israel is the political expression of a refusal to assimilate, to be assimilated – and not least because many of its citizens are still only a generation away from a murderous project to eliminate difference, designed and executed in the very heartlands of the enlightenment.

I do not deny – and nor does Hazony – that borders often mean border disputes and therefore conflict. We live in a fallen world. But the desire that we all submit to the same rules, the same cultural framework, is the far greater danger, threatening as it does the very diversity that the Left so often proclaims as one of its objectives.

“This universalism is indeed a form of racism”, writes the brilliant Rabbi Daniel Boyarin. Until the Left begins to recognise that its own version of ‘one size fits all’ universalism contains within itself “coercive discourses of sameness”, and various forms of implicit – sometimes explicit — racism, it will never begin to address, or even understand and recognise, the anti-Semitism that it promotes.

How can we be racists, when we want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, thinks the leftist, not appreciating that, as with the gods of old, this desire for harmony through sameness is the very root of the trouble.