Futility of the Klein-Hazony Dialogue

To win the proletariat, the left must pierce the blood-and-soil illusion and discard the theater of Liberalism against Fascism; both only dispute the terms of managing decay, never the possibility of emancipation.

The public dialogue between Ezra Klein and Yoram Hazony is not a debate over the soul of a nation but a functional diagnostic of a system in crisis. To analyze this exchange as a conflict of ideas, to tally points for logical consistency or moral clarity, is to be captured by the very ideological theater it stages. It is a performance where two competing management strategies for late capitalism are presented as a profound philosophical dispute. Klein, representing the old guard, clings to the procedural manuals of a liberal order that has lost its material authority. Hazony, an architect of a new authoritarianism, proposes a brutalist renovation designed to contain the system’s escalating failures. A materialist critique must refuse to choose a side in this boardroom dispute. Instead, it must dissect the material function of both positions, exposing them as complementary instruments of control, each designed to preserve the underlying structure of exploitation while merely altering its public-facing justifications. Klein’s patient attempt to find rational coherence in Hazony’s arguments is the key symptom of the paradigm’s exhaustion. He is searching for a software bug, oblivious to the fact that the hardware is melting. His tools-reason, consistency, appeals to shared principle-belong to an era when the fictions of creedal belonging and upward mobility still held purchase, lubricating the machinery of global capital. That era is over, and his bewilderment is the sound of an obsolete ideology confronting the raw, material grievances it can no longer pacify or explain.

The operational protocol of liberalism, which Ezra Klein embodies, with its emphasis on rational debate and universal principles, was never a timeless truth but a historically specific tool that served the needs of an expansionist phase of capital. The abstract notion of a nation as a voluntary association of individuals bound by a creed was the perfect ideological lubricant for a system that required a mobile, interchangeable global workforce. It provided a moral justification for dissolving traditional bonds, opening borders to capital flows, and creating a fungible mass of labor stripped of any identity beyond that of consumer and worker. This Reified Symbolic Mandate of creedal belonging functioned as long as it delivered a baseline of material stability and the credible promise of a better future. But the material foundations that supported this edifice have crumbled. Decades of deindustrialization, financialization, and systemic precarity have transformed the promise of inclusion into a lived experience of atomization and abandonment for vast segments of the population. The social contract, which exchanged loyalty to abstract principles for a share of material prosperity, has been breached. As a result, the liberal toolkit has lost its efficacy. Logical argumentation and appeals to hypocrisy are impotent against a political formation animated by the concrete experience of dispossession. Klein’s failure is not a personal shortcoming but a systemic inevitability. He operates as if political conflict can be resolved into a single, coherent consensus, while the material reality is one of irreconcilable antagonisms. His continued insistence on the sanctity of the debate itself performs a crucial service for Yoram Hazony’s rising authoritarianism, granting it legitimacy as a reasonable position within a spectrum of ideas, thereby obscuring its true nature as a raw instrument of class force.

Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism emerges from the wreckage of this liberal promise, offering itself not as a new idea but as a political technology calibrated for an era of managed decline and intensifying class conflict. It is structurally and functionally a fascist protocol, a term used here not as a moral epithet but as a precise technical description of its purpose. Fascism is the crisis management strategy that capitalism deploys when the contradictions it generates can no longer be contained through the ordinary mechanisms of democratic consent. Its primary function is to resolve the crisis of class antagonism not by addressing its material roots, but by sublimating it into a fabricated struggle between nations, races, or cultural tribes. This maneuver preserves the fundamental economic structure-the relations of private property and wage labor-by radically reconfiguring the political and cultural superstructure to enforce social discipline. Hazony’s intellectual framework provides the necessary ideological cover, the sanctifying ghost, for this violent project. The romantic narrative of organic bonds, of families and tribes united by shared blood and soil, is a sophisticated tool for mystification. It works to replace the concrete, material, and inherently conflictual reality of class with the ethereal, fictional unity of the tribe. The laid-off factory worker is instructed to find his primary loyalty not with other workers, but with the finance capitalist who offshored his job, on the grounds that they share a common language, a common god, or a common ancestor. This is the foundational lie of all nationalist ideology: the substitution of an imaginary vertical bond of tribe for the real, horizontal antagonism of class, a sleight of hand that ensures the exploited continue to identify with their exploiters.

This ideological substitution proposed by Yoram Hazony is operationalized through a carefully constructed political mythology. The constant invocation of ancestral cemeteries and generational claims to the land serves as a tactical weapon to redefine belonging. It recasts national identity not as a commitment to a set of principles that can be debated or adopted, but as an immutable, inherited status rooted in lineage. This redefinition is the essential precondition for the fascist project, as it provides the ideological justification for dividing the population into two distinct camps: those who belong by right of blood, and those who are, by their very nature, alien interlopers and illegitimate claimants on the nation’s resources. Hazony’s call to restore a “dominant cultural center” based on a mythical Anglo-Protestant core is the explicit program for this politics of purification. It is a frank admission that the social order can no longer be maintained by the fragile consensus of democratic norms, but requires the coercive power of a single, hegemonic group to impose cohesion. The historical narrative deployed is a deliberate inversion of reality, positing a past of organic unity now fractured by the corrosive forces of immigration and multiculturalism. This fiction conveniently ignores the fact that the American project has been defined by violent internal conflict from its inception, a history of brutal struggles over the very definition of who belongs. Hazony is not charting a new course; he is attempting to resurrect the ideology of the slavocracy, updating its blood-and-soil particularism for an era of post-industrial precarity. The entire project is a reactionary effort to resolve social contradictions by forcibly re-imposing a rigid, hierarchical order, sanctified by a fabricated history and a theology of tribal chosenness.

The obsessive focus in Hazony’s framework on immigration, diversity, and cultural grievances serves as the primary mechanism for scapegoating, a crucial technique for misdirecting social anger. It is a calculated strategy to channel the legitimate rage of a materially insecure and spiritually hollowed-out populace away from the actual architects of their condition-the capitalist class-and toward a designated internal enemy. The immigrant, the cultural minority, and the political dissident become the repositories for all the anxieties and frustrations generated by a system of relentless exploitation. Arbitrary demographic targets, such as a supposed maximum tolerable percentage for the foreign-born population, are political fabrications, pseudo-scientific alarm bells designed to manufacture a permanent sense of existential crisis. This manufactured emergency then serves to justify the very authoritarian measures required to “restore order”: the militarization of borders, the expansion of the surveillance state, mass deportations, and the suspension of civil liberties for designated out-groups. These policies are not merely expressions of cultural preference; they are instruments of labor discipline. By creating a politically vulnerable and hyper-exploited underclass of precarious workers, capital can exert immense downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of the entire labor force. By deliberately fomenting racial, ethnic, and religious divisions, it shatters the potential for a unified, multi-racial class consciousness that would pose a genuine existential threat to its dominance. The manufactured culture war is, in material terms, a form of class war waged from above, using the weapons of fear and bigotry to keep the working class divided, disorganized, and powerless against its common enemy.

The strategic ambiguity surrounding the boundary between mainstream national conservatism, as articulated by Yoram Hazony, and the explicitly white supremacist fringe is not a sign of ideological inconsistency but of tactical discipline. The polite disavowals of overt Nazism by the movement’s intellectual architects are a necessary component of public relations, but the distinction remains functionally decorative. The core logic of ethnocentric hierarchy and the designation of an internal enemy is useful to the maintenance of class power, regardless of its specific branding or aesthetic. The raw, violent energy of the racist right is a potent political resource for atomizing the working class and terrorizing any organized opposition. This resource will be cultivated, tolerated, and strategically deployed as long as it serves its purpose. The recurring symbolic gestures and tacit alliances between mainstream political figures and overt fascists are not gaffes; they are signals to these extremist currents, assuring them of their place within the broader reactionary coalition. They serve to normalize a political vocabulary of violent exclusion, preparing the ground for more aggressive measures. Ultimately, Hazony’s national conservative project is structurally fascistic because its objective class function aligns perfectly with the historical role of fascism as the emergency protocol of a bourgeoisie in crisis. Its program-a militant, exclusionary national identity, the fusion of corporate and state power, a patriarchal cult of the traditional family, the violent suppression of dissent, and a relentless war on any form of independent working-class organization-is the classic response of a ruling class that can no longer secure its interests through the fraying veil of liberal democracy.

The promise from Yoram Hazony that this period of aggressive, illiberal action is merely a temporary phase, a necessary corrective to “strengthen the center” before a more tolerant order can be restored, is the oldest and most transparent lie of authoritarianism. It is the perpetual alibi of reaction: a temporary state of exception is required to save the constitutional order; a brief period of repression is necessary to restore pluralism. This is a deliberate and cynical deception. While the nation is being culturally disciplined and its political life purged of dissent, the material relations of production are being ruthlessly secured. The worker is politically neutered and divided, the immigrant is used as a tool of social control, and the power of capital is insulated from any meaningful democratic challenge. The “center” that is being rebuilt is nothing more than the bourgeoisie’s preferred arrangement of power, now fortified with the coercive apparatus of the state and sanctified by a nationalist ideology. This entire political spectacle, however, is a distraction from the core material reality. The polarization that defines our moment is not, at its root, an argument over flags, values, or historical narratives. These are the surface expressions of a fundamental and irreconcilable class contradiction-the ceaseless struggle between those who own the means of life and those who must sell their labor to survive. Every plank of Hazony’s national conservative platform, from attacks on unions to the demonization of migrants, is a strategy to intensify the rate of exploitation. By fragmenting the working class along lines of race, religion, and nationality, it prevents the solidarity necessary to struggle for better conditions. The cohesion it promises is the cohesion of the chain gang.

A meaningful strategic response must therefore begin by utterly rejecting the false choice presented in the dialogue between Ezra Klein and Yoram Hazony. The struggle is not to defend a hollowed-out liberal order against a reactionary insurgency, as both are ultimately committed to preserving the same underlying system of exploitation. To enlist in the defense of Klein’s establishment liberalism is to fight for the right to a more politely managed decline, to preserve the velvet glove that conceals the iron fist. The task is not to win an argument over the true meaning of the nation, a phantom entity whose invocation has always served to obscure the material reality of class division. The only path forward is to refuse the terms of their debate entirely. The struggle is not for the soul of the nation, but for control over the material means of existence. The only effective praxis is one that sidesteps their ideological battlefield and focuses on building autonomous power at the level of the material base. This requires a radical shift in perspective, away from the grand theater of national politics and toward the immediate, tangible realities of everyday life. It means recognizing that the true sites of contestation are not the television studio or the ballot box, but the workplace, the apartment building, the neighborhood, and the networks through which food, energy, and care are distributed. Any politics that does not begin from the material facts of rent, debt, hunger, and isolation is merely a hobby for a class of people insulated from these realities.

The starting point for any authentic resistance is the concrete material experience of the individual confronting the oppressive conditions of late capitalism. It is the gnawing anxiety of precarity, the alienation of meaningless labor, the crushing weight of debt, and the encroaching reality of ecological collapse. The egoist impulse for self-preservation and autonomy, when understood not as an abstract philosophy but as a practical, materially driven force, becomes the engine of this resistance. It is the rational desire to live, to be free from domination, and to secure the conditions for one’s own flourishing. This impulse, when shared and acted upon collectively, is the foundation for a new kind of politics. It is not based on allegiance to an abstract ideal, a flag, or a creed, but on the formation of concrete, flexible alliances grounded in shared, immediate material interests. This is not a call for a mystical, abstract unity of “the people,” but for a practical program of action: the organization of militant tenant unions to fight landlords and decommodify housing; the creation of worker cooperatives and solidarity economies to establish non-exploitative relations of production; the building of independent logistical networks for food, communication, and care that reduce dependence on the fragile and coercive systems of the state and the market. Each of these initiatives must be measured by a simple, material standard: does it expand our direct control over the means of our own existence? Does it reduce our dependence on the systems that exploit us? Does it build our collective capacity to survive and thrive outside their control?

This practical work of building material autonomy requires the systematic application of three core principles. The first is the assertion of usufruct, the right of use over the right of ownership. This means actively reclaiming and repurposing the vast resources left idle and wasted by capital. Abandoned buildings can become squats and community centers. Fallow land can be turned into community gardens. Discarded technology can be salvaged and repaired to build independent communication networks. This is a direct assault on the sanctity of private property, which holds the means of life hostage for the purpose of profit. The second principle is complementarity, the fostering of horizontal, non-hierarchical collaboration based on diverse skills and mutual need. This involves dissolving the rigid, alienating roles imposed by the capitalist division of labor and creating fluid networks where individuals contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. It is the electrician sharing their skills with the medic, who in turn shares their knowledge with the farmer, creating a resilient web of mutual aid that stands in stark contrast to the competitive, atomized logic of the market. The third and most crucial principle is the establishment of an unconditional, irreducible minimum. This means creating and defending communal systems that guarantee the baseline of material well-being-food, shelter, healthcare, safety-for every member of the community. It is a declaration that no one will be allowed to fall below a certain floor of survival, a commitment that forms the unbreakable core of collective solidarity and provides the secure foundation from which all other struggles can be waged.

This strategy of building a parallel infrastructure of survival and autonomy is the only way to render the ideological struggles of the ruling class, as represented by Klein and Hazony, irrelevant. It does not seek to win the argument over which ghost should haunt the decaying house of the old republic; it seeks to build a new structure altogether, on a foundation of material self-sufficiency and mutual reliance. This process is slow, difficult, and often invisible to the grand narrative of mainstream politics. It is the painstaking work of building relationships of trust, of learning new skills, of experimenting with new forms of social organization, and of defending these fragile experiments from the inevitable backlash of the state and capital. It requires a profound skepticism toward all grand promises and ideological blueprints, rejecting the lure of future utopias in favor of immediate, tangible improvements in our material conditions. It demands that we see collapse not as a distant, abstract possibility to be debated, but as an ongoing material process to be navigated pragmatically. It means developing the capacity to secure our own sources of power, both electrical and political, and to defend them. It also necessitates confronting the psychological toll of this struggle, creating spaces for the collective processing of the grief and loss that are inseparable from living through a period of systemic decay. This is the only praxis that matters: the slow, deliberate reclamation of our lives and our world from the bottom up.

Ultimately, the goal is not to achieve a final victory or to establish a perfect society, as such teleological fantasies are themselves ideological traps. The objective is more immediate and concrete: to expand the zone of autonomy, to increase our collective material capacity, and to build resilient communities capable of weathering the storms of a collapsing world order. The metric of success is not measured in votes or media attention, but in tangible capacities: calories produced, liters of clean water secured, watts of off-grid power generated, encrypted communication channels established, and the strength of the communal bonds forged through shared struggle. This is the egoist materialism of negation in practice. It negates the hollow abstractions of the State, the Market, and the Nation not through critique alone, but by building a material reality in which they are no longer necessary. It asserts the primacy of the living, breathing individual and the concrete community against all reified systems of control. It is a politics grounded in the immediate needs of the body and the practical realities of survival. While managers like Ezra Klein and Yoram Hazony debate the terms of our continued servitude, the real work lies in making ourselves ungovernable, not by shouting slogans, but by methodically constructing the material basis for a new way of living, a life of freedom and dignity wrested from the ruins of the old. This is the slow, arduous, and only meaningful path forward.