 G'day, May 40 here. So I'm listening to a pretty good interview with Yoram Hazone by Alex Kashuta From a sub-stack Garden of Earthly Delights. She lives in Romania. She's married. She's a mother. I've got a little boy and she's asking Yoram Hazone like what exactly is conservatism? Does it have anything in common with these established ideas or is it something completely revolutionary? How far back do you go to harness these ideas? So what are the main concepts here? Is it things that you're naming? Yeah, so is conservatism simply right-wing liberalism? Is it all about increasing human freedom? Neoconservatives, fusionists, libertarians, I don't know what else you just named. These are all right liberals, you said. Well, these are all versions of liberalism and one of the things that I work hard to do in the book is to distinguish conservatism from liberalism because you're right in hinting that it's all become So yeah, most of what we think of as conservatism is really right-wing liberalism Very confused, especially in the last generation, but you know, even a few decades before that the traditional distinction between liberal and conservative begins with liberalism being a political philosophy or a political movement that focuses on freedom It's focused overwhelmingly on the freedom of the individual and certainly the versions of liberalism that we've been dealing with in the last generation are quite extreme in their strident insistence that if you give ever-expanding liberties to individuals, then you'll solve most of society's problems and conservatism is a very different creature as I... Yeah, so liberalism is all about individual human rights while conservatism is much more about preserving the people, the tribe Right? It's not just about ever-expanding freedom because conservatism has a fundamentally skeptical view of human nature that therefore can't primarily be about expanding freedom My history of Anglo-American conservatism going back at least to the 1400s and conservatism is a it's a competing political worldview that sees national and religious tradition as the key to strengthening and maintaining a nation through time So even just from those in few introductory words of definition, you can already see that Whereas liberals begin with the free and equal individual, you know some kind of imaginary state of nature in which human beings are perfectly equal and perfectly free and don't take on any obligations or responsibilities except the ones they consent to. Conservatives have never really bought any of that So the conservative tradition, here I'm focusing specifically on the British and American one but there are other conservative traditions as well but what they all have in common is that they begin with individuals being born into families and families being born into tribes and tribes being born into nations and all of these nations compete with one another just like the tribes compete with one another, families compete with one another Right, so I often talk about where I differ from liberalism. I don't look at people as primarily individuals, I look at people as primarily members of tribes, people are born into families which are part of tribes which are part of nations So this is the difference between liberalism and conservatism Right, and the more realistic view of human beings is that people are not basically good Right, so all right-wing political movements have a conception that the individual is not basically good, but it cannot just be simply trusted to pursue his own desires and then everything's going to be great No, you need to tie people to families to tradition Right, to time-tested ways of organizing families and peoples And that's going to work better than simply ever-expanding rights