Liberals and Conservatives Will Need to Be Allies to Fight the Growing Marxist Cultural Revolution: Yoram Hazony

Liberals and Conservatives Will Need to Be Allies to Fight the Growing Marxist Cultural Revolution: Yoram Hazony
Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 2, 2021. Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times
Katabella Roberts
Jan Jekielek
Updated:
Liberals and conservatives will need to be allies in an effort to fight a growing Marxist cultural revolution taking place across America, according to Israeli philosopher and Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Yoram Hazony. Hazony was one of the key organizers of the recent the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando.
Speaking to Jan Jekielek on The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders“ program, Hazony explained that in the past year, there has been a growing Marxist cultural revolution throughout the United States and indeed the rest of the world. The full on-camera interview, conducted at the National Conservatism Conference on Nov. 2, will premiere on EpochTV in coming days.

Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after German Karl Marx who stood in opposition to religion, despite being a Christian in his youth.

Specifically, Marxism divides people according to their economic status: the wealthy people are “oppressive,” and the poor people are “oppressed.”

Over the past year, Marxism has been increasingly more visible in US society, from the Marxist underpinnings of Black Lives Matter organizations, to divisive critical race theory (CRT) being taught to servicemen and women and which the Biden administration is also pushing to be applied in schools.

CRT redefines human history as a struggle between the “oppressors”—typically considered to be white people—and the “oppressed”—other identity groups—similar to Marxism’s reduction of history to a struggle between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat.”

Hazony described liberalism and conservatism as “separate worldviews and competing movements,” with liberalism being born in the 17th century and working on the fundamental basis that every individual has natural freedom, and must be granted those freedoms by their government and treated equally.

Meanwhile, the philosopher explained that conservatism in Britain and America is an older indigenous political theory or system which has at its center institutions such as legal tradition and organized religion like Christianity.

“It’s important to remember the differences because a liberal life is very different from a conservative life,” said Hazony, author of “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

“And most conservatives think that, ultimately, liberalism is not sustainable because it undermines tradition. It doesn’t allow for transmission to future generations.”

Despite their differing worldviews, Hazony believes that both liberalism and conservatism will at some point need to become allies in order to “fight” the Marxist revolution taking place.

“In the last year, there’s kind of been a Marxist cultural revolution, which was taking over much of what was really liberal up until recently ... liberals and conservatives at this point, or certainly some of them, are going to have to be allies to fight the Marxist,” Hazony said.

The Edmund Burke Foundation is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.

Through various national conservatism conferences, Hazony said that the foundation hopes to “build an alliance” and “refine the set of ideas, which can be proudly carried forward by that alliance in order to save America and and the democratic countries from the two scourges that became so dramatically evident into in the year 2020.”

“On the one hand, [there is] a rising imperialist China, abroad, and at home, a version of neo-Marxism, which is successfully running a country of cultural revolution, taking over most of what, until very recently, were liberal institutions,” Hazony said.

“I don’t think the liberals are strong enough to save almost any of those institutions. To get anywhere, we’re going to need a strong traditionalism, including religion and nationalism. And those elements, religion and nationalism, are at this conference, in this movement, being balanced or rebalanced with the concerns for individual freedom that, you know, are important to all of us,” Hazony continued.

“If we can put the national concerns for national independence, national cohesion, national traditions, and the religious concerns back on the table together with the concern for individual freedoms, then we think we'll have a political paradigm that will be powerful enough, God willing, to defeat these other opponents,” he added.

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