Futility of the Klein-Hazony Dialogue
Liberalism cannot defeat Fascism in a polite debate.
The exchange between Ezra Klein and Yoram Hazony is not really a debate about the “soul of the nation.” It is a display of a system in deep crisis. What they each present in this debate are rival management strategies for the decline of capitalism dressed up as a polite philosophical discussion. Klein in this farse represents a collapsing liberal order that insists debate and reason can guide us back to stability. Hazony represents the emerging fascism that promises to reorder capitalism through hierarchy, exclusion, and coercion. Neither offers liberation. Both aim to preserve the system of exploitation, Klein with the fading language of “shared principles” and Hazony with the blunt discipline of authoritarian nationalism.
Klein’s role here is almost tragic. He thinks Hazony can be cornered with logic, coherence, and appeals to principle. But Hazony is playing a different game. Fascists thrive on contradiction and hypocrisy. They speak one way to sound respectable to moderates, then twist their words to give cover to extremists. This slippery ambiguity is not a weakness, it is a strength. It allows Hazony to evade labels in order to maintain power. Klein mistakes this for inconsistency, but it is intentional fascist strategy: bend truth itself into a tool of propaganda. Reason may catch a liberal; it never traps a fascist.
Liberalism, as Klein embodies it, was never timeless. It was the dream of endless global expansion, holding workers together with the myth that anyone could succeed if they bought into a secular creed: equal rights, opportunity, progress. But decades of deindustrialization, collapsing wages, and mounting precarity have destroyed that promise. People sense it, and the rituals of debate and appeals to principle no longer soothe the wounds. Liberals like Klein still argue as if consensus is possible, even while material life reveals irreconcilable conflicts. What Klein cannot see is that his blindness unintentionally legitimizes Hazony, conceding to him a seat at the table when he should be called what he is, a fascist and responded to with violence.
Hazony’s so-called “National Conservatism” is just fascism updated for our moment of economic decline and social fragmentation. Fascism steps in when capitalism can no longer manage its contradictions through liberal democracy. It reroutes class rage away from the real source that of the bosses and capital owners and redirects it toward scapegoats like immigrants, minorities, outsiders, and deviants. Hazony’s myth-making about family, tribe, blood, and soil is propaganda designed to stifle solidarity and turn workers against one another. It tells the laid-off worker that his enemy is not the billionaire who shipped his job overseas but the immigrant who moved next door. This is not innovation. It is the old fascist trick of substituting tribe for class.
Hazony’s ideas of inherited belonging to blood ties, ancestral graves, and cultural cores lay the groundwork for white nationalist exclusion. Belonging is no longer about choice or principle but birthright. That is how fascism draws its lines between those who naturally belong and those cast as intruders. His call to restore an Anglo-Protestant cultural center is not patriotism, it is racialized exclusion, a direct descendant of the slavocracy. In practice, this means scapegoating, purges, mass deportations, repression, border militarization, and the production of a vulnerable, hyper-exploited underclass. These measures are not cultural whims. They are economic tools to discipline labor and keep wages down while dividing workers against each other. This is class war from above, papered over with nationalist lies.
Hazony’s movement does not hide its relationship to more openly racist currents. It pretends to disavow them while leaving the door half open. This is not carelessness but strategy. Fascists know they need to wear both faces, the polite “public intellectual” mask and the violent street thug. One normalizes exclusion in the mainstream, the other enforces it through terror. Together they form the machinery of fascist politics.
Hazony insists this is only a temporary correction until the political center stabilizes. This is one of the oldest lies of authoritarianism. Temporary exceptions always become permanent rules. The goal is not to safeguard the Republic, but to destroy working-class organization, scapegoat immigrants, and reinforce capitalist rule. That is the center he wants to preserve, a society in which capital is secure, dissent crushed, and cohesion imposed by force.
The false choice between Klein’s liberalism and Hazony’ fascism must be rejected outright. Liberalism offers only managed decline, while fascism only offers bloodied bodies, but both leave capitalist exploitation untouched. The real struggle is not over the meaning of the flag or the fate of the Republic. It is over who controls the material means of existence, who has access to housing, food, energy, work, and care. That struggle does not happen in debate halls, but in workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities where everyday life is fought over and built.
The path forward is not Klein’s hollow liberalism or Hazony’s fascist authoritarianism. It is the construction of real power at the base where tenant unions struggle against landlords, worker cooperatives strike against bosses, mutual aid networks build against the indifference of state and market. Hazony weaponizes nationalism to break worker solidarity. Our task is to build solidarity rooted in immediate material needs, not myths.
This is slow, unglamorous work, but it is the only way to render their theater irrelevant. It turns the fight from their realm of ghosts and propaganda back to reality. Fascism thrives on despair and division. Real liberation grows from autonomy, solidarity, and survival. Either we are divided by the myths of nation and sacrificed to capital, or we reclaim control over daily existence and dismantle the foundations that keep fascists like Hazony in power. No debate will decide this. Only organized, material action will.