The latest episode in the unmaking of the American Right came to us live from Jerusalem. The National Conservative conference, organised in the first week of October by the Israeli-American Yoram Hazony, showed how the breakdown of US society will change the American-Israeli alliance.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech from the Pnyx (the hill where Ancient Athenians debated and deliberated), warning that the end of the West is nigh unless it recovers its thumos, or warrior spirit.
“All the hopes that we entertain in the midst of the confusions and dangers of the present are founded, positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, on the experiences of the past,” Leo Strauss wrote in his 1950 essay Jerusalem and Athens. Western civilization, Strauss believed, is defined by the tension between Jerusalem (revelation) and Athens (reason).
The revelation in Jerusalem was that Israel, having lost the support of young left-wing Americans, is also losing young right-wing Americans, and especially young white men.
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