Just because his thesis is ahistorical and internally contradictory does not mean that it cannot be influential. Many bad books have had great influence. This one has been very lucky, having appeared just as the word nationalism was adopted by Donald Trump, who finds it a useful way of dressing up a set of foreign and domestic policies that are largely governed by his whims and dictated by his self-interest. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, has used the language of nationalism as well. Hazony’s book also appeared at the moment when a handful of Anglo-American conservative intellectuals, jolted out of their old alliances by Trump and Brexit, were looking for a new project—and just when the parties of the European far right were craving the legitimacy that can be granted by British, American, and especially Israeli friends. To put it differently: The arc of history once described by Martin Luther King and Barack Obama is now bending the other way, and a lot of people are leaping aboard.

The sight of an intellectual elite undergoing a radical shift in its views and alliances is never elegant, and this event had some rough edges. Hazony’s opening speech set a strange tone. He once again set up black-and-white categories, contrasting (bad) “enlightenment rational liberals” who have no ties to family or place with (good) conservatives who do, thus leaving out a very large, and much more nuanced, third category: the many enlightenment rational liberals who are patriotic, take care of their children, and feel attached to their local customs. He attacked the euro, Europe’s common currency, not for its economic faults but because euro notes are decorated with drawings of imaginary bridges instead of drawings of real ones. He declared that European children “are not taught that there is such a thing as a nation.” Of course he has every right to evoke an old and legitimate political tradition—Burkean conservatism has been with us for a long time—but some of this was silly. At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about “the nation” in all of them. It’s also ridiculous to claim that liberal Europeans never speak of their nations with pride. On the very day Hazony was lecturing in the hotel ballroom in Rome, the president of France was lecturing at a university in Krakow, declaring that he feels “proud to be French and proud to be European,” and saying he expects that Poles feel the same way too. To millions of people, these things do not feel contradictory.

But other speakers in Rome also reflected an almost paranoid sense of persecution. The idea that “the nation” has been outlawed is clearly something that a certain breed of conservative now genuinely perceives to be true. The American Christian writer Rod Dreher solemnly described a world in which he felt repressed, just as people had been under totalitarian communism.* “The all-consuming ideology among us is … a globalist, victim-focused identity politics, often called ‘social justice,’” he warned, calling on audience members to think of themselves as Christians persecuted for their faith in the past. Roberto de Mattei, an Italian Catholic intellectual, spoke darkly of a “dictatorship of relativism” and declared that the progressive establishment had banned the writing of books about the history of communism. Since I have personally written three books about the history of communism, all of which have been published in multiple European languages—including Italian—I found this statement mystifying.