August 4, 2025 -- Roundtrip Charlottesville to Durham
- Lucian@going2paris.net
- Aug 6
- 5 min read
Charlottesville
August 4, 2025
Back in Cville after a two-day trip to Durham and back. I visited the land of the dastardly Blue Devils to watch my great niece Avery play in a preseason game for the Duke women's soccer team. (Avery is my older sister Cindy's oldest granddaughter, the daughter of Cidy and Ken's son, Josh. Got it?).
The drive to Durham took me through parts of Virginia and North Carolina I had never visited. I had been to Farmville but not south of there and never in rural North Carolina above Durham. Trump country. Not dirt poor but a long way from thriving. In Virginia near the border is a large man made lake (Simth Mountain Lake?) -- there were a lot of pickups pulling boats. I thought how opposite the area was than the two endpoints of my drive -- Charlottesville and Durham. Both places being highly educated and affluent. It made the podcast I listened to on the drive all the more relevant. More on that in a minute.
Here are some photos from the drive there and back.
The podcast.
Here's the description of the podcast episode:
Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we define who is an American. He explained that this is the root of many of our country’s problems: a national identity that has become too broad.
That was also a core idea of the 2018 book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which caused a sensation on the right. Its author, the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, went on to build a movement. For years, he has hosted NatCon — short for National Conservatism — conferences. Those events have featured speakers like Marco Rubio, who is now the secretary of state, and Senator Josh Hawley. And one of the most reliable speakers, year after year, has been Vance.
I wanted to talk to Hazony. What exactly is his argument, his worldview? And are the Trump administration’s policies putting it into practice?
Ezra Klein is a wonderful interviewer. He's wicked smart -- I feel like he is playing four-dimensional chess while I am stuck in my two dimensional worldview. He has strong beliefs but he surpresses them when he interviews folks who on the opposite side of an issue. He is curious. He wants to understand the opposite side of the issue. He pokes and prods his guests in a compassionate way -- so very different than the typical interviews we hear and see today. By the end of this interview, I felt horror but I also believed I had the facts to support my horror.
Here's the Wikipedia article on Yoram Hazony:
Yoram Reuben Hazony born 1964)[1] is an Israeli-American philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute[2] in Jerusalem and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.[3] He has argued for national conservatism in his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism[4] and 2022's Conservatism: A Rediscovery.[5]
Biography
Yoram Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel, and moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, US. He was raised and educated in the United States and returned to live in Israel after finishing university.[6] Hazony received his BA from Princeton University in East Asian studies in 1986 and his PhD from Rutgers University in political philosophy in 1993. While a junior at Princeton, he founded The Princeton Tory, a magazine for conservative thought.[7] He is the brother of David Hazony and Daniel Hazony. He married Yael Fulton, an American[8] whom he met at Princeton, and she moved to Israel with him. The couple live in Jerusalem and have nine children.[9]
Academic and journalistic career
Hazony founded the Shalem Center in Jerusalem in 1994 and was president and then provost until 2012.[10][11] He helped design the curriculum for Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college, established in 2013.[12] Hazony has served as director of the John Templeton Foundation's project in Jewish Philosophical Theology and as a member of the Israel Council for Higher Education committee examining general studies programs in Israel's universities and colleges.
He authors a blog on philosophy, politics, Judaism, Israel, and higher education, called Jerusalem Letters.[14] Hazony has published in outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Affairs.
Religious and political views
Hazony is a Modern Orthodox Jew and relates his views on Open Orthodoxy in an article published in 2014. In it, he states that he fears that Open Orthodoxy is acting as an ideological echo chamber in which any unapproved views are ridiculed and quashed without debate. Hazony describes his concern that elements of Open Orthodoxy have seemingly decided to accept all conclusions of academic Bible critics as indisputable fact, without even going through the motions of investigating whether these conclusions are true.
Hazony is an outspoken Judeo-nationalist and has written that nationalism uniquely provides "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves".[19] In 2018, his book, The Virtue of Nationalism was released by Basic Books. In 2019, it was named "Conservative Book of the Year" by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It has been read and recommended by heads of state, including Viktor Orbán[20] and Giorgia Meloni.[21] It has been called a "key text of the nationalist right", and Hazony has been cited as an intellectual influence on American vice president JD Vance.[22]
Some critics maintain that The Virtue of Nationalism is theoretically inconsistent or incoherent and that it bears little relation to the historical body of nationalist thought.[23][24][25][26] Writing for the Tel Aviv Review of Books, Yair Wallach argued that Hazony's 2020 book, A Jewish State: Herzl and the Promise of Nationalism, is characterised by "intellectual dishonesty", in part for presenting a selective account of Theodor Herzl's understanding of Zionism and nationalism.[27]
Hazony organized and spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in England in May 2023, where he stated that the United Kingdom was plagued with woke "neo-Marxist" agitators who want to detach Britons from their entire past, and called for the return of mandatory military service.
But how about Avery's game?
She played great. One of two freshman in the starting lineup for the fourth ranked Blue Devils -- behind Carolina, Notre Dame and FSU, I believe. She is so fast and smart on the pitch. She played as many minutes as any Blue Devil (roughly 70), had some great shots, passes and takeaways. She foreced defenders to make passes before they were ready to -- that was fun to watch. The game ended 0-0 but I thought it was a win for Duke as the team they played was a professional women's team.
Nest up -- the Gamecocks in Columbia for one more preseason game.
Comments