The Bloody Price of Ethno-Nationalism | Glenny Loury, Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

The whole discussion is fascinating. Glenn Loury is a more-or-less centrist with proclivities toward both Left and Right while Bessner, his main interlocutor, is staunchly Left. They make for interesting conversation partners.

While the whole conversation is worthwhile, I was struck by their remarks about Israel as a nation-state at 53:34. The central point is that the modern nation-state was ethnically conceived as a state for a single nation (ethnos). Thus the idea of a two state solution for Israel and Palestine runs counter to the founding logic of the modern nation. Now that they've pointed this out, it's obvious. But I hadn't thought of it before.

At one point in the conversation, I forget just where, Bessner mentions what the American nation did with the people they found already living on the continent. That's a complicated story. One impulse, only partially successful, was to wipe them out. Those that weren't wiped out, however, were afforded the opportunity of living on reservations. Those reservations are interesting political constructions. The Indians living on them are full citizens of the United States. But the reservations do have some (small) autonomy, enough to support gambling casinos, for example. It's a peculiar arrangement.

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1,499 views Aug 23, 2025
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0:00 The origins of Self-Censorship
4:11 Black and conservative in Reagan’s America
8:30 The social science hall of fame
12:45 Ground News ad
14:42 Jews, assimilation, and the quantitative revolution
19:53 Human universalism vs. ethno-national particularity
23:39 Historicizing “the Jew”
25:44 Danny: Larry Summers can’t see outside his own neoliberal paradigm
29:47 Are we entering a period of, as Marx wrote, “mutual ruin”?
32:43 Is capitalism leading us toward nuclear war?
39:15 What the Manhattan Institute incident taught Glenn about his own book
44:59 Glenn: “I’m rethinking everything”
48:37 Is the right reverting to a pre-New Deal political paradigm?
53:34 Is Israel a reversion to an Early Modern model of nation-building?
1:00:04 American Jews’s role in Israel’s creation and perpetuation
1:05:01 Why Glenn previously censored himself on Gaza
1:11:27 Glenn: So far, I’m disappointed in Trump

Glenn Loury (Brown University, Hoover Institution, Self-Censorship), Daniel Bessner (University of Washington, American Prestige, Democracy in Exile), and Derek Davison (American Prestige, Foreign Exchanges). Recorded August 6, 2025.