The Auron MacIntyre Show - Liberalism, Conservatism, and Leo Strauss ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried

00:00:00.480 Hello, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great

00:00:04.340 stream with a great guest that you're really going to enjoy. After the Nick Land Alexander

00:00:09.680 Dugan debate, many people were asking questions about the nature of liberalism. Was the interpretation

00:00:14.440 of those two thinkers correct? Are there alternative ways to look at this? And in a fantastic move,

00:00:21.040 Dr. Paul Gottfried reached out and contacted me, wanted to talk a little bit about that.

00:00:25.020 So I'm excited today to talk to him about the nature of liberalism. We're also going to be

00:00:29.820 getting into Leo Strauss and the impact he has had on the wider conservative movement.

00:00:35.380 His latest book is The Essential Paul Gottfried. It's from Passage Press. They do great work. It's

00:00:39.740 a beautiful volume, as always. I encourage you to pick it up. Dr. Gottfried, thank you so much for

00:00:45.040 joining me. Thank you very much for having me on. I think this is the fourth or fifth time, but

00:00:49.380 I've enjoyed every appearance on your show. Well, it's been an absolute privilege to host

00:00:55.020 you. I'm very glad that so many gentlemen like you who have just been writing critical works that

00:01:00.740 many people haven't had access to are now back in kind of the limelight somewhat. People are more

00:01:05.860 aware of what you're doing. And of course, they want to know your thoughts on the debates of the

00:01:09.780 day, things that you have written about and thought about extensively. So you contacted me after

00:01:15.400 watching the Alexander Dugan and Nick Land debate, and you had some interesting thoughts about the

00:01:21.580 nature of liberalism, the kind of the historical development. And so maybe we could just start at

00:01:27.920 the beginning because a lot of people were looking at the Nick Land debate. And the one thing both of

00:01:32.600 them seem to kind of settle on is that globalist liberalism is kind of this mutation of a liberalism

00:01:41.580 that arises from a Western and particularly an Anglo way of understanding the world. What is your

00:01:48.940 reaction to that kind of general framework? Well, I think there is a small truth in that statement,

00:01:57.020 but it's also covered over with all kinds of qualifications that I think should be made that

00:02:06.760 although liberalism very definitely has a, among other points of origin, an English point of origin,

00:02:15.800 and one might say that that liberalism reaches its political apogee in England in the 19th century.

00:02:25.640 Its ideas go back to a much earlier time, and I think are much more widespread than the two guests

00:02:34.920 last week suggested. I would also, I would also indicate that I sometimes become annoyed when I hear

00:02:43.400 the word liberal simply used by people on a certain kind of right or counter-revolutionary right or

00:02:49.560 neol-reactionary right, making liberalism synonymous with everything they dislike.

00:02:54.920 I think my wife will take care of that, that phone call. I typically remind them

00:03:11.960 that liberalism, what they call liberalism, covers a lot of different political movements.

00:03:19.000 And although people today call themselves liberal, they use the term as a nice term for many people,

00:03:28.040 just as the term conservative is nice for other people, what they're describing has very little

00:03:33.240 to do with liberalism as it existed and was practiced in the 18th or 19th century. For instance,

00:03:40.760 liberals of the early 19th century definitely accepted gender roles, had no interest in having women vote,

00:03:48.600 believed in a restricted franchise with only those from the French called censitaires who paid a

00:03:56.520 certain amount of taxes, own property should be allowed to vote. They believed in open debate,

00:04:04.120 but only on certain subjects. And this would also apply to the founding fathers of the United States,

00:04:10.680 who believed in free speech, I think as Walter Burns proved in a book many years ago,

00:04:15.240 as it pertains to theological questions and political positions. They certainly did not believe that

00:04:22.840 people had a right to sell pornography or to attack traditional Judeo-Christian gender relations or how

00:04:31.000 people lived together. So that the liberalism only covered a very, very small list of what we would

00:04:38.760 call rights. And it did nothing to get rid of hierarchy, social hierarchy, which I thought was

00:04:45.640 actually good as long as careers were open to talent. And even that, I suppose, depended on whether you

00:04:53.320 were a man or a woman, whether you were a citizen of a country, whether you were a tax paying citizen,

00:04:59.240 and so forth. So that, in effect, liberalism meant something much more conservative, if I may use that

00:05:07.720 term, than anyone today would be suggesting by using the term liberal, even the term conservative.

00:05:14.680 Because 19th century liberals, who might describe as people who carried out the ideas of the bourgeoisie,

00:05:24.280 the property-educated classes at the time, were much more conservative than people are today.

00:05:32.680 And the right against which they were reacting were things like feudal aristocracy,

00:05:39.080 manorialism. In the case of France, the restriction of government positions to members of the aristocracy,

00:05:47.480 which could not be given to the roturier, the common lot, which was not only just the peasants,

00:05:54.440 but it included also the professional classes. So I think we have to be very careful in how we use

00:06:01.400 the word liberal. Another point that I think I've perhaps belabored more than I should, but it just

00:06:07.800 keeps coming up in my conversations with people, is that one should not confuse the seed of something

00:06:15.080 for the movement or the development that one is attacking. There's a very famous observation that

00:06:23.640 was made by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, that the really bad turn in Western philosophy,

00:06:29.480 what he calls Seinsvergessenheit, forgetting your being goes back to Socrates. It's also the same,

00:06:36.520 similar argument is made in Nietzsche. And Socrates believed that problems could be solved,

00:06:42.600 that we can deal with them rationally, and no longer believed in fate. And we know that Heidegger

00:06:49.400 and Nietzsche were very big on fate. That which is destined, which we accept, you know, not something

00:06:56.440 which we can rationally control and get rid of, which they see as, you know, part of a non-tragic

00:07:03.240 way of life or looking at the world. Well, I mean, you know, it's an interesting idea,

00:07:08.920 but I've, you know, I would not say that the beginning of managerial government goes back to

00:07:13.960 Socrates. You know, I mean, there's, or the arguments that I always hear against the Protestant

00:07:19.880 Reformation that, you know, you go from Martin Luther to wokeness, you know, in one move or something,

00:07:25.800 this is ridiculous, these arguments. I mean, there's all kinds of intervening circumstances,

00:07:32.120 you know, over a period of 500 years, by which you go from point A to point Z.

00:07:36.920 So I've never liked these facile generalizations about, you know, where a particular idea is going

00:07:44.440 to take you. And trying to father upon, you know, somebody who comes up with an idea you dislike 500

00:07:51.720 years ago, as the one responsible for the latest form of the left.

00:07:57.400 Yeah, there, there is a sense in which if you travel back far enough, you know, for instance,

00:08:01.880 the, you know, the idea that the Protestant Reformation is responsible for all of wokeness,

00:08:06.200 you know, this is something that is often pointed to. And it's like, well, if you go back

00:08:09.240 far enough, that means that the Catholic Church is responsible for all of wokeness. You know,

00:08:13.160 it's all about where you draw those lines. They would argue because it was a rebellion

00:08:17.720 against authority. Well, I couldn't imagine more authoritarian societies than 16th century

00:08:22.920 Lutheran societies, or the Swedish Lutheran state, or the Danish Lutheran state. You know,

00:08:28.360 I mean, there obviously are other factors that are much more decisive than the fact that Luther

00:08:33.560 rebelled against Rome. Well, then let's get into some of those factors,

00:08:38.440 because I think, as you say, the narrative that we usually hear when we're laying out this idea

00:08:43.240 is that liberalism, and I do think there's some truth to this, that that at some level,

00:08:49.400 the willingness to open up, put everything under the rational microscope, make everything something

00:08:55.560 that is a some at some level, a rational or even sometimes voluntary association, this necessarily

00:09:05.320 creates a level of liquidity in the, you know, the things are moving around, there's not enough

00:09:12.440 structure, there's not enough virginity, there's not enough hierarchy. And once you kind of open the

00:09:16.280 door to this, once all these things are kind of opened up to a public dialectic, this kind of thing,

00:09:20.840 an integrative debate, they're going to kind of just naturally shift to the left, because the right

00:09:26.360 tends to be kind of ordered, it tends to be about hierarchy, it tends to be about these fundamental

00:09:31.400 axioms, as where the left tends to be about renegotiating these things, moving them around.

00:09:36.600 And so I think for a lot of people, when they start to see this cultural movement that's breaking

00:09:41.160 down what were these harder structures in European society, they see this as the beginning of the

00:09:47.720 moves that lead us here. I don't think most people would look at John Locke and say, yes, of course,

00:09:52.680 he's for, you know, the new atheists trying to figure out if you should trans the children or not.

00:09:57.880 I think a lot of people would understand that these are very separate things. But I can understand

00:10:03.240 why they draw this causal line. What other factors besides liberalism itself, do you think kind of

00:10:09.480 led it down this path? Well, I think modern democracy, what I call mass democracy, which is not

00:10:15.880 tied to a particular nation or preserving a particular culture, but which sees, you know,

00:10:21.080 everybody in the world as a possible citizen with equal rights, who get equal benefits from the state,

00:10:27.160 the kind of thing that our conservative movement in the United States is now preaching as a

00:10:30.760 conservative position. I think this definitely plays a role. The development of the modern managerial

00:10:37.000 state, which claims to have scientific expertise of how government is run, and which identifies self

00:10:43.720 rule with the rule of experts, who usually do not hold traditional social or cultural values, usually

00:10:50.200 quite the opposite. I even wonder whether John Locke is a typical liberal. I think some of the arguments

00:10:59.080 made against Locke are probably correct. But again, we have to look upon him as a 17th century figure who

00:11:07.400 was heavily invested in the slave trade and, you know, who was really not, probably never viewed himself

00:11:13.880 as an egalitarian and was writing his tracks for levelers in England. As we know, he did not believe

00:11:29.560 that everybody should vote. And of course, citizenship in Locke does depend on being accepted by other

00:11:35.240 citizens, you know, as part of civil society. But the atomistic side, the atomistic materialistic side

00:11:43.240 of Locke, I think, makes him really a forerunner of a much more advanced stage of liberalism

00:11:50.040 than one typically finds in the 19th century. And in the 18th century England, I mean, Locke was

00:11:55.960 considered a radical in many ways. So I don't know if he's a typical liberal. I don't think John Stuart

00:12:01.960 Miller is a liberal. He was a social democrat and a feminist. Most liberals were not feminists. But

00:12:08.360 I do concede your idea that by breaking up, one might say, the hierarchical structure of what had

00:12:17.560 come down from medieval society, though it had changed a number of times from, let's say, the 12th to 13th

00:12:22.440 century. But by attacking the structure of authority, liberals were opening the door to more radical

00:12:31.000 change. I think that's true. They probably would not have seen themselves doing this, but I think that

00:12:35.880 was probably one of the effects, you know, of their politics. Of course, there are people who see,

00:12:43.960 you know, the great change in Western politics coming even earlier with monarchical consolidation

00:12:51.560 against feudal aristocracy. The Greek-German historian, Paniotis Condilis, in his book,

00:13:00.360 Conservativismus, does make that argument that, you know, what he sees as the left or the liberals

00:13:07.320 sort of start their work with the new monarchies, you know, which creates centralized government and

00:13:12.760 take away the power of the feudal and feudal aristocracy organize against this. And this Condilis sees as the,

00:13:19.640 you know, something long before the French Revolution that presages this liberal turn

00:13:27.560 in Western politics.

00:13:31.480 You know, we can look at someone like Thomas Carlyle railing against mass democracy.

00:13:36.920 And so I think these things have been linked in the minds of people for a long time. He was certainly,

00:13:42.520 many people will paint him as one of the first reactionaries against the Enlightenment.

00:13:48.360 And so do you think that liberalism, because you identified mass democracy as one of the

00:13:53.880 key forces here that drove liberalism this direction, but do you think liberalism is

00:13:58.040 inextricably linked to democracy? Is the kind of the telos of liberalism that inevitably leads us to

00:14:06.840 mass democracy?

00:14:08.280 Yeah, I think there's a love-hate relationship because the liberals talk about, you know,

00:14:14.360 equality before the law and giving everybody economically, everybody can enter the marketplace,

00:14:19.800 at least theoretically. And these are egalitarian ideas, but many European liberals fight doggedly

00:14:26.760 against extending the franchise, having a mass, mass franchise. And if you remember in England,

00:14:31.880 it was Disraeli who was the head of the Tory party, you know, who pushed the idea of manhood,

00:14:39.400 near manhood, universal manhood suffrage, not entirely universal, there still were requirements.

00:14:45.320 But he extended the franchise well beyond what most 19th century liberals wanted to do.

00:14:53.000 Although liberalism itself is going to change afterwards, it will move toward the left.

00:14:56.680 I mean, there's no question. So that by the end of the 19th century, liberals accept

00:15:03.400 something like a, you know, the transformation of a democratic order. And then, of course,

00:15:09.000 we know in England, the liberal party by the early 20th century becomes essentially a leftist party,

00:15:15.000 which, you know, becomes more and more leftist over time, you know, and it plays a principal role

00:15:21.000 in divesting the House of Lords of its power. So liberalism, we know, historically does become,

00:15:28.840 one might say, less hierarchical, less elitist over time and moves in this direction.

00:15:34.040 In the case of these reactionaries or neo-reactionaries today, they're not traditional conservatives.

00:15:41.320 I mean, that world has changed, right? And what they were doing is they are reacting against the left.

00:15:46.600 This is the argument that the right is essentially the group that organizes against the left,

00:15:52.520 just as paleo-conservatives are the group who organize against the neo-conservatives.

00:15:57.240 They're not, you know, they're not Southern agrarians or something like that.

00:16:01.720 So I think one has to understand these groups historically. You know, Thomas Carlyle does not

00:16:07.160 want to go back to, you know, 17th century or aristocracy. He liked Oliver Cromwell, by the way,

00:16:14.680 much better than Charles I, as we know. So, I mean, he basically is defending, you know,

00:16:20.600 an authoritarian reaction against what he sees as, you know, leveling government and predatory

00:16:28.680 capitalism in the 19th century, mid-19th century.

00:16:33.640 Well, let me put this question to you, the same one that I put to Dugan and Land. Do you feel that

00:16:39.160 ultimately, whatever this mutation of liberalism, whatever we'd like to call that, do you feel like

00:16:45.400 that was just the ideology that happened to be dominant at the time where managerialism and kind

00:16:53.400 of our current structure arose? And so it simply, they kind of facilitated each other and became

00:16:58.600 synonymous? Or is there something about liberalism that does need to kind of expand its hyper-rationalization,

00:17:07.000 its individualization, its tendency to open up things and, you know, pave the way for possible

00:17:13.480 globalization? Do you think that was an inevitable tie-in or was it just the ideology on top when

00:17:19.000 kind of modernity arrived?

00:17:21.000 No, I think that was an implication or a seed contained within the original liberalism.

00:17:26.280 But if you were to ask a person, you know, in the, Alexander Hamilton, for instance,

00:17:32.760 to do a favor, you probably could not even have seen these developments.

00:17:36.600 But I would agree with you, there are ideas that are extracted from the corpus of liberal principle,

00:17:43.480 uh, which find their way into, uh, uh, into Deweyite, uh, uh, left liberalism and into the New Deal

00:17:54.360 and into all these, the, uh, John Rawls, who defends a kind of almost desiccated John Locke,

00:18:00.200 which he's trying to use, you know, to justify a more extensive egalitarian welfare state.

00:18:06.280 So there are ideas that you can extract from liberalism that lead in that direction.

00:18:11.080 Of course, one can also extract things from Catholicism, you know, that justifies open borders

00:18:16.520 and, uh, what else, uh, uh, redistributionist economics and, uh, you know, it, it depends on

00:18:24.600 what you're looking for, you know, and the tradition which you want to exploit to push your own, uh,

00:18:29.320 contemporary ideas. But I, I do concede there, there is at least the germ of what you're talking

00:18:35.480 about the liberalism. I think someone like Max Weber saw that when he spoke about, uh,

00:18:40.040 Welt in Salvo, the kind of world disenchantment, which comes from rationalization that, that owes its

00:18:47.080 origin to liberalism. Although Weber himself was a liberal, a German liberal, but I, I think,

00:18:52.760 I think he understood that connection. I think there is one, but I think that it gets exaggerated,

00:18:58.440 vastly exaggerated. And there's an attempt to father much later developments. We, we would

00:19:05.880 both consider deplorable political developments on people living hundreds of years ago.

00:19:11.160 And, uh, that's what I'm saying though liberal idea, well, there, you know, there is, there's

00:19:16.360 more than one liberal idea. There are a number of liberal ideas. Um, but you know, certain ideas

00:19:22.280 do get carried over. I mean, I, I think part of it is that there is a recognition that liberalism is

00:19:28.200 nice. You know, the enlightenment is nice. We want to help everybody. We want to, we want to free

00:19:33.160 everybody. Liberalism is about freedom. So that you get people like John Dewey coming along and,

00:19:39.160 gee, we like, we like freedom. So we are liberals. Um, or, you know, other, other people where they now

00:19:46.440 have these, uh, uh, these liberals like Barry Weiss and others who are, uh, talking about preserving

00:19:53.400 the liberal heritage, which is now under attack. Well, I mean, to me, they don't represent the

00:19:58.600 liberal heritage. They represent a desiccated liberalism, which takes certain liberal ideas

00:20:04.680 and throws other ones away. And, uh, which wants to preserve against people who are even more radical.

00:20:10.840 I mean, I, I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure that I see, uh, uh, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville

00:20:18.280 or Lord Byron or not Lord Byron. Um, uh, some of the, some of the, some of the liberal thinkers of

00:20:25.400 the early 19th century or the 18th century, uh, Alexander Hamilton, Madison. I don't see any of these

00:20:31.240 people, uh, in, in the people who now use in the intellectuals and journalists who now use the term

00:20:37.240 liberal, uh, because it's become so far removed from the society and the moral context in which

00:20:43.960 liberalism developed that, uh, I think the relationship has become increasingly tenuous.

00:20:49.000 When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch airlines ticket takes you to more than just

00:20:54.360 your destination. It takes you to winding streets, spontaneous detours, and the realization that

00:21:01.320 neither of you is actually good with directions. Recalculating route. And when the final shortcut

00:21:07.080 taken isn't exactly short, welcome aboard KLM Royal Dutch. Our crew is here to give you a trip home

00:21:13.640 that goes just as planned. KLM Royal Dutch airlines. When you travel, travel well.

00:21:21.320 It's apparently to apparent to a large percentage, I think, uh, of conservatives at this point that

00:21:29.800 something has gone awry, but for many of them, they're still not sure what I was recently having

00:21:35.160 discussions with, you know, some, some decently, uh, up there state level leaders for different

00:21:41.160 Republican causes. And they were very excited about people like Barry Weiss. This is momentum.

00:21:46.520 This is victory. They were talking, they were saying things like the nebocrats will never win another

00:21:51.480 nationwide contest again, uh, because of, of the kind of the situation that they find themselves in.

00:21:57.240 And it was a little comical because, you know, whenever I talk to these people and I've been,

00:22:03.880 you know, both of us have been called, of course, the woke right for, for pointing this out.

00:22:07.800 Uh, but, but I, I let them know, you know, the things that you are defending are in no way

00:22:13.240 conservative. They in no way, uh, reflect anything that the founders believed or any of the values

00:22:19.080 that they held. And they will tell me, oh, well, the founders, you know, that the seed of the

00:22:25.080 American idea was there at the founding, but we perfected it over time, right? Like the founders,

00:22:30.520 you know, they, they, you know, yes, they had the, the all men are created equal in these lines,

00:22:35.000 but we still had slavery. And so we had to work that out and over time, and I'm trying to explain

00:22:39.160 them. You realize that you're just explaining progressivism, right? Like you're, you're talking

00:22:42.920 about how you morally progressed along this line. And so you're a conservative arguing for

00:22:49.240 progressive, uh, progressive stance. Why is it so difficult? What was it? Where was the

00:22:54.600 transformation in just, it seems so radical, especially in the last 50 or so years that

00:23:00.680 conservatism has basically adopted Bill Clinton style liberalism at best. In fact, I think it's to

00:23:06.680 the left of Bill Clinton style liberalism, but they present this as like the founding beliefs of guys

00:23:12.280 who, you know, were, were writing different legal documents in the 1790s. It's just so disconnected.

00:23:17.640 It's almost amazing. Yeah. Well, one of our, uh, young editors,

00:23:22.200 John Howden just wrote something. I, I don't think I'll be divulging any secrets by mentioning the

00:23:27.080 content of what he wrote, but he points out that the, uh, that the Democrats, uh, the, the conservatives

00:23:33.880 today, particularly the boomer conservatives beat up on the Democrats because they're the real racist.

00:23:39.720 They're not the, we are the progressives, you know, and you are the party of John C. Calhoun and

00:23:44.840 Jefferson. I hear this on Fox just about every day now. Um, well, the fact is that if they're

00:23:50.040 appealing to the black people, they don't care about this. They have no idea who this is. They

00:23:54.440 know that, you know, blacks are white, say that whites are racist and they, they like to exploit that,

00:24:00.040 uh, that position. And many do feel resentment against whites, but they really, they, they're also

00:24:05.320 Democrats and they happened since 1936 in the United States. So they're, they're, they're, they're,

00:24:10.360 they're not, uh, going to hate the Democrats because there was some dude living 200 years

00:24:14.920 ago, owned a slave and was a member of the democratic party. But I think it makes, it makes

00:24:19.320 these Republican boomer Republicans feel good about themselves. You know, we are really on

00:24:25.320 the progressive side, the Democrats, you see, they're the party of segregation and we're the

00:24:29.960 party of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. And everything was sort of great in this

00:24:34.920 country. And my, my, it was great up until when, and well, you know, until I don't know, they began

00:24:41.800 doing, uh, sex change operations on kids or until DI went too far, but there is a, a, a refusal to

00:24:50.600 recognize that a things have been going in this direction for a long time, you know, and some of

00:24:57.080 the things you're praising were actually like the civil rights movement, you know, appointed the United

00:25:02.040 States very definitely in this direction. It created, you know, state agencies, administration

00:25:07.400 to look into our souls or, uh, what is the term Elizabeth the first used that we're not, you know,

00:25:14.520 um, uh, trying to be windows into people's souls. So that's exactly what the government is doing

00:25:20.760 and which the Republicans think is great. It's just the Democrats are being, you know, are still the

00:25:25.000 party of slavery. Um, and the, the, the other, the other thing that they, they do not recognize is that

00:25:31.240 is what they're embracing is essentially leftist positions. What there's, what they're saying at

00:25:35.640 the end of the day is that the, the Democrats are really the, uh, really the fascist right-wing

00:25:41.240 party. Um, they really have no, um, uh, no sense of all the progress that we've made was with the

00:25:48.040 progressive party, with the true progressive party. Now, if, if, if that is the conservative

00:25:53.000 position, it's certainly not conservative, nor is it part of the right, which is the right being

00:25:58.120 post-conservative by my definitions. Um, it is, it is an art, it is an argument that the

00:26:04.360 Democrats are hypocrites, you know, and they're not really as progressive as Republicans are.

00:26:11.880 So when it comes to the civil rights act, uh, I've had this debate with several people at this point,

00:26:18.840 I think there is a growing consensus across even some mainstream, uh, commentators that the civil

00:26:27.000 rights act is a problem. Um, there are two minds about this. I'm one of these people who says it

00:26:32.600 just needs to go. It just needs to be thrown out. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's the alternative

00:26:37.560 constitution of the United States. It's inherently destructive. You're basically just giving the

00:26:42.040 government this blank check to be able to walk into the personal lives of every human being in the

00:26:48.040 United States. It's basically Soviet style thought police, uh, but that we've just kind of said is okay

00:26:53.400 because of political correctness. Now on the other side of that, I've had guys like Chris Ruffo,

00:26:58.440 who again has acknowledged the problems of the civil rights act. He's not saying it's not an issue,

00:27:02.360 but he says we need to leave. Um, I think he said something to the effect of a night watchman,

00:27:07.760 uh, civil rights regime in place because, uh, the racism has become so anti white and anti Jewish and

00:27:16.280 anti Asian now that we still need this government apparatus and we just need to move it the other

00:27:21.680 direction. Now I'm certainly happy with Harmie Dillon changing the way that the civil rights

00:27:26.400 division works. Uh, you know, she's certainly doing much better work there that has been done

00:27:31.360 in a long time, but I am worried that by leaving that infrastructure in place, you are ultimately

00:27:37.120 just opening up this, uh, you know, an inevitable return, uh, to this being weaponized against the

00:27:43.200 right. What are your thoughts on, uh, keeping the civil rights act around in an attempt to stop anti

00:27:48.400 white racism? No, I don't think it's going to work that way. Um, I, I also don't like the whole

00:27:54.160 like concept behind it, that somehow the state has a right to, as I said, to, you know, um, uh,

00:28:00.320 have windows into our souls. I don't like that. Um, I also do not like, uh, the state telling me

00:28:06.960 what I must do with my house, my property, because it very quickly, it moves, you know, into, into laws

00:28:12.560 against speech and hate speech and so forth, which we already have in many states and, uh, property

00:28:19.120 rights go, uh, freedom of expression goes, and, and this has happened very, very quickly in the

00:28:25.200 United States. Uh, it's, it's not that you pass the civil rights act in 1964 and then all these

00:28:31.040 things happen 60 years later. No, it's like almost overnight that, that you get a chain of developments,

00:28:37.520 you know, leading into a, an oppressive anti-discrimination regime. You know, it's

00:28:42.720 happening by 1965. You already have affirmative action even then. Um, my, my, my, my view of this,

00:28:50.480 uh, is that one does not have to defend segregation, Jim Crow, any of these things. You can say, in fact,

00:28:57.840 there were, you know, blacks, blacks were treated in, in an unfair discriminatory fashion, um, in 1950,

00:29:04.880 1940, whenever you want to start it. Um, but the laws that were passed to deal with this,

00:29:11.680 uh, were in many cases overkill and you can't get rid of their, their effects. I mean, they,

00:29:16.080 we, we simply have to deal with, with what they have produced, the government bureaucracies,

00:29:20.880 the civil rights commission. And I think, although I like Chris a great deal and I, I like his scholarship,

00:29:27.440 um, I'm afraid I can't agree with him. I think the best thing would be to simply to get rid of this

00:29:32.560 stuff that, which means the Democrats have, God forbid, they ever come back into power because

00:29:37.360 they are, they are left wing totalitarians. Now, uh, they will, they will simply re try to reenact

00:29:42.960 this and you'll, you'll get it, you know, you'll have to get it once again, all the things they did

00:29:48.160 before. Uh, otherwise they would have to go through the, the motions of passing new laws, which would,

00:29:54.400 which would, which would take some time. But, you know, I, I, to me the, uh, an analogy that,

00:30:00.320 that comes to mind is the French revolution that I'm willing to concede that before the French

00:30:07.200 revolution, uh, uh, peasants were forced to perform these corvets, these labor duties. This was wrong.

00:30:14.480 I'm happy they, you know, that, uh, uh, manorial obligations were removed in France. This is fine.

00:30:21.920 But the French revolution was a horror. It resulted in millions of deaths. It, it, it, you know,

00:30:27.520 it even had a bad effect on France economically, politically, and in other ways. Um, so when,

00:30:34.240 when, when, when doesn't have to, um, uh, express jubilation, uh, about, you know, uh, attempts to

00:30:43.040 remedy past evils, um, if, if these remedies, uh, uh, result in a loss of freedom, have dangerous,

00:30:52.000 dangerous cunts. And I think the civil rights revolution has, I also see that the, the, uh, uh,

00:30:59.120 the, the requirement that we treat blacks and women equal, whatever this, you know, this,

00:31:04.560 but the 64 civil rights require, I see this going, going very quickly into laws, but homosexuals,

00:31:11.600 then laws about trans, just move from one to the other. You know, it's before you can blink your eyes,

00:31:17.440 you're, you're going from one to the other because you already have these agencies in place and you

00:31:22.880 have created a sense of guilt among nor in the normal white Christian population of this country.

00:31:28.640 They did something horrible back then. You know, we have to spend the rest of our life atoning.

00:31:33.200 It's unlimited atonement, you know, for this, uh, this terrible thing. Uh, uh, yesterday I heard

00:31:40.000 the speech that was given by Kamala Harris. I don't know if you remember this when we, we, we, uh,

00:31:45.120 the Biden administration decided to give us indigenous people today instead of Columbus

00:31:49.760 birthday. And she was going on just ranting against these white Europeans and what terrible

00:31:54.800 people they were. And, you know, I'm thinking that what would happen if somebody gave a similar

00:32:01.200 speech about Jews in Israel, how they react, they'd be indignant and justifiably so, by the way,

00:32:08.480 or Japanese, you committed all these. But I, I, I think that, that much of the white

00:32:14.240 Christian population in America has become masochistic. You know, they, they, they seem

00:32:19.120 almost to revel in guilt, um, or, or, or, or impose this guilt on others whom they don't like,

00:32:25.520 you know, ascribe this guilt to other white, uh, Christians. Um, but I, I, I thought her speech

00:32:31.200 was shocking, you know, and yet we, we got the indigenous people. They took Trump to get rid of it

00:32:36.320 and go back to Columbus day. Um, but you know, I, I think all of this comes out of the era of the

00:32:41.680 civil rights movement and the intent to lay guilt trip on us, which has been going on for decades

00:32:47.680 now. So, uh, you know, the, the more you can get rid of this at this point, the better. I don't

00:32:53.360 think we're going to go back to being a segregated society. If we get anything like that, that's,

00:32:58.560 that's not likely to happen. Um, so, uh, whatever limited good they may have done, you know, they,

00:33:05.360 they, they've already performed. And now, now I agree with you. I mean, the, the effects of these laws

00:33:10.880 are just, just, just odious. So one of the concepts that I've become fascinated in,

00:33:16.800 and I see it across many different authors now, um, is this idea of obviously, you know, traditions

00:33:24.320 and, uh, ways of being, being particular to different nations, different peoples, but as they

00:33:32.640 expand, as they tend to embrace an imperial life cycle of civilizations, every civilization seems to want

00:33:39.680 to test itself to expand at some level to enforce its will on those around them. Um, and as that

00:33:46.800 occurs, uh, it, we obviously have to change and shift that mode of being that way of being, it has

00:33:54.160 to expand out. You need to start codifying it formally in documents and spreading it through

00:33:59.440 rules and standardizations and things to make the empire, these kinds of things work. And as that

00:34:05.920 occurs, it seems to alter significantly that way of being. Once it expands beyond the original

00:34:11.600 population that was supposed to live in that way, it seems to have a deleterious impact. I think both

00:34:16.560 Lugan, Dugan and Land were expressing this kind of Heideggerian idea of civilizational Daseins,

00:34:23.440 right? And the way in which, uh, once, once those move beyond their natural boundaries, they start,

00:34:28.720 they start to warp. And so my question for you is, is, is that liberalism just going through the

00:34:38.000 inevitable progression of any way of being that becomes an abstract ideology that has to be spread

00:34:44.320 over an empire or did the modernization of the managerial class and its ability to scale things

00:34:52.080 beyond make this process even more radical in this iteration in the liberal expansion than perhaps

00:34:58.960 it would have been in something, say, the Roman empire? Is there, is there some interaction with

00:35:03.360 those different forces that kind of has led us to the current, the current outcome?

00:35:07.360 Yeah, I, I think I'd give an answer that you'd give that this, uh, that managerialization

00:35:13.760 begins in the liberal era. Um, and, uh, liberals were not really anti-managerial. Um, if you read Hegel

00:35:23.600 or other people writing about Hegel was a liberal, I suppose, in the German political context. Um, uh,

00:35:30.800 but if, if you, if you read, uh, others talking about manager, uh, from like, uh, in France who spoke

00:35:38.080 about the bureaucracy as la classe capacitaire, you know, the ones with capability or they're part of

00:35:43.920 the class capacitaire, which would embrace the, you know, the, the educated bourgeoisie. And there was

00:35:49.760 nothing to fear because, you know, they, they, they would operate within a, within a limited sphere

00:35:54.720 of authority. Um, and they would, um, make govern more, they would make government fairer. We have a,

00:36:01.280 you know, also, uh, in 1881, uh, an act by which we create a government or a federal bureaucracy

00:36:07.840 in the United States. It was not seen at, you know, in the 19th century to be something that

00:36:12.640 would absorb, engulf, you know, everything sees power, which is what it's, what it's done. But,

00:36:18.560 you know, people living back then did not really see this happening. And it's only the 20th century

00:36:25.280 that this becomes a serious problem. Right. And then of course, with the progressive era,

00:36:30.000 and then with social democracy and so forth, there's a glorification of managerial rule,

00:36:34.960 which I point out in my book after liberalism. Um, so this, this is not something that was

00:36:40.960 necessarily part of the original liberal package, but it was a development which early liberals didn't

00:36:47.840 fear at all. It was fine. You know, people like themselves would manage the government. It would be

00:36:54.320 kept out of the hands of the, uh, of, of, of the rabble because they were afraid of mass democracy.

00:36:59.760 Right. You know, and this would prevent mass democracy. Um, so, I mean, of course,

00:37:05.280 what it would do is you have, I argue, you have an alliance of managerialism and mass democracy

00:37:10.560 that results in this sort of globalist monstrosity in the end. But there's, I'm afraid liberals in the

00:37:16.240 19th century did not see this. And I think the managerialization of the world, uh, you know,

00:37:21.840 things that Burnham and others began talking about, you know, in the 19, uh, 1940s, 1950s,

00:37:27.680 this has occurred. And, uh, what I would argue has made the situation even worse is that the managerial

00:37:34.400 class, uh, has bought into various post-Christian, egalitarian, um, uh, homogenizing ideologies,

00:37:43.600 wokeness being the, being the, uh, the, the most recent, and I think in many ways, the most pernicious.

00:37:50.160 Um, so that in order to be a democracy, you must have a managerial state,

00:37:55.040 and you must have woke ideology. Otherwise you, you don't make, you can't join the democracy club

00:37:59.600 anymore. Right. I mean, uh, so Hungary, which is, you know, a traditional Christian democratic

00:38:05.760 government or something is, is, is anti-democratic and fascist. So Slovakia now, probably the Czech

00:38:11.680 Republic will be soon, Serbia and this, because you have to have all this wokeness and gay instruction

00:38:18.080 in school because it's part of the democracy package. Um, but this, I think also comes with

00:38:23.520 managerial rule because it is the state managers and more recently, of course, the media, uh, which is

00:38:30.800 also part, part of the ruling class, um, or the power block, they call the power block. Uh, they

00:38:37.520 pushed this ideology, you know, that this is the post-Christian religion that managerial government,

00:38:43.440 which is the true democracy is going to, is, is now imposing on us.

00:38:49.600 So the other thing that I wanted to touch on with you today, uh, is a man that some people will,

00:38:55.600 uh, blame, uh, directly for this idea of neoliberalism or globalizing liberalism,

00:39:04.400 turning us into a, a global liberal, uh, empire is Leo Strauss. Uh, now I have read a couple of

00:39:12.720 Leo Strauss books, a few of his essays on, uh, Carl Schmidt and others. I'm not in any way,

00:39:18.400 uh, you know, scholar of this guy, but I'm somewhat familiar with what's going on. I know that you wrote

00:39:23.200 a book on this. I apologize. I have not been able to get to it yet. I have a mountain of reading,

00:39:27.200 but it will, it will, it will be, it will be read. Um, but I wanted to pick your brain on this

00:39:32.240 because I've run into a lot of Straussians, you know, now that I'm, I'm, I'm more in these, uh, circles.

00:39:38.800 And I, I guess maybe just, uh, your opening thoughts on Leo Strauss and why he became such

00:39:48.320 a critical part of some percentage of the intellectual, uh, conservative movement.

00:39:54.000 Yeah. His, his fame, I think, uh, is entirely American, you know, as, as I argue in my book

00:40:01.280 on Leo Strauss in the, in the conservative movement, uh, and, uh, he, uh, uh, rises to a

00:40:08.000 level of fame here that he probably never would have, would have attained had he stayed in Germany,

00:40:13.440 had he survived the war or gone back there because he appeals to what become dominant concerns and

00:40:21.360 themes in the post-war period. And which is already, uh, when I say unveiled in his Walgreens lectures

00:40:29.440 that he gives the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, the, the enemies that we fight,

00:40:34.720 uh, whether it's communism, fascism, uh, Burkean conservatism is also thrown in with these, uh,

00:40:41.680 these bad things, uh, these things are historicism and relativism and positivism. These are all bad

00:40:49.440 things. And, uh, uh, uh, the, the, the, the attempt to, to understand morality, uh, moral questions as

00:40:59.840 being relative to a particular age, um, or, or treating them just as, or treating liberal democracy

00:41:06.160 as just another form of government. Uh, this, uh, this is the source of our troubles. It's the,

00:41:14.080 you know, it's nihilistic. It shows the breakdown, uh, of those, uh, those, those moral principles

00:41:21.120 and beliefs that made America a great country in the past. And the beliefs in the United States,

00:41:26.800 which made us great in the past is that is the found in the declaration of independence

00:41:32.160 and in the belief in natural right, uh, the natural right in history is because his lectures

00:41:38.720 and, uh, the good people are the ones who believe in natural right. The bad people are like me who

00:41:44.400 believe in history and historicism as, as I've learned from the way the Straussians have treated

00:41:49.680 me throughout my life. But, um, the, uh, uh, these are very popular themes in the post-war period.

00:41:57.600 And I, I was, uh, surprised, you know, looking at some of the old issues of national review,

00:42:03.040 um, how all these Straussian things are there. You know, the communists are positivists,

00:42:07.760 relativists, historicists. Hegel, Marx, they're historicists.

00:42:13.360 Sorry to, sorry to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt, but I, it might help the audience to

00:42:19.520 define some of these terms. I've read natural right in history, but some of this might blow

00:42:23.200 past a few of them. So right. Yeah. No, I, uh, yeah, that all truths are relative to the period

00:42:29.920 of time in which you're living and to the historical conditions that have came there. Right. So that,

00:42:35.280 uh, uh, I mean, Carl Schmitt may have summarized this best when he said, uh,

00:42:41.280 an historical truth is true only once, historical truths are true only once, uh, which means they

00:42:51.520 don't last. Of course, Schmitt meant in a different sense, but, you know, Strauss, Strauss argued that,

00:42:57.920 you know, that this is really the devil, you know, that, that, uh, to, to believe that,

00:43:03.280 you know, that all men are created equal is only true at one time, uh, or it's just one truth among

00:43:09.920 other truths. Um, you know, it's sort of the end of American morality. And in, in political thought,

00:43:17.040 he traces us back to Machiavelli, uh, who changes, one might say all of the, uh, traditional frames

00:43:24.880 of reference in political philosophy by saying that success in Machiavelli, which is resourcefulness,

00:43:33.520 this, these are the things that count and not morality. So, you know, Machiavelli was a teacher

00:43:39.520 of evil, according to Strauss. And most of the people in the, you know, National Review believe that.

00:43:45.280 I was looking at some correspondence, uh, uh, involving Frank Meyer, Buckley, others,

00:43:52.160 and they all agree that, you know, Machiavelli is the source of our nation because he did not,

00:43:58.560 uh, he was not, uh, he did not hold certain moral truths, uh, as being indisputable and being eternal

00:44:05.040 in their application. And of course, for Strauss, it is the, it is natural right and the declaration of

00:44:11.120 independence, which defines America's spiritual identity. So people did resonate to these positions,

00:44:17.440 you know, back then. And you also got particularly among Catholic conservatives who were very important

00:44:23.280 in the 1950s and sixties, uh, Catholic conservatives were very much concerned about relativism. This is

00:44:29.360 the big problem. You listen to Bishop Fulton Sheen, one of the early, you know, conservative Catholic TV

00:44:35.360 stars. He was always railing against relativism. Uh, and this is what, and positivism, you know,

00:44:41.920 was the belief that, uh, uh, uh, one can separate moral values from, um, from scientific truths or

00:44:50.640 things you could agree on, you know, um, outside of, uh, outside of a moral context.

00:44:56.480 Uh, I go through all of this, by the way, in my, in, in, uh, tiresome perhaps tiresome detail with my

00:45:02.480 book on Leo Strauss. You can't miss that. I try to refute all of these, all of these charges, uh,

00:45:08.800 but there's no question that they have a powerful influence on the conservative movement. Also, if you

00:45:14.720 remember, Strauss was somebody who fled the Nazi regime, he was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime.

00:45:20.640 So citing him, you know, um, showed that these people on the right were not really, you know,

00:45:26.480 pro Nazi or pro fascist. And here was a victim of, of Nazism, you know, who was expressing these

00:45:32.720 ideas for us. So he, he, he does have enormous influence on, uh, when I say the conservative

00:45:40.320 revival or the, the new conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s. And, uh, he has a job at the university,

00:45:47.760 uh, at the university of Chicago that allows him to train, uh, a lot of thinkers, uh, professors,

00:45:54.480 writers, um, who reflected his views. So the, you know, we're still dealing with Straussians even now.

00:46:01.920 In fact, there were East and West coast Straussians. We had the Chicago school,

00:46:06.240 they're not really quite East coast, but the Chicago school, uh, followed, uh, Alan Bloom,

00:46:11.920 Thomas Pangle. There were, there were others in this group and, um, uh, Harvey Mansfield.

00:46:18.800 They're one group of Straussians and a West coast, uh, a group of Straussians who were, uh,

00:46:24.640 students of Harry Jaffa at Claremont. And, uh, they differ on certain questions. Um, uh, as I say,

00:46:33.120 most of the East coast Straussians are Jewish. Most of the West coast Straussians are Catholic,

00:46:37.680 when finds very few Protestants among them. Um, for, for a, for a reason, I think that my friend,

00:46:44.000 Barry Shane once gave that, um, uh, both Catholic, neither Catholics nor Jews want to admit that

00:46:51.680 America had a Protestant founding. It was founded by prices. I've noticed this.

00:46:57.520 I've noticed this. So that, you know, they, they, they, they can be part of the,

00:47:03.440 they can be part of the founding now. And of course the founding of America has to do with,

00:47:08.320 with universal rights for them. Right. I mean, the, uh, because, you know, you cannot say that

00:47:13.600 these rights only obtain to, uh, you know, white American male property holders, they have to be

00:47:20.000 universal. Right. And the argument that Straussians and the Republican party now make is that, um, uh,

00:47:27.920 we only became fully American or became fully, um, cognizant of our founding when we recognized

00:47:35.280 the universality of these principles. We couldn't have slavery. Everybody had men, women, everybody

00:47:39.920 had to be equal. And you've, you know, you've heard these arguments before, so I won't bore you

00:47:45.440 by repeating them. So I guess we'll put aside the irony that ultimately the Straussians are the

00:47:53.360 most progressive conservatives available in this sense. Right. Um, but, but just getting to the

00:47:58.880 question of natural right and relativism, can you explain if there is any difference between what

00:48:05.120 people mean by natural right and natural law? And also can you explain, can, can you explore the idea

00:48:12.800 that ultimately this, uh, you know, uh, moral relativism can lead to progressivism because if

00:48:19.200 none of these things are fixed, none of them eternal, there, there is no ultimate truth in

00:48:23.760 morality, then can't you just rearrange society however you want to create gay marriage and

00:48:28.720 trans kids and all of that stuff? Yeah. I, I think you've brought in several different,

00:48:33.600 you know, operative terms here. Uh, first of all, let me say that not all Straussians are

00:48:38.560 politically on the left. Most east coast ones are now, there are many of them support Kamala Harris

00:48:44.320 and Biden and they hate Trump, you know, generally. And many of them have joined the liberal wing of

00:48:50.080 the democratic party of Max Boot, uh, Bill Kristol and others. But the west coast Straussians at Claremont

00:48:57.600 are the ones who are mostly Catholic are quite conservative on contemporary issues. Uh, although

00:49:03.760 their founder, Harry Jaffa was Jewish, but I think his wife was Catholic and, uh, they very definitely

00:49:09.520 had a, had a predominantly Catholic following and they are conservative in American politics.

00:49:15.040 Conservative populace, they almost to a man or a woman support Trump. But getting, getting back to

00:49:22.560 these, these other questions, um, do I, do I believe that relative, well, first of all, natural law is

00:49:28.960 different from natural right. Although there are some people who would argue that one flows into the

00:49:33.840 other. I don't see the connection between the two. Uh, natural law is about moral obligations that we

00:49:40.960 have that, uh, are derived from human reason, from our reasoning faculty as human beings. And which, uh,

00:49:49.280 I suppose, uh, Catholics would say, or high church Anglicans conforms to the divine law. Um,

00:49:56.720 so they're talking about moral, also their moral obligations that make you part of the community.

00:50:04.160 Right. They, they, they assume our social nature. Natural right does not assume our social nature.

00:50:10.400 Um, uh, and what, what natural right assumes is that every individual is born with certain, um,

00:50:20.080 certain rights or entitlements. I have a right to life, to liberty, uh, to, to other things because

00:50:27.280 the, as I've argued, the list continues to expand. So it goes well beyond, and then of course the

00:50:32.880 pursuit of happiness, right? It can mean any number of things I would think, right? So it's sort of,

00:50:38.960 sort of open-ended rights with which we're born and come into this world, not as a member of society,

00:50:44.880 as somebody's son or daughter, or as members of a community, but as an isolated individual,

00:50:50.560 you have those rights. So I, I think it is much more atomizing than that, than the concept of natural

00:50:56.320 law, which is ultimately Aristotelian and which develops, uh, in the late or in the high middle ages.

00:51:03.360 Um, the, uh, the other question is, do I believe that, uh, relativism, uh, leads to

00:51:13.200 openness to change or doing anything you want? No, I don't believe that at all. And I'll tell

00:51:19.360 you why I don't believe there are a moral relativist. I've never met a moral relativist,

00:51:24.080 uh, unless a person is using some kind of relativist, uh, tool to undermine my morality,

00:51:32.160 to undermine my positions. Like, you know, how can you believe in God? You know,

00:51:35.600 this isn't, of course that person does have, you know, uh, usually, uh, his, uh, his or her own agenda.

00:51:43.760 So someone, someone who, you know, says, I don't believe in God and I don't believe in morals and

00:51:49.760 every individual creates them. And you find the same person believes in gay marriage, you know,

00:51:54.240 as a moral imperative. Well, that person is not a relativist. That person is a, is a moral absolutist,

00:52:00.640 usually a moral fanatic. Unfortunately, they have the, you know, their, their morals are the opposite

00:52:05.440 of what people traditionally have believed, but I don't, I just don't see relativism, you know,

00:52:11.360 at work. Um, I, I think one has to distinguish, and I think the late Sidney Hook made this distinction

00:52:17.360 between relative, relativity or relativism and relationalism. Like I see things related,

00:52:24.240 I'm not a moral relativist certainly, but I think, I see things related to each other. And I insist

00:52:30.640 that, you know, when we talk about certain things, we contextualize them. We understand them in terms

00:52:35.840 of an historical period where people believed at that time and so forth. That doesn't make me a moral

00:52:40.960 relativist, however. So obviously the narrative about Leo Strauss, the way that it goes is that due to

00:52:50.480 his emphasis on esoteric writing and the noble lie, uh, and due to the idea that you can universalize all

00:52:58.960 of these American values, his intellectual work kind of created the synthesis that generated the

00:53:05.280 neoconservatives who felt that they could lie their way into wars because ultimately is worth it to

00:53:10.480 create the universal, uh, you know, liberal American empire and bring democracy and all of the benefits

00:53:16.640 of the constitution to all of these different people. Do you feel that story is correct? Because

00:53:22.080 I've spoken to several Strauss scholars and they're deeply offended by the idea that ultimately this is

00:53:26.960 where Strauss's, uh, thought has to lead, that perhaps it is the disciples of Strauss that ultimately are

00:53:33.360 responsible for this. Or do you think there really is something at the heart of Strauss's philosophy that

00:53:38.960 will bring us to neoconservatives?

00:53:41.280 Yeah, I, I, I think that, uh, you know, some Straussians a lot like the Lake Stanley Rosen would

00:53:48.480 have been utterly offended by these ideas, but he was a devotee of Leo Strauss. So, I mean, it is

00:53:54.320 possible to be a devotee of Leo Strauss without believing these things. I mean, it's quite possible,

00:54:00.240 you know, to be in many ways, a disciple of Carl Schmitt and to regret his decision to join the Nazi

00:54:06.160 party in 1933. Um, I don't think that Schmitt's ideas inevitably led in that, in that direction.

00:54:13.120 Um, I think, I think there is a great deal in Strauss that might push one in that direction,

00:54:19.600 particularly if you look at who his disciples are. And that's what I do in my book that, you know,

00:54:24.240 they, his disciples usually have certain concerns. Um, the, the, the, the ones who were closest to him,

00:54:30.880 uh, were predominantly Jewish. Many of them had memories of the Holocaust, you know,

00:54:36.000 it's something that stayed with them. They were fanatically pro-Israel. Um, and, you know,

00:54:41.520 they saw America as being a country that protected them because it had these universal values,

00:54:47.120 uh, universal democratic, egalitarian values, whatever. And what they did was they, uh, well,

00:54:54.560 they were attracted to Strauss because I think they saw that at the core of what he was teaching

00:54:59.360 and they emphasized those values in their own political and moral positions.

00:55:04.640 And this, I argue, was true not only the Jews among them, was true of Walter Burns,

00:55:09.040 was true of Harvey Mansfield and others who were not Jewish, who also attracted the same,

00:55:14.160 the same political body of ideas. I do remember that when the neoconservatives came along, I spoke

00:55:19.760 to Strauss and I met was a neoconservative. I mean, it's, it's like telling me that, you know,

00:55:26.880 the people who opposed the war in Vietnam were just conservative isolationists. Well,

00:55:31.200 no, that's not true. I mean, having lived through that, let me tell you, almost everybody I met was

00:55:35.840 pro-communist, you know, and it'd be, all the opponents, I mean, in graduate school,

00:55:40.640 you know, they were all pro-communist, you know. So the same thing with the Straussians, you can say,

00:55:45.040 well, it's theoretically possible, you know, to take these positions, uh, on political philosophy,

00:55:52.080 or hermeneutics, or, you know, how you read text and so forth. But for some reason, the same types of

00:55:58.160 personalities kept popping up, you know, people with the same, the same concerns who were drawn to Strauss.

00:56:04.640 And as I argue, you find some of these ideas also in Strauss. I mean, Strauss was,

00:56:09.360 was passionately Zionist, obsessively Zionist. Um, he also was a great fan of, you know, Churchill

00:56:18.400 and these people, you know, who fought the Nazis. It was very important. And to him, morality in the

00:56:24.240 United States meant upholding, upholding natural right and, uh, universalizing these crews.

00:56:30.640 So where do you think Strauss's overall body of work fits? Do you think that it's, it's,

00:56:39.920 you can see Strauss as a good scholar, a careful reader. Do you think he ultimately has a significant

00:56:47.120 contribution to, uh, philosophy on its own? Do you think that the Straussian project as understood by

00:56:54.000 East Coast or West Coast has, uh, a greater value? Or do you think that he is someone that's an overall

00:57:00.000 detriment to the right or conservative movement?

00:57:03.360 Yeah, I, I don't think his greatest contribution is to, is to conservatism.

00:57:07.520 And, you know, as I, as I argue in my, uh, my book on Strauss, which was published by Cambridge,

00:57:14.400 which seems to have sold well, but it did not get reviewed in any conservative publication that

00:57:18.560 I'm aware of, by the way. Um, and it, it did get, you know, it did get reviewed in some,

00:57:25.360 you know, some journal, uh, uh, and, and, you know, the farther, the farther I got,

00:57:31.280 that you get away from the Straussians and the conservative, uh, what I call conservatism

00:57:35.600 incorporated, you know, the, the nicer the reviews look, um, or there were reviews, but the, uh,

00:57:41.920 the argument I make is, is that Strauss does make some contributions to, uh, to political thought.

00:57:49.360 And, uh, there's some of his work, his book on Hobbes, which I read in, which was in German,

00:57:54.800 I read his book, I was then translating to English, I think is a great work, you know,

00:58:00.480 and it shows that he finds the, the, the, what he calls the alternate classical sources and Hobbes,

00:58:07.600 that Hobbes is influenced by ancient materialism, Epicureanism. I think he's right. And, you know,

00:58:14.800 and his, his book on Spinoza's, I think is very good. Uh, some, some of his early work, I think is

00:58:20.240 excellent. And I think he is a serious scholar. Now, I, I don't think he, you know, ranks at the top

00:58:28.080 of all the emigre scholars who came to America, who fled the Nazis, but I think he definitely makes at

00:58:33.680 least a second, uh, uh, uh, rung. And, um, he is, uh, you know, he's a person of vast learning,

00:58:41.280 who's learning I respect and his family's background is very similar to mine. You know,

00:58:46.080 so I'm, I'm not, uh, I don't dislike him. I have sympathy for him, uh, much less sympathy,

00:58:51.600 however, for his disciples who, you know, are generally not, generally not nice people at all,

00:58:56.560 particularly the East Coast Straussians. They behave, behave horribly toward each other. They've

00:59:01.040 behaved horribly toward me personally. Um, uh, most of them are, are not of the same rank as,

00:59:07.680 as, as their teacher. So, um, you know, I, I think as time goes on, his, you know,

00:59:14.080 his actual contribution, where he ranks, it will become more obvious. Um, I don't think the

00:59:20.480 conservative or what we call the right, certainly the, the post-Boomer right has the same infatuation

00:59:26.960 with Strauss as the, um, as the older conservative movement. And it looks, it looks like, um,

00:59:33.920 the, uh, the, the, the Straussians are not becoming a dying breed. They certainly have much less influence

00:59:40.160 than they used to, except for the Claremont group, um, who have allied themselves very closely with the

00:59:48.720 populist right. Yeah. And I think that is the most interesting aspect of this. I agree that,

00:59:55.200 you know, I don't think the MAGA movement looks a lot like any kind of Straussian, uh, understanding,

01:00:00.800 but, uh, the fact that Claremont is, I, and I think, you know, the kind of Straussians in general

01:00:06.660 are, as far as the right has an intellectual scene, uh, are a very large part of it still.

01:00:14.080 And so if, if any movement is built out of this, if any lasting institutions are staffed and

01:00:20.040 educational, uh, opportunities are provided, curriculums are created, professorships are

01:00:24.680 awarded, it seems like they would come from the Straussian, uh, place. So that would be my only,

01:00:31.720 uh, you know, kind of thought on that is I agree that there's very little of that in

01:00:36.120 the mainstream conservative movement, very influential in the conservative movement anymore.

01:00:39.400 But if the right does shift to any kind of intellectual pursuit, any installation of, uh,

01:00:45.240 intellectuals into these different institutions, it seems like the Straussians would have a heavy

01:00:49.800 role in that. Yeah. But the question is, are the Claremonters really Straussians to what extent of it?

01:00:57.240 And, you know, many of the ones I speak to, you know, uh, have some kind of family connection

01:01:03.960 or, uh, uh, they studied under somebody who had studied under Harry Jaffa. But I think that connection

01:01:10.520 is, is becoming more and more tangential. And, um, many of the people, you know, associate with

01:01:16.520 Claremont are not really Straussians at all. I mean, that's my experience. I also had a long series

01:01:23.000 of debates with my friend, Michael Anton, who is a West Coast Straussian and was a student of Harry Jaffa.

01:01:30.280 And much of it was unnatural right, which he accepts and I don't. Um, but the interesting thing is we

01:01:37.000 didn't disagree on anything else. I think most of our views were exactly the same.

01:01:43.080 Well, I think this is a good point to wrap it up, but I am very interested, of course,

01:01:47.240 in diving into your book on Strauss. And I'll recommend to people again to pick up your newest

01:01:51.400 book from Passage, uh, the Essential Pog Guide, Great Freed Collection. I have a few

01:01:56.680 questions from the audience. Would you mind switching over to those real quick?

01:02:00.200 Go ahead. Excellent. All right, guys, we've got, uh, a name I cannot read. I know we shouldn't

01:02:09.320 punch right when you're cool with him, but AA's recent output has been, has me questioning his

01:02:14.600 motives, borderline third worldist at times. Uh, yeah, Nima, uh, Nima Parvini, uh, also known as

01:02:21.000 academic agent has certainly had a number of opinions on the current, uh, political, uh, situation that I

01:02:26.280 might disagree with, but I'll be honest. I haven't really kept up with him at the moment, so I can't

01:02:30.440 comment directly because I honestly just don't know, uh, kind of where he's at right now.

01:02:35.800 I would agree. He writes for us, but I'm not quite sure where he's at.

01:02:42.600 Uh, Jacob says, uh, wasn't, uh, Disraeli extending the franchise a pragmatic matter of using the

01:02:49.640 conservative temperaments of the working class against the middle class rather than ideological?

01:02:54.920 Yes. No, I, I, I'm sure it was, but I, I think only a conservative would have tried that, um, uh,

01:03:03.400 you know, sort of reaching down, reaching down from the liberal middle class, you know,

01:03:08.200 to win the support of the working class. Um, and I, I, I mentioned that to, to, uh, you know,

01:03:14.840 suggest, you know, sort of what the right had become even, even in the time of, of Disraeli,

01:03:19.880 that it's sort of, sort of making democratic alliances. Disraeli, by the way,

01:03:23.720 had been a chartist in the 1830s. He had supported universal manhood suffrage. Um, so,

01:03:30.040 you know, I, I think in many ways, Disraeli is, is, is, is not so much a traditional Tory as a

01:03:36.360 predecessor of the right. Uh, Napoleon III in France did something very, Bismarck did something

01:03:41.800 very similar. Well, and isn't this always the temptation of democracy, right? To expand the

01:03:47.720 franchise at the moment where it will be advantageous to you to outmaneuver your opponent,

01:03:51.400 but it, but it inexorably drives you towards the mass democracy then?

01:03:55.000 Yeah. I, I, I think Disraeli, uh, judged badly.

01:03:58.360 Mm-hmm.

01:03:58.920 As I heard a piece in Disraeli that, uh, was praised by President Nixon,

01:04:03.880 whom I showed this, and he'd read with me, that the working class did not, did not vote,

01:04:09.240 you know, did not vote for the conservatives. They, uh, became associated with the, with the left,

01:04:15.080 you know, and became labor rights. Uh, you could say that, you know, many, many years later,

01:04:19.560 they joined the MAGA movement or joined the right or something, but we're looking, we're looking back

01:04:23.720 in the late 1860s right now. Right.

01:04:26.280 And I think at the time it probably was not, uh, a politically wise move for the Israeli.

01:04:33.160 Jacob also says, I've heard the equivalent of the Democrats are the real racist inside

01:04:37.720 Sons of Confederate veterans meetings. The common dissonance of some boomers in the eighth is

01:04:42.680 the eighth wonder of the world. Yeah. Again, I think we've, we've covered that in detail, but it is very

01:04:48.600 clear that, uh, unfortunately older generations, even some inside the Sons of Confederacy are confused

01:04:54.760 about, uh, how the rhetoric should be, uh, pursued. No, I, I, I agree. I mean, the, uh,

01:05:02.760 well, there may be of two minds about this. I mean, their family may have fought for the cause, but

01:05:07.240 at the same time, they want to be loyal Republicans. They have to beat up on the

01:05:11.320 Confederate side and link them to the Democratic Party. Well, we're seeing that a lot right now with

01:05:17.320 the Democrats pushing back against president Trump's deployment of ice, right? He's going

01:05:22.120 out and depointing people. And all of a sudden the Democrats are trying to stop them, push back.

01:05:27.240 And all the Republicans are saying, look, they're the neo-Confederates. Yeah. The Democrats are back

01:05:31.720 again. Yeah. We're seeing a lot of that wild speaker says Rufo suggestion to wield the CRA brings

01:05:39.400 to mind the saying the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Yeah. I wouldn't have

01:05:43.960 phrased it that way for obvious reasons, but, uh, it is hard not, not to notice that ultimately

01:05:49.720 leaving that weapon on the table seems to invite the return of a rather tyrannical left, uh, if you

01:05:55.080 leave the apparatus in place. No, I, I, I agree. Although I can see why people would be tempted to take

01:06:00.840 that position. Sure. And, and I'm, you know, we're, we're, I don't think even there are people who say

01:06:06.200 the government should not wield power, you know? So it's not some libertarian argument of you can just

01:06:10.360 never have a state wielding any kind of power, but just practically, if you have this apparatus

01:06:15.960 designed to, again, like basically be a Soviet mind control device across the entire, uh, country

01:06:21.560 in this area, it will be used for that again, inevitably. I feel like what they're overlooking

01:06:26.040 is the fact that 99% of the people working in that bureaucracy are on the left, you might change the

01:06:32.600 person at the top, but you're not going to change the nature of the bureaucracy, which was,

01:06:37.320 which was great. It was left just to carry out at the point of time was, it was, it was a leftist

01:06:41.880 objective. So, uh, we'd have to go down and, you know, make sure that everybody working there,

01:06:47.720 you know, has the mentality of Chris Rufo, uh, which is not likely to happen.

01:06:53.080 Yeah. I know Dylan was able to clear out a decent amount of, uh, employees who simply refused to show

01:06:58.040 up to work once she kind of told them what the job was now, but you're right. There are always going to

01:07:02.040 be those stalwarts that hang in there and they're going to end up driving a lot of the actions of the

01:07:05.560 bureaucracy, which is of course the point you've made about managerialism over and over again.

01:07:09.480 Both of us have, uh, Antebellum says, uh, do you think that the former Eastern Bloc states like

01:07:14.680 Poland, Hungary, et cetera, form a useful model of right-wing managerialism that could be imitated

01:07:21.160 in the U S and perhaps just a larger addendum to that. Do you think right-wing managerialism can't even exist?

01:07:27.160 Yeah, I think, I think it can exist in, you know, right-wing countries. In the case of Poland,

01:07:36.440 I don't know. I mean, Poland is sort of, uh, evenly balanced between something that looks like the

01:07:41.960 Democratic party here and a conservative Catholic nationalist party, which isn't that far to the

01:07:47.720 right. Then they have another Confederation party, which is to the right of, of that party. Um, I don't

01:07:54.120 know whether I trust the Polish bureaucracy. Uh, I would assume they're, they, you know,

01:07:58.440 they, they probably are coming to resemble the, uh, Western European or American bureaucracy.

01:08:03.720 Hungary is a different case. Uh, I, I think it's, uh, you know, they're a very conservative country

01:08:11.000 and I don't think their bureaucracy has been infected yet. Uh, certainly they're there. I think

01:08:17.480 the journalism has, they do have, they do have a leftist media, which opposes the government.

01:08:23.560 I don't know whether the, whether the bureaucracy does. Poland, I think is, is a more precarious

01:08:28.200 situation. All right, guys. Well, that's all the questions of the people. Thank you very much,

01:08:33.240 everybody for watching. Thank you once again, Dr. Gottfried for coming on. It's always a fantastic

01:08:38.040 time speaking with you. Thank you very much for having me on once again. Of course. And if it's your

01:08:44.120 first time on this channel, guys, you need to subscribe on YouTube, click the bell notification,

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The Auron MacIntyre Show - October 13, 2025

Liberalism, Conservatism, and Leo Strauss ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried ｜ 10⧸13⧸25

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