The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Esoteric Philosopher Whose Disciples Hijacked Conservatism ｜ 6⧸17⧸26

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00:00:30.000 Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Oren McIntyre. Before we get started today, I just want to remind you that one of the ways we keep the lights on around here is, of course, subscriptions to Blaze TV.

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00:01:34.040 and that free 30-day trial of blaze tv all right guys so i want to talk to you a little bit today

00:01:43.420 about a man that many people in the conservative movement may not be familiar with his name is

00:01:49.140 Leo Strauss. And even though you may not know who Leo Strauss is, Leo Strauss and his disciples

00:01:55.720 have shaped modern conservatism. They've had a radical impact on not just conservative foreign

00:02:02.720 policy, as the neocons are often boiled down to, but the nature of American identity and our

00:02:08.300 outlook on where our values come from, the idea of the propositional nation. A lot of things could

00:02:13.460 be tied back to this understanding of American identity. We're going to be going a lot of

00:02:19.220 different places today. This is a guy who's considered a very esoteric philosopher. So

00:02:24.040 please understand that this is going to be an overview. I'm not going to be getting into every

00:02:28.880 aspect of Leo Strauss that could and has taken entire lecture series from very serious academics.

00:02:35.060 We may go in more depth in his individual writings later. I'm also going to go ahead and

00:02:39.740 recommend a previous talk that I had with Dr. Paul Gottfried, who is a guy who I highly respect,

00:02:45.640 who's written a book on the impact that Leo Strauss had on the movement. Now, I'm not just

00:02:49.680 drawing from his book, but it is a critical step in understanding what went on. And I have

00:02:54.780 interviewed him partially on this book before. So as I go through and explain this, if you want to

00:02:59.820 learn more about Leo Strauss and get it right from the guy who has studied this in detail,

00:03:04.540 I really recommend that interview as well. All right. So first, who is Leo Strauss? Well,

00:03:12.460 Leo Strauss was a German Jewish academic. He was moving outside of his home country of Germany for

00:03:20.740 his different academic opportunities. He was in Paris. He eventually moved to England. And of

00:03:26.540 course, during this time abroad, we saw the development of the Third Reich, the rise of the

00:03:32.120 Nazi regime. And Leo Strauss, being Jewish, understood that ultimately it would be a bad 0.82

00:03:37.520 idea for him to return home. So eventually he settled in the United States as a way to

00:03:44.180 kind of avoid the rise of Hitler as so many Jews did. So this is a guy who is already fleeing the 0.91

00:03:51.920 impact of kind of the rise of the Nazis and lives in the shadow and writes in the shadow, of course,

00:03:57.240 World War II and the Holocaust and everything that comes after. And that's going to be really

00:04:01.560 critical to remember as we kind of take a look at how his thought develops and how it impacts

00:04:07.240 many other people, some Jewish in the United States, some not Jewish, but all who have a very

00:04:13.660 important impact on the conservative movement going forward. So why did Leo Strauss become

00:04:20.840 important to the conservative movement? If you look at the work of Leo Strauss, he seems in many

00:04:26.500 ways like an odd fit. Leo Strauss and many of his disciples were not actually particularly

00:04:31.460 conservative people. However, Leo Strauss offered something very important to the conservative

00:04:37.260 movement at the time. Conservatives were dealing with Heidegger. Martin Heidegger, who I've

00:04:45.100 talked a little bit before on this channel, he was someone who had a radical impact on philosophy.

00:04:52.820 His book, Being in Time, was kind of an earthquake when it came to philosophical understanding,

00:04:59.240 and it really was probably one of the first jumping off points for postmodernism.

00:05:04.980 You could maybe say Nietzsche was the first postmodernist, but Heidegger is definitely

00:05:08.940 the next most important figure in that.

00:05:11.280 And so because of that, he has had a very big impact on modern philosophy.

00:05:16.920 Even people who reject this postmodernism have to grapple with Heidegger at some level.

00:05:23.820 Heidegger challenged many things, and one of them was kind of the classic understanding

00:05:27.740 of metaphysics that had underlied the Western understanding of kind of truth, the idea of

00:05:34.440 kind of objective truth and morality.

00:05:37.160 There's a lot to Heidegger.

00:05:38.820 I don't know if that entirely actually sums up what he was writing about.

00:05:43.300 The point is, this is how it was understood, how it was perceived. And obviously, as we look at the postmodernists, that is most certainly the direction that they took many of his teachings.

00:05:53.900 And so the conservatives were looking for a way to kind of battle back against Heidegger's impact.

00:06:01.860 They needed a way to kind of reground the idea of objective morality in a world that had now embraced kind of this incredible form of relativism that seemed to undermine many conservative beliefs.

00:06:14.980 And in that figure, in that search for a figure to kind of fight back against Heidegger, they discovered Leo Strauss.

00:06:23.820 Leo Strauss had this idea of natural right.

00:06:26.240 In fact, probably his most famous book is Natural Right in History, which talks extensively,

00:06:31.980 as you might imagine, about this concept.

00:06:34.220 And Leo Strauss's natural right is interesting because rather than being grounded in the

00:06:42.320 Bible or some longstanding religious tradition, even though Strauss was ethnically Jewish,

00:06:48.660 he was an atheist. Instead, natural right was kind of this more flexible version of natural

00:06:55.880 law. It's not natural law. Natural law tends to be Aristotelian or Thomistic, grounded more in

00:07:03.460 the teachings of the Catholic Church or other related Christian teachings. This was not

00:07:09.640 something that Leo Strauss was embracing. His natural right was more flexible. It allowed for

00:07:15.600 more prudent in its application different regimes were able to kind of flex use some flexibility

00:07:23.380 in it was not entirely relativistic in the way that obviously maybe perhaps a postmodern

00:07:30.060 understanding of the world was but it was very different from natural law but this re-established

00:07:36.340 the possibility of some form of objective truth perhaps one that was you know more interested in

00:07:44.300 creating the minimum conditions of political life for Strauss than perhaps natural law with

00:07:50.100 its more rigid dictates, but one that nevertheless was very useful to conservatives at that time.

00:07:56.380 And also the fact that it wasn't grounded in one particular religious tradition meant that it could

00:08:02.160 have a more universal application off of an increasingly diverse United States and perhaps

00:08:08.060 an application outside of it as well. But we'll get to that in just a minute. So there's also

00:08:14.280 the fact that Leo Strauss was himself, obviously, someone who was fleeing the Holocaust. He was

00:08:21.440 himself a Jewish man. And this was kind of important for conservatives at the time because

00:08:25.680 if you look at the old right in the United States, the old right valued many things that

00:08:31.120 had suddenly become taboo. Ideas of tradition and heritage, the idea of a distinct national

00:08:38.580 identity and traditional particularism. These things were now seen as dangerous because of

00:08:45.560 the rise of the Third Reich. They had kind of received, you know, again, this branding as

00:08:52.340 a dangerous idea that would only be pushed by the previous German enemy. And so by aligning

00:08:59.520 themselves with Strauss, this allowed many conservatives to kind of avoid the post-World

00:09:04.380 War II, baggage of being associated, having the right associated with kind of these more

00:09:09.940 traditional understandings of conservatism. And so that was a way to distance themselves

00:09:16.160 ultimately from this. Now, the problem, of course, with natural right is it was still

00:09:23.000 not founded in any actual transcendent system. And so I think that while Strauss does some

00:09:29.820 interesting work uh with natural right uh he's he's trying to kind of build this idea out it

00:09:35.580 always fails up to the point where he's trying to then uh find some more transcendent ground for it

00:09:40.600 at the end of the day it never quite uh eclipses heidegger's understanding because it's not willing

00:09:45.340 to reach for that kind of more divine interaction uh and so that this is a constant limiting factor

00:09:51.420 with strauss he comes up to i think what are often uh you know some truths uh you know about uh you

00:09:57.960 the nature of rights, the nature of the world around us, but he ultimately falls short because

00:10:04.120 that atheism is always holding back. Strauss often wrote about reason and revelation and how these

00:10:10.540 two are in tension. You've probably heard this framed as Athens and Jerusalem, and that is usually

00:10:15.480 people repeating people like Alan Bloom, who were themselves disciples of Leo Strauss. So if you've

00:10:20.820 ever heard this juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem, of revolution, of revelation and

00:10:27.420 reason. Those are people speaking in Straussian language, even if they don't know it. And you'll

00:10:32.140 see this throughout kind of this presentation that I'm giving. We will often run into the fact

00:10:37.200 that many conservatives are parroting Straussian ideas without really understanding it. But again,

00:10:43.780 that said, this tension between reason and revelation was always one that's difficult

00:10:48.420 for Strauss, but he always sides on reason because, again, he is an atheist. He never breaks

00:10:53.780 through that limitation. And so that really colors his thinking. All right. So let's talk about

00:11:00.380 what made Strauss different. Why is he so notable and how does the way that he look at texts or

00:11:08.240 understand philosophy, why does that have wider implications for the conservative movement? That

00:11:13.700 doesn't seem something like a lot of what people talk about conservatism. They're not usually

00:11:18.120 talking about a lot of philosophy or theory. So why does the way that Leo Strauss reads Plato or

00:11:24.340 Aristotle have a significant impact on, say, what your dad watching Fox News thinks about world

00:11:30.540 events? Well, believe it or not, it actually does. So a couple of things you need to understand about

00:11:35.740 Leo Strauss. He was a great scholar. There's no arguing that. I want to make it clear, Leo Strauss

00:11:42.960 is not a stupid man he's not a joke uh he is a serious thinker and someone to be grappled with 0.91

00:11:49.540 uh you can't just throw him away and say oh well he was a neocon or he was the you know he came up 0.94

00:11:54.780 with this ideology and therefore uh that that's uh what defines strauss and i don't really need

00:12:00.400 to understand anything else no this is this is a serious scholar uh and the way that he approached

00:12:06.080 texts he was you know very good at reading in other languages very good at analyzing texts

00:12:10.840 carefully. And he kind of posited two things that were really important to kind of the Straussian

00:12:16.560 method. One is that the great writers throughout history were persecuted. He actually has a work

00:12:24.740 called Persecution in the Art of Writing. And he thinks that philosophers throughout history

00:12:32.000 had to be very careful about what they said, because if they didn't, they could be killed for

00:12:37.480 it. And this is obviously true at some level, right? Like Machiavelli doesn't release most of

00:12:43.480 his writings until he's dead or very close. You know, this is because, you know, if he put his

00:12:50.120 real thoughts down and had it attached to him, it could be very dangerous. We often see philosophers

00:12:55.360 in the past writing through characters. If you look at the works of obviously like Plato, he says

00:13:00.700 everything through the mouth of Socrates for the most part. He very rarely attributes the beliefs

00:13:06.120 to himself. And there's a couple things going on there. First, Strauss believed that because

00:13:11.980 philosophers had to be very careful about what they said, they had to write in this very esoteric

00:13:17.180 style. You had the things that were kind of out there for public consumption, the things on the

00:13:21.860 surface that people would read. But then behind the scenes, the philosophers were kind of imbuing

00:13:27.400 this passage with more complicated ideas that were hidden behind layers of meaning that people had to

00:13:33.920 work through to understand. We can see this in, of course, something like Jesus's parables.

00:13:40.000 People say, well, Jesus, why would you just say what you mean? And the answer is because he's

00:13:45.260 saying difficult and dangerous things and oftentimes has to hide the meaning for those

00:13:50.280 who are listening closely, let the listener understand, as it were. And so Leo Strauss is

00:13:55.560 saying that this is something throughout history that we see in many different philosophers.

00:14:00.380 and so when we read philosophical texts first we need to recognize that this is in play

00:14:05.800 second if there's something we read in a philosophical text from a guy who otherwise

00:14:10.660 is like rather brilliant and you know understands things much more complicated than we do

00:14:14.920 then we need to take the time to read closely because perhaps that's not a mistake or that's

00:14:20.560 not a contradiction it's not a logical error perhaps that mistake that obvious uh you know

00:14:25.860 mistake is there for a reason. It's drawing us to some piece of information that Leo Strauss wants

00:14:31.860 us to find, or rather that the writer wants us to find, that Leo Strauss thinks the writer

00:14:36.180 wants us to find. And again, this is obviously true at some level. We'll get into more of that

00:14:42.860 in a second. The other thing that Leo Strauss talks about is the immunity of the commentator.

00:14:48.760 Strauss talks about how philosophers also often speak in the voices of other people or use other

00:14:54.760 texts as authoritative, but then slowly bleed in what they want those texts to say or what they

00:15:02.540 ultimately want to say through the commentator or as the commentator. So for instance, when you look

00:15:09.120 again at Plato, he's saying things through Socrates. Well, that's not what I said. This is

00:15:14.080 what my teacher Socrates said, right? At some level, we do know today, of course, that Plato

00:15:18.540 is saying what he wants to say. But at the time, that's a way to shield yourself by always saying,

00:15:23.420 Well, someone else actually said this first. When we look at someone like Machiavelli, he writes his discourses on Livy and he's using the historian, the Roman historian Livy as kind of a Bible for what he wants to, for what he's going to be saying is going to quote Livy chapter and verse to say, oh, well, that's what this historical thing.

00:15:43.520 That's what this historical thing means. But slowly over time, Strauss says actually what Machiavelli ends up doing is using Livy as this like figure of authority so that then he can say the things he wants to say through Livy.

00:16:00.340 So Machiavelli uses the immunity of the commentator to say the things that he wants to with the authority of Livy, even though what he said might not actually be what's implied in there, or he might be overstating and injecting his own beliefs.

00:16:13.760 And so these two key techniques are what we would call a Straussian hermeneutic, which is a fancy way of saying the method by which you should read and interpret the text.

00:16:24.480 And so when you're operating in the Straussian hermeneutic, it allows you in many ways to pull out deeper meanings.

00:16:31.340 Okay, what was really going on here? Is there really a mistaken logic? Was this really what Socrates or Livy said? Or is there something that Plato or Aristotle or Machiavelli is slipping in there in the meantime that kind of helps them get away with things?

00:16:48.400 Now, again, the point is that this is a true statement at some level, like it's very obvious with Machiavelli, Plato, others that they were using these techniques to some extent.

00:16:58.940 However, what Leo Strauss doesn't really tell you is, of course, this allows him to reinterpret what those people were saying as well, right? By placing this hermeneutic around the interpretations of the text, you can then, as a more modern philosopher, kind of make the ancients say what you wanted them to say.

00:17:21.340 And that's a very handy thing. So that's where you get this reputation from Straussians of being somewhat deceitful because you have this constant implication that, well, are you actually finding deeper thoughts in this text where there are really no contradictions?

00:17:38.900 or are you just using that as an excuse to then kind of hijack what that thinker is

00:17:44.540 ultimately saying and bend it towards your maybe more modern ends and so this is like a constant

00:17:50.580 tension because these uh you know people are often held up as you know classical scholars you know

00:17:57.120 obviously uh Strauss is talking about Plato and Aristotle and uh all all kinds of important

00:18:02.600 xenophon and other important ancient commentators uh but but is he really uh bringing their ancient

00:18:10.320 wisdom to the modern day or is he manipulating it in some way through this uh very esoteric

00:18:16.040 way of kind of interpreting the text and making them say something that they never really met

00:18:22.120 now it's not just leo strauss i want to make it clear if we just focus on leo strauss uh we will

00:18:31.380 have a problem because Straussianism goes well beyond him. And I think it changes things in

00:18:36.060 very important ways. And we'll talk about a couple of his disciples here, but it's important to

00:18:42.120 recognize that guys, for instance, like Harry Jaffa, who studied along and from Strauss, was

00:18:49.600 a student of Strauss, they've been clear that actually one of Strauss's motivations in his

00:18:55.760 intellectual project was to make the world safe for the Jewish diaspora. Really, Strauss had been

00:19:03.300 heavily impacted by his need to flee his home country and obviously the events of the Holocaust,

00:19:07.760 as you can understand, a terrible thing to go through and see so many of the people that you

00:19:12.920 love and know die. And so it was very important for him that these systems around him were made

00:19:19.580 safe for the diaspora, which he was a part of. And so part of the motivation for Strauss's attempt

00:19:27.680 to kind of bring natural right to the front and his championing of things like liberal democracy

00:19:34.180 had to do with his desire to make the world safe for these people. And by the way, I'm not like

00:19:40.580 pulling this out of nowhere. I'm not like reading this in out of my own motivation. Harry Jaffa has

00:19:45.240 said this specifically. You can look up the interview I believe he did with the University

00:19:49.240 of Chicago talking about Strauss. And he says very specifically, one of Strauss's goals was to

00:19:55.500 create the safety net for the Jewish diaspora. So this is not my own bias. This is not something I

00:20:01.500 made up. This is something that some of his most famous disciples have said out loud. So

00:20:07.680 that's certainly part of it. So how did Strauss do this with natural right? Why was that part of

00:20:14.700 the project. Well, what Strauss does is he founds natural right in the America or kind of gives it

00:20:23.320 its new founding in the American constitution. And most importantly, the Declaration of

00:20:27.980 Independence. For Strauss, the Declaration of Independence was kind of this new form of

00:20:32.920 transcendency, this document that really sold natural right to Western democracies. And by

00:20:42.460 using that as kind of his new transcendent document, it did a couple things. It created

00:20:49.580 a founding for objective morality that was not necessarily Christian. He could create a more 0.73

00:20:56.640 universal idea of these rights that did not rely on a religious tradition that he did not believe

00:21:04.200 in. And Harry Jaffa also thought this was important because he himself was also Jewish.

00:21:09.760 And so now, you know, natural law might have been a very Christian concept, but natural

00:21:14.860 right was something that would just exist in kind of the American founding documents.

00:21:20.220 And not only is that something that could, you know, be given to countries that had Jewish

00:21:26.060 diasporas in them, it could be spread across the world.

00:21:29.060 Now, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were no longer, you know, historically situated

00:21:34.380 particular beliefs of the American people.

00:21:36.940 This is something that was universalizable. And in that way, you could ultimately spread it across the world. And because this system was safe for the Jewish diaspora, that meant that the further you spread liberal democracy, the safer that Jews abroad would be.

00:21:53.560 And so this was a very big plus for guys like Jaffa and guys like Leo Strauss in adopting this mentality. So if you're trying to understand this connection to neoconservatism, I think we can already recognize what's going on here, right?

00:22:10.620 Like this mirrors a lot of the debates we're having on foreign policy and the propositional nation.

00:22:16.080 If America is a set of traditions and values, a heritage and history that's tied to a specific people or a set of peoples, then that could have limits.

00:22:28.800 It could push people out. But this is something that's totally inclusive and anyone could pick it up.

00:22:34.320 And so now everyone can fit into this propositional nation, not just in the United States, but in a wider American-influenced empire.

00:22:43.620 So the question you might be asking yourself here is, well, is this all just a smokescreen then to obtain that kind of global, classically liberal or liberal democracy empire?

00:22:59.580 Is that all this was?

00:23:00.500 Was Strauss just doing it simply for that purpose?

00:23:03.260 And I think the answer is no. If we look at that was certainly part of the motivation. But again, this guy was a serious philosopher and a serious thinker. And if you are doubtful about that, Carl Schmitt actually was in dialogue with Leo Strauss regularly.

00:23:18.600 They would send letters to each other. And Strauss actually wrote an essay responding to Carl Schmitt's essay, Concept of the Political.

00:23:29.680 And Carl Schmitt said that Leo Strauss's insights about his own work were some of the most penetrating insights he had ever seen.

00:23:37.780 So Carl Schmitt had an incredible respect for Leo Strauss's intellect.

00:23:42.740 So while I think that it matters that these motivations are there and they will have implications as we discuss the rise of neoconservatism, I think it's important to remember that Strauss is a serious scholar and even though I disagree with his philosophical project, he's not someone to just be dismissed out of hand.

00:24:00.820 We can't just point to this and say, oh, well, this is all just a kind of plot to create this ideology that would then like take over the American government.

00:24:10.180 That I don't believe is correct.

00:24:12.120 I do think that what we're going to talk about is a system of incentives that did center much of Strauss's work and the wider neoconservative project in the United States.

00:24:22.140 But I don't think that's what Strauss himself ultimately was aiming for all or at least the only thing he was aiming for as he wrote.

00:24:29.800 Now, that said, you know, Karl Marx probably would have hated his current day disciples, right? Like super woke Marxists would be the kind of people that Karl Marx would have sneered at. I mean, the kind of people that Joseph Stalin probably would have rolled into a ditch.

00:24:43.720 that said uh carl carl marx is still in some at some level responsible for his disciples even if

00:24:51.380 he would have found them abhorrent you know the ideology that carl marx birth did give uh well

00:24:57.360 birth to all of these successive versions of his ideology so just as we can say that carl marx

00:25:03.800 probably wouldn't recognize and would probably find disgusting uh current day marxists leo strauss

00:25:09.080 probably would look at the current crop of neoconservants and find them deeply unimpressive

00:25:13.360 and find what they've done with his work rather ugly.

00:25:16.640 But I don't think that we can then turn around

00:25:18.400 and say he had no impact or is not responsible

00:25:21.120 for kind of what flowed logically from his work.

00:25:24.800 I think the seeds, very least,

00:25:26.900 of what Straussians would do with Strauss' work

00:25:30.160 were there from the beginning,

00:25:31.360 even if he himself would not have agreed with this.

00:25:34.760 Now, there's also a couple schools of Straussianism.

00:25:38.720 Obviously, he worked at the University of Chicago,

00:25:41.640 which still has a kind of a robust program today.

00:25:45.360 Harvey Mansfield, I believe, is one of the guys that probably represents this at some level.

00:25:50.920 But those are often called the East Coast Straussians.

00:25:53.760 And this is the kind of they tend to focus on a lot of Strauss's more Nietzschean and Machiavellian influences.

00:26:01.760 You can see why often people, again, are worried about the nature of Straussians that come out of that school.

00:26:11.640 The other big school of Straussianism that was founded was West Coast Straussianism, and we already talked about its founder, Harry Jaffa.

00:26:20.320 Harry Jaffa founded the Claremont Institute, which is obviously still around today.

00:26:25.360 Now, I also want to put out a little disclaimer here.

00:26:28.640 I am actually friendly with many people at the at the Claremont Institute.

00:26:33.980 There is certainly an influence of Leo Strauss in that organization, though I think it has waned over the years.

00:26:39.380 there are still many proud Straussians there but there are people there who are not Straussian at

00:26:44.800 all and I'm not trying to cash even though I'm going to say some things about Harry Jaffa that

00:26:50.260 may not you know sound like ringing endorsements I would like to say I'm friendly with many of

00:26:55.260 these people they're great people I don't you know I don't think they're doing you know super

00:26:59.480 deceptive work or something but this is just the intellectual history of kind of what's going on

00:27:04.560 here. And I'm not going to avoid it, even though, again, I do think that there are a number of

00:27:09.300 people at the Claremont Institute that are great and doing great work and are true American patriots

00:27:14.020 and all of that. So that said, Harry Jaffa just has an interesting impact on the conservative

00:27:20.120 movement as well. Just as Leo Strauss kind of took values and kind of this idea of natural

00:27:27.000 rights and moved it from a transcendent God-based, you know, kind of substrate into, you know,

00:27:35.900 refounded it in the Declaration of Independence and kind of turned those documents into Holy

00:27:41.340 Writ. In the same way, Harry Jaffa kind of refounded the United States in Abraham Lincoln.

00:27:48.540 He saw Lincoln as kind of the pivotal figure in American history and the guy who really helped

00:27:54.660 the united states to realize its promise uh that that had been laid out in the declaration of

00:28:00.700 independence all men are created equal the rights everything else uh but had not really met

00:28:06.260 expectations up to that point if this sounds familiar it's the story that literally all of

00:28:10.620 your conservative uh you know uh pundits your your your your mom your dad you know everyone

00:28:16.860 who's kind of listened to conservative talk radio this is the narrative that they put together

00:28:20.720 This is their storyline, and they got it from Harry Jaffa, even if they don't know it.

00:28:25.200 The idea that Lincoln was the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence is an extremely Straussian understanding, and you will hear it parroted by basically every conservative you know today.

00:28:38.260 This is what the average conservative believes, and this is why they have a reverence for Abraham Lincoln.

00:28:44.560 uh they don't understand uh that this is a very progressive form of conservatism right uh that

00:28:53.280 actually the founding documents were incomplete and the founding fathers were racists and bigots

00:28:58.480 and uh you needed someone like abraham lincoln to kind of come along and truly find us uh you know

00:29:04.740 truly find us the the real understanding of what the declaration meant right that you know the

00:29:09.940 declaration, the founders, uh, that they didn't know. And once, uh, Abraham Lincoln showed up on

00:29:15.920 the scene, he really solidified the true meaning of what it is to be American. Again, a very common

00:29:20.860 refrain from conservatives today. And, uh, this is a big switch because of course, uh, again,

00:29:28.680 you're no longer founded in, you know, transcendent Christian ideas. Uh, the, the history of the

00:29:34.420 United States is no longer a valid, uh, retort to kind of what this new version of conservatism

00:29:39.680 is pushing it's all refounded by by it's a revolution inside the form if you're not familiar

00:29:46.080 with that term you keep the form you keep you keep calling it conservatism you keep calling it the

00:29:50.800 right but you hollow out and replace everything inside of it and that revolution occurs while you

00:29:56.360 maintain the outside shell and what happens is a lot of people just kind of look at it and say oh

00:30:00.660 well that's still the same thing so you know the fact that we've really i've done episodes on this

00:30:04.900 before the fact that we really had more like five republics in the united states and not just the one

00:30:09.640 continuous republic we don't notice because we don't call them different things the fact that

00:30:13.500 the articles of confederation were fundamentally different from the constitution which was

00:30:17.280 fundamentally different from uh the united states after the 14th amendment and abraham lincoln and

00:30:22.620 that was different you know and until we got to fdr and then the civil rights movement like each

00:30:27.920 one of these things was a revolution inside the form we kept the constitution in theory we kept

00:30:32.500 the idea of our democratic republic in theory but we constantly changed what it actually looked like

00:30:38.500 The way it worked in, say, the 1960s, bared basically no resemblance to what it looked like in the 1840s, even though technically we say we're still under the same Constitution and nothing has changed.

00:30:50.100 The same is true in conservatism here.

00:30:52.300 What Harry Jaffa is pulling off here is a radical revolution inside the conservative form that fundamentally changes the way that the old right understood things while still calling itself right wing and conservative.

00:31:04.280 And this meant that the average, you know, kind of just conservative newspaper reader or radio listener or television watcher did not understand how their entire world was being changed.

00:31:16.040 For instance, for Harry Jaffa, you know, putting Lincoln at the center really made equality the new goal of conservatism, which it had never been before.

00:31:26.820 Lincoln was not a hero to many right wingers or conservatives.

00:31:30.080 In fact, if you look at guys like Mel Bradford or Russell Kirk, they thought that Lincoln was a tyrant who was responsible for the centralization of power in the United States, the stripping away of states' rights, the suspension of habeas corpus, all kinds of other things that really broke down many of these American traditions.

00:31:50.200 That was the view of Lincoln in many ways before you had this understanding.

00:31:55.820 Now, post-Jaffa, Lincoln is basically Jesus, and he has kind of saved the United States from its contradictions that were at the core of its founding.

00:32:06.880 It has brought about the true and real meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

00:32:12.060 If this sounds familiar, it is, again, a very Straussian technique.

00:32:16.260 And now this is the center of what conservatism is.

00:32:20.280 And so you have this really radical break from tradition that is being presented as conservatism.

00:32:29.800 This is what conservatives believe, even though actually, if you look at the tradition of the right and conservatism in America, it's very, very different.

00:32:39.140 Okay, so we understand why this was necessary on a moral level, but how did neocons become a driving force in foreign politics?

00:32:46.900 How does all this business of natural right and the Bill of Rights Constitution, how does this eventually translate into a broader understanding of how we should conduct ourselves internationally?

00:33:03.140 So, obviously, when we look at the globe after World War II, we have a very important dynamic going on.

00:33:12.480 Now, America had already approached empire. If we look basically kind of at the Spanish-American War, that's probably where most people point to at the beginning. But obviously, as America starts taking the Philippines and Cuba and these places, it's dabbling in empire. And that's OK. A lot of people were doing that at the time.

00:33:33.800 It was basically like, well, all these other European powers are colonizing, and if we don't keep up, we're going to fall behind. We need an empire too. There are a lot of warings against that. I've gone on at length about the negative impacts of empire, so I'm not going to stop and do a soliloquy on that now.

00:33:50.980 But you understand, you know, that this was something that was happening to a lot of countries.

00:33:56.180 The United States was part of this. This is also part of kind of just the cycle of regimes.

00:34:00.280 People tend to when you look at the growth and death of civilizations, the kind of cyclical history, it's very normal for expanding or, you know, vibrant countries to want to expand their reach.

00:34:12.500 They want to expand their way of life, their control of area. They want to exert influence. That's just natural as well.

00:34:18.100 So I'm not blaming, I want to be really clear, I'm not blaming the idea of empire on Leo Strauss or his disciples, the Straussians, but I am just saying that their ideology is going to serve a function inside that growing desire.

00:34:31.320 So after World War II, America finds itself basically with a global empire, right? We've more or less divided the world between Russia and ourselves. Everyone kind of falls under one of these two blocks, or they will soon as both powers tend to expand.

00:34:47.360 and we need a way to manage this empire you know before we had a couple of holdings but now we're

00:34:53.440 talking about most of the globe even if we don't directly control them in the way we did with say

00:34:58.020 the philippines uh we at least have nominal control we are heavily influencing places like

00:35:03.820 uk they're more or less under uh our direct influence because they're so beholden to us

00:35:09.900 to rebuild and and everything else re-industrialize and so you have this dynamic where the united

00:35:15.460 States has to figure out how to kind of cohere this global empire. And in the USSR, they see 0.83

00:35:23.320 communism. And communism is this globalized ideology that allows the control of the empire 0.77

00:35:31.520 to spread. When you have the USSR move into an area, you know what's going to happen. Everyone's

00:35:36.480 going to kind of imbibe the communist ideology. That system is going to be put in place, the

00:35:42.060 economic system the philosophy the social outlook they're going to come to dominate and put these

00:35:46.980 countries under uh you know communist control now there's not a perfect history of this obviously

00:35:52.000 the communists killed a lot of people millions and millions and millions and millions of people

00:35:56.400 to try to force this ideology onto them but it is at the very least a universal ideology that

00:36:02.020 kind of coheres uh the the communist holdings in the eastern bloc and america needs something

00:36:09.560 similar right like we need a way to a story that tells us why it's okay for united states this

00:36:16.240 nation that threw off an empire that it was a colony that rejected uh colonialism why we

00:36:21.940 suddenly have colonized the world why we suddenly have an empire how does that make sense like how

00:36:25.760 how do we deal with the cognitive uh dissidence that most conservatives still don't handle today

00:36:30.660 uh i'm a nation that's entirely uh defined by throwing off foreign tyranny and and colonization

00:36:36.820 And also, I run half the world under colonization.

00:36:43.360 And the answer that I come up with is really this neoconservatism idea of spreading liberal democracy.

00:36:53.580 You see, we won World War II because we're the good guys, and we need to spread our ideology because it's our ideology that defeated Hitler and the Nazis.

00:37:02.840 It's not that we had superior weapons, superior tactics, better allies, you know, that we used, you know, we just had better troops, the quality of our people. None of that is the case. It was the call for freedom, right? Everyone out there is just yearning to be free.

00:37:18.360 And so we need to spread liberal democracy to make the world safe and to make sure that authoritarianism never rises again and that we can combat communism.

00:37:27.420 And, of course, remember that this neoconservatism doesn't just come out of nowhere.

00:37:33.120 Many of Strauss's new disciples were former Trotskyites.

00:37:38.020 The neoconservatives were in large part former Trotskyites.

00:37:42.720 And if you don't know your kind of battle in communism, the Trotskyites were the globalists.

00:37:48.360 They were the people who thought, you know, who said, no, we can't have a nationalist version of these communist revolutions.

00:37:52.960 It must be a global revolution. And so they're already familiar with kind of the character of global ideologies, the need to spread them in order to control empires.

00:38:03.620 This is something they're already very well versed in. And so it's not exactly a stretch for them to say, OK, well, we need to implement this.

00:38:10.960 And so now kind of Jaffa's Straussian universalism becomes the backbone of neoconservatism and the justification for its foreign policy.

00:38:22.080 And obviously, I don't need to tell you that this has obviously had a huge impact on what we did in the latter half of the 20th century.

00:38:33.420 you have the constant spread of liberal democracy through the intervention of the United States and

00:38:39.920 its allies and the belief that this could really just be ported everywhere the idea of course that

00:38:45.200 George W. Bush could somehow install liberal democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan comes directly

00:38:52.180 out of this idea of neoconservatism that well you know people are just kind of blank slates and

00:38:57.060 these universal ideas can just be moved to anyone. And so we can just take the transcendent truths

00:39:04.400 of the Declaration of Independence, which is basically a holy document for the Straussians,

00:39:08.220 and we can just apply it to people in the same way that you can apply Bible verses from

00:39:12.920 Christianity. It's kind of a way to get rid of Bible verses in Christianity and replace it with

00:39:17.100 the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the Declaration. But they ultimately believe that you 0.80

00:39:23.200 can just spread this wherever you go. And so this idea is very much a direct consequence of

00:39:31.120 the Straussian understanding. Now, again, is that exactly what Leo Strauss would have said?

00:39:36.120 Probably not. That probably would have been a little too simplistic for Leo Strauss.

00:39:39.840 But again, we have to look at not just him, but his disciples. It's not just about Marx.

00:39:44.980 It's what people did with Marx's work. It's not just about Strauss, who was far more intelligent,

00:39:50.320 and a much higher level operator than the Straussians. But nonetheless, that is an impact

00:39:57.100 of his work. And so we have to take that into consideration. So obviously, we understand the

00:40:03.860 foreign impact of this. We understand why this impacted our foreign policy. But it also impacts

00:40:10.640 the American understanding of kind of who we are as a people. All of a sudden, the idea that

00:40:16.620 that America is a specific nation, a particular people, you know, the kind of thing that John Jay

00:40:23.540 wanted for us in the Federalist Papers, that falls away. And instead, we get this idea that

00:40:29.420 America is an idea. And that starts to work its way into pretty much every aspect of American

00:40:36.600 identity, even inside the conservative movement. You know, the right would have rejected this in

00:40:41.200 previous decades. Russell Kirk famously said that conservatism rejects ideology and would not

00:40:48.700 embrace this, but that has been redefined. This is one of the reasons that Russell Kirk was

00:40:52.960 ultimately canceled because he was constantly pushing back against neocons and thought that

00:40:57.420 their influence was really deleterious to the American project and the identity of the conservative

00:41:04.360 movement. But you can see how many of these ideas are basically what you get back on a Fox News

00:41:09.880 program on Rush Limbaugh, you know, what you hear from your grandparents when they're just kind of

00:41:14.940 parroting what they said. And so I guess I want to wrap up this discussion with some of its

00:41:20.440 implications. You know, is Leo Strauss an enemy? Well, kind of. Obviously, his approach to philosophy

00:41:30.820 and its embrace by the conservative movement has probably had some pretty serious negative impacts

00:41:36.740 for the American right and conservatism in general.

00:41:40.780 Though, again, I want to stress,

00:41:42.420 the guy is not just an arch villain.

00:41:44.720 He's not just someone who's entirely

00:41:47.720 pulling the wool over your eyes, I think, at some level.

00:41:50.200 I think he does have important things to say.

00:41:52.160 I have benefited from the scholarship

00:41:54.040 and the writings of Leo Strauss,

00:41:56.400 so I don't want to just completely dismiss him

00:41:58.740 as a thinker or as a serious, even, philosopher out of hand.

00:42:02.440 But I'm not also going to pretend

00:42:05.080 that there are not dangers inherent in what Strauss was doing. You can't unmoor the idea

00:42:11.620 of natural rights from God. You cannot just re-found them in the Constitution or the

00:42:16.860 Declaration, and you certainly can't re-found the country in Lincoln without having some

00:42:23.120 very negative impacts on kind of the conservative identity.

00:42:27.360 now that said even if you understand that a lot of what conservative commentators you know

00:42:36.840 conservative pundits uh even you know politicians uh even your your parents a lot of what they

00:42:43.540 repeat is uh you know a formulation uh on of leo strauss even though that's the case

00:42:50.120 i i want you to be very careful about how you ultimately approach this because if you just run

00:42:57.720 up to uh you know these people and you say by the way everything you believe is a lie it was all

00:43:02.900 implanted by this uh you know esoteric philosopher leo strauss and uh it's actually that that is not

00:43:08.500 going to work okay that that's going to scare people it's going to throw them off and it's also

00:43:12.720 not necessarily true uh you need to understand that most of the people who are parroting a lot

00:43:19.000 of these kind of assumptions that arise from the Straussians, they're not aware that's what that

00:43:24.920 came from. They're just trying to be good Americans and good conservatives. These people are not your

00:43:29.840 enemies. They are your friends. They are your family. They are your greatest potential allies.

00:43:35.600 And so when you approach this, you need to do it respectfully and carefully. You need to recognize

00:43:40.400 that the average conservative really loves the country and they really want to do what's right.

00:43:45.700 And if they have a mistaken idea of what the history and beliefs of the founders were, because it comes through the Straussian lens, well, it's your job then to bring the truth, not to attack them or attack their values.

00:44:02.120 Remember, their ultimate value is that they love America and you need to center that when you're having a discussion with them. You need to make it clear that you love America. When you're discussing the parts of this that are incorrect, the neoconservative foreign policy, the idea of the propositional nation, you need to make sure that you stress that the founders did not believe this.

00:44:25.780 You know, that looking to Lincoln as the ultimate, you know, kind of decider of truth in the American experience is not the best way to understand American history.

00:44:35.660 If we go back and we look at the beliefs of the things that are written in the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, George Washington's farewell address, all of these things that are actually foundational to the nation, we can see a lot of things that don't jive with modern conservatism.

00:44:52.960 And this is why I draw a lot of heat. Right. In addition to the edgier thinkers like Carl Schmidt or others that I explore, I also do a lot of drawing on just actual American history and real American political theory, like the things that are real American founders said and did and not the cartoons that you got from Schoolhouse Rock or from, you know, whatever conservative pundit you were listening to in the 1980s.

00:45:16.320 And so when you present the information in that way, when you're saying, no, this is not what some random German philosopher said, or this is not some deconstruction brought about by these complicated foreign philosophers, but here's just what the founders actually said.

00:45:33.280 does that jive with the current conservative movement? That is a very useful tool. At first,

00:45:40.720 people will still be resistant, but ultimately, the force of the argument is kind of too much to

00:45:44.900 bear. I mean, what are they going to do? Are they going to argue with George Washington? Are you

00:45:47.940 going to argue with John Jay, you know, that they didn't know what they were talking about,

00:45:52.640 but someone who told you that Martin Luther King is the real true conservative they understood?

00:45:57.280 It's not going to work. And so I think when you're confronting these things, it's really

00:46:01.760 important. Do not deconstruct the founding. Do not try to deconstruct the symbols of America.

00:46:07.680 Do not attack people for genuinely holding beliefs that they believe to be the true American

00:46:14.600 idea. Instead, you should approach them with the truth of the founders. Instead of going back to

00:46:22.180 this idea that just one phrase in the declaration actually defines all of

00:46:27.720 you know kind of kind of human morality and the identity of the United States look at what the

00:46:33.500 founders who wrote that really believe you know what what was the majority belief among Americans

00:46:38.560 the United States where were they getting all of their ideas from the declaration no they were

00:46:42.900 getting it from the Bible and the Anglo-English tradition you know tradition like that's where

00:46:48.460 they were drawing from it's English common law and Christianity that made America you know not

00:46:54.960 the fact that Lincoln discovered equality in the middle of the country's history like that just

00:47:00.740 doesn't make sense and over time if you present the words of the founders to kind of show where

00:47:07.460 these ideas go wrong you're going to be in a much better position than if you try to attack them

00:47:12.120 head-on or you try to bring foreign philosophers in now again I'm somebody who's explored all of

00:47:16.280 these people I've made arguments based on them I'm not saying you can't do that but if you're

00:47:20.260 looking for the most effective way to counter these ideas, this is it. Because it's impossible

00:47:26.020 to argue that Leo Strauss or Harry Jaffa was more correct about what the United States was

00:47:31.260 than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Jay and all of these people. It's just too

00:47:39.660 hard to tell someone that Alexander Hamilton didn't know what America should be, but Harry

00:47:46.660 Jaffa did and I think if you are putting yourself on firm ground like that you'll have an easier

00:47:51.620 time kind of not again dismantling these notions but correcting them back to the actual traditional

00:47:59.220 understanding of what America is and I think that's the most valuable thing I can do kind of

00:48:03.920 I can leave you with in this talk I don't think everyone needs to run out there and read Leo

00:48:08.720 Strauss even though I do think he's an interesting scholar if you're not somebody who's like basically

00:48:13.780 dedicating their life to philosophy uh it's kind of a waste of time if you only have i can you're

00:48:19.760 like well i can read like two philosophy books a year uh i would not go to leo strauss i would

00:48:24.980 stick with some of the more important stuff stick with aristotle your plato read the founders you

00:48:29.740 know read read bertrand de juvenile before you read leo strauss but strauss is valuable you know

00:48:36.680 there there is something there uh but it's just not it's not worth your time and dedication to

00:48:40.920 try to wade through all this if you if you don't have time in uh but that said i just think that

00:48:45.300 understanding where this came from the reason i'm telling you about leo strauss gives you this

00:48:49.660 background of of where this ideology emerged and why it has insinuated itself so deeply into the

00:48:55.540 conservative movement and it'll help you better grasp you know why we ended up with this foreign

00:48:59.840 policy why we ended up with this propositional nation idea why we came up with this idea that

00:49:04.660 we need to conquer the world in the name of liberal democracy uh it didn't come from nowhere

00:49:08.980 Again, Leo Strauss didn't dictate it all by himself. I don't think Leo Strauss would look at the current batch of neocons and find them in any way impressive. But ultimately, his work does have consequences. And I think that we can see those consequences and they've manifested themselves in the conservative movement of today. But those ideas are wearing thin.

00:49:28.960 I think we're seeing the collapse of those, the utility of those has died out. And so if we understand where that came from, then we have a better chance of kind of recapturing the American identity in a way that I think is more honoring what the founders really believed rather than the way it was reinterpreted in the 1930s, 40s, 50s to facilitate a specific geopolitical situation.

00:49:54.780 uh so uh that said guys i hope that's useful i know there's a lot there complicated um it's uh

00:50:01.980 not the not the uh most surface level reading but i think it is important i think uh it will

00:50:07.960 help you understand where this all came from all right so i think we do have at least one

00:50:13.360 question from the audience so we'll go there cherry coke nixon says strauss weber nietzsche 0.97

00:50:21.540 marx angles has germany ever produced any useful philosopher or is it just degenerate trash uh 0.96

00:50:27.700 nihilistic trash kant maybe uh yeah well that's funny because many people said that kant was as 0.92

00:50:32.400 close as you could get to demonology but yeah it's very true that uh you know he might be the 0.96

00:50:37.520 the closest thing to an analytic philosopher uh in that tradition even though very much but yeah

00:50:42.520 i mean a lot of people understand that german philosophy is um radically different um you know

00:50:47.760 especially many anglos find it to be incredibly unuseful i do think that there are insights

00:50:52.120 uh in many of these guys that are ultimately useful even if you don't agree with them like

00:50:57.840 i certainly don't agree with many parts of say nietzsche or marx or max weber uh but ultimately

00:51:03.260 uh understanding nietzsche is critical to understanding the modern world as you see it

00:51:07.840 around you uh the same is true as weber i would reject many of uh of weber's final conclusions

00:51:13.280 but i would say that he ultimately shaped pretty radically the world that we live in and so having

00:51:19.260 a grasp on kind of what he was talking about is useful uh but yeah i i totally understand the

00:51:24.660 aversion to many of the german philosophers uh their ideas have certainly been uh as destructive

00:51:31.240 or at least are in many cases more destructive than they have been constructive at the end of

00:51:35.800 the day all right guys well we're going to go ahead and wrap this one up if it's your first

00:51:41.860 time on this channel please go ahead and subscribe like the video bell notification all that stuff

00:51:47.980 so you know when we go live and it really helps with the algorithm if you want to get these

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00:51:55.820 podcast platform and when you do if you leave a rating or review that also helps out very much

00:52:01.180 with the algorithm magic and of course my book the total state is in its second edition it's a

00:52:06.620 paperback and it's got an extra chapter so if you're waiting for the paperback or the extra

00:52:10.260 chapter. You can pick that up on Amazon now. Thank you everybody for watching and as always,

00:52:14.580 I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 17, 2026

The Esoteric Philosopher Whose Disciples Hijacked Conservatism ｜ 6⧸17⧸26

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