00:00:00.000When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination.
00:00:06.260It takes you to winding streets, spontaneous detours,
00:00:10.360and the realisation that neither of you is actually good with directions.
00:00:15.680And when the final shortcut taken isn't exactly short,
00:00:20.400our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned.
00:00:25.660KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. When you travel, travel well.
00:00:30.000Hey, 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.
00:00:42.020So if you want to support what I'm doing on the show and you want to get access to all the behind the scenes, the documentary, all your favorite Blaze TV hosts, you need to head to blazetv.com slash Oren to get $20 off your subscription today.
00:00:55.280That's blazetv.com slash Oren to get $20 off.
00:01:00.540And of course, we all know America's historic 250th celebration is fast approaching.
00:01:07.420And if you want to get some merchandise to celebrate from the Blaze, you need to head over to shopblazemedia.com.
00:01:14.680When you do that, you'll be able to use the promo code Oren10 to get 10% off that merchandise.
00:01:20.880and you'll also receive a free trial for blaze tv that 30-day free trial comes with that 10% off
00:01:28.160so again head to shopblazemedia.com use the promo code or intend to get 10% off your merchandise
00:01:34.040and that free 30-day trial of blaze tv all right guys so i want to talk to you a little bit today
00:01:43.420about a man that many people in the conservative movement may not be familiar with his name is
00:01:49.140Leo Strauss. And even though you may not know who Leo Strauss is, Leo Strauss and his disciples
00:01:55.720have shaped modern conservatism. They've had a radical impact on not just conservative foreign
00:02:02.720policy, as the neocons are often boiled down to, but the nature of American identity and our
00:02:08.300outlook on where our values come from, the idea of the propositional nation. A lot of things could
00:02:13.460be tied back to this understanding of American identity. We're going to be going a lot of
00:02:19.220different places today. This is a guy who's considered a very esoteric philosopher. So
00:02:24.040please understand that this is going to be an overview. I'm not going to be getting into every
00:02:28.880aspect of Leo Strauss that could and has taken entire lecture series from very serious academics.
00:02:35.060We may go in more depth in his individual writings later. I'm also going to go ahead and
00:02:39.740recommend a previous talk that I had with Dr. Paul Gottfried, who is a guy who I highly respect,
00:02:45.640who's written a book on the impact that Leo Strauss had on the movement. Now, I'm not just
00:02:49.680drawing from his book, but it is a critical step in understanding what went on. And I have
00:02:54.780interviewed him partially on this book before. So as I go through and explain this, if you want to
00:02:59.820learn more about Leo Strauss and get it right from the guy who has studied this in detail,
00:03:04.540I really recommend that interview as well. All right. So first, who is Leo Strauss? Well,
00:03:12.460Leo Strauss was a German Jewish academic. He was moving outside of his home country of Germany for
00:03:20.740his different academic opportunities. He was in Paris. He eventually moved to England. And of
00:03:26.540course, during this time abroad, we saw the development of the Third Reich, the rise of the
00:03:32.120Nazi regime. And Leo Strauss, being Jewish, understood that ultimately it would be a bad0.82
00:03:37.520idea for him to return home. So eventually he settled in the United States as a way to
00:03:44.180kind of avoid the rise of Hitler as so many Jews did. So this is a guy who is already fleeing the0.91
00:03:51.920impact of kind of the rise of the Nazis and lives in the shadow and writes in the shadow, of course,
00:03:57.240World War II and the Holocaust and everything that comes after. And that's going to be really
00:04:01.560critical to remember as we kind of take a look at how his thought develops and how it impacts
00:04:07.240many other people, some Jewish in the United States, some not Jewish, but all who have a very
00:04:13.660important impact on the conservative movement going forward. So why did Leo Strauss become
00:04:20.840important to the conservative movement? If you look at the work of Leo Strauss, he seems in many
00:04:26.500ways like an odd fit. Leo Strauss and many of his disciples were not actually particularly
00:04:31.460conservative people. However, Leo Strauss offered something very important to the conservative
00:04:37.260movement at the time. Conservatives were dealing with Heidegger. Martin Heidegger, who I've
00:04:45.100talked a little bit before on this channel, he was someone who had a radical impact on philosophy.
00:04:52.820His book, Being in Time, was kind of an earthquake when it came to philosophical understanding,
00:04:59.240and it really was probably one of the first jumping off points for postmodernism.
00:05:04.980You could maybe say Nietzsche was the first postmodernist, but Heidegger is definitely
00:05:08.940the next most important figure in that.
00:05:11.280And so because of that, he has had a very big impact on modern philosophy.
00:05:16.920Even people who reject this postmodernism have to grapple with Heidegger at some level.
00:05:23.820Heidegger challenged many things, and one of them was kind of the classic understanding
00:05:27.740of metaphysics that had underlied the Western understanding of kind of truth, the idea of
00:05:38.820I don't know if that entirely actually sums up what he was writing about.
00:05:43.300The 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.
00:05:53.900And so the conservatives were looking for a way to kind of battle back against Heidegger's impact.
00:06:01.860They 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.
00:06:14.980And in that figure, in that search for a figure to kind of fight back against Heidegger, they discovered Leo Strauss.
00:06:23.820Leo Strauss had this idea of natural right.
00:06:26.240In fact, probably his most famous book is Natural Right in History, which talks extensively,
00:06:31.980as you might imagine, about this concept.
00:06:34.220And Leo Strauss's natural right is interesting because rather than being grounded in the
00:06:42.320Bible or some longstanding religious tradition, even though Strauss was ethnically Jewish,
00:06:48.660he was an atheist. Instead, natural right was kind of this more flexible version of natural
00:06:55.880law. It's not natural law. Natural law tends to be Aristotelian or Thomistic, grounded more in
00:07:03.460the teachings of the Catholic Church or other related Christian teachings. This was not
00:07:09.640something that Leo Strauss was embracing. His natural right was more flexible. It allowed for
00:07:15.600more prudent in its application different regimes were able to kind of flex use some flexibility
00:07:23.380in it was not entirely relativistic in the way that obviously maybe perhaps a postmodern
00:07:30.060understanding of the world was but it was very different from natural law but this re-established
00:07:36.340the possibility of some form of objective truth perhaps one that was you know more interested in
00:07:44.300creating the minimum conditions of political life for Strauss than perhaps natural law with
00:07:50.100its more rigid dictates, but one that nevertheless was very useful to conservatives at that time.
00:07:56.380And also the fact that it wasn't grounded in one particular religious tradition meant that it could
00:08:02.160have a more universal application off of an increasingly diverse United States and perhaps
00:08:08.060an application outside of it as well. But we'll get to that in just a minute. So there's also
00:08:14.280the fact that Leo Strauss was himself, obviously, someone who was fleeing the Holocaust. He was
00:08:21.440himself a Jewish man. And this was kind of important for conservatives at the time because
00:08:25.680if you look at the old right in the United States, the old right valued many things that
00:08:31.120had suddenly become taboo. Ideas of tradition and heritage, the idea of a distinct national
00:08:38.580identity and traditional particularism. These things were now seen as dangerous because of
00:08:45.560the rise of the Third Reich. They had kind of received, you know, again, this branding as
00:08:52.340a dangerous idea that would only be pushed by the previous German enemy. And so by aligning
00:08:59.520themselves with Strauss, this allowed many conservatives to kind of avoid the post-World
00:09:04.380War II, baggage of being associated, having the right associated with kind of these more
00:09:09.940traditional understandings of conservatism. And so that was a way to distance themselves
00:09:16.160ultimately from this. Now, the problem, of course, with natural right is it was still
00:09:23.000not founded in any actual transcendent system. And so I think that while Strauss does some
00:09:29.820interesting work uh with natural right uh he's he's trying to kind of build this idea out it
00:09:35.580always fails up to the point where he's trying to then uh find some more transcendent ground for it
00:09:40.600at the end of the day it never quite uh eclipses heidegger's understanding because it's not willing
00:09:45.340to reach for that kind of more divine interaction uh and so that this is a constant limiting factor
00:09:51.420with strauss he comes up to i think what are often uh you know some truths uh you know about uh you
00:09:57.960the nature of rights, the nature of the world around us, but he ultimately falls short because
00:10:04.120that atheism is always holding back. Strauss often wrote about reason and revelation and how these
00:10:10.540two are in tension. You've probably heard this framed as Athens and Jerusalem, and that is usually
00:10:15.480people repeating people like Alan Bloom, who were themselves disciples of Leo Strauss. So if you've
00:10:20.820ever heard this juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem, of revolution, of revelation and
00:10:27.420reason. Those are people speaking in Straussian language, even if they don't know it. And you'll
00:10:32.140see this throughout kind of this presentation that I'm giving. We will often run into the fact
00:10:37.200that many conservatives are parroting Straussian ideas without really understanding it. But again,
00:10:43.780that said, this tension between reason and revelation was always one that's difficult
00:10:48.420for Strauss, but he always sides on reason because, again, he is an atheist. He never breaks
00:10:53.780through that limitation. And so that really colors his thinking. All right. So let's talk about
00:11:00.380what made Strauss different. Why is he so notable and how does the way that he look at texts or
00:11:08.240understand philosophy, why does that have wider implications for the conservative movement? That
00:11:13.700doesn't seem something like a lot of what people talk about conservatism. They're not usually
00:11:18.120talking about a lot of philosophy or theory. So why does the way that Leo Strauss reads Plato or
00:11:24.340Aristotle have a significant impact on, say, what your dad watching Fox News thinks about world
00:11:30.540events? Well, believe it or not, it actually does. So a couple of things you need to understand about
00:11:35.740Leo Strauss. He was a great scholar. There's no arguing that. I want to make it clear, Leo Strauss
00:11:42.960is not a stupid man he's not a joke uh he is a serious thinker and someone to be grappled with0.91
00:11:49.540uh you can't just throw him away and say oh well he was a neocon or he was the you know he came up0.94
00:11:54.780with this ideology and therefore uh that that's uh what defines strauss and i don't really need
00:12:00.400to understand anything else no this is this is a serious scholar uh and the way that he approached
00:12:06.080texts he was you know very good at reading in other languages very good at analyzing texts
00:12:10.840carefully. And he kind of posited two things that were really important to kind of the Straussian
00:12:16.560method. One is that the great writers throughout history were persecuted. He actually has a work
00:12:24.740called Persecution in the Art of Writing. And he thinks that philosophers throughout history
00:12:32.000had to be very careful about what they said, because if they didn't, they could be killed for
00:12:37.480it. And this is obviously true at some level, right? Like Machiavelli doesn't release most of
00:12:43.480his writings until he's dead or very close. You know, this is because, you know, if he put his
00:12:50.120real thoughts down and had it attached to him, it could be very dangerous. We often see philosophers
00:12:55.360in the past writing through characters. If you look at the works of obviously like Plato, he says
00:13:00.700everything through the mouth of Socrates for the most part. He very rarely attributes the beliefs
00:13:06.120to himself. And there's a couple things going on there. First, Strauss believed that because
00:13:11.980philosophers had to be very careful about what they said, they had to write in this very esoteric
00:13:17.180style. You had the things that were kind of out there for public consumption, the things on the
00:13:21.860surface that people would read. But then behind the scenes, the philosophers were kind of imbuing
00:13:27.400this passage with more complicated ideas that were hidden behind layers of meaning that people had to
00:13:33.920work through to understand. We can see this in, of course, something like Jesus's parables.
00:13:40.000People say, well, Jesus, why would you just say what you mean? And the answer is because he's
00:13:45.260saying difficult and dangerous things and oftentimes has to hide the meaning for those
00:13:50.280who are listening closely, let the listener understand, as it were. And so Leo Strauss is
00:13:55.560saying that this is something throughout history that we see in many different philosophers.
00:14:00.380and so when we read philosophical texts first we need to recognize that this is in play
00:14:05.800second if there's something we read in a philosophical text from a guy who otherwise
00:14:10.660is like rather brilliant and you know understands things much more complicated than we do
00:14:14.920then we need to take the time to read closely because perhaps that's not a mistake or that's
00:14:20.560not a contradiction it's not a logical error perhaps that mistake that obvious uh you know
00:14:25.860mistake is there for a reason. It's drawing us to some piece of information that Leo Strauss wants
00:14:31.860us to find, or rather that the writer wants us to find, that Leo Strauss thinks the writer
00:14:36.180wants us to find. And again, this is obviously true at some level. We'll get into more of that
00:14:42.860in a second. The other thing that Leo Strauss talks about is the immunity of the commentator.
00:14:48.760Strauss talks about how philosophers also often speak in the voices of other people or use other
00:14:54.760texts as authoritative, but then slowly bleed in what they want those texts to say or what they
00:15:02.540ultimately want to say through the commentator or as the commentator. So for instance, when you look
00:15:09.120again at Plato, he's saying things through Socrates. Well, that's not what I said. This is
00:15:14.080what my teacher Socrates said, right? At some level, we do know today, of course, that Plato
00:15:18.540is saying what he wants to say. But at the time, that's a way to shield yourself by always saying,
00:15:23.420Well, 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.
00:15:43.520That'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.
00:16:00.340So 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.
00:16:13.760And 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.
00:16:24.480And so when you're operating in the Straussian hermeneutic, it allows you in many ways to pull out deeper meanings.
00:16:31.340Okay, 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?
00:16:48.400Now, 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.
00:16:58.940However, 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.
00:17:21.340And 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?
00:17:38.900or are you just using that as an excuse to then kind of hijack what that thinker is
00:17:44.540ultimately saying and bend it towards your maybe more modern ends and so this is like a constant
00:17:50.580tension because these uh you know people are often held up as you know classical scholars you know
00:17:57.120obviously uh Strauss is talking about Plato and Aristotle and uh all all kinds of important
00:18:02.600xenophon and other important ancient commentators uh but but is he really uh bringing their ancient
00:18:10.320wisdom to the modern day or is he manipulating it in some way through this uh very esoteric
00:18:16.040way of kind of interpreting the text and making them say something that they never really met
00:18:22.120now it's not just leo strauss i want to make it clear if we just focus on leo strauss uh we will
00:18:31.380have a problem because Straussianism goes well beyond him. And I think it changes things in
00:18:36.060very important ways. And we'll talk about a couple of his disciples here, but it's important to
00:18:42.120recognize that guys, for instance, like Harry Jaffa, who studied along and from Strauss, was
00:18:49.600a student of Strauss, they've been clear that actually one of Strauss's motivations in his
00:18:55.760intellectual project was to make the world safe for the Jewish diaspora. Really, Strauss had been
00:19:03.300heavily impacted by his need to flee his home country and obviously the events of the Holocaust,
00:19:07.760as you can understand, a terrible thing to go through and see so many of the people that you
00:19:12.920love and know die. And so it was very important for him that these systems around him were made
00:19:19.580safe for the diaspora, which he was a part of. And so part of the motivation for Strauss's attempt
00:19:27.680to kind of bring natural right to the front and his championing of things like liberal democracy
00:19:34.180had to do with his desire to make the world safe for these people. And by the way, I'm not like
00:19:40.580pulling this out of nowhere. I'm not like reading this in out of my own motivation. Harry Jaffa has
00:19:45.240said this specifically. You can look up the interview I believe he did with the University
00:19:49.240of Chicago talking about Strauss. And he says very specifically, one of Strauss's goals was to
00:19:55.500create the safety net for the Jewish diaspora. So this is not my own bias. This is not something I
00:20:01.500made up. This is something that some of his most famous disciples have said out loud. So
00:20:07.680that's certainly part of it. So how did Strauss do this with natural right? Why was that part of
00:20:14.700the project. Well, what Strauss does is he founds natural right in the America or kind of gives it
00:20:23.320its new founding in the American constitution. And most importantly, the Declaration of
00:20:27.980Independence. For Strauss, the Declaration of Independence was kind of this new form of
00:20:32.920transcendency, this document that really sold natural right to Western democracies. And by
00:20:42.460using that as kind of his new transcendent document, it did a couple things. It created
00:20:49.580a founding for objective morality that was not necessarily Christian. He could create a more0.73
00:20:56.640universal idea of these rights that did not rely on a religious tradition that he did not believe
00:21:04.200in. And Harry Jaffa also thought this was important because he himself was also Jewish.
00:21:09.760And so now, you know, natural law might have been a very Christian concept, but natural
00:21:14.860right was something that would just exist in kind of the American founding documents.
00:21:20.220And not only is that something that could, you know, be given to countries that had Jewish
00:21:26.060diasporas in them, it could be spread across the world.
00:21:29.060Now, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were no longer, you know, historically situated
00:21:34.380particular beliefs of the American people.
00:21:36.940This 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.
00:21:53.560And 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?
00:22:10.620Like this mirrors a lot of the debates we're having on foreign policy and the propositional nation.
00:22:16.080If 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.
00:22:28.800It could push people out. But this is something that's totally inclusive and anyone could pick it up.
00:22:34.320And so now everyone can fit into this propositional nation, not just in the United States, but in a wider American-influenced empire.
00:22:43.620So 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?
00:23:00.500Was Strauss just doing it simply for that purpose?
00:23:03.260And 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.
00:23:18.600They would send letters to each other. And Strauss actually wrote an essay responding to Carl Schmitt's essay, Concept of the Political.
00:23:29.680And Carl Schmitt said that Leo Strauss's insights about his own work were some of the most penetrating insights he had ever seen.
00:23:37.780So Carl Schmitt had an incredible respect for Leo Strauss's intellect.
00:23:42.740So 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.
00:24:00.820We 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.
00:24:12.120I 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.
00:24:22.140But 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.
00:24:29.800Now, 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.
00:24:43.720that said uh carl carl marx is still in some at some level responsible for his disciples even if
00:24:51.380he would have found them abhorrent you know the ideology that carl marx birth did give uh well
00:24:57.360birth to all of these successive versions of his ideology so just as we can say that carl marx
00:25:03.800probably wouldn't recognize and would probably find disgusting uh current day marxists leo strauss
00:25:09.080probably would look at the current crop of neoconservants and find them deeply unimpressive
00:25:13.360and find what they've done with his work rather ugly.
00:25:16.640But I don't think that we can then turn around
00:25:18.400and say he had no impact or is not responsible
00:25:21.120for kind of what flowed logically from his work.
00:25:31.360even if he himself would not have agreed with this.
00:25:34.760Now, there's also a couple schools of Straussianism.
00:25:38.720Obviously, he worked at the University of Chicago,
00:25:41.640which still has a kind of a robust program today.
00:25:45.360Harvey Mansfield, I believe, is one of the guys that probably represents this at some level.
00:25:50.920But those are often called the East Coast Straussians.
00:25:53.760And this is the kind of they tend to focus on a lot of Strauss's more Nietzschean and Machiavellian influences.
00:26:01.760You can see why often people, again, are worried about the nature of Straussians that come out of that school.
00:26:11.640The other big school of Straussianism that was founded was West Coast Straussianism, and we already talked about its founder, Harry Jaffa.
00:26:20.320Harry Jaffa founded the Claremont Institute, which is obviously still around today.
00:26:25.360Now, I also want to put out a little disclaimer here.
00:26:28.640I am actually friendly with many people at the at the Claremont Institute.
00:26:33.980There is certainly an influence of Leo Strauss in that organization, though I think it has waned over the years.
00:26:39.380there are still many proud Straussians there but there are people there who are not Straussian at
00:26:44.800all and I'm not trying to cash even though I'm going to say some things about Harry Jaffa that
00:26:50.260may not you know sound like ringing endorsements I would like to say I'm friendly with many of
00:26:55.260these people they're great people I don't you know I don't think they're doing you know super
00:26:59.480deceptive work or something but this is just the intellectual history of kind of what's going on
00:27:04.560here. And I'm not going to avoid it, even though, again, I do think that there are a number of
00:27:09.300people at the Claremont Institute that are great and doing great work and are true American patriots
00:27:14.020and all of that. So that said, Harry Jaffa just has an interesting impact on the conservative
00:27:20.120movement as well. Just as Leo Strauss kind of took values and kind of this idea of natural
00:27:27.000rights and moved it from a transcendent God-based, you know, kind of substrate into, you know,
00:27:35.900refounded it in the Declaration of Independence and kind of turned those documents into Holy
00:27:41.340Writ. In the same way, Harry Jaffa kind of refounded the United States in Abraham Lincoln.
00:27:48.540He saw Lincoln as kind of the pivotal figure in American history and the guy who really helped
00:27:54.660the united states to realize its promise uh that that had been laid out in the declaration of
00:28:00.700independence all men are created equal the rights everything else uh but had not really met
00:28:06.260expectations up to that point if this sounds familiar it's the story that literally all of
00:28:10.620your conservative uh you know uh pundits your your your your mom your dad you know everyone
00:28:16.860who's kind of listened to conservative talk radio this is the narrative that they put together
00:28:20.720This is their storyline, and they got it from Harry Jaffa, even if they don't know it.
00:28:25.200The 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.
00:28:38.260This is what the average conservative believes, and this is why they have a reverence for Abraham Lincoln.
00:28:44.560uh they don't understand uh that this is a very progressive form of conservatism right uh that
00:28:53.280actually the founding documents were incomplete and the founding fathers were racists and bigots
00:28:58.480and uh you needed someone like abraham lincoln to kind of come along and truly find us uh you know
00:29:04.740truly find us the the real understanding of what the declaration meant right that you know the
00:29:09.940declaration, the founders, uh, that they didn't know. And once, uh, Abraham Lincoln showed up on
00:29:15.920the scene, he really solidified the true meaning of what it is to be American. Again, a very common
00:29:20.860refrain from conservatives today. And, uh, this is a big switch because of course, uh, again,
00:29:28.680you're no longer founded in, you know, transcendent Christian ideas. Uh, the, the history of the
00:29:34.420United States is no longer a valid, uh, retort to kind of what this new version of conservatism
00:29:39.680is pushing it's all refounded by by it's a revolution inside the form if you're not familiar
00:29:46.080with that term you keep the form you keep you keep calling it conservatism you keep calling it the
00:29:50.800right but you hollow out and replace everything inside of it and that revolution occurs while you
00:29:56.360maintain the outside shell and what happens is a lot of people just kind of look at it and say oh
00:30:00.660well that's still the same thing so you know the fact that we've really i've done episodes on this
00:30:04.900before the fact that we really had more like five republics in the united states and not just the one
00:30:09.640continuous republic we don't notice because we don't call them different things the fact that
00:30:13.500the articles of confederation were fundamentally different from the constitution which was
00:30:17.280fundamentally different from uh the united states after the 14th amendment and abraham lincoln and
00:30:22.620that was different you know and until we got to fdr and then the civil rights movement like each
00:30:27.920one of these things was a revolution inside the form we kept the constitution in theory we kept
00:30:32.500the idea of our democratic republic in theory but we constantly changed what it actually looked like
00:30:38.500The 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.
00:30:50.100The same is true in conservatism here.
00:30:52.300What 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.
00:31:04.280And 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.
00:31:16.040For 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.
00:31:26.820Lincoln was not a hero to many right wingers or conservatives.
00:31:30.080In 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.
00:31:50.200That was the view of Lincoln in many ways before you had this understanding.
00:31:55.820Now, 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.
00:32:06.880It has brought about the true and real meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
00:32:12.060If this sounds familiar, it is, again, a very Straussian technique.
00:32:16.260And now this is the center of what conservatism is.
00:32:20.280And so you have this really radical break from tradition that is being presented as conservatism.
00:32:29.800This 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.
00:32:39.140Okay, so we understand why this was necessary on a moral level, but how did neocons become a driving force in foreign politics?
00:32:46.900How 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?
00:33:03.140So, obviously, when we look at the globe after World War II, we have a very important dynamic going on.
00:33:12.480Now, 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.
00:33:33.800It 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.
00:33:50.980But you understand, you know, that this was something that was happening to a lot of countries.
00:33:56.180The United States was part of this. This is also part of kind of just the cycle of regimes.
00:34:00.280People 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.
00:34:12.500They want to expand their way of life, their control of area. They want to exert influence. That's just natural as well.
00:34:18.100So 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.
00:34:31.320So 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.
00:34:47.360and we need a way to manage this empire you know before we had a couple of holdings but now we're
00:34:53.440talking about most of the globe even if we don't directly control them in the way we did with say
00:34:58.020the philippines uh we at least have nominal control we are heavily influencing places like
00:35:03.820uk they're more or less under uh our direct influence because they're so beholden to us
00:35:09.900to rebuild and and everything else re-industrialize and so you have this dynamic where the united
00:35:15.460States has to figure out how to kind of cohere this global empire. And in the USSR, they see0.83
00:35:23.320communism. And communism is this globalized ideology that allows the control of the empire0.77
00:35:31.520to spread. When you have the USSR move into an area, you know what's going to happen. Everyone's
00:35:36.480going to kind of imbibe the communist ideology. That system is going to be put in place, the
00:35:42.060economic system the philosophy the social outlook they're going to come to dominate and put these
00:35:46.980countries under uh you know communist control now there's not a perfect history of this obviously
00:35:52.000the communists killed a lot of people millions and millions and millions and millions of people
00:35:56.400to try to force this ideology onto them but it is at the very least a universal ideology that
00:36:02.020kind of coheres uh the the communist holdings in the eastern bloc and america needs something
00:36:09.560similar right like we need a way to a story that tells us why it's okay for united states this
00:36:16.240nation that threw off an empire that it was a colony that rejected uh colonialism why we
00:36:21.940suddenly have colonized the world why we suddenly have an empire how does that make sense like how
00:36:25.760how do we deal with the cognitive uh dissidence that most conservatives still don't handle today
00:36:30.660uh i'm a nation that's entirely uh defined by throwing off foreign tyranny and and colonization
00:36:36.820And also, I run half the world under colonization.
00:36:43.360And the answer that I come up with is really this neoconservatism idea of spreading liberal democracy.
00:36:53.580You 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.
00:37:02.840It'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.
00:37:18.360And 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.
00:37:27.420And, of course, remember that this neoconservatism doesn't just come out of nowhere.
00:37:33.120Many of Strauss's new disciples were former Trotskyites.
00:37:38.020The neoconservatives were in large part former Trotskyites.
00:37:42.720And if you don't know your kind of battle in communism, the Trotskyites were the globalists.
00:37:48.360They were the people who thought, you know, who said, no, we can't have a nationalist version of these communist revolutions.
00:37:52.960It 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.
00:38:03.620This 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.
00:38:10.960And so now kind of Jaffa's Straussian universalism becomes the backbone of neoconservatism and the justification for its foreign policy.
00:38:22.080And 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.
00:38:33.420you have the constant spread of liberal democracy through the intervention of the United States and
00:38:39.920its allies and the belief that this could really just be ported everywhere the idea of course that
00:38:45.200George W. Bush could somehow install liberal democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan comes directly
00:38:52.180out of this idea of neoconservatism that well you know people are just kind of blank slates and
00:38:57.060these universal ideas can just be moved to anyone. And so we can just take the transcendent truths
00:39:04.400of the Declaration of Independence, which is basically a holy document for the Straussians,
00:39:08.220and we can just apply it to people in the same way that you can apply Bible verses from
00:39:12.920Christianity. It's kind of a way to get rid of Bible verses in Christianity and replace it with
00:39:17.100the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the Declaration. But they ultimately believe that you0.80
00:39:23.200can just spread this wherever you go. And so this idea is very much a direct consequence of
00:39:31.120the Straussian understanding. Now, again, is that exactly what Leo Strauss would have said?
00:39:36.120Probably not. That probably would have been a little too simplistic for Leo Strauss.
00:39:39.840But again, we have to look at not just him, but his disciples. It's not just about Marx.
00:39:44.980It's what people did with Marx's work. It's not just about Strauss, who was far more intelligent,
00:39:50.320and a much higher level operator than the Straussians. But nonetheless, that is an impact
00:39:57.100of his work. And so we have to take that into consideration. So obviously, we understand the
00:40:03.860foreign impact of this. We understand why this impacted our foreign policy. But it also impacts
00:40:10.640the American understanding of kind of who we are as a people. All of a sudden, the idea that
00:40:16.620that America is a specific nation, a particular people, you know, the kind of thing that John Jay
00:40:23.540wanted for us in the Federalist Papers, that falls away. And instead, we get this idea that
00:40:29.420America is an idea. And that starts to work its way into pretty much every aspect of American
00:40:36.600identity, even inside the conservative movement. You know, the right would have rejected this in
00:40:41.200previous decades. Russell Kirk famously said that conservatism rejects ideology and would not
00:40:48.700embrace this, but that has been redefined. This is one of the reasons that Russell Kirk was
00:40:52.960ultimately canceled because he was constantly pushing back against neocons and thought that
00:40:57.420their influence was really deleterious to the American project and the identity of the conservative
00:41:04.360movement. But you can see how many of these ideas are basically what you get back on a Fox News
00:41:09.880program on Rush Limbaugh, you know, what you hear from your grandparents when they're just kind of
00:41:14.940parroting what they said. And so I guess I want to wrap up this discussion with some of its
00:41:20.440implications. You know, is Leo Strauss an enemy? Well, kind of. Obviously, his approach to philosophy
00:41:30.820and its embrace by the conservative movement has probably had some pretty serious negative impacts
00:41:36.740for the American right and conservatism in general.
00:42:05.080that there are not dangers inherent in what Strauss was doing. You can't unmoor the idea
00:42:11.620of natural rights from God. You cannot just re-found them in the Constitution or the
00:42:16.860Declaration, and you certainly can't re-found the country in Lincoln without having some
00:42:23.120very negative impacts on kind of the conservative identity.
00:42:27.360now that said even if you understand that a lot of what conservative commentators you know
00:42:36.840conservative pundits uh even you know politicians uh even your your parents a lot of what they
00:42:43.540repeat is uh you know a formulation uh on of leo strauss even though that's the case
00:42:50.120i i want you to be very careful about how you ultimately approach this because if you just run
00:42:57.720up to uh you know these people and you say by the way everything you believe is a lie it was all
00:43:02.900implanted by this uh you know esoteric philosopher leo strauss and uh it's actually that that is not
00:43:08.500going to work okay that that's going to scare people it's going to throw them off and it's also
00:43:12.720not necessarily true uh you need to understand that most of the people who are parroting a lot
00:43:19.000of these kind of assumptions that arise from the Straussians, they're not aware that's what that
00:43:24.920came from. They're just trying to be good Americans and good conservatives. These people are not your
00:43:29.840enemies. They are your friends. They are your family. They are your greatest potential allies.
00:43:35.600And so when you approach this, you need to do it respectfully and carefully. You need to recognize
00:43:40.400that the average conservative really loves the country and they really want to do what's right.
00:43:45.700And 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.
00:44:02.120Remember, 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.
00:44:25.780You 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.
00:44:35.660If 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.
00:44:52.960And 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.
00:45:16.320And 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.
00:45:33.280does that jive with the current conservative movement? That is a very useful tool. At first,
00:45:40.720people will still be resistant, but ultimately, the force of the argument is kind of too much to
00:45:44.900bear. I mean, what are they going to do? Are they going to argue with George Washington? Are you
00:45:47.940going to argue with John Jay, you know, that they didn't know what they were talking about,
00:45:52.640but someone who told you that Martin Luther King is the real true conservative they understood?
00:45:57.280It's not going to work. And so I think when you're confronting these things, it's really
00:46:01.760important. Do not deconstruct the founding. Do not try to deconstruct the symbols of America.
00:46:07.680Do not attack people for genuinely holding beliefs that they believe to be the true American
00:46:14.600idea. Instead, you should approach them with the truth of the founders. Instead of going back to
00:46:22.180this idea that just one phrase in the declaration actually defines all of
00:46:27.720you know kind of kind of human morality and the identity of the United States look at what the
00:46:33.500founders who wrote that really believe you know what what was the majority belief among Americans
00:46:38.560the United States where were they getting all of their ideas from the declaration no they were
00:46:42.900getting it from the Bible and the Anglo-English tradition you know tradition like that's where
00:46:48.460they were drawing from it's English common law and Christianity that made America you know not
00:46:54.960the fact that Lincoln discovered equality in the middle of the country's history like that just
00:47:00.740doesn't make sense and over time if you present the words of the founders to kind of show where
00:47:07.460these ideas go wrong you're going to be in a much better position than if you try to attack them
00:47:12.120head-on or you try to bring foreign philosophers in now again I'm somebody who's explored all of
00:47:16.280these people I've made arguments based on them I'm not saying you can't do that but if you're
00:47:20.260looking for the most effective way to counter these ideas, this is it. Because it's impossible
00:47:26.020to argue that Leo Strauss or Harry Jaffa was more correct about what the United States was
00:47:31.260than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Jay and all of these people. It's just too
00:47:39.660hard to tell someone that Alexander Hamilton didn't know what America should be, but Harry
00:47:46.660Jaffa did and I think if you are putting yourself on firm ground like that you'll have an easier
00:47:51.620time kind of not again dismantling these notions but correcting them back to the actual traditional
00:47:59.220understanding of what America is and I think that's the most valuable thing I can do kind of
00:48:03.920I can leave you with in this talk I don't think everyone needs to run out there and read Leo
00:48:08.720Strauss even though I do think he's an interesting scholar if you're not somebody who's like basically
00:48:13.780dedicating their life to philosophy uh it's kind of a waste of time if you only have i can you're
00:48:19.760like well i can read like two philosophy books a year uh i would not go to leo strauss i would
00:48:24.980stick with some of the more important stuff stick with aristotle your plato read the founders you
00:48:29.740know read read bertrand de juvenile before you read leo strauss but strauss is valuable you know
00:48:36.680there there is something there uh but it's just not it's not worth your time and dedication to
00:48:40.920try to wade through all this if you if you don't have time in uh but that said i just think that
00:48:45.300understanding where this came from the reason i'm telling you about leo strauss gives you this
00:48:49.660background of of where this ideology emerged and why it has insinuated itself so deeply into the
00:48:55.540conservative movement and it'll help you better grasp you know why we ended up with this foreign
00:48:59.840policy why we ended up with this propositional nation idea why we came up with this idea that
00:49:04.660we need to conquer the world in the name of liberal democracy uh it didn't come from nowhere
00:49:08.980Again, 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.
00:49:28.960I 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.
00:49:54.780uh so uh that said guys i hope that's useful i know there's a lot there complicated um it's uh
00:50:01.980not the not the uh most surface level reading but i think it is important i think uh it will
00:50:07.960help you understand where this all came from all right so i think we do have at least one
00:50:13.360question from the audience so we'll go there cherry coke nixon says strauss weber nietzsche0.97
00:50:21.540marx angles has germany ever produced any useful philosopher or is it just degenerate trash uh0.96
00:50:27.700nihilistic trash kant maybe uh yeah well that's funny because many people said that kant was as0.92
00:50:32.400close as you could get to demonology but yeah it's very true that uh you know he might be the0.96
00:50:37.520the closest thing to an analytic philosopher uh in that tradition even though very much but yeah
00:50:42.520i mean a lot of people understand that german philosophy is um radically different um you know
00:50:47.760especially many anglos find it to be incredibly unuseful i do think that there are insights
00:50:52.120uh in many of these guys that are ultimately useful even if you don't agree with them like
00:50:57.840i certainly don't agree with many parts of say nietzsche or marx or max weber uh but ultimately
00:51:03.260uh understanding nietzsche is critical to understanding the modern world as you see it
00:51:07.840around you uh the same is true as weber i would reject many of uh of weber's final conclusions
00:51:13.280but i would say that he ultimately shaped pretty radically the world that we live in and so having
00:51:19.260a grasp on kind of what he was talking about is useful uh but yeah i i totally understand the
00:51:24.660aversion to many of the german philosophers uh their ideas have certainly been uh as destructive
00:51:31.240or at least are in many cases more destructive than they have been constructive at the end of
00:51:35.800the day all right guys well we're going to go ahead and wrap this one up if it's your first
00:51:41.860time on this channel please go ahead and subscribe like the video bell notification all that stuff
00:51:47.980so you know when we go live and it really helps with the algorithm if you want to get these
00:51:52.100broadcasts as podcasts you need to subscribe to the or mac entire show on your favorite
00:51:55.820podcast platform and when you do if you leave a rating or review that also helps out very much
00:52:01.180with the algorithm magic and of course my book the total state is in its second edition it's a
00:52:06.620paperback and it's got an extra chapter so if you're waiting for the paperback or the extra
00:52:10.260chapter. You can pick that up on Amazon now. Thank you everybody for watching and as always,