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- [00:05]
A
So I'm very pleased to be talking to Damon Linker. I'm interested in talking to him because in many ways, we've got very parallel backgrounds. Damon studied political philosophy at Michigan State with some old friends of mine, Jerry Weinberger, Arthur Melzer and the like. And so he had a Straussian education, as did I, because I was a student of Alan Bloom as an undergraduate and then Harvey Mansfield when I got to the Harvard government department. And Damon since then has gone on to do many other things. He's, he has, he has a regular blog and has been, you know, for many years a commentator and acute observer of the right wing in the United States. So the question, Damon, that I really want to start out with is the following. And I asked this of Laura Field when I did a interview with her on her new book, Furious Minds. So we all had very similar backgrounds. You know, you, Laura, me, Bill Kristol, you know, Bill Galston, a number of people. But then there's a. Another bunch of people with Straussian backgrounds that read the same books and had the same kind of introduction to political theory that we did that all veered off and became MAGA Republicans, many of them associated with the Claremont Institute. And so my question to you to just get this started is, how do you account for that split? I mean, I think many people are aware of the west coast versus East Coast Straussians, but that's just a label that doesn't really explain very much. So what is your account for how this happened?
- [01:44]
B
Well, it's a great question. It's a complicated one because Strauss is a deep thinker, a major, major figure in 20th century thought and intellectual history. And so doing him justice, I think, requires having to kind of up our game, how we think about these things.
- [02:02]
A
You're in the process of writing a book about this?
- [02:04]
B
Yes, I am. I was signed up to write a book about Strauss that would be more of a straight, intellectual biography of him. This was about 10 years ago with Yale University Press, and that was right around the time Trump won the election. And people with Straussian pedigrees began supporting Trump. But then others, like Bill Kristol, kind of broke from them and opposed Trump. And that created such a complexity about him, his legacy, that I sort of put the project aside and just decided to observe the political world for a little while and figure out how to make sense of it all. So now I'm doing a different version of that book for Princeton University Press that will incorporate the history of the Straussians into the story of Strauss's own intellectual ideas and development.
- [02:56]
A
Gaither, you're the perfect person to answer this particular question.
- [02:59]
B
I like to think so. Thanks. I mean, I think the best way to explain this in a simple way, unfortunately, requires even going as far as invoking a little Plato. If there's anything that your average, generally educated person knows about Plato, it's the Allegory of the Cave. The Allegory of the Cave, as some of your listeners no doubt know, talks about how education begins with people coming to realize that they are kind of intellectual prisoners within the context of their time and place and realizing, some of them, that they haven't adequately looked into the things that they've been taught, that there is a kind of, if you will, a kind of ethos within our world that has inculcated certain opinions about morality, justice, politics and the meaning of life, things like this. And a few of these people come to realize that, hey, I'm prisoners in a context. I have to look on this critically, and they become philosophers who eventually exit the cave. And then philosophers. Philosophy is about coming back into the cave and liberating other people to join you outside of the cave to bathe in the light of the sun, the truth of things, not the kind of more limited, shadowy version of reality that we're inculcated in as young people in our context. And this is, for Plato, true of every single political community that's ever existed. Now, Strauss took this idea, and for complicated reasons I won't even begin to explain here, came to the conclusion, conclusion that modern liberal political communities have a special problem when it comes to philosophy, in that they actively teach within their cave, that the people within the cave have already left the cave because they teach that we, unlike people in the benighted past, recognize that there are equal rights, that everyone is fundamentally equal, basically, the teachings of the Declaration of Independence, to summarize it, and while Strauss was not a severe critic of these things, he believed, with, I think, Plato, that it was a version of our cave. But because the teaching of that cave is that to believe in these things that we believe in, like rights, is itself to believe that that is a. Already to have liberated oneself from the cave creates a kind of double problem for people within liberal contexts like ours. So Strauss came to believe, and I believe and will try to show in my book, that his form of pedagogy, both in the classroom, when he was teaching and in his books and writings, had to involve two steps of education. First, you had to liberate people from believing too easily in liberalism and that meant, in effect, turning them into kind of conservatives. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, the best way to summarize it is he convinced people that they needed to believe in a kind of moral. Moral realism, that when you make a statement about what is morally just, righteous and good, you are making a statement about the nature of reality itself, and we need to look into that. It's a kind of truth claim about the way the world is, and we need to look into that. And he believed that the liberal approach to this gets at part of this reality of morality. And your own most famous first book, the End of History and the Last man, gives a kind of version of this because it's about equal recognition of people for their dignity, that every human being, within a liberal context believes everybody else, at least, are supposed to believe that they are equal, that they have rights, and that we recognize each other's rights. This is a kind of horizontal version of morality. But the broader version of morality also involves hierarchical distinctions like ignoble or base, honorable and dishonorable, beautiful and ugly. And that you need to get students to kind of become aware of this much broader template of moral distinctions that Strauss would say we all make all the time. It's just that the liberal context kind of gives us no vocabulary to recognize them or to interrogate what we're calling noble and honorable and just in this place, broader sense of righteousness. And then. So that's step one of the education. And that, in effect, turns his students, first of all, into a kind of classical conservative who believes that there are these moral distinctions kind of written on the kind of natural order. But Strauss's education has a second step that unfortunately not all of his students take, which is to interrogate those classical conservative distinctions philosophically. And so what you end up with in the Straussian world is a lot of people who end up becoming pretty conservative people who believe that there is written on the universe, on the natural world, a series of hierarchical moral distinctions that they believe are true. And if they want to go further in their philosophic education by reading more Plato and Aristotle and other great philosophers, they will see that there are dialectical problems with these assertions about what is true and noble and base and better than other things. And they will become far more skeptical philosophic types who sort of look on all of politics with a kind of respect, but also with a kind of ironic distance, like, yeah, okay, politics is very important. Human nature shines maybe at its greatest clarity in great political deeds. Statesmanship is a great human activity that shows a kind of human greatness at work in the world, and we should study it. But to be a philosopher and actually escape from the cave, rather than, say, ruling it even well, is better and nobler than to remain in the cave, even at a high level. And so, again, to go back to the Straussians in your initial question by way of this long route, what we see is that Straussian Strauss students, whether they were the ones who first studied with Strauss, like Harry Jaffa, who found. Whose students founded the Claremont Institute. Later, Harry Jaffa became a political philosophy professor and ended up doing some valuable scholarly work. But he also became a supporter of Barry Goldwater's political campaign and helped to write Goldwater's famous speech at the 64 convention that talked about how moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue and so forth, and extremism is no vice in certain contexts. He and his students. Students ended up becoming one kind of staunch conservative at that point. Then you had people like Irving Kristol, who studied with and read Strauss and became the founder of the neoconservative movement, which was a different conservative, not radically different than the Goldwater right, but a little more liberal, a little more moderate. Alan Bloom, your teacher, around that same time in the 80s, wrote the closing of the American Mind, which. Which I think comes sort of closest to where I'm gonna come down on Strauss in my book, I think truest to his real legacy, both talking about the importance of inculcating and examining our hierarchical moral convictions, but ultimately with a view toward leaving them a little bit behind, again with some ironic distance. And then you had people, some of the people around the second Bush administration who supported the Iraq war. I don't think there's anything directly Strauss that would lead one to think that was a good policy. But there were people who were influenced by Strauss in that orbit who were that kind of Bush conservative. And now in our time, we have people like Michael Anton and others surrounding the Claremont Institute who have become Trumpist, sort of Straussian trumpists. Now, how could they all be descended from Strauss? I think, well, the cave evolves over time, and what it means to be a staunch conservative is different in 1964, from the mid-80s, from the early 2000s to 2016 to today. And so what you're going to get from a certain kind of Straussian is going to be a staunch conservative of a certain type that will be sort of relative to the regime as it evolves down through the decades and centuries. But what remains constant is that it's Always possible at any of those moments to kind of realize that to be truly philosophical and reflective is to subject those conservative convictions to a kind of dialectical critique that sees their weaknesses, their half truths that are buried in their positions. And so I would urge sort of itself, ironically, because I don't think there's any chance of it, but I would urge someone like a Michael Anton to, like, you know, reflect a little bit on what you're saying here and ask yourself, what would Socrates say about this? Like, is this really philosophy? Or is this a kind of. To use a fancy term, a kind of propa dudic to philosophy that. That really is only going part way up and out of the cave, and you're basically. You are trying to control the cutouts at the back of the cave and kind of be the puppet masters there. But that's not philosophy, that you're kind of trapped in the world of shadows and deception as much as anyone who's chained to the floor. That's my long answer. Sorry that went on, but it is complicated.
- [13:27]
A
Yeah. So, to talk about the Claremont Institute itself, one of the things that's really puzzled me is the transformation that happened with Harry Jaffa himself. His first book, Crisis of a House Divided, is an excellent book. You know, it basically argues that actually the Constitution itself is not the deepest source of, you know, American values in a way that it's trumped by the. To use a term, by the Declaration of Independence and its declaration that all men are created equal. And, you know, this figures directly in his interpretation of the Lincoln Douglas debates, where, you know, Douglas was saying, I care not whether people vote up slavery or down slavery. What matters is, you know, their democratic choice. And Lincoln said, no, not so fast. People cannot choose something that violates this basic principle in the Declaration. And it's curious the way that a lot of the Claremont people keep talking about needing to go back to the Constitution and to respect the Constitution and that, you know, their liberal opponents have failed to do that, but they seem to be going back to a Constitution that's not the one that. Or rather, they are going back to the Constitution and they're sort of forgetting about the Declaration. But it does seem to me that that shift had already happened in Jaffa's own career as he got older and he himself got more conservative. And somehow in that mix, you insert a lot of American nationalism, because that's the only way I can interpret, you know, some of his conclusions. That basically, the. I don't think this is too much of an exaggeration. But, you know, he would argue that the American regime was kind of the apotheosis of Aristotelian virtue, that it incorporated all the teaching of the classics and put it in a, you know, modern, practical form. What do you think about that?
- [15:17]
B
Yeah, no, that I agree with the way. I mean, for me, the problem with Jaffa and where he went awry is when he started talking about the US as the best regime. You know, if you. If you study Strauss or have studied with his students, you know that the term best regime is wrapped up with Plato's Republic and also with Aristotle's politics, that there's a way that classical political philosophy holds out that the way you determine the relative justice of any given political whole community is by coming up with a city in speech, that you kind of. You kind of work out, well, what would it take to make a perfectly just regime? And you kind of come up with this model in the mind or a city in speech, if you're doing a Platonic dialogue and in speech, you come up with that model, and then you judge actual existing regimes by that standard. So look at that way. Almost by definition, there is no. No best regime in the world. No regime is a best regime because it's a city in speech or a mental construct of a philosopher. And yet, knowing this full well, because Jaffa studied with Strauss, he was a very smart man. He decided at some point, well, either he forgot what he had been taught, or he decided that he thought that the prudentially right, Right way to go as a teacher was to begin telling his students that actually we nailed it here in the United States. We got the best regime right here, and we have fallen away from it. And it's the combination of those two things that create the real problem for the Claremont people. Because if you believe that we once were the best regime, that first of all leads you to, I think, exaggerate the excellence of the American regime above what any. What any form of government in the actual existing world could be. Because one thing you learn from studying ancient political philosophy is that the reason why no actual country or political community is the best regime, because it isn't possible in reality for there to be a best regime, because justice in itself has contradictions within it as a concept that don't add up, if you try to make a perfectly just regime or constitution in one way, it will be unjust in some other respect that is also justice. And said, then you'd have to go the other way and fix those problems, but then you would begin to violate other ideas of justice because the idea of justice itself doesn't hold together when subjected to adequate scrutiny. And so it's very dangerous to say that any particular country ever attained that because it's not true. It's a kind of noble lie or a myth. But then the second problem is that if you've done that and you say that America used to be the best regime, then the fact that when you look around at our actual world and you see all the ways in which we fall short, not only of the way America used to be, which if you're sufficiently conservative, you might think was better in the past, but that we look at how far we fall from the best regime, that can lead to a kind of indignation about how bad things are. It sort of leads you to, to fall prey to some of the most extreme tendencies of extreme right wing reaction to the political present. It's as if your fellow citizens who don't agree with you, who are still liberal or even insufficiently right wing conservatives, are kind of betraying some higher truth in a way that is a kind of, I don't know, a kind of, I don't know, the word is escaping me, but a kind of betrayal of the highest truths that any human beings can ever attain. And that leads to a kind of rage. It leads to things like Michael Anton's Flight 93 essay, where the world of our country 10 years ago is presented as this nightmare scenario that, that we're on the flight that's been hijacked by terrorists who are gonna fly the plane into the White house or the U.S. capitol. And our options are either to rush the cockpit and install Donald Trump as president. And yes, that could lead us all to die, but you know, we'll die if we let Hillary Clinton win. Like that's, that is so over the top in its hysteria about the reality of the present. And, and it's made possible by this assumption that, like, look how far we've fallen from where we began.
- [20:22]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, if you look just historically at where we began, even in Jaffa's terms, you know, from his first book, we had slavery.
- [20:30]
B
Right. What you, what you end up with, like, especially when you read the earlier Jaffa in light of this later Jaffa, basically we had like 1865 or I guess the amendments right after the war. So like 1868 until roughly the Wilson administration, with the rise of progressivism in the administrative state, which for the latter day Claremonsters is kind of the big fall from which everything proceeds. And so what we're talking about the Gilded Age, we're talking about the Grant administration, the mess of the 1877 resolution.
- [21:10]
A
Yeah, William McKinley. That bump seems to.
- [21:12]
B
Yeah, William McKinley and, and then maybe Theodore Roosevelt. But he was a kind of proto progressive, so he can't really be included in the pantheon. So what are we talking about here? Like the economic takeoff of the post Civil War period. And it wasn't a great period in the country, frankly. It was very violent. There were terrible labor protests. Why one would focus on that era of America and politics rather than say, as I'm more inclined to do, and I suspect you are, the post World War II context in which we became kind of the default leader of the free world and created these liberal international institutions that we've husbanded for decades and then perhaps over expanded them, became a little too heady in the post Cold War world, thinking they could do more good than maybe was realistically possible. That's a fine discussion to have. But to see it as this huge drop off of a CLIFF from like 1890, I don't see it myself.
- [22:20]
A
Yeah, well, let's broaden away from Straussians and talk about the right more generally. I think one of the remarkable things about the moment that we're in is that there just seems to be such a disjunction between the kind of rhetoric that is being used by many people on the right and the actual reality of. Of America in 2025. You know, that Michael Anton piece is a perfect example of this, that we are facing an existential threat that America will not exist if we continue down this path. And you know, by any objective standard, it seems to me that, I mean, as you were just pointing out, you go back to any earlier period of American history and they're really big problems, you know, big injustices. And a lot of those have actually been. Have been made a lot better. There's been a lot of reform. And how is it psychological? You know, so this is why I've now come to the conclusion that you can't understand contemporary politics just by theoretical ideas. That you really need to refer to something like social psychology to really explain how people get into these moral panics over where we are at the present moment. Because I just think that, you know, that's not. Not, you know, it doesn't correspond to anybody's lived reality. Okay, so maybe if you're a young guy and you're being beaten out for a job, an entry level job by a woman, and you can say, well, that's, you know, the result of this liberal world we're living in. But you know, compared to the kinds of injustices that have existed, you know, in our country in previous generations, not to mention, you know, authoritarian regimes that are ongoing right now, you know, things are pretty good. So how do you explain this?
- [24:10]
B
That that's where I think we need to, you know, bring in things like what I, I've seen you have begun to talk more in terms of social media and what this has done to our minds. And I, I really do think that it's a scary moment when one that frankly, I don't know where it goes unless this, I mean, because this stuff isn't going anywhere. This is now the, the world we live in. And I'm, I'm beginning to become a little skeptical on, of whether survive an age where conspiratorial panic memes have more influence on shaping public opinion than anything resembling rational speech and deliberation. I just, I look out, I mean, every week brings kind of a new wave of these things which the right is very happy to weaponize as much as they can because they think that it, it advantages their own side. And a lot of the people, people in positions to kind of spread these memes or arguments or claims and believe it themselves, like they, they're kind of like, I, I believe, I think Michael Anton is being completely sincere when he writes the things that he does. And let alone a lot of the other people on the right, I think they, they have fallen prey to the same kind of panic narratives. It's, I mean, but as you say, if you look at things in any, in any kind of objective measure, what is it? What is unemployment? Like, what, below 5%? It has been below 5% for years now. We did have a bad bout of inflation, but bad bout of inflation was what, 8, 9% for a few months and then it went back down. You know, we're, we're in a world where even within my living memory, when I was a kid, and I know you were a bit older, but I remember the late 70s and early 80s and double digit, double digit interest rates, inflation, stagnation, that was really bad. There were lines for the gas station stretching down the street for a quarter mile. You could only get gas every other day, depending on whether the end of your license plate was an odd or an even number. That sounds positively dystopian by contemporary standards, but by the standards of the world, even that wasn't that bad. I mean, there are countries, I mean, well, it seems, seems funny to bring up Venezuela given that Trump Seems eager to start a war to overthrow their government right now. But within the last decade they've suffered from four to five digit inflation, hyperinflation. And then you look at the Weimar Republic. A lot of people on the right are always saying we're in the new Weimar Republic. And I agree that at the level of consciousness, a lot of people on the right have, have worked themselves into a Weimar sensibility. But we don't have communists firebombing buildings in our cities. We don't have hyperinflation barrel fulls of money. We don't have reparation payments to the people who defeated us in a world war within living memory. Like it's so unbelievable. I mean, what worries me is like, God, what if we actually did have a really bad economic downturn? How insane would things become then? I mean, I don't have a great simple explanation for it. Although I will say there are times where I wonder if being deeply wired into a social media environment is conducive to a kind of psychosis, a kind of civic psychosis. Like we can't debate empirical reality anymore. We're sort of debating the video game version of reality where the other party is like, like the, your, your opponent on the screen that you're fighting with your fake gun, you know, in Call of Duty, as opposed to the actual human beings that are actually in the world.
- [28:22]
A
If you get shot, you've got another life, you know, you just get up and fight again. Yeah, let's, let's shift to a different philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, because he's obviously had an effect on, on a certain part of the right that, and he's very different from, you know, the classical philosophers that Leo Strauss admired. Actually, it points to a really deep contradiction within the extreme right today where, you know, some of them are Catholic integralists, you know, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule and so forth. But some of them are outright, you know, Nietzscheans who contest the basic, basic Christian assertion of the universal equality of dignity of all human beings. And they actually want a more hierarchical world. You know, Matthew Rose wrote this book on the precursors of the contemporary right. And it's very clear that people like Oswald Spengler or Benoit, this French right winger, are anti Christian. I mean, they, they directly blame Christianity for creating this leveled, you know, egalitarian world and that that's really what needs to be destroyed. And it seems like some, you know, Silicon Valley types have picked up, you know, the Nietzschean part because it appeals to them. The idea that there's Actually a superior class of people that ought to have more influence in a. In a political system. What do you think?
- [29:46]
B
Well, yeah, that is absolutely one faction of the right today. I'm at the risk of bringing Strauss back in. Strauss wrote a fabulous essay in 1941 that I know you, you republished part of it, I think at American purpose several months ago, titled German Nihilism. And he talks in that piece, and obviously it's 41, so the war hasn't even begun on the American side yet. It's going on in Europe. And Strauss is trying to explain to his very American audience what's going on over there. Why have so many Germans fallen in for Hitler and fascism? And he tries to explain it and I think in terms that do explain that faction of our right today, there's a kind of longing for, once again, a kind of hierarchical notion of morality, that there are certain ideas and then actions that are better than, more dignified than others. And that certain people, not all of them, they're usually men, but not all men. Certain men have within their souls a kind of bodily deep longing for some notion of greatness and the achievement of something that you would call glory. We don't talk a lot about glory in our late modern liberal world, but as a motivation for human action and human history. There's a long history of men being motivated by glory. That's why you sign up to fight a war, to join a crusade to do other great deeds, where you're going to risk your life for the sake of some end that you deem worthy of that sacrifice. And our world doesn't provide a huge number of outlets for that. And there are people on the right in America today who, like some of the people who came to support Hitler, who long for a world in which not just a sub faction of a diverse pluralistic liberal world have that aspiration, but that the political whole will be oriented toward providing glory to those who demonstrate it as a kind of board for their great noble sacrifice. And so that's a way in which, as you talk about at the end of the end of history book, the possibility that from out of a liberal world, people might actually, at least some might actually choose to restart history, as you put it, by kind of starting wars for their own sake, like kind of get. Create a situation that will lend itself to the demonstration of great acts of noble sacrifice for a cause. And the strange thing about our right today is that, as you say, there are other people on the right who have such different ideas about what all this is about. Like, why would you support Donald Trump? Like, all right, I guess I can see if I look the right way and squint and tilt my head, I can see why, like a Nietzschean, like say Bronze Age pervert would be find this alluring. But why would a Patrick Denise like this or an Adrian Vermeule? And you realize that in the end, these people don't agree about very much. But what they agree on is that they hate the left and that is enough. And we saw it leading up to the 2024 election and we're going to see it again. They're going to try as best they can before the midterms coming up next November, and they certainly will try it again in 2028. No matter who the Republican is on the ballot, they are going to do everything they can to treat the left as a unified force associated with the most unhinged and irresponsible faction on the left. They will find the one crazy left wing professor who says a crazy left wing thing and they will focus on that and say is what everyone to the left of center believes. Therefore Dineen and Vermeule and Bronze Age pervert and Nick Fuentes and everyone who works for Trump and who voted for Trump in 2024 has to come back together in this coalition to defeat the left. And then we get in, as we are now in the middle of the second Trump administration and all that's sort of falling apart and we have squabbling factions and they're sniping at each other and, and that's sort of, I think, what you'd expect to see in the, in the inter, the interregnum between the electoral contests. But I suspect we're going to start to see the attempt. I already seen that some of the Trump people are already talking about trying to hold like a political convention next summer to kind of stand in for one of our every four year conventions that we hold before presidential elections to try to nationalize the midterms and kind of show as Michael Anton loves to talk about the stakes, the stakes are so high. We must. Even if you don't like Trump, even if he hasn't lowered your grocery bill, even if he hasn't done anything he promised he would do, even if his tariffs have made prices worse, we have to put all that aside and vote for him. Because if not, the woke apocalypse will befall us.
- [35:13]
A
Okay, so one last important issue I want to cover is the one about gender, because gender has been important. You know, Harvey Mansfield, one of his last books was A book on manliness. And I think that one thing that's quite remarkable about the current right is the degree to which it's gendered. You know, it's really young men, men that are the most aggressive and the real drivers of a lot of the right wing populism, including in Europe.
- [35:41]
B
So it's not just an American phenomenon.
- [35:43]
A
No. In fact, in the Korean presidential election last year, there was a huge split between young Korean men and young Korean women. The young men all voted for the conservative candidates and the women for the liberal one. Now, I've got a sociological explanation for why this has happened, but I wonder if you could talk about the role of gender, because a number of Straussians come out on this issue in not the same place. I, I would, you know, I would come out. I think in Laura Field's case, this is what really annoyed her. Not that I don't think she's, you know, any kind of ideological feminist. She's just a woman. And a lot of this stuff I think is kind of offensive to, you know, that that rhetoric and the way they talk is, is offensive to, to women who've experienced this sort of thing, you know, in their. So what do you think about that dimension and where does it come from and where's it going?
- [36:36]
B
Yeah, that's another huge topic and really fruitful. There's a lot of thinking and writing, I think, that still needs to be done on this phenomenon. It is very complicated. A few thoughts. I see this, by the way, in my own life because my son is 23 years old and his politics are kind of center, although he very much follows the right, including the false. So he's like hyper aware of Fuentes. Telling me about Fuentes years ago, before he was really even on my radar. And my son isn't sympathetic to him, but he's struck by how many of his male friends are and he's sort of alarmed by it a little bit. And I think this is one of the issues in our moment where I think we're really dealing with a couple kind of dialectical problem where the left really has gone too far on things and generated a backlash that is in danger of doing a lot of damage. And so I really want both sides to moderate on this issue, which means, in part, sort of, you know, I'll use as a shorthand kind of locker room talk. Like this whole idea that there are male spaces in which men can be, let's say, a little less hyper civilized. Not quite as polished. Now, I personally am very hyper civilized in the Sense that, I mean, in the sense that like, I don't like locker room talk. I've never been a sports guy. I don't do that. But I know that a lot of men, sort of, that's sort of, I think, a little bit by nature where they come down and this has to do, do with males, sex drive and testosterone in their bodies and their own sense of a little bit of maybe by nature the inclination toward that hierarchical dimension of morality. I've been talking about that, like this notion that you get fulfillment by doing a deed that requires the sacrifice of some parts of your desires for the sake of the praise that you receive for having done it as a provider, as someone who accomplished, whether it's making a lot of money in a job or doing something strenuous physically, like being a fireman or a cop or a soldier, like, there's something in men that lead them to long for those experiences and things. And there is a way in which I think our culture has gone pretty far. And part of it, sociologically, maybe this is your, I don't know your sociological explanation, but part of it, I think is about the prominence of women in the public sphere, in the workplace. And I wouldn't oppose any of that. But it's a big, big bump in the road that now, like, it's sort of like the norms of our public existence have reset within the last generation or so, such that a lot of those sort of default male tendencies no longer receive the kind of societal recognition or legitimacy that they once did. So that if you feel things, it's kind of, you're taught that it's bad, it makes you bad, it means you actually aren't worth being hired, that you need to be hauled in before, you know, the human resources department and reprimanded. And that sort of school marmish response, I think, has really antagonized a lot of young men. And the younger you go, the more. And you know, so we're all talking about things happening very, very rapidly. Like, a lot of this became especially acute in the early 20s, right around the time of social media coming online with smartphones. And then we had the kind of last few years of the Obama administration where I think it got worse. And then when Trump won, there was a kind of sense among a lot of sort of default center left people, including a lot of women, again, not necessarily straight strident feminists, but just women who believe in the dignity of women in the workplace and in the home. To say, this is so appalling what Donald Trump represents that we have to sort of stamp this out, the thing that led him to win. We have to make that go away. And that paradoxically has had the effect of, of intensifying the very phenomenon that they wanted to step to stand out. And then of course the trans thing got mixed up in this post opera Phil as well, which made it even more radical at a kind of philosophical level. And that thankfully the last thing I'll say on this again, I could go on because it is a complicated topic, but I see tentative signs that a lot of the kind of ideological, trans sort of Judith Butler ideology behind a lot of that is kind of backing down. Small anecdote. This trans activist and lawyer Chase Strangio was on Ross Douthat's very, very good podcast at the New York Times about three weeks ago. And for an hour and 15 minutes, this, you know, the, the only pro life conservative at the Times had a perfectly amicable, sometimes testy, but perfectly reasonably disagreeable conversation with this trans lawyer and activist about trans issues on a podcast. And no one excommunicated anybody. Nobody said you can't say that you should be canceled. They simply talked about it. And they're differences. And that is a huge change, I mean, even for that particular person because Strangio was a major, major player on kind of Trump 1.0 Twitter getting kind of whipping up sort of digital lynch mobs against anyone who didn't endorse the kind of maximalist trans position. So to the extent that that moderates a little bit and we can actually have reasonable, civil, mutually respectable conversations about the public policy issues and mor surrounding these issues, that's a good de escalation and I think a model for what we need to do on other fronts.
- [42:59]
A
Yeah, no, I think that is the trend. So I am publishing a memoir next year. It's going to be titled in the Realm of the Last Man. So it's actually going to get back to that issue that I raised at the end of the end of history and the Last man about the reaction of people that don't want to be last man. But among other things, you know, one of the chapters has a discussion of human nature. And just to bring the thing on gender back to more philosophical plane, it does seem to me that many philosophical controversies over human nature translate into contemporary fights, you know, political fights. And one of them is a division within liberalism itself between what I would call Rawlsian liberals who emphasize, you know, it really comes from a Kant more than any anyone else who emphasize moral autonomy as the core human characteristic that needs to be protected in a liberal society versus a more Anglo Saxon view that roots rights in human nature and not simply autonomy. And it does seem to me that one of the areas where liberalism is pushed too far is in the raising of autonomy and the protection of autonomy of above, you know, most other human goods, you know, other inclinations human beings have towards community, towards family and so forth. What you really had to do is, you know, protect that one dissident individual. And that's really the. The whole point of liberalism. And I think that, you know, the. The transgender discussion fits into this because I think that one of the things that's driving that is just this, you know, this real fear that human nature may intrude and limit human autonomy. So I would think that, you know, a generation ago, absolutely nobody would think that you could change your gender just as a matter of human will. But now that seems to be the default position of a lot of people in the medical community, that it is simply a choice that people make, just like they choose whether they be Republicans or Democrats or whatever. And I think that has stirred something of a reaction that from the human nature side, that there are actually natural limits to the ability of people to choose and that those limits, you know, ought to be respected.
- [45:22]
B
Well, I certainly think it would be salutary on many, many fronts if we reacquired an appreciation for and recognition of limits, that freedom is real and important, but it is not absolute. It isn't the unconditioned, as Kant would put it, that we are always partly conditioned because we are in physical bodies. We are in a physical world. There are are certain givens, including our own kind of intellectual and emotional predisposition, like, who are you? Not just nurture, although that is important as well, but our nature, that some people have certain natures and they differ. And that has to be in the mix as we have these conversations about how to live, how to run our politics, what policies to pursue, which ones are reasonable and which ones probably are not.
- [46:13]
A
Right. Okay. Well, Damon Linker, I'm really looking forward to your book. When is it? When are you.
- [46:20]
B
It still has a ways to go. We're thinking it'll probably be out early 2028, so a little over two years from now. I'm not done writing it yet, so it's still to come, but I think my schedule to get it completed is realistic. So a couple years from now, it
- [46:37]
A
should be on the way. Yeah. And who knows where the world is going to be in 2020.
- [46:41]
B
Yeah, of course. My publisher, of course, wants it out then, so it'll be before the election. And I keep saying, well, we'll see how much it actually speaks to the details of whatever might be happening then. But yes, it'll be out there.
- [46:54]
A
Okay, well, thanks very much for talking and have a great holiday season. And same to you.
- [47:00]
B
Thanks for having me, Frank.
- [47:01]
A
It was.
- [47:01]
B
Take care. Bye Bye.
- [47:04]
A
Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama Podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to American Purpose and my Frankly Fukuyama column at www. Persuasion community. This is a new podcast, so please do share.