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- [00:05]
A
So I'm really pleased to be talking to Laura Field. Laura is a political theorist, and she's just published a book called Furious Minds on the origins of a lot of the ideas that are animating the contemporary maga. Right. So, Laura, a pleasure to be able to talk to you. As I just mentioned, we have similar backgrounds. We both have Straussian backgrounds. I was a student of Alan Bloom as an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student in the Harvard government department, I studied with Harvey Mansfield. And you also. Well, maybe you can say a little bit about, you know, your training in political theory.
- [00:46]
B
Sure. And thank you so much for having me. I'm. I'm really delighted to be here talking with you. So, I. I started out at the University of Alberta is where I did my undergraduate degree, and there were these two amazing Straussian professors there, Leon Craig and Heidi Studer. Craig was kind of an autodidact type, but Heidi, I think, was studied with Bloom and Pingle at the University of Toronto. Anyway, so I got caught up in it there, just fell in love with the books they were teaching, and they were such wonderful teachers. I think that many of these Straussian teachers are just phenomenally good at what they do. And so then after that, I went to the University of Texas at Austin and completed my doctorate with. Under Tom Pengel, Lorraine Pingle, Devin Stauffer, and Gary Jacobson, who's a public law guy. And so I did. Also did public law as my second field. Jeff Tulis was my teacher down there. And so. So the Straussianism was kind of my way into the book because some of the other schools, the. What we call the West Coast Straussians, were sort of at the vanguard of the intellectual movement behind Trumpism. So, in a way, the Straussians probably are overemphasized in my book just because that's my. My own way into it. So.
- [01:57]
A
So, yeah, so in the book, you refer to them as Claremonters. We always talked about them as Clair. Monsters.
- [02:04]
B
Yeah, I think the editors didn't really want to go with that for obvious reasons.
- [02:08]
A
Yeah, well, all right, so let. Let's take that as a starting point. It seems to me that people that had been students of Strauss or one of Strauss's students, like Bloom or Mansfield, went in two different directions. So. So most of the Claremonters ended up being Trump supporters, and many of the East Coast Straussians, like myself or Bill Kristol or Bill Galston, ended up being never Trumpers very passionately. And so maybe the first thing to explore is why did the Claremont students of Harry Jaffa end up, you know, being so conservative in so many respects. This may get a little bit in the weeds, but I think that this is a discussion that most other writers on the, on the American right today. Miss. You know, I, when I hear people like Charles Kessler or other of these Claremont people talking about the need to get back to the original Constitution, I think about Harry Jaffa's first book, the Crisis of the House Divided, in which his argument, you know, it's about the Lincoln Douglas debates. And he says that there's actually a more fundamental founding document than the U.S. constitution, which is the Declaration of Independence and assertion that all men are created equal. And for that reason, no state had the right to legitimize slavery because that contradicted that fundamental principle. But then somehow today, when these people talk about needing to defend the Constitution, the principle of equality seems to have dropped out completely. You, you know, you've reverted to this older interpretation. So maybe you could explain a little bit what happened to Harry Jaffa, why he drifted away from that original position, ended up, you know, being the, you know, the mentor of all these. I don't know what you call.
- [04:01]
B
Yeah, Like, I mean, I think I'm gonna say a couple things that were surprising to me in, in the kind of what unfolded with the Claremont people. And then I kind of want to turn it back on you and ask you what you think happened, because I bet you have some thoughts, too. But I think what I was to. So I want to start with just saying I think it was very surprising to see over the course of researching this book, how mired some of these thinkers were other strands of American conservative thought. And so, so we can. We can talk about Jaffa, but it's like Michael Anton, who wrote the famous Flight 93 election essay, and some of the people around him in that essay and in prior writings, in the first sort of defenses of Trumpism that were. That they were writing on these online blogs, it's sort of infused with Paleo conservatism, Right. And this sort of. Sam Francis, as somebody very interesting to them, I think James Burnham a little bit. So there's all these other influences that they seemed very sort of mired in, and that that's where they were. I think that they were quite a bit more tapped into these other threads of American conservative thought than. Than I would have expected. And so they were, they were taking a kind of. They were separating themselves from Jaffa in some important ways because Jaffa stood opposed to some of that. Right? I mean, Jaffa was a great enemy of the Paleos in some respects. So we can, we can say a little bit more about why that is. But also like even just Charles Kessler is far more sort of wedded to, I think, conservative politics than Jaffa would have been. Even though Jaffa wrote the famous speech for Goldwater. But when I, when I've been in around Kessler or just, just the kind of vibes, it's very Buckley, right. There's this kind of old fashioned. I don't know, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's. I know that I found it surprising when I was, when I was writing the book, so I think that's kind of just interesting me. They've always been sort of more involved in the movement or more invested in that than I think Jaffa was. Jaffa strikes me as somebody who eventually became a little bit more that way. But in his earlier writings, I mean, especially the first Lincoln book, just there was a kind of distance or scholar. Scholarliness to it that didn't suffer from that kind of partisanship. But I think that the Jaffa question. There's also a kind of stridency in Jaffa and to the whole West Coast Straussian school and a certain way of thinking about the founding that I, I think is, you know, very, I'm very persuaded by some of it. I like focusing on Declaration of Independence. I like their, the kind of emphasis on the ideas of the founding. But then I think sometimes it gets a little fanatical and there's a, there's a, there's a missing piece of just like modernity happening and history happening. And so they're unable to kind of take, take American history and move with it. And then I think there's also just a. It's soured. And so when you have somebody like Anton now, it's soured because they think that basically on. I mean, I don't want to just say white supremacist grounds, but they've become this kind of. They've become. They've taken on this paleo strand and I think that they think that things have gotten so bad with immigration basically and with the transformations demographically of the country that it's. That, that's. There's a kind of nativism built in now to their understanding. That's how I would. I don't know what you think, but that's, that's sort of where what I found the most surprising.
- [07:16]
A
No, I think that's. That's right. I think the Jaffa contribution or the way I've always interpreted it is that he was fundamentally less interested in classics and philosophy, but just in American nationalism. Interpretation of the American regime as the apotheosis of Aristotelian, you know, political thought, which I could never figure out because Strauss himself, you know, never had that kind of. And that. That then blossomed into just plain, you know, American patriotism. And that was really the thing that was driving a lot of them. But I do find it very strange, you know, that Anton Flight 93 article and a lot of the rhetoric coming from Claremont people is filled with such a moral panic, you know, that if we don't stop, storm the cockpit right now, America is going to die. And, you know, where this comes from just strikes me as a big mystery because in my view, America is really not in such bad shape right now by that kind of rhetoric.
- [08:22]
B
No, I'm in complete agreement. I find it very bizarre, but I think it ties into this Aristotelian impulse, which I don't think is Aristotelian, but the way they understand Aristotle as this sort of very confined moralist who has a very specific understanding of virtue and understands the political regime to be aiming for these virtues. That, that. And then he. He blends it with other strands, right? With a certain kind of religious conservatism and I guess, modern thought. Right. Or Lincoln, I guess. But he's sort of. The whole premise is that the American founding isn't truly modern in the way that many others would see it. And I just. That is something I still can't wrap quite. Wrap my head around, because I believe in virtue as much as the next person and, you know, excellence in striving. But that does not seem to be the organizing principle of the American regime. It seems to fundamentally reject that sort of homogenous virtue seeking perfectionism in a way, I think. I mean, I'd love to. We. It allows for all kinds of moral. Moral flourishing, but it doesn't seem to me to be directed in any one way. And so they've got this very singular understanding of the American way of life and how things should be. And I don't see it.
- [09:36]
A
Yeah, they're much more accepting of religion. I remember Bloom, when talking about the, you know, the. The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, really dismissed the Jerusalem side. And he said, that's not philosophy. You know, that's not something to be taken seriously. I mean, you can think about the importance of religious claims, but ultimately philosophy and reason trumped religion. And that might be one of the points of difference, you know, east coast and the west coast. Straws.
- [10:08]
B
Yeah, but I think some of these young guys who are in these circles. Right. Who. Because I think that some of them think that they, by being so dogged and so fanatical, think that they, I mean, sometimes I've seen in like little blog posts and stuff, they think that they're saving the, they're preserving the possibility of philosophy through this particular approach to politics. Right. That they are. They're breaking free of the liberal chains, breaking free of those sort of bourgeois everything. And that, that's, that kind of raw politics is necessary to preserving philosophy. I mean, I think that's sort of how some of them think that's how I'm trying to make sense of, of why they're doing this because I don't think all of them are especially pious, I guess. You know. Anyway, I don't know if you've heard that, that kind of argument. It gets pretty weird in some of these corners.
- [10:56]
A
No, it is, is very strange. So one of the features of your book, Furious Minds, which, by the way, I really learned a lot and enjoyed reading, I would recommend it to anybody that wants to understand, you know, the current American political situation. But you know, the question of gender appears a lot in your critique of many of them. And I think, you know, it's definitely plays a role in, not in Strauss really didn't talk about gender particularly. Bloom didn't either. But, you know, he didn't really have any female students and in fact, a lot of the girlfriends and wives of his students really didn't like him very much because he, you know, I just think he didn't care, you know, for women that much. And of course, Mansfield, one of his last books was his book on manliness. But maybe you could talk about that a little bit as a theme. And you know, many of these writers.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's sort of my entryway into the book at. I start with this anecdote about just having kind of awful experience, one of these conservative summer camp things. And, and it, you know, that was a useful anecdote, but I think, and, but in when I started writing the book, I didn't really.
- [12:08]
A
Why don't you actually describe what happened?
- [12:11]
B
Okay, so I was at this dinner at a, at a. It was the first dinner of this, you know, fancy two week program and, and I sat next to one of the staff members and you know, very soon in the conversation he said I would. He explained how he had just met Michelle Obama, the first lady. This was around 2010 or so and had, had, had been in her presence and was going on about how she was so beautiful and so statuesque. And then he just said, and I'd really like to. And so it was like I, I was just grossed out. You know, I thought, who. Who are you? And I knew what it was. I mean, it was. He's trying to. It's a kind of, I mean, in a way, it's a philosophy thing. It's a thing that philosophy people do to just sort of push you to the edge. See. Oh, is she going to respond? Is she cool? Or, you know, or am I dealing with someone who's lame? And I just, But I was, I was not like 19 at the time. I was, I mean, I was pretty young compared to now. I was 26 or something, or 28 or 30, I don't know. But I just thought, oh, give me a, Give me a break.
- [13:10]
A
Yeah.
- [13:11]
B
So it really pissed me off. But I mean, it was also just like, that was timing wise when I really started to get disenchanted with a lot of this stuff. But I want to be clear of. The people who I studied with were very good to me overall. I mean, I do think that a lot of those circles, a lot of conservative academia is pretty misogynist in a lot of ways and it kind of seeps out. But per. On a personal level, I was treated pretty well. It's sort of, you know, I think when you get older and you're on the job market or you're teaching young people, I started. That's when. And then having kids, I started to really understand that gender stuff a lot more sort of directly in my own life. But my own, My own people I studied with were pretty good to me. I wouldn't have written the book in that way if I didn't think there was some truth to the fact that these circles in conservative academia are kind of rife with a. I wouldn't say casual misogyny because I think it's intellectualized. Right. I think that they are. It's the, it's Bloom's interpretation of the Republic doesn't help with this stuff. I don't, I don't think he's right about a lot of that stuff. I think that. I don't know, and I don't really care if Plato was a misogynist or not. I mean, at a certain point we get to, we get to say, have our own ideas, right, about these things. Things. But, but I think that there's a kind of way of approaching Philosophy that dismisses women doesn't teach female thinkers and is exclusive of them. And so that's way ramped up now on the new Right. I mean, Mansfield didn't help with his book and his legacy. And although, I mean, I don't have anything personally against Mansfield, I just don't like that book and thought it was irresponsible. You know, whatever. I have some criticisms, you know, you know him. I don't. I'm sure he's a wonderful person. But, you know, there's these things. So these things. I think it's not. It's. And the Straussy is not the wor. But it bubbles up in all of these other contexts politically in ways that are really bad. Right. And you see Bronze Age pervert and a lot of this stuff that's kind of part of the manosphere now and really rampant. And it's not totally disconnected from the worlds we come.
- [15:04]
A
It's not totally disconnected, actually. I think one of the points of connection is Nietzsche misogynist and it's, you know, you know, Bronze Age pervert. And, you know, a lot of these guys are really channeling Nietzsche much more than Plato and Aristotle. You know, somehow aggression, you know, is in itself, you know, a virtue that's associated with men and that. That, you know, is really what they've introduced into that tradition where, you know, that's not Aristotelian or Platonic. That's just, you know, modern in many ways.
- [15:40]
B
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I think that so much of what they do with Nietzsche is so. I mean, I don't want to sit here and defend Nietzsche on women. I mean, I kind of would like to, but I don't think I've got the time to kind of make any kind of case like that. And rhetorically, Nietzsche's just guilty as charged in so many respects. So I think that. And I think you're right. There's a kind of willfulness and just. Yeah, I don't even know how to describe what they're doing. But you're right, it's far more Nietzschean than Platonic. But I think that there's kind of a permission structure there within the Straussian world to. To say, yeah, that's. He. I mean, I. Yeah, it gets complicated because I think Nietzsche's aggressiveness had a philosophical purpose a lot of the time. And so he's being outrageous in ways that he hopes the reader will then sit back, take a look inward, you know, and he says. He says horrible things about everybody. And and the consequences of that, you know, he was. I can't. Pastraus is the one. Or. Who is it? The one who says he's singularly easy to misinterpret. So, yeah, I'm probably a little too soft on Nietzsche in general.
- [16:43]
A
Well, there definitely is a permission structure there because Strassians take Nietzsche very, very seriously, even if they recognize that he's not compatible with, you know, ancient. Ancient thought. But he is in the. In the pantheon.
- [16:58]
B
But I think the problem is. I know. I do too. I think I really. I like Nietzsche too much. And so that's what I mean. I don't. I think that part of the problem is their. The way in which they understand some of this and reject Nietzsche and even the ways in which they. And I. I don't. The kind of moral panics about postmodernism that we see. Right. And I. I think you may be. I wouldn't call you a moral panicker, but I'm not. I'm not. I think that some of what happens in this, in the kind of big culture wars between conservatives and the rest of academia, have to do with how we take up some of these ideas that do come from Nietzsche and from continental think. Right. And I agree with a lot of those critiques, but I. I fundamentally don't know where. What we do with them because I think we have to deal with them in a very. In a much more direct way than just saying it's bad and rel. You know, it's relativistic, because I think that that's not gonna do. Do the job. So, you know what? I'm. On a philosophical level, I get. I get a little squirrely when people just blame Nietzsche.
- [18:01]
A
Right. Well, you know, in my own experience, I. I went to France in the mid-1970s, and I actually studied with Derry Dunn and Roland Barthes. You know, Michel Foucault actually came to visit Telluride House, where I was living at Cornell while I was there, which is the reason that I graduated and spent time, you know, France. It's. It always struck me that the postmodernists had taken ideas from Nietzsche. I mean, the relativism and the critique of master narratives sort of thing, but still remained, you know, leftists or Stalinists.
- [18:38]
B
Yeah.
- [18:40]
A
They did not accept the contradiction that they were living that, you know, if, you know, if nothing is true and everything is a matter of interpretation. That's true of Marx and communism as well. But they somehow wanted to hold on to that moral framework even while using Nietzsche. Nietzsche to deconstruct you know, everybody else. And that's ultimately the reason I just decided, after I'd actually listened to them more carefully, I decided that this was just an impossible position and that they were misusing Nietzsche. I mean, Nietzsche, yeah. Great consistency to say that, you know, the Christian God is dead, then everything is permitted, including, you know, fascism. And you could derive from that a very different kind of politics that none of the postmoderns in the United States, you know, all the critical theorists are unwilling to acknowledge, you know, that a lot of very unpleasant doctrines become possible.
- [19:40]
B
Was it when you were there, like, did it strike you as just very superficial compared to what you saw in the Straussian?
- [19:48]
A
Yes.
- [19:49]
B
Yeah.
- [19:50]
A
Yeah. Well, it's complicated because I do think that some of their textual interpretation was pretty good. The year I was at Yale, I studied with Paul Deman. At that point, he had not been discredited yet because of his Nazi associations. And I knew I was leaving Yale and I wrote a paper for his. For his seminar, which was basically an interpretation of Rousseau, which I deliberately did in a very Straussian fashion, you know, looking carefully at the text and trying to understand the underlying meaning. And he returned it to me and he gave it an A. And he said, well, in one respect this is completely wrong, but in another respect it's completely right. And I do think that he, you know, he did encourage close reading of texts and, you know, this understanding that the surface meaning is not always the same as the real intent behind it. So, you know, there's a little bit of sophistication there, but it's been a long time actually, since I left that whole world. The followers, you know, then had much cruder versions of these ideas.
- [20:56]
B
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [20:59]
A
Let's move on to talk about Leo Strauss himself, because he's become one of the most maligned thinkers. And it's very painful in many ways because of the association of so many, like, third, fourth generation Straussians with the MAGA movement. I think that in the minds of a lot of people, Strauss is one of the architects of the current. Right. This is not something new. This really began at the time of the Iraq war because Paul Wolfowitz had been a student of Bloom's, and it was assumed that somehow the whole bush 43, you know, policy derived directly from the teachings of Leo Strauss, which was simply ridiculous, this idea that, you know, elites are supposed to lie. And so that's now taken a, you know, more modern form with the association of the West Coast Straussians with maga. But maybe you could say a little bit about your appreciation of Strauss and the ways in which he was both misinterpreted but also perhaps correctly interpreted in certain ways.
- [22:03]
B
Yeah, I'm. I mean, I think I studied with all these wonderful Straussian teachers, and I've learned a lot from reading Strauss personally. I. I think that. I mean, he's a wonderful commentator on ancient texts. It's very hard work to read Strauss. There's no easy gains, and you're not going to find the secret hidden teaching with any casually, and you're not gonna. And it's just very rich in all kinds of ways. So there's nothing, I think. I hope I haven't contributed with my book to that kind of simplistic way of understanding the Straussians. I think probably I'm. I would. I've joked before, I'm not really. I'm kind of a bad Straussian because I haven't sort of spent that much time, like, pouring over Strauss. My teachers that I was closest to really didn't do that either, as far as I can tell. And so it was really this love of philosophy and a way into the philosophic tradition. And so I. I always spent my time reading other things. I just didn't. I didn't like that part of the Straussian world that got so caught up in Strauss, and Strauss was such a powerful thinker, obviously, and teacher, that he left this really complicated legacy. Right. And because he was. He was, I think, a powerful teacher and he had students who became very loyal, and I think he probably cultivated a bit of that himself and at elite institutions a lot of the time. So I think after a few generations, you end up with students who. Who have thought about some pretty big political questions very deeply and who are very ambitious. And so that legacy is going to be complicated, but it doesn't really necessarily have much to do with you. So, I mean, in my read of this, no, he's not in any real way responsible for anything happening at the Claremont Institute today. Unfortunately, he. They think he is. Right. So he claimed. They. A lot of them will claim that legacy. And I guess the way I see it, and there is, if you're a good Straussian and read my book super carefully, there's a place where I make it quite clear that I think this problem is built into politics. And it's a problem of ambition, right? And of political ambition, you know, thumos and. And a desire. And it's there in Plato, right? I mean, the noble lie stuff is in Plato. The secret teaching stuff is In Plato, the problem of the very ambitious young people trying to master the universe and gain power for themselves, that's, that's in Plato. It's not a Strauss problem. And so, so that's, I mean, that's how I think about it. I think that these, these sort of generational legacies in politics are very complicated. And he has had. His students have had a lot of power in this country, but so have all. I mean, it's just, that's just part of politics. So does that make sense? Do you think I was too hard on Leo Strauss?
- [24:38]
A
Well, let's explore a couple of items within that list. The first one is esotericism and the second is thumos. So with esotericism, I think you make a very interesting point. So the, you know, this is fundamental to Strauss's reading of Maimonides and then many subsequent thinkers, that a lot of them did not write openly about what they really thought about things because they lived in repressive societies and their meaning needed to be interpreted from the text. But you suggest that the rather cultish quality of many Strauss students may derive from that. That there is a meaning that's accessible to, you know, careful readers, but not to ordinary people and that this kind of reinforces us versus them, you know, mentality. You think that's fair?
- [25:27]
B
I think it's. I think, I think it's part of what does happen empirically with some of these circles. But I, I want to say, I think that the. If you think about the esoteric tradition that Strauss defended or that someone like, like my professor Leon Craig defended or Arthur Meltzer, it's not just there's the persecution aspect, right? So there's people. People. I care about this because I sort of. I do. I'm enough of a Strawsian to believe in the esoteric tradition, right. There's the persecution. They're. They're shielding their truest thoughts because they, they might be persecuted by the authorities. That be because most societies were much more repressive. But there's also. Because it might be that the truths they are protecting are dangerous in some way or harmful to some people. Atheism or whatever being the sort of obvious go to possibility there, but other things too, right? And then the. I think. But the one that I care about most is this idea that there's a kind of artfulness and that it's pedagogically unsound to just tell people in a treatise. You think, right, Because. Which is sort of foreign to us, maybe as like late moderns or Whatever. But it's like this idea is that there's an artistry and that if you're a true teacher, you don't want to just tell anyone what you think because that, that just solves the problem for them and you're trying to teach people how to think for themselves. I think that's a really important part of all of this Straussian stuff and include in a part of an really important part of the philosophy thing, right. Like, and, and that that's actually what matters most in all of this. So, so when I say, but I do think that all of that said, when you get into these circles, spend 10 years your life as a student, it draw, it attracts a certain kind of student who does want the secret teachings, right? Who might be looking for a kind of comfort, even psych. If we're going to get, you know, if we're going to do some psychoanalysis, they're kind of looking for guidance and there's a, there's something about the way these, these texts are taught in some of those circles that, that promises that and, and, and to be fair to them, also takes these big life questions, these Socratic questions much more seriously than pretty much any other corner except of academia, except maybe the seminaries. So you get this kind of jumble of things going on in these circles and I think it does get to be a little unthinking and cultish and, and people start following one another, but, or, and, and sort of seeking a certain kind of relationship to their mentors that is maybe, I don't want to say it's like authoritarian impulse or anything like that, but I think that that does kind of, that is sort of what happens. That happens in other contexts, texts too, that happens in other parts of academia for sure. Right. These cultish enclaves. And so, so I, I, that's my way into some of this. When I saw these certain people who have Straussian PhDs like Darren Beatty or the people at the Claremont Institute or Costa Della Maria, who is, you know, is Bronze Age pervert, turning into these other sort of alter ego characters with this explosive of sort of political ambition, I thought, well, that's, there's something sort of familiar that takes us maybe into the Thumos question, but it didn't, you know, it doesn't strike me as all that surprising that because it, these circles attract a certain sort of person and there are all kinds of wonderful people too, right, who don't have those tendencies and who just want to teach and learn and, and, and write about the book so that. That's certainly not the whole story, but it. But it. It certainly. It does show you something about human nature when you're in those circles for a long time, and then you recognize those things happening in other places, too. And there's a kind of conspiracism that it can be conducive to.
- [28:54]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's very fair. I mean, esotericism really is. It's a real thing. You know, there were great writers that wrote esoterically, and many moderns simply don't understand that, because they don't. That's not the way they write and think, and therefore they miss it. So.
- [29:10]
B
And it's magical when you do get sort of initiated into seeing some of that. It's very exciting. Right? It's. It can be very. Yeah, it's just very exciting. And you feel like you're part of something, and then it looks. It. I think psychologically what it does is it allows you to look down on all the people who don't get it right. And that's really important to a lot of these young men, especially if I'm honest.
- [29:30]
A
Okay. Yeah, I. It's interesting. And watching our politics evolve, I find myself actually resorting to a kind of pop social psychology more often. Often. Because it seems to me that you can explain people's behavior only. Only that way, and not in terms of, you know, based on a kind of underlying, you know, serious idea that. That they've got. But let's go on to the question of Thumos, because you talk about it at several points in your book, mostly in a negative context. Now, Thumas, for me, has been very important. I wrote about it at great length in the End of History, in the Last Man. Man. I'm going to publish a memoir next year whose title is in the Realm of the Last man. Because I think that to me, thumos was always a critical way of understanding human social behavior. It was important because modern economists miss it completely. Right. For them, yes, you've got desire, you've got reason, the first two parts of the soul. But they don't take thumos into account. And it seemed to me that. That you couldn't explain a lot of modern politics, contemporary politics, without reference to Thumos. That. That is to say, it's a desire for recognition of one's intrinsic dignity by other people. And that is a demand made both by people on the left and by people on the right. You know, for example, you think about the demand for gay marriage. You know, why Couldn't they be satisfied with, with civil unions if their main interest was economic and protecting, you know, survivorship rights and inheritance and that sort of thing? And I think the explanation really is dignity. That gay couples wanted to have society acknowledge that their relationship was just as valuable as that of a man and a woman. And that that was, you know, that desire for recognition was really one of the big drivers of, you know, modern politics. So Charles Taylor, I think, is the one contemporary thinker that really talks about recognition and that, and obviously that also comes from Hegel, who kind of understood, or at least in the Kozievian interpretation of Hegel, that becomes the single most important driver of history. But I'm just curious about your take on thumos.
- [31:50]
B
So I mean, it's there in the book because it's sort of something these guys I'm writing about talk quite a bit about. And so I haven't done a full systematic rethink of it on my own, but I'm, I'm, I, I think of it in the Platonic sense, right. The middle part of the soul that is sort of responds to injustice and with a sort of, can be very violent reaction. But it's sort of spiritedness is the word I think of. And I'm in total agreement that it's not just a negative thing, that it needs to be kind of, you know, educated and refined and that it can also fuel all kinds of positive things, things when it's understood and that it's the, I think that's right, that it's the seat of the need for recognition, but it's kind of also status oriented. Right. That it's not just a desire for equal recognition and it's probably connected to the desire to also thwart other people's.
- [32:40]
A
Yeah, well, I rise in the end of history. I, I invented these two Greek words, megalithumia and ISO. Right, okay. Distinctive forms of recognition where, okay, everybody feels, you know, isothermia, that they want to be, you know, at least as good as other people them and are very resentful when they're not treated that way. But megalothumia was not so evenly distributed. You know, there were certain people that really did want to dominate. And one of the big tasks of democratic politics was how to contain megalothumia and turn it into socially positive forms rather than simple willful domination. So, you know, one of the arguments I made was that that was one of the great virtues of capitalism was that, you know, your megalithumia could be actually turned into creating big companies and making a lot of money, which actually benefited other people. And I actually referred to Donald Trump in that original book saying, you know, he was an example of somebody that
- [33:41]
B
had heard that quoted. Friend was quoting that last week. That's wonderful.
- [33:46]
A
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for him, you know.
- [33:49]
B
No, no. And it doesn't seem to be enough for a lot of people. I mean, do you think. It seems to me like it does explain so much of the. What's deep, what's trul. Driving what's happening is. Is something to do with thumos and, and, and with young men.
- [34:04]
A
No, definitely. So the young men. It's easy, I think, to explain that. It's true that a lot of liberal culture has really, you know, emphasized the status of women, even if women in fact, are not really being given equal status economically and socially. But certainly the culture, you know, has elevated them and quite well. So my least read book was one I published in 1999 called the Great Disruption. And I basically argued that feminism and women moving into the labor market was not an ideological thing. It was primarily driven just by economics that we are making this transition from an industrial to a post industrial, or what's sometimes called an information economy, in which the average worker does not lift heavy objects off the factory floor, but rather sits behind a computer screen all day. Women were sitting simply better at that, especially at lower skill levels in younger ages than young men. And as a result, they were displacing men in job markets. And in fact, right now, I think in the United States, 60% of undergraduates are women. But this is true everywhere. It's true in Saudi Arabia, it's true in Iran. You know, all these very socially conservative places. Rise of women in labor markets is really explained by that they actually, actually do a lot of useful work in a service economy. A lot of the, the manosphere really needs to be explained by unrequited thumos. You know, that young men are not getting the recognition and the social status that their fathers and grandfathers did. And they're intensely, you know, resentful of that. And that's really what's causing a lot of the support for these populist parties that is trying to build on that anger and resentment.
- [35:51]
B
Did you ever read or study Bacon's, Francis Bacon's the New Atlantis?
- [35:57]
A
No, I have to admit I did not.
- [35:58]
B
Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. But it's this very strange utopian story and it's sort of a technological island that's discovered and. But it's Sort of super advanced science. Right. Like Francis Bacon being one of the founders of modern science. And so it's super advanced scientifically. They're taking pills to keep themselves happy and stuff. But the social arrangements are extremely bizarre and. And it's almost like they've manufactured an extremely patriarchal society that overcompensates for modernity by just elevating fathers in this sort of bizarre way. But it, But I think Prentiss Bacon is maybe anticipating some of these problems of the kind of the service economy and just the fact that the. Well, what does Hobbes call them? The sons of pride or whatever, that there's going to be this problem with thumos and modernity and there's going to have to be some compensation for men. But it's very. It's also dystopian because it's just. And it's weird as a woman to read it because any. The fathers, it's just this bizarre society. And you wonder, well, what. What is. What are we, what are we supposed to take from this? But it, I mean, it does seem, and it's hard, I think, for women today to take seriously, for many women to take seriously what we call the crisis of masculinity because you look at the numbers for women and, you know, different career paths and who dominates in what areas, and it still just seems sort of silly to suggest. Suggest that women are doing so well. But I think that with. Without thumos, you can't see that. But with, with the thumos part of it, you can start to see it, you can start to understand it.
- [37:26]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's again why I think economists get things wrong, because they simply don't see that as one of the major drivers of human behavior.
- [37:36]
B
Yeah.
- [37:36]
A
And, you know, they're simply looking at the material situation. And I also think. So that's the title of my memoir, in the Realm of the Last Man. Because the problem with the Last man is the Last man operates in a world without thumos, that people have aspirations to be better, to seek social justice, to have, you know, aspirations that go beyond physical security and material comfort. And to me, you know, a lot of our weird politics right now is a lot of people that. That are just not. They're. They're afraid of becoming last men. And that's why they dress up in camo and go out on January 6th playing like they're patriots, you know, who are fighting real injustice. And the problem is actually not that we're living in such a horribly unjust world I mean, in fact, the problem is kind of that it's too prosperous, too peaceful, and, you know, a lot of the social justice demands have actually been achieved. And so you want something more than that. And if you can't. If you can't struggle for democracy and. And equal rights, then you can struggle against it. But the point is, the thumos drives you to that struggle, and that's kind of the problem of our world right now. And that's why you're not going to fix things simply by redistributing income.
- [38:55]
B
No, I. I just. I find that. I agree, but I also am so. It seems so ridiculous to me. I. I mean, there's just, on a personal level, a real, like. Just like a. Give me a break. Like the last. The, you know, I mean, we could talk about the last man stuff, but I feel like, you know, just join a band or something, learn an instrument. I mean, get out of your house and like. Or go to the firing range. Like, I don't know. I just. I have so little patience for that sort of. That aesthetic and that complaint of these young men. But. And I have two young sons, right? And so I'm not completely unsympathetic to a lot of this stuff, but there's so much to be done in the world, right? There's so many, you know, inventions we need. I don't think that it's that comfortable and soft and existing. I think there's a lot of brutality, there's a lot of injustice that people could go work on. There's a lot of science to be done. I mean, it just. It breaks my heart that that's. That the thumos is. Is going in those directions rather than just going for something a little nobler, a little more wholesome. You know, I. I just. It's. It's so frustrating. But anyway.
- [39:57]
A
Yeah. Well, as a. As a big supporter of Ukraine and its current struggle against Russia, my advice to all these guys that want to arm themselves with AK47s is they should volunteer to fight on behalf of Ukraine if they want to really risk their lives in a noble. Stop pretending that there's one here in the United States. Yeah. Okay. So maybe to conclude, your book is very comprehensive and you deal with a lot of other strands in the contemporary, right, like Catholic integralism and all of these, you know, Bronze Age perverts type. One thing that I think you recognize but a lot of other people don't, is that there's a fundamental inconsistency or conflict in a lot of those strands because, you know, the, the Nietzschean strand really rejects this principle of equality. And if you go back to Matthew Rose's account of some of the right wing precursors of, of contemporary right wing politics, people like Oswald Spengler or Benoit or, or some of these earlier thinkers, they actually are anti Christian, just like Nietzsche. I mean, they blame Christianity for this assertion of universal human dignity or they
- [41:09]
B
see that it's going to not succeed with the thumotic types. Right.
- [41:13]
A
But yes, and they want a more hierarchical, stratified society. And I think that the, the kind of Catholic integralists go to the same conferences and speak at the same sessions, but they kind of of elide over the fact that, you know, it's Christianity that's actually being attacked in, you know, in these other right wing circles.
- [41:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. And we see a lot of that kind of bubbling up now in the, in the, in our real politics. Right. With Kevin Roberts and this stuff at the Heritage Foundation. I would say, I think the post liberals who include, you know, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeil, Sohrabamari people probably are somewhat familiar with those names. They, I. There's a kind of integrity to their way of thinking and they're, they're less politically, they're less immediately politically engaged though I think they're quite close with J.D. vance. Right. But there's a, they're a little more careful. I think they actually care about, you know, Catholic social teaching, equality and, and even, you know, they're not as anti immigration in some instances as the rest of the new Right. And so, and they, they don't know. I would be careful. They don't necess. Those guys don't necessarily go to the same conferences. They will. They might once in a while, you know, but mostly they're kind of above the fray, hiding from the rest of the movement and I think trying to keep their distance and keep their hands clean a little bit. But you're right. And then at some of these conferences, more and more, some of the uglier voices do come and are sort of part of the general conversation. So there has been this weird radicalizing and it's, there's all kinds of incoherence. But we see now, I think now we see the real anti Semitism problem with the Nick Fuente stuff. And so it's, it's this weird cacophony and there's a whole bunch of fissures because it's not just the kind of ugly racist stuff versus the sort of more decent Catholic stuff. There's also which, you know, do we destroy the administrative state or harness the power of the administrative state to sort of legislate morality? It's. But I think they're quite happy to kind of go along together so much as they can. Like, Patrick Deneen wrote a piece about how there wasn't how J.D. vance would be able to square the circle of Doge and Maga, you know, to carry both torches. It's. It. I think that the, my view is that the schisms among. Within the New Right, though, I'm. I mean, I'm obviously no fan of a lot, a lot of this, so I'm happy to see all of these, the schisms breaking out in the, the discord. But I think what matters a lot more is the radicalism of the whole movement versus the average voter, because this does seem like one, one area where at the top with these elites that I write about, they're quite a bit stranger and more radical than most GOP voters even, or even Trump supporters really would realize. And so that's what I hope is sort of the ultimate message of my book is like, yes, it's chaotic. There's a lot of contradictions, but they're pretty unified when it comes to political action. And J.D. vance. And that's worrisome because they're quite disconnected, I think, from what I. What ordinary Americans think about.
- [44:10]
A
Well, there's some, some signs right now that people are beginning to wake up to that. I think it's coming mostly through an economic channel where people are beginning to realize that the tariffs actually aren't going to benefit them. But, but I do think that it might spread to a recognition that, you know, this movement is bringing on a lot of really unpleasant stuff of snatching people off the street and sending them off to foreign countries without any kind of due process. And I think that, you know, the, the election that was just held is a kind of indication that, you know, this realization is beginning to set in.
- [44:49]
B
Yeah, I sure hope so.
- [44:50]
A
So. Okay, well, Laura Field, thank you very much. This is really interesting. Like I said, I actually learned a lot about the movement, and by the end of the book, it gets kind of depressing because you're just talking about this menagerie of extremists. But I do think it's important, you know, what you, the way you ended it to say that, you know, some of it is so extreme that it really does risk getting seriously out of touch with Americans who basically are, are much more moderate than any of the people that, that you discuss.
- [45:20]
B
Yeah, I really do. I really do believe that. So I hope, I hope that's true. Anyway, thank you.
- [45:25]
A
Well, thanks very much for talking and, you know, good luck. I, I hope a lot of people read the book because. Because I think they're going to learn a lot from it.
- [45:32]
B
That means a lot. Thank you.
- [45:37]
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.commun.