Loading summary
Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
Damon Linker
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [00:22]
Eli Karetney
Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra.
- [00:29]
Blinds.com Narrator
See mintmobile.com@blinds.com, it just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
- [00:59]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.
- [02:07]
Eli Karetney
With the Trump administration pursuing authoritarian policies that seem designed to transform America's democratic political order and upend the post World War II. Liberal international order Some commentators are asking whether we are witnessing the deliberate acceleration of American decline. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetney. I teach politics at Baruch College and have for years been the deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. With our director, John Torpy, on sabbatical this year, I have the privilege of serving as the institute's interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast. Here with me today to kick off our podcast season is Damon Linker, who asks provocatively in an article published this week at the Persuasion Substack, whether the Trump administration is choosing to pursue policies that will hasten American decline. Damon Linker, teaches politics at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Notes from the Middle Ground at Substack. He's a senior fellow at the Niskinen center and is working on a book about Leo Strauss's influence on the American right. Today we will discuss that influence, as well as related reactionary trends in American politics and thought. Hi, Damon. Thanks for joining us on International Horizons.
- [03:41]
Damon Linker
Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this.
- [03:45]
Eli Karetney
Let's start with the piece you wrote for Persuasion. Can you state your case that the administration is, quote unquote, slitting the nation's throat and hastening American decline, and that this is happening not as a result of incompetence but as a consequence of decisions being taken that radically expand executive power, decisions that are guided by a coherent theoretical vision, a vision that you argued in a New York Times article in May is influenced by the writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Today's announcement, the Department of Defense will be renamed the Department of War seems in line with such a vision.
- [04:25]
Damon Linker
Well, that last bit about Department of War, I think, definitely speaks to my point, because it used to be called the Department of War. It became the Department of Defense after the Second World War because we were then in the Cold War, which wasn't a real war, and yet we were going to maintain a very large, complicated bureaucracy to oversee our defense commitments around the world, and they would in most cases fall short of actual waging of hot wars. So therefore we had to call it something else, namely a Department of Defense. But Trump wants to go back to the old Department of War, which I think points to the fact that, you know, one way to talk about this is to just note that when Trump speaks about, you know, making America great again, there's a real lack of specificity about exactly when he thinks we were great. You know, a lot of people assume he must mean the 50s because that's what the Republican right has often looked back to from Reagan on as kind of the, the best America ever was. And then we had the cataclysm of the 1960s that ruined everything. So the trick is to catapult ourselves back to the great 1950s. But I don't think that with the Trump movement and the MAGA movement that that's necessarily true. I elements of the 1920s, there are elements of the 1880s in this. There are a lot of people in the MAGA coalition who are deeply uncomfortable from the right with America as an empire. You know, Pat Buchanan, who I think prefigured a lot of this, wrote a book in the late 90s called a republic, not an Empire. This is a vision of small America compared to what we became in the post war period when we ended up having defeated the Axis powers, kind of by default responsible for the defense of these defeated countries in Europe and in Asia, and facing what we thought was a very formidable new totalitarian threat in the form of the Soviet Union. And in that context, we, we kind of took the mantle of providing a kind of base level enforcement of order around the world. And a lot of the right then, the descendants of the old right that opposed our intervention In World War II during the 1930s, the so called America first movement, which of course echoes very directly and obviously with Trump, they, they were not happy with this. And they went, in that fact of the right went into eclipse with the, the rise of kind of the right wing version of waging the Cold War with Bill Buckley, National Review and the people they influenced. And, and so I mean, by way of just sort of talking around all of these subjects, I'll stop so you can redirect us back to, to where you would like us to be in the conversation. I just feel like relative to the apex of American power, which I think was reached probably around say, 1992, in the immediate aftermath of the United States winning the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think the Trump vision is clearly a diminishment of American power relative to that point. It's a vision of kind of America having, having a sphere of influence. We're still a great power, but Russia is a great power, China's a great power, India is a great power. Each of them should be permitted their sphere of influence. So we'll largely take over the Western hemisphere. It's a revival of the Monroe Doctrine. And then combined with that is the domestic policy side of it. You know, the whole science based executive branch project of the post war period where, where, you know, the, the two parties in our system believed that, you know, winning the Cold War, defending America and free countries around the world required having a very active administrative state with expertise, with educated people in positions of authority in the government from both parties, you know, a public health apparatus with informed experts there as well. And so for all of that, the Trump administration seems to want to dismantle in favor of again relative to that high baseline of competence, expertise, lack of corruption, transparent government services will all be taken apart and replaced by something that much more would resemble kind of the spoils system of the late 19th century where you have rampant corruption, government posts handed out as kind of favors to political friends, not people who have any kind of specialized expertise that would qualify them to make decisions about, about public matters and so forth. So I'll leave it at that. But that's kind of my vision of, of what's really going on here with the Trump administration.
- [10:19]
Eli Karetney
That's fantastic, Damon. Thank you. And so much there to tease out. One one place to start. You know, you paint a picture of a kind of turn away from empire, a turn away from expansive US Role in the world, an imperial role in the world, managing global affairs, and towards what some realists would call a kind of vision of restraint. That's not a term we usually associate with Trump, especially in the context of, you know, the MAGA rhetoric. So wherein lies the greatness? If they're, you know, and where does executive power play into this? If this is a, a turn away from empire and kind of a consolidation of, of American power and a focus inward, where's the greatness in this?
- [11:11]
Damon Linker
Well, it's complicated. I mean, I think, you know, you mentioned realism and restraint. You didn't pair them immediately, but they were in adjacent sentences, though that's a slogan that, that some Maggar Wright really tried to disseminate and kind of make a regular talking point over the last, especially the first Trump administration and under Biden. I think it's a little misleading. There is a way of understanding what a lot of people on the MAGA right would like to see in foreign policy in terms of realism, just simple calculation of America's self interest without any moral or legal obligation to allies and others around, around the world, no overarching vision of human rights that should guide where we intervene or not. And how. But it's not really restraint. There's, like, no reason to assume that Trump or anyone close to Trump cares about being restrained. What they want, in fact, is a kind of lack of restraint in the sense that Trump and the people around him, but especially Trump as a person, the thing he wants most of all is freedom of movement. He wants no international law, no expectations of our obligations to others through treaty, treaty obligations, or simply the kind of more sort of informal way that we tend Americans to think that, you know, we're sort of friends with anyone who's a democracy, and so we'll come to their aid and call them an ally, even if technically we're not allies, because there's no treaty obligating us to do it. But if a democracy on the other side of the world is attacked by terrorists or an authoritarian regime, we're sort of inclined to think we should have a stake in that, because it matters to us that democracies thrive and democracy's enemies do not thrive. And that, of course, has led us astray into all kinds of bad decisions in foreign policy down through the decade. So I don't want to make it sound like I'm giving a blanket endorsement to that, but that is sort of the paradigm that has governed a lot of our foreign affairs, at least at the ideal level. But now Trump wants to be free of all that. He wants to be free to do whatever he wants anywhere in the world, to make a decision to do X or Y or Z based on whatever he feels is right in the moment. Moment. And. And that doesn't imply restraint. It implies total freedom of movement by the great statesman who's running the show. And that's why I see this as a vision that goes back to. To the late 19th century, because that's really the last time that the world operated according to these rules. I would say late 19th century to the eve of World War I, pretty much, because it was in the wake of World War I that we had the first halting attempts to create a League of Nations. Some sense that, like, the major powers need to get together and talk things out to avoid a cataclysm like World War I and all of the death and kind of pointless suffering and destruction that it brought. And obviously, we didn't settle into an order like that of any kind until after World War II, when we finally were like, all right, yeah, that was bad enough that we really have to figure something better out. But Trump wants to go back to that now. What makes this great? I mean, it means that we're not ultimately guided by anything impersonal like a law or a principle or an ideal that applies potentially to all people of goodwill everywhere in the world. It is purely one guy sitting in a place in the White House saying do this and people saying yes sir, okay, we'll do that. Even if the professionals, the experts, the people who know the languages and the politics of other regions and countries in the world, even if they are thinking to themselves boy is this stupid, boy is this counterproductive. Boy, if Trump chews out the president of the Prime Minister of India because the Prime Minister of India refuses to endorse Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for supposedly helping to de escalate a conflict with Pakistan a couple of months ago. And if that scuttles are decades long rapprochement with India and attempt to kind of bring them into the western democratic fold for both moral and geostrategic reasons, to help check China, to help keep them on our side against Russia. If he blows all that up because he's a narcissist and just wants Modi to say oh yes, the great Trump, we could never have averted nuclear conflagration with our neighbor Pakistan without Trump helping us here, then then that's fine because at least Trump is just doing whatever he wants. That is a vision of greatness of a kind. I think it's a kind of authoritarian notion of greatness where our guy has the muscle power to just sort of insult anyone he wants, do anything he wants to humiliate our friends and allies. To say to a treaty ally in NATO like Denmark, yeah, we want to take Greenland too bad to say to our neighbor to the north, Canada, you know, the longest peaceful border in human history probably between the United States and Canada, to kind of constantly rib them and threaten them that we're going to like turn them into the 51st state. That makes a lot of people on the right really giddy that like haha, he's such a bully and he's our bully. This is fantastic. That is there. That's what they understand by greatness as far as I can tell.
- [18:04]
Eli Karetney
Really appreciate that. Damon said some really, really interesting and thoughtful things there. I want to kind of push a little further on the argument you make that far from a kind of vision of restraint or what others call a kind of transactional attitude, I think you persuasively argue that there's a higher principle guiding him, if you can call it a principle and it's a kind of authoritarian principle, and that the greatness is somehow in their mind, tied in with this freedom of action and freedom of movement on the part of a bold decision maker. I use that term carefully, the decision, the decision of the leader. And maybe here we can kind of push a little further in thinking through some of the intellectual influences and here thinking about, as you had written, the influence of Carl Schmitt and maybe filtered through Strauss's work. So where does, in what you've said so far, where do you see the hand of Carl Schmidt's idea of the state of exception, of the kind of the leadership principle, you know, the Fuhrer principle, and where, you know, where the authoritarianism might be, not just about kind of the narcissism of a supposedly bold leader, but that there's at least in the minds of some on the intellectual right, that there's a principle here, and part of that principle is opposition to even rebellion against the administrative state liberalism, kind of procedural liberalism in the way that Schmidt talked about, that there's a cause here and it's not just the power of the narcissists, that there's a anti administrative state, anti global state, anti liberalism imbued in this kind of decisionism.
- [20:20]
Damon Linker
Yeah, yeah. This goes back to an op ed I wrote for the Times a few months ago where I tried to sort of trace an intellectual historical lineage from, from Carl Schmitt through Strauss as a conduit to the Claremont Institute, which is a offshoot of kind of the Straussian world, and then from there to the Trump administration. The case is, is something like this in Aristotle, in John Locke and in lots of other political philosophers. There is an acknowledgment of, and an awareness of the fact that rule of law, defined for our purposes as following established rules and procedures and limits on executive decision making, that like okay, X or Y is happening in the world. What can we do in response? Well, here are the guidelines. Follow the rules. There's an acknowledgment in a lot of these political philosophers that this is a good procedure to do that it's good to hem in executive power by settled rules. However, this is in some respects a second best solution. And we can know that meaning to the political problem, a solution to a problem. And the problem is that there are plenty of situations, especially emergency situations in politics, where you actually can't rely on pre written guidelines. You need someone to be the decider in the moment, looking at the specifics of the situation and deciding, given all of these unanticipatable variables of this moment, what is the best course of action. And you know, Locke talks about this in terms of a kind of freedom of prerogative of the monarch to, you know, have a privy council of advisors and then in the moment to make a decision without relying on prior restraint of, of the rule of law. And that you sort of have to admit that this is going to arise from time to time in politics. And I think this is clearly true. I agree with Aristotle on this. I agree with Locke when he writes about this. And there's really no way around it that there are situations where you just sort of have to put your faith in the person you put in the decider role. Now the role, the importance of Schmidt here is that Schmidt takes this true insight of politics. And he says, in effect this gives us an opening for a kind of politics that is basically run exclusively on emergency powers by an executive who will rule entirely in this way. And he associates liberalism with a kind of dithering in kind of indecisive, regulatory, managerial rule following. And he wants to destroy that form of politics in favor of a kind of dictatorial decisionism. And you get there by. Well, in the Weimar, the context of Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, where Schmidt is, is, is writing by the fact that the Weimar constitution had a provision in it that permitted exactly this. They actually kind of anticipated the need for this and they built into the constitution an emergency provision that the in a sufficient emergency, the Chancellor can govern as a dictator. And so he uses this as a kind of open door to push through into dictatorship. And Hitler did exactly this. After the Reichstag fire in the spring of 1933, shortly after Hitler took charge, he said, this is that emergency and therefore I will now govern without the need for a legislature. I will simply dictate what we need to do. And Schmidt loved this. He basically followed Hitler was following what Schmidt said he should do. So what Strauss does is in his most well read book, Natural Right in history, from 1953, he uses on a few pages in the middle of the book. And Strauss is a very slippery writer. He writes in a very kind of dialectical way where he'll like raise points that he doesn't necessarily 100% endorse, but it's like on the way to getting to what he really does endorse. But what that is is itself kind of murky. But in a few pages of that book, he kind of lays out the Schmidian position and says in effect that there is, as I did of myself a few minutes ago, there is no real way to avoid there being a need in certain emergency situations for a rule of basically a wise man. You need a kind of philosopher king who will be able to size up the situation and decide what to do without being previously restrained by being restrained by previously authored rules and restrictions on that power. Because it's not possible before the fact to kind of predetermine what may or may not be necessary in the moment of emergency. Now, I don't, again, I think this isn't Locke. I think it's an Aristotle and it's in Strauss in these few pages. And I know, don't. I don't think that this, like, means that Strauss is advocating for the role of dictatorship in the way that, that Schmidt did. In fact, Strauss wrote a critical review of, of Schmidt's concept of the political that goes at him exactly in this way, pointing out that rather than trying to, like, deal with this perennial problem of politics and make politics better, Schmidt shows signs in his wr, wanting to bring about this very emergency for the sake of enhancing executive power. But because these passages are in natural right and history, they kind of bequeath to the Straussian community, and especially the Claremont faction of that community, this vision of a president who is governing unconstrained by any prior limits of law or ideology, because ideology is itself a kind of constraint on what a president will do. If, you know, George W. Bush, I think that all kinds of terrible things, bad decision making in the wake of 9, 11, around the Iraq war and some of the domestic surveillance stuff. But there were limits to what he was going to do. Like, he wasn't, he wasn't threatening to invade Canada or Denmark or Greenland or Panama just to assert American power over the world. He, he, his vision of it was that we, we had a kind of divinely ordained mission to end tyranny in our world. Now, that could be used in all kinds of bad ways. It was in Iraq, and it could have potentially, you know, you had some neocons like Norman Podoritz advocating for toppling seven governments in the Middle east in that period. So it could have gone much more, much worse even. But that's still a kind of limit. It's not like Bush would have been like, okay, and next we're gonna, like, go to South America. We're gonna, we're gonna topple the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Like Trump. Sometimes Sable saber rattles about doing so. I'll, I'll leave it at that. But, like, this is the idea, this vision of a president who sort of resides above any limit or constraint and is just sort of looking out at the world and deciding on the basis of his own prudence, as Aristotle would say, or in Greek phronesis, practical wisdom. And, and the last thing I'll say is that the, that the, a lot of the MAGA intellectuals who are, come out of this kind of Straussian tradition and they, they see Trump as like a kind of genius. And in the sense that like here we were in this world of George W. Bush, you know, Twice President, then McCain, then Romney running, both of them lose. But like their general vision of America and the world was pretty much the Bush vision, which was itself an updated version of Reagan. And they see Trump comes on the scene and he just, this seeming moron guy, real estate developer from Queens comes on the scene and he just demolishes the entire commitments of the Republican Party and says, no, actually we're not going to fight wars for democracy. We're going to close the border and get rid of immigrants. We're going to, we're going to have, have, you know, executive orders specifically attacking Muslims, which of course Bush never did. Bush tried to be very universalistic in the wake of 911 to tamp down any violence that would have arisen against Muslims. Trump reverses all of that and it works. And so a lot of those people look at him and they're like, man, that guy saw things nobody else sees. He, he was a kind of statesman, a brilliant, perspicacious thinker. He understood things nobody else did. All the wise men of the Republican Party got this wrong. So he's the wise man and therefore why not just give him free reign to basically tell, tell us what to do everywhere. So that's the weird way in which the contingencies of Trump the person and how he came on the scene and took control of the party and reversed the polarities on all of these long standing ideological commitments on the American right plays into this classical, subtle and I think like true distinction that comes down to us from Aristotle, Locke, Schmidt, Strauss and, and, and it ends up with a kind of deference to Trump doing pretty much anything he wants anywhere.
- [32:07]
Eli Karetney
Wow. So much there to respond to my, I want to, and I want to get to what you said about the kind of the Claremont folks and maybe the West Coast Stralsianism and the differences from maybe the East Coasters and how they influenced the neoconservatives and in a post 911 world. But before, before I get there, a question I'm so glad you brought up not only natural right and history that those Few pages where you detect, you know, Schmidt's hand. But also the review that Strauss wrote about 20 years beforehand, I think he was still in Germany, hadn't yet immigrated to the U.S. that review of the concept of the political, which was really brilliant. Schmidt acknowledged its brilliance by saying something like, you know, Strauss, you know, with X ray vision, saw right through me.
- [33:01]
Damon Linker
He did. And then. And Schmidt repaid it by giving Strauss a letter of recommendation that helped get him a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to flee Germany right at the correct moment when Hitler was coming to power. And he let Strauss leave with a kind of letter of introduction to fellow scholars around Europe. So he was a great benefactor for Strauss for like two years. But then Strauss kept writing him letters once he was abroad and Hitler had taken over. He kept writing him to like, get him to, and continue this, this intellectual discussion. And by that point, Schmidt didn't respond anymore because now Schmidt was a Nazi and he was getting close to the, to the Hitler regime. And he couldn't be, he couldn't be in correspondence with a Jew. So Hitler, Strauss actually like, writes to one of his friends in this period, I think it's Jacob Klein, and he's like, Schmidt's no longer responding to me. Is this, Did I. Was it something I said? And I think it's Klein who responds basically, like, well, you know, he's being a little cagey. They're watching is male. He can't be in a conversation with a guy like you. And Schmidt. And Strauss is like, okay, you know.
- [34:25]
Eli Karetney
So in that review in the early 30s of the concept of the political, one of the things that I always found interesting that, that the critiques that, that Strauss levels against Schmidt is that in his, in Schmidt's anti liberalism, he, he essentially negates liberalism. He puts a, you know, what Strauss calls a kind of minus sign in front of liberalism, but is unable to achieve, quote, unquote, a horizon beyond liberalism. And it seems, you know, you mentioned in the piece, I believe in the New York Times piece, that Strauss quote, unquote, tamed Schmidt's view of politics. And I think there's truth to that, looking at it politically. But if you look at it philosophically, there's a sense in which Strauss was seeking a more radical kind of horizon than what Schmidt was able to achieve. So I wonder kind of where Strauss turned in seeking that horizon beyond liberalism and where Plato plays into this. And if not Plato's vision of philosopher kings themselves as rulers, is there a kind of second best alternative from Strauss's mind in the way that philosophers or philosophical advisors and writers can, can guide the hand of the decision maker, you know, and where, where handlers and kind of those whispering in the ear of, of the leader are playing the, the role of the wise man.
- [35:56]
Damon Linker
Yeah, I mean it's obviously complicated stuff. I mean, I guess I would say and, and the argument of the book that I'm, I'm writing on Strauss is going to really try to make this case that the horizon beyond liberalism that Strauss is groping toward at the time he writes that review, but he had, he didn't yet, he hadn't worked it all out yet. He didn't figure crack. He didn't crack it until late in the 30s once he was in this country around 1938. 39 is where I'm tracing it to in the book. But what it has to do with is basically leaving politics behind. What it ends up being is a profoundly, I won't say anti political but apolitical stance that ultimately Strauss comes to affirm a view of philosophical reflection that involves leaving politics behind as something that always will be, will be mired in, in lies, in necessary lies, in distortions of the truth that there's really no solution to that like you can't make politics become perfectly transparent, perfectly good, perfectly fulfilling for human beings that instead the best you can hope for is that you can, if to speak in Platonic terms, that you can leave the cave to see it for what it is. Maybe if, if there's a particularly open minded and wise person in charge and they ask your advice, you might be tempted to, to come talk and give a little advice about what to do. But ultimately the philosopher seeks to understand and achieve wisdom, which is always extra political wisdom. It's wisdom that shows that there is no political solution to the problems of the human condition. And so in that respect, looking back on that critique of Schmidt from the stance that he eventually develops, about nine years later, Schmidt still is looking to kind of find the salvation of his soul in supporting a kind of dictatorship because he believes that in a dictatorship everything will be ordered as it ought to be and we will fix the problems of the world this way. And Strauss's response to that is to say essentially no, you won't. You're going to maybe even make it worse by endorsing this thug who's going to commit the most unspeakable acts of, in human history and jeopardize the survival of Western civilization itself by going to war with the entire world and kind of, you know, leading us to the precipice. And so that's my view of Strauss. Now I also have an account in the book. I mean, the subtitle of the book will be Something about Strauss, Leo Strauss and the Hidden Truths, the American Right. Now I will briefly summarize that in a minute and then turn it back to you. So you can either follow up or turn in another direction. I'm fine with either. But my interpretation is not just that Strauss sort of leaves the cave of politics behind by the late 30s. It's also that he believes that the only path out of the cave is to first become a conservative. That we, he believes, reside, meaning we in the modern world reside in a cave beneath the Platonic cave, which is liberalism. And you can't get out of the cave from liberalism. It's a kind of dead end. You have to, to first educate liberals, either ideological committed liberals or default liberals who have never really thought seriously about anything but just grow up in a liberal regime like the United States and sort of believe in rights and equality and the, you know, the stories that Americans tell themselves about politics. You have to first get those people to question those liberal piety by becoming conservatives who think in terms of kind of classical hierarchical moral distinctions, noble, base, honorable, dishonorable, just and unjust. Which obviously there's a version of justice and injustice within liberalism too, but, but a kind of more fluid version of justice and injustice that it has to do with fights over the common good within a particular regime. Beautiful and ugly. Like there are all of these hierarchical moral distinctions that liberalism sort of doesn't have anything to say about. Like for, for, for liberalism, morality is always egalitarian. It's about, you know, universal equal recognition. All right, you, you have rights. Okay, I'll agree. You have rights if you acknowledge and recognize that I have rights. All right, and I'm recognizing your rights, you're recognizing my rights. And, and we go back and forth about that and, and then we sort of have all of our moral and political disputes about, like who has rights and who doesn't have rights and how to expand the rights to the people who've been excluded and always expanding that, that sphere of rights. That's a little kind of cross section of morality for Strauss. But morality is also about this group of people is degraded, this other is exalted. These people are honorable, those are dishonorable, some are noble, others are base. These hierarchical moral distinctions need to first become accepted as the vocabulary of politics and morality in a full way. And doing that brings us back to Plato's Cave. And only once you've done that can you then engage. And Strauss, I think, in his books, in his lecturing, and in, and, and his public speaking in his lifetime, shows an example of how one takes those moral categories, the hierarchical ones, and subjects them to a kind of dialectical criticism that ultimately points beyond politics to a kind of apolitical philosophical life. And you, you can't get there unless you first go through that intermediary step of becoming conservatives. And then briefly, in 10 seconds, how does that tell us anything about the American right? Well, there are a lot of people who have been influenced by Strauss who are quite content to stay in that hierarchical cave. They actually don't realize it's a cave. They think that's philosophy. And that's basically the Claremont faction, mostly, although, you know, you mentioned the East Coast Straussians. That's really getting into the weeds to, for the listeners. But basically, like Straussians, like, you know, Bill Kristol, who's a student of Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, he's a particularly prominent neoconservative. And you can tell, you can tell the east coast straws who are politically engaged because they tended to be very pro Iraq War, very pro Bush, very involved in the Republican Party until they got to Trump. And then they, they've become basically like, what, neoliberals? We can't use that term because it means something else in the discourse. But like, they're like, Bill Kristol's now Democrat. He supports Biden in 2024. He hates the Republican Party, wants to see it destroyed. How did that happen? Well, because he was more of that other faction of the Straussians. But according to my argument in the book, Bill Kristol might be like a more decent human being than some of the kind of nasty Claremonster types, and I do think he is. But he's also not really doing well, what Strauss ultimately cares about, because he's still just doing politics. He's just switched teams. And, and, and, you know, Strauss has respect for that. You know, it's, it's better than other things you could be doing with your life, maybe, but it's still not what Strauss himself cared most about, which was reading, reading philosophy books and trying to figure out the meaning of existence, if you will.
- [45:50]
Eli Karetney
Wow. Where. Where to respond.
- [45:55]
Damon Linker
I leave them speechless.
- [45:58]
Eli Karetney
So political philosophers in, in the kind of the school of Strauss, despite differences, you know, between these different schools and the different approaches, there's, there's an element of politics as a way of doing philosophy. Strauss talked about how philosophers, philosophers need to first be political philosophers, partly or mainly to protect the project of philosophy at its highest. The kind of the engagement with truth with a capital T, and that permanent quest, that commitment to searching for the truth as the highest kind of way of life, life. When Strauss talked in kind of grand terms, and you talked about how the political Straussians seem to kind of dismiss that side, the higher side of the project, and engage in politics and remain in the cave. And I want to just kind of focus there for a moment as we shift, you know, in this last segment of the podcast, towards how this all hits the regime, how this affects the Trump administration and the American regime. So you had talked about how the Claremont folks have their own kind of reading of history. Maybe say a few words about that, because that's part of the, in my understanding, the kind of. The inevitable and even necessary kind of deceptions, the noble lies that even serious philosophers, you know, when they're playing the role, when they're playing the politics, need to be engaged in readings of history. And so maybe say a few words about where, you know, where Lincoln plays into this, where the. The fall with Woodrow Wilson and FDR and the shift towards the administrative state, how that kind of plays a role in the Straussian imagination.
- [48:14]
Damon Linker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, most of this goes back to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who was a Strauss student who studied with Strauss in the 1940s at the New School. And he. He developed over the course of his career. He's the guy who founded the Claremont Institute. So when I say Claremont or claremonsters, which I love, I'm talking about the. The people in and around that institute, which isn't affiliated with Claremont Graduate University, although some of the people there sometimes have taught at that institute. But if you go out there and you. You meet people from the actual university, they bristle at the fact that their name is now associated with these people. And what they really mean is this independent institute that Harry Jaffa helped to found, and he promulgated a kind of just so story for the right. And it goes something like this. You sketched it very briefly yourself, Eli. But it's basically, the American founding was fantastic. It had one defect, and that was slavery. Finally, we were fortunate enough in the person of Abraham Lincoln, to get a great world historical statesman who took charge at exactly the right moment, rightly saw that we had to wage a civil war to resolve this issue. He was on the side of the angels in kind of refounding America as this new birth of freedom based on a kind of purge, a Purging of what was defective in the founding, about slavery and kind of refounding the country and dedication to equality among all citizens. So up to that point, that sounds like generic American happy story. That's not really distinctive. I mean, some of Jaffa's reading of Lincoln as a kind of philosopher, statesman who's like, engaging in platonic analysis and dialogue, electic in his debate with, you know, Stephen Douglas, that's. That's distinctively Java. But the general view of a new birth of freedom with Lincoln at standard stuff. So that means that in the, in the decades immediately following the Civil War, America achieved what Jaffa referred to as. We became basically the best regime. We are the best that can be attained in politics, politics in the United States. So what, what was America like in those years? Well, that was the. The Gilded Age. It was the time where the south sort of reverses itself after, you know, refuses Reconstruction, you know, holds the country hostage in 1876, 77, holds a gun to its head and says, you got to let us do what we want with our blacks down here, here, down here, or we're not going to let you pick a president. And it gets sorted out and we get Jim Crow and all kinds of nastiness. None of that really bothers Jaffa. I mean, in the sense that he doesn't highlight it as a major problem. What he really dislikes, and then the people he influenced at Claremont have developed a lot further beyond Jaffa is this narrative that the real problem is Woodrow Wilson and the progressives. Woodrow Wilson, the first and only PhD to ever hold the presidency, is a political scientist. He has all these ideas that America needs to become more of a galvanized nation. And that requires the president to kind of go over the heads of Congress and speak directly to the mass of the American people and get them to. To support a much bolder and more expansive view of federal power. And then part of that involves needing to create what becomes known as the administrative state, which is basically the rule in the executive branch of experts who will regulate modern life to protect workers, protect children, protect safety, do all kinds of things that the government ever did before to kind of make this juggernaut of a modern industrial society run smoothly. The Straussians at Claremont, the Jaffaites, hate this. They think this is a kind of undermining of self government. It ends up, they claim, creating this class of unaccountable bureaucrats who are kind of moral busybodies who regulate progressively more and more elements, elements of American life. This got a huge kind of quantum leap in threateningness, kind of threat to democracy by the happenstance of the Great Depression and the New Deal, which then gives it exactly what Wilson hoped it would, which was overwhelming popular support for this vast expansion much further of federal power. And basically according to this faction at Claremont, this is like their moment of break. So everything from roughly Wilson and the progressives to the New Deal, after that, it's all downhill and an accelerating downhill of getting worse and worse with the government getting bigger and bigger, regulations more and more onerous, ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats, more intense over time. And what is needed is, they think, an utter reversal. It's, it's, I mean, my, my teacher Mark Lilla, you know, was, wrote a very, very critical review of, I think your mentor, Corey Robbins book back around, you know, 13 years ago. And I think that the review was unduly harsh. But in that review, he, Lilla, makes a lot of very useful, useful distinctions that I like to draw on. One of them is to say there are two kinds of reactionaries in the world. There are either there are restorative reactionaries who want to kind of go back to a past and kind of redo things by catapulting to the past. And then there are redemptive reactionaries who think we can't any longer get back to that past. It's too gone, too far gone and destroyed. We have no alternative but to level the skyline and create a kind of open field of rubble and then build anew on that from scratch. Well, the Clare monsters up until around 2016 were very much restorative reactionaries. They just wanted to go back before Wilson, just, just, just, just ignore, get rid of the administrative state, deconstruct it, as Steve Bannon said later, and return to before those before times. And then if we could do that, everything would be great. We'd be the best regime again by the time we get to Michael Anton, who's a very prominent West Coast Jaffa eyed Straussian, who writes this famous essay, the Flight 93 election, arguing that every conservative in America, if they really are conservative, must support Donald Trump. He, by the way, is the outgoing director of policy planning at the State Department right now. He also served in the first Trump administration for a time on the National Security Council. He basically, he announces, in effect, he announces, we have to become redemptive reactionaries. We have to empower this guy who is going to destroy everything. And then we can build anew and kind of recreate something of the old excellence of the past on the ruins of the administrative state that will be. Will be either leveled to the ground or we'll also seize it and use that power to do what we want. So that's kind of the just so story behind all of these people. Now, what all of that has to do with the earlier stuff I said about Strauss is I have no freaking clue like that, that how you get from Strauss to that like is is is. You know, I'm going to tell the story of how it happens in my book, but it is not obvious to me in any way other than, wow, that's an implausible reading of where it originates, but boy, it's pretty amazing. It's a very, very different kind of approach to things.
- [57:36]
Eli Karetney
Thanks, Damon. I know I promised an hour, but I can't let you go without asking you at least one question about bap, so let me do that. But let me just briefly say that was a wonderful, you know, Diddy there on the west coast, just so story. And I'm like flooded with memories, you know, whether it's Lilla's review of Corey's, Corey's book. I remember Corey reacting to being called a lumper and thinking about how all political philosophers are one way or another lumper. But that was actually a thoughtful, if harsh review. But one thought in terms of the kind of battle against the administrative state on the part of would be great leaders and great wise men. I'm reminded of on tyranny and Strauss's engagement with Alexander Kozhev and the idea of the universal and homogeneous estate and where Kozev's ideas, you know, filter down to Fukuyama and the end of history and, you know, some flooded with lots of ideas. You know, maybe in another conversation we can pick up on some of this. And one name which I. We haven't. Hasn't come up and it needs to come up. And maybe now as we say a few parting words about bap, Nietzsche is somewhere hovering here in the background. And there's no way to engage in a conversation about Strauss's influence without about saying something about Nietzsche. So maybe I'll leave the Nietzsche question to kind of address that maybe through bap, but maybe just say a few words about Costine Alamaru, better known as Bronze Age pervert, or bap, who you've written about as a quote unquote, rogue disciple of Alan Bloom. So maybe connect a few of those dots and why should we care be paying attention to BAP and what he says on social media? Why does it matter? I think it does, but I'm inviting you to say a few.
- [59:47]
Damon Linker
Yeah, well, I mean briefly, so listeners can follow. Costin Alamariu, also known as Bronze Age Pervert, is a guy who has a PhD in Political Science from Yale. He studied under Steven Smith, who's a Straussian, and also Brian Garston, who is not a Straussian, although I believe Harvey Mansfield served on the dissertation committee as well. And I've actually seen the written comments from the, the dissertation committee to his dissertation. He's a guy who graduated. I think he got his PhD from Yale around 20. 15. 15, something like that. And he over the next couple of years self published a book called Bronze Age Mindset that became a kind of fluke, runaway bestseller among the further right male readers who worked in the first Trump administration. So I would say the reason to pay attention to the guys and so much as social media presence now as it is that that he's read by a lot of young male right wingers. And the piece you mentioned where I talk about him as a rogue disciple of Alan Bloom is I was actually responding to an essay that somebody else had written making that claim. And I tried to argue that it's like not quite fair to Bloom to blame him for baptism. And it's also not really fair to Strauss, although I do think that, that there are disturbing things in this. Not that they deserve blame. Like he's like their child, but, you know, I mean, Alexander the Great studied with Aristotle. Alcibiades was a Socrates student. Like there is a long, ugly history of people who encounter the, what Strauss called the mania of philosophy, namely what philosophy is. When you leave the cave that you, you sort of, you get exposed to what radical questioning of everything really means, including radical questioning of morality and all of its aspects. And some people come back as sociopaths and that is an eternal risk for philosophy. And BAP is one of our sociopaths. That's, that's kind of the way I would prefer to frame it. He's a guy who substantively disagrees very strongly with Strauss. Like his reading of Plato's Gorgias is completely absurd from the point of view of the way Strauss read that dialogue. He sort of sees, I mean, I'm not going to get into the weeds of this on this for your listeners, poor listeners, but there's a character in the Gorgias who's very Nietzsche and very bap like called Calicles, who's like a total nihilist, believes justice is just whatever the strong do and can get away with, doesn't believe in any Kind of common good or obligations to anybody and so forth and so on. At great length. Socrates refutes him repeatedly, sort of exposes to everyone listening to the conversation that Callicles soul is monstrously disordered. And that's kind of the lesson of the dialogue that, like, this guy is a man. Yes, well, Bronze Age pervert thinks actually Callicles is the hero of the Gorgias. And he shows that Socrates is a SAP sucker and trunk and chump. That is not Strauss's reading of the dialogue. And frankly, I think it's an insane reading of the dialogue. But, but, you know, there are some, some young people who, you know, do on the right. You do get young people who, like, read Plato for fun. That's just the way the right is. And he has, like, minions who, like, are devoted to thinking this is the right reading. And Calicles is a hero and we should all basically become little tyrants who try to conquer the world and make everyone else our slaves. So again, BAP is our. Is our sociopath. And that doesn't mean that we should, you know, we should execute the philosophers like Socrates's fate. It also doesn't mean we should even demonize them necessarily. But it means that we should be reminded that radical philosophical questioning of everything is potentially a dangerous business. And Strauss did it very radically. And you're going to, you know, if. If you're unfortunate enough to live at a time where there are actual, live political options for these sociopath paths to gain a foothold among staffers in the White House, in the West Wing, then there, There are moments like our own where that philosophical mania can have a kind of ominousness to it. You can end up generating, as Strauss thought you needed to, not just conservatives, but maybe fascists. And that doesn't mean Strauss wanted to generate them. He was writing and living in 1950s and 60s America, and his students were nothing like that. But we now live in a different cave. Our cave has evolved or perhaps devolved such that creating a bunch of people who think philosophy means hanging out and trying to rule the cave, trying to manipulate the little cutout out in the. Behind the chained prisoners on the floor. If that is a cave where, where, like, the leader is Donald Trump, then, you know, creating all of these would be cave dwellers. And having them associate hanging out in the cave and ruling it with philosophy again could be a little, A little ominous. This. So this, this has now become the. The greatest, the greatest public airing of what my book will be saying that anyone has ever heard beyond my agent and my editor so lucky, all of you, I guess.
- [66:35]
Eli Karetney
Thank you. Thank you very much. Damon. With that ominous image in mind, I want to thank you for joining us us on International Horizons. This has been a very thought provoking, interesting, in some ways scary conversation. I very much appreciate your time.
- [66:54]
Damon Linker
That's my brand. Yeah.
- [66:58]
Eli Karetney
So good luck to you the. The start of this, the fall semester. And thank you again for joining us.
- [67:04]
Damon Linker
Thanks. Same to you. It's been great. Thanks for having me.