Ask Me Anything—August '22

I answer questions about how to be an intellectual, my Catholic conversion, Straussian factionalism, and much else

(Getty Images, royalty free. Credit: DrAfter123)

Many thanks to those of my paying subscribers who answered my Monday call for questions. If you’re a nonpaying subscriber and want to have the chance to pose a question the next time I do an AMA feature, you will need to convert to paying. (Hint hint.) Now on to the festivities….

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KV34—What would you recommend as the best path for someone interested in being an effective public intellectual today? Please feel free to define "effective public intellectual" in your own terms.

DL: I’m a little tripped up by “effective” in this question. Because I really don’t know how to be effective, if that means influential in a way that elevates or improves how the country thinks about politics. First, America is an enormous place. Second, most Americans don’t devote much time to thinking about politics. Third, most Americans aren’t educated enough to engage with the kind of writing intellectuals do. That means being an effective public intellectual amounts to having an influence on the relative small number of elites who care and know a lot about politics. But people tend to engage with and approve of opinions that confirm them in their current views. So having an influence often means telling people what they want to hear. But what good is that? What does it add? Hell if I know.

I can tell you how I view my own work as a public intellectual: Aristotle talks about a political philosopher serving as a kind of umpire for the polity, taking part in the game but attempting to judge it fairly by remaining somewhat apart from it. I think we could use more of this in our public life: Pundits who strive for an Olympian perspective on what’s going on, rather than just engaging in partisan politics by other means.  

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Jack Bucknell—You noted that you are a Catholic convert who no longer practices and have settled back into your secular Jewish roots. Would you be willing to describe the intellectual, or other, roots of your journey to and from Catholicism? 

DL: Oh man, big question. You’d have to interview my therapist at length to get a full answer. Here’s the somewhat redacted version: I was raised as a secular Jew—so secular that I received no Jewish education at all. No Hebrew school, no bar mitzvah. In my late 20s, I began to feel spiritual longings for the first time in my life. By that time, I knew a lot more about Christian theology than I did about Judaism, and I’d also married a Catholic. We were going to start a family soon, so it seemed like it made perfect sense to convert. And then, just a couple of months after I entered the RCIA program at St. Mary’s Parish in New Haven, I landed a job working for First Things magazine, where my boss would be the formidable Catholic convert Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

So many problems solved! So much harmony between my mind and my heart and my home and my job! I remember once saying something like that to the conservative writer Michael Novak shortly after I started my new job, and he loved the sentiment. But I came, rather quickly, to distrust it, realizing that most such neat and tidy solutions end up being redescriptions of problems rather than true solutions, which are actually pretty hard to come by in life.

You can read my first book if you want to see how the First Things episode turned out. The short version is that watching at close range as a priest cheered on what I considered a deeply misguided war and ran defense for a church embroiled in a horrific scandal—well, it did a lot of damage, turning my always lukewarm faith into something much colder. I tried to keep with the program as the years went by, but eventually I just couldn’t persist in the charade of attending Mass with my kids when I just didn’t find the church especially worthy of reverence. I no longer believed—did I ever?—that it was what it claimed to be. Once I admitted to myself that that’s what I thought, the nearly two-decade-long experiment was over.

Reaffirming my secular Jewish roots was comparatively easy because it didn’t require me to change anything about how I’d come to live and think. All that happened is that I made a public declaration that I would stand side-by-side with my fellow Jews if rising anti-Semitism ended up getting worse. (It hasn’t … yet.)

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Lee Patterson—As a left-leaning classical liberal who is worried about the global decline of western liberal democracy, I often find myself echoing sentiments that are most often heard from the right. I'm 100 percent behind the notion that trans-identifying people should have equal access to the same rights and legal privileges that are available to all of us, simply because we're human beings. But the "trans-rights movement," it seems to me, aims to change the use of language and basic biological categories associated with sex, in favor of removing well-established and scientifically sound distinctions between males and females. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the way our education and health systems are engaging with children around topics of sex, gender, and identity. The right sees this but appears to be capitalizing on the facts for political gain. The left appears to be willfully ignoring the issue. My question is: How can those of us on the left notify the politicians and media that they have been fed a diet of egregiously bad misinformation regarding the actual risks (both medical and psychological) associated with the current regime of an “affirmation model of treatment” for gender-confused youth?

DL: I don’t have much of an answer to that specific question at the end about medical treatment, because I’m not a doctor or psychological professional trained to treat gender dysphoria and related conditions. I will say, though, that I largely agree with where you come down here. I am fully in favor of transgender rights because I support protecting the rights of all Americans. But I think the gender ideology progressive activists have embraced and turned into a precondition of being on the right side of this issue is largely nonsense, should not be taught as fact to children (especially young kids), and could well turn out to be incredibly harmful to the left’s political prospects.

Defending all of these assertions would require a substantial essay (or more), so I will leave it at this for now. But at least you now know where I stand: I think liberals need to speak out against gender ideology while simultaneously vowing to defend the political rights of transgender people against intolerance and bigotry.

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Frank W Stanton—I’ve heard you talk about the new alt-right with Mona Charen, and about new publications like Compact. Before I listen to Andrew Sullivan interview Compact’s founder Sohrab Ahmari, can you point me to articles (yours or others) that help explain this worldview?

DL: Aside from reading this newsletter, you could Google my name together with The Week and some of the names you’re interested in to see a few things I wrote while I was a columnist there. Sullivan has also written insightfully about many of them. The important thing to recognize is that the world of the right has lots of subfactions in it. Sohrab Ahmari has his own distinctive and pretty unusual history of ideological evolution, which I’m sure Sullivan explores with him on the podcast, and Compact is itself unusual in being the most “horseshoe”-affirming publication on the right—meaning that it aspires to unite the anti-liberal right and left against the liberal center. They publish Marxists and various anti-woke leftists alongside right-wing Catholics and cultural populists.

That group has some overlap, but also some divergences from, the “National Conservative” movement that Yoram Hazony has been trying to organize, with considerable success, over the past half decade. Then there are the state-capacity policy intellectuals who write for American Affairs, and the second-generation theocons at First Things, and the fascist-adjacent radicals at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind. And assorted right-wing podcasts. Most of the publications I’ve listed here are fairly highbrow. At the lower end, there’s always Breitbart, which may well be the first mass-market website for the alt-right.

I realize I haven’t given you exactly what you asked for. That’s because there aren’t a lot of synoptic things written about this whole big and still-emerging world. Maybe the best option is to scan through episodes of the excellent “Know Your Enemy” podcast on various aspects of it. Listening to several of those episodes would definitely give you the education you’re looking for.

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Josh—Do you think the primary route out of our hyper-polarized condition in the U.S. is educational; psychological; political; spiritual; economic; or other? Needless to say, these approaches overlap, but what is the tip of the spear? Or do you at core believe there is no way out but through great pain of one sort or another?

DL: That’s a tough one. I’m not a big “solutions” guy. I like to show that the problems we face are more complicated and intractable than most people realize or assume. That makes proposing solutions pretty difficult.

But I will say this one limited thing: So far, at least, the populist right hasn’t been winning majorities. That means the non-populists still have considerable political strength on their side. A lot has been written about the right’s ability to leverage various counter-majoritarian institutions to overcome the left’s support. That’s certainly true. But the non-populists can do something similar by embracing the modest reform of instituting non-partisan/open primaries. This has already managed, in the states where it’s been tried, to strengthen more moderate candidates relative to extremist ones (who do better in closed primaries). I’d work toward something like this kind of reform as a first step in pushing back against the rise of the anti-liberal right.

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Mark Parshall—Can you please explore the enduring impact of the Grover Norquist tax pledge as a fundamental component of Republican/right-wing orthodoxy over the past 30 years or so? Norquist’s “drown it in the bathtub” quip seems to encapsulate the right’s “philosophy” of governance.

DL: I think Norquist’s influence has been almost entirely pernicious. He turned Reagan’s justifiable critique of tax rates in the 1970s into a fixed dogma for a world that had already lowered taxes quite a lot. His position, including the vile slogans “drown it in the bathtub” and “starve the beast,” amounts to a full-on assault on our public institutions. That’s bad. Sorry I don’t have anything more elaborate to say than that.

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Edward Hackett—It is evident that Trump gave voice to some of the worst types of people in America. He didn't create them; he only gave them a platform to become more public with their hatred. My question: Is there a chance that some level-headed Republicans can re-capture the party? Or is the Republican party dead, leaving us needing a new party to serve as a counterpoint to the Democrats?

DL: An adequate answer would take more space than I have to give it, but I will say briefly that I think Trump gave voice to a faction of the electorate that was underrepresented before he launched his presidential campaign in 2015—and he made them worse/more dangerous by goading them on and flattering them. It’s a reciprocal relationship.

As for the future, I don’t think any levelheaded Republican is likely to win power in the party anytime soon. Normally, I would say the best path forward for the GOP would be to lose several elections by a wide margin, as the Democrats did during the Reagan/Bush 41 years and the British Labor Party did under Thatcher/Major. That kind of drubbing can inspire a significant change in a party.

But hyperpolarization and negative partisanship work to undermine this process by making landslides by the less-crazy party less likely. (Lots of Republican voters disliked Trump, but most of them voted for him anyway, because they were convinced the Democratic option would nonetheless be worse.) Then there’s the increasing willingness of Republicans to reject democratic majoritarianism when it doesn’t give them wins.

So repeatedly losing elections might not prompt a rethinking on the right about its behavior. On the contrary, it might inspire the party to move even further away from viewing a democratic victory as necessary for political legitimacy. Which would be much, much worse.

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Maggie—Personal question, but I suspect many feel the same. I am firmly anti-woke, anti-progressive, pro-Enlightenment, and uphold classical liberal values, but I also think the Republicans these days are nuts. How do I politically align myself with integrity, besides subscribing to this newsletter?

DL: This one is pretty simple: Muster up the clarity and fortitude to declare personal independence from all the factions, schools, cliques, and parties. Use your mind to find your own way through the confusion and idiocy of the present. Rejoice in intelligence and good judgment wherever you find it, and hold fast to it through the times when it seems like the whole damn world’s gone mad. Subscribing to “Eyes on the Right” is a good start—haha—but there is wisdom out there in other places, too. Search and ye shall find.

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David Dagan—Your two posts on Leo Strauss were so helpful in explaining his thought. It's not hard to connect the dots and understand his appeal to conservatives but...I think having you do more of that explicitly would be helpful! Any chance we could get a quick and dirty guide to the sub-schools that have developed from his philosophy and their impact on politics?

A request for more on Leo Strauss? If you insist! The problem is that I could go on forever on the topic, so I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can.

Since the 1980s, the Straussian world has been divided into the following broad factions:

“East Coast” Straussians—The most prominent are or were Allan Bloom, Thomas Pangle, Clifford Orwin, Walter Berns, Steven Smith, Nathan Tarcov, Arthur Melzer, and lots of others who studied with Strauss directly at the New School for Social Research in the 1940s or the University of Chicago during the 1950s and ’60s, and also their students, and students of students. Members of this faction are characterized by devoting most of their teaching, scholarship, and public writing to the interpretation of philosophical texts—Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, and so forth. Berns studied the American founding, so he wrote a lot about the Federalist Papers and other founding-era documents. Like the other “East Coast” types, he tended to view the U.S. as having “low but solid” foundations (to quote a formulation from Strauss)—meaning that it was an outgrowth of the modern sensibility devised and cultivated by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke in explicit rebellion against classical and medieval thought, which aimed higher (in terms of virtue). But most “East Coasters” tend not to be especially political. When they do take political stands—as Bloom did in The Closing of the American Mind—they end up sounding like neocons, which means like Cold War liberals who shifted right in reaction to the excesses of the counterculture during the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

“West Coast” Straussians—There isn’t any good reason why the “East Coast” Straussians have a regional designation to their name. (Pangle has taught at the University of Texas-Austin for nearly two decades now, for example.) The name stuck mostly because of its contrast to the “West Coast” description for those who have followed the lead of Harry Jaffa, who taught for decades at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University out in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Though the “Claremonsters” have by now left an important imprint on Hillsdale College in Michigan, and they have an office in Washington DC as well, so the “West Coast” descriptor has probably outlived its usefulness.

Jaffa was a Straussian. (He studied with Strauss at the New School.) But I no longer consider his acolytes Straussians at all. They’re Jaffaites. After his first two (very good) books (the first on Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, the second on the Lincoln-Douglas debates) Jaffa largely jettisoned the Socratic approach to philosophical thinking that was most important to his teacher. What was left was a cramped form of classical moralism blended with hagiographical treatment of the American founders, Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan.

For Jaffa, America’s founding wasn’t “low but solid”; the U.S. was the “best regime.” If you want to get a sense of where the “West Coasters” were coming from pre-Trump, think of dogmatic Catholic natural law theorists—utterly convinced they possess the final, fixed moral truth that should be obvious to everyone—and then mix in the pious worship of a small selection of statesmen instead of the veneration of the Saints. That’s Jaffaism for you.

As for what’s happened to it since Trump burst on the scene in 2016, I’d say I explained that pretty well in my second post on Strauss: “their behavior is precisely what one would expect to see from true-believing, unskeptical moralists when they encounter what they take to be evidence that virtue (as they understand it) is on the verge of some final defeat in the political world.” Click on the link above for more on the topic.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.—Harvard University’s ninety-year-old Straussian stands alone. He’s had a huge influence on the Straussian world. Some of that is a function of his brilliance as a scholar and teacher. But it’s also because he placed himself at the bloody crossroads between the two warring factions. He is more philosophical than most West Coast Straussians and more politically engaged than most East Coasters. He’s taught lots of prominent scholars in the East Coast camp, as well as the politically engaged anti-Trump neocon Bill Kristol, but also Charles Kesler, arguably the most accomplished scholar among the second-generation West Coasters.

The “Midwest” Straussians—I don’t really buy that this is a thing, but members of the club throw the category around. I think it mainly means the University of Notre Dame’s Michael and Catherine Zuckert, two important teachers and scholars who have worked to do something similar to Mansfield in keeping on friendly terms with both factions of the divided Straussian world.

The Catholic/Mormon Straussians—In this category, I’d place the late Peter Lawler, along with Daniel Mahoney, Ralph Hancock (the premier LDS Straussian), maybe Hadley Arkes (a Catholic convert), and definitely the great French Straussian Pierre Manent. This group falls somewhere in between East and West Coast, and also somewhere between Athens (reason) and Jerusalem (revelation). Maybe it’s most accurate to call that place Rome (or in Hancock’s case, Salt Lake City).

“My” Straussians—I tend to read and learn the most from those Straussians who remain furthest from the political fray and devote their time and talents to … reading and interpreting philosophical texts. Here’s a list of some of the best (in no particular order, and with apologies to any I’ve forgotten to include): Arthur Melzer, David Leibowitz, Jerry Weinberger, Paul Stern, Tom Pangle, Clifford Orwin, Christopher Bruell, Susan Shell, Robert Bartlett, Richard Velkley, Ronna Burger, David Bolotin, Mark Lutz, Michael Davis, Devin Stauffer, Steven Smith, Michael Gillespie, Timothy Berns, Dustin Sebell, Ariel Helfer, Alex Priou, and the great German Straussian Heinrich Meier.