Making Sense of the Reactionary Right
A recent essay from David Brooks proposes one way to do it. Leo Strauss pointed to another
An old grad-school friend of mine wrote me this past Saturday to say that he’d heard David Brooks plug me and my Substack on a podcast. That was very nice to hear. Brooks and I have a number of things in common, among them a history of growing up for part of our childhoods in Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (Brooks is eight years older than I am, and we have no memory of running into each other on the many playgrounds scattered across that postwar development.)
In the early phases of our respective careers, Brooks and I were both neoconservatives of a kind, followed by a shift to the liberal center—mine prompted by the Bush 43 administration, Brooks’ by John McCain’s choice of the unfit proto-Trump Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008.
One final thing that Brooks and I share is a blend of aversion and attraction to right-wing critiques of liberal modernity. At some level, we both “get it”—we feel in our bones the dissatisfactions and discontents that haunt many modern people, leading some of them to embrace political reaction as a response to the unfulfilling character of the way we live and situate ourselves existentially in the modern world.
Brooks’ latest effort to grapple with this dissatisfaction and discontent can be found in an essay for The Atlantic titled “History Is Running Backward: Why Reactionaries Are Taking Over the World.” It’s a stimulating and thoughtful sketch of various reactionary thinkers that overlaps in interesting ways with my own Penn course on the Reactionary Right. I wrote about that course as it was just getting started, back in January, and I will return to it in a follow-up post I’ll write at some point in May, after the class has ended.
In this post, I’m more interested in engaging with Brooks’ account of the reactionary tradition—and explaining why I’ve become convinced that a lecture by Leo Strauss delivered in February 1941 can serve as a reliable and illuminating guide to what’s ultimately motivating it at the deepest levels. I’ve written about this essay before, including, rather briefly, in my January post about my course. But here I will go into somewhat greater depth than I have previously.
