In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal declared “We are all neocons now.” The claim is exaggerated but not by much. Neoconservatism has been, for better or worse, the most influential political philosophy of the last generation. But what exactly is it? My new book Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea attempts to answer that question.

Defining neoconservatism is no easy task given that its exponents deny that it’s a systematic political philosophy. Neocons such as Irving Kristol prefer to characterize neoconservatism as a “persuasion,” a “mode of thinking,” or a “mood.” At best, they say, it’s a syncretic intellectual movement influenced by thinkers as diverse as Plato, Trotsky, and Hayek. Daniel Bell captured the syncretic nature of neoconservatism when he described himself as a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” On one level, neoconservatism certainly is a syncretic “mode of thinking,” but I shall demonstrate here that neoconservatism is in fact a comprehensive political philosophy shaped most fundamentally by the ideas of Leo Strauss via Irving Kristol.

First, though, let us examine how the neocons present themselves, particularly in relation to the broader conservative intellectual movement and the Republican Party. Irving Kristol once boasted that neoconservatism is the first variant of twentieth-century conservatism that is “in the ‘American grain.’” The implication of this extraordinary claim is that Goldwater conservatism—with its proclaimed attachment to individual rights, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism, and its rejection of the modern welfare-regulatory state—is somehow outside the American grain. The neoconservatives are and always have been, by contrast, defenders of the post–New Deal welfare state. Not surprisingly, the neocons support, in the words of Ben Wattenberg, a “muscular role for the state,” one that taxes, regulates, and redistributes—and, as we shall see, one that fights. This, apparently, is what it means to be in the American grain.

What really bothers the neocons about small-government Republicans is that they lack a “governing philosophy.” The neocons have long urged the Republicans to reinvent themselves by giving up their Jeffersonian principles and developing a new “philosophy of governance.” Ironically, though, the neocons’ conception of a “governing philosophy” is not one defined by fixed moral principles. Instead, it’s an intellectual technique defined by pragmatism. The neocons’ “philosophy of governance” is a philosophy for how to rule or govern. It’s all about “thinking politically,” which means developing strategies for getting, keeping, and using power in certain ways. The neocons therefore urge the GOP to become chameleon-like and to adapt themselves to changing circumstances.

The neocons’ pragmatic statesmanship is grounded in two basic assumptions: first, the identification of the “public interest” with some kind of golden mean and, second, the conceit that they—and only they—have the practical wisdom by which to know the golden mean. The neocons therefore believe it to be both necessary and possible for wise statesmen to find the golden mean between altruism and self-interest, duties and rights, regulation and competition, religion and science, socialism and capitalism. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, has argued that neoconservative statesmen should be able to figure out the “precise point at which the incentive to work” would be “undermined by the availability of welfare benefits, or the point at which the redistribution of income” would begin “to erode economic growth, or the point at which egalitarianism” would come “into serious conflict with liberty.” In the end, the neocons’ strategy is to accept the moral ends of liberal-socialism, but with the caveat that they can do a better job of delivering “social services” or that they can direct those services toward conservative ends.

Neoconservatism is much more, however, than just pragmatic political thinking. It is a systematic philosophy with deep philosophical roots. At the core of my book is the claim that the political philosopher Leo Strauss was the most important influence on Irving Kristol’s intellectual development. Neoconservatism reveals for the first time the importance of Kristol’s 1952 review of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing. Strauss, according to Kristol, had “accomplished nothing less than a revolution in intellectual history, and most of us will—figuratively, at least—have to go back to school to learn the wisdom of the past we thought we knew.”

What did Kristol learn from Leo Strauss?

1. There is an unbridgeable chasm between theory and practice, philosophy and the city, the wise few and the vulgar many. That is, there is a radical disjunction between the “realm of theoretical truth” (i.e., the realm inhabited by philosophers) and the “realm of practical moral guidance” (i.e., the realm inhabited by nonphilosophers). What this meant for Strauss is that Platonic idealism is compatible with Machiavellian realism.
2. The West is in a state of intellectual and moral decline as seen by the rise of philosophic nihilism. Strauss identified the source of modern nihilism with Enlightenment liberalism—the liberalism of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Strauss was a trenchant critic of modern rationalism and science, natural-rights individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism, all of which, he argued, turned man away from a supranatural reality to nature, from faith to reason, from community to the individual, from duty to rights, from inequality to equality, from order to freedom, and from self-sacrifice to self-interest. The result is that man and society have come unhinged from the natural order and from the religious faith necessary to sustain moral and political unity.
3. Platonic political philosophy is a necessary antidote to the maladies of modern society. Classical natural right was defined by four principles. First, the political community is the primary unit of moral value, which means the “common good” is the end of the regime and coerced “unity” is the means to that end; second, a truly just political order should mirror the “hierarchic order of man’s natural constitution,” which means that some men are more fit to rule than others; third, that which is naturally right for any given society is always changing depending on necessity and circumstances, which means that philosophic statesmen should not be hampered by conventional morality or the rule of law; and fourth, virtue and the public interest represent the end or purpose of the city, which means that wise statesmen must use “benevolent coercion” to make their citizens virtuous.
4. Platonic statesmen should ground the regime on certain ancestral pieties and political myths. The cardinal virtue for the vulgar many is self-sacrifice.

Straussianized neoconservatism is defined by what Irving Kristol called a “new synthesis” of ideas—a synthesis he characterized as “classical-realist” in nature and temperament. At the core of neoconservatism is a fundamental dualism that combines what Strauss called “the way of Socrates with the way of Thrasymachus.” Platonic natural right (the “realm of theoretical truth”) provides the ultimate standard of justice for neoconservative statesmen. Yet the messy day-to-day reality of politics means that conventional morality and sometimes even Machiavellian prudence (the “realm of practical moral guidance”) are both necessary and salutary. Philosophically, Strauss thought it possible to advocate the “shrewd ‘power politics’” of Machiavelli within a larger Platonic framework that separates theory from practice. Thus Kristol learned how to reconcile Platonic idealism (the “classical” thesis) with Machiavellian prudence (the “realist” antithesis) to create the neoconservative synthesis.

What, then, are the core principles of neoconservatism?

1. Neoconservative Metaphysics: The neocons take the “political community” or what Irving Kristol called the “collective self” as the primary unit of moral, social and political value. They accept Plato’s premise that the polis or the nation is the only community adequate for the fulfillment of man’s natural end or telos, which they associate with what they variously call the “public interest” or the “common good.” The actual content of the “public interest” is whatever wise and benevolent men say it is, which is precisely why it should never be defined. The highest task of neoconservative statesmanship is to superimpose ideological unity on the “collective self” in the name of an ever-shifting “public interest.”
2. Neoconservative Epistemology: Neoconservatives begin with the Platonic assumption that ordinary people are irrational and must be guided by those who are rational. According to Irving Kristol, there are “different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy.” The highest truth in Strauss and Kristol is restricted to the philosopher, while the common man is and must be limited to “knowledge” of a different sort: to myth, revelation, custom, and prejudice. Neoconservatives believe the opinions of the nation must therefore be shaped by those who rule. To control ideas is to control public opinion, which in turn is to control the regime as a whole. Ultimately, the vulgar must be ruled by faith and by faith’s necessary ally, force.
3. Neoconservative Ethics: If you believe, as Straussianized neocons do, that there are “different kinds of truth for different kinds of people,” then you must believe that there are and must be different moral codes as well. Ordinary people need some form of conventional morality that is easily learned, followed, and transmitted from one generation to another. The vulgar many need piety and patriotism as the ordering myths by which to live. For the neocons, morality is conventional and pragmatic. Because they regard the nation as the primary unit of political value and because they identify the “public interest” with the purpose of government, they regard moral good and virtue to be that which works—not for the individual, but for the nation. Morality is therefore defined as overcoming one’s petty self-interest so as to sacrifice for the common good.
4. Neoconservative Politics: Central to the neoconservatives’ philosophy of governance is the conceit that it is possible, in the words of Kristol, for a small elite “to have an a priori knowledge of what constitutes happiness for other people.” Because common people cannot possibly know what they really want or what constitutes their true happiness, it is entirely appropriate for a philosophically trained political elite to guide them to their true happiness and to prevent them from making bad decisions. The highest purpose of neoconservative statesmanship is therefore to shape preferences, form habits, cultivate virtues, and create the “good” society, a society that is known a priori to those of superior philosophic wisdom. The neocons therefore advocate using government force to make “good” choices for America’s nonphilosophers in order to nudge them in certain directions—that is, toward choosing a life of virtue and duty. As Strauss made clear in his most influential work Natural Right and History, wise statesmen must learn to use “forcible restraint” and “benevolent coercion” in order to keep down the selfish and base desires of ordinary men.

The culmination of the neoconservatives’ political philosophy is their call for a “national-greatness conservatism.” Following Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss, David Brooks, William Kristol, and a new generation of neocons proclaimed the “nation” as the fundamental unit of political reality, “nationalism” as the rallying cry for a new public morality, and the “national interest” as the moral standard of political decisionmaking. This new nationalism, according to Brooks, “marries community goodness with national greatness.”

The moral purpose of national-greatness conservatism, according to David Brooks, is to energize the American spirit; to fire the imagination with something majestic; to advance a “unifying American creed”; and to inspire Americans to look beyond their narrow self-interest to some larger national mission—to some mystically Hegelian “national destiny.” The new American citizen must be animated by “nationalist virtues” such as “duty, loyalty, honesty, discretion, and self-sacrifice.” The neocons’ basic moral-political principle is clear and simple: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the nation-state.

Politically, Brooks’s new nationalism would use the federal government to pursue great “nationalistic public projects” and to build grand monuments in order to unify the nation spiritually and to prevent America’s “slide” into what he calls “nihilistic mediocrity.” It is important that the American people conform, swear allegiance to, and obey some grand central purpose defined for them by the federal government. The ideal American man, he argues, should negate and forgo his individual values and interests and merge his “self” into some mystical union with the collective soul. This is precisely why Brooks has praised the virtues of Chinese collectivism over those of American-style individualism.

In the end, the neocons want to “remoralize” America by creating a new patriotic civil religion around the idea of “Americanism”—an Americanism that will essentially redefine the “American grain.” The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtues, sacrifice themselves to the “common good,” obey the commands of the government, fight wars, and die for the state.

The neocons’ national-greatness philosophy is also the animating force behind the their foreign policy. Indeed, neoconservative foreign policy is a branch of its domestic policy. The grand purpose of national-greatness foreign policy is to inspire the American people to transcend their vulgar, infantilized, and selfish interests for uplifting national projects. The neoconservatives’ policy of benevolent hegemony will, according to William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic.” In other words, the United States should wage war in order to combat creeping nihilism. In the revealing words of Kristol and Kagan, “The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy.” Going to war, sacrificing both treasure and blood in order to bring “democracy” to strangers—this is a mission worthy of a great nation.

The neocons therefore believe that a muscular foreign policy—one that includes military intervention abroad, war, regime change, and imperial governance—will keep the American people politicized and therefore virtuous. By saving the world from tyranny, America will save herself from her own internal corruption. And there’s more. By keeping America perpetually involved in nation-building around the world, neoconservative rulers will have the opportunity to exercise their statesmanlike virtues. There can be no statesmanship without politics and there can be no truly magnanimous statesmanship without war, so the neocons fear and loathe moral principles that might deny them this outlet. A condition of permanent war, a policy of benevolent hegemony, and the creation of a republican empire means that there will always be a need for politics and statesmanship.

Neoconservatism is a systematic political philosophy. The neocons’ talk about moderation and prudence is really only meant to disarm intellectually their competitors in the conservative-libertarian movement who want to defend the Founders’ principles of individual rights and limited government. The neocons preach moderation as a virtue so that ordinary people will accept compromise as inevitable. But a political philosophy that advocates “moderation” and “prudence” as its defining principles is either dishonestly hiding its true principles, or it represents a transition stage on the way to some more authoritarian regime—or both.

My deepest fear is that the neoconservatives are preparing this nation philosophically for a soft, American-style fascism—a fascism purged of its ugliest features and gussied up for an American audience. This is a serious charge and not one I take lightly. The neocons are not fascists, but I do argue they share some common features with fascism. Consider the evidence:

1. Like the fascists, Strauss and the neoconservatives reject the values and principles associated with Enlightenment liberalism—namely, reason, egoism, individual rights, material acquisition, limited government, freedom, capitalism, science, and technology. They are repulsed by the moral ethos associated with liberal-capitalism, and they praise the nobility of the “barbarian” virtues such as discipline, courage, daring, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice.
2. Like the fascists, Straussianized neocons are metaphysical collectivists: they take the nation as the primary unit of political value; they view the body politic as an organic whole; they promote social duties over individual rights; they support using the coercive power of the state to promote order and unity; they demand that individuals subordinate themselves to the “public interest” and serve some fuzzy notion of “national greatness.”
3. Like the fascists, Strauss and the neocons are statists who strongly oppose a depoliticized—that is, a night watchman—view of government in favor of a paternalistic, corporatist, omnipotent state. They advocate using the coercive power of the state to regulate man’s economic life and his spiritual life.
4. Like the fascists, Straussianzed neocons downplay the importance of constitutional rules and boundaries, and they glamorize the virtues of great statesmen.
5. Like the fascists, Strauss and the neocons believe that life is or should be defined by conflict and that a state of ongoing peace and prosperity is morally degrading; they advocate keeping the American people in an agitated state of permanent fear and loathing against internal and external threats; they want to militarize American culture; they romanticize the virtues of war and empire as regenerative; and they support a foreign policy of perpetual war in order to restore America’s national destiny and sense of greatness.

In sum, I worry that the neocons are paving the road to a kind of soft despotism that might even lead one day to a type of fascism. They make us feel comfortable with certain fascist principles by Americanizing them—by draping them in traditional American manners and mores and in the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln.

The neoconservatives are the advocates of a new managerial state—a state controlled and regulated by a mandarin class of conservative virtucrats who think the American people are incapable of governing themselves without the help of the neocons’ special, a priori wisdom. They are the conservative version of FDR’s brain trust: they want to regulate virtually all areas of human thought and action. They support government control of the economy, as well as government regulation of people’s moral and spiritual lives. The neocons want to regulate the bedroom as much as they want to regulate the boardroom.

The neoconservatives are the false prophets of Americanism. Those who wish to defend America’s Enlightenment values and the individual-rights republic created by its revolutionary Founders must therefore recapture from the neocons the intellectual and moral highground that once defined the promise of American life.

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force.

–F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” The Constitution of Liberty

I agree with C. Bradley Thompson that one cannot successfully defend liberty or indeed grasp what is unique about the American political tradition by embracing neoconservatism.[1] Moreover, I agree that there are elements of neoconservative thought that pose as much a threat to liberty as anything one encounters on the left or from so-called progressivism. Most importantly, I think Thompson is dead right to note the importance of Leo Strauss’s views to neoconservatism.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with the thought of Leo Strauss. While I find it worthwhile to be alert to the possibility that a writer may not always want to state his fundamental message in a forthright manner, as Strauss famously claims, I find some Straussian interpretations of philosophical texts to be strained and unnecessary. But I also think that Strauss had a keen eye for what is fundamental in philosophy and thus understood implicitly the significance of Aristotle’s dictum that “initial deviations from the truth are multiplied later a thousand-fold.” So, it is about one of Strauss’s more fundamental claims regarding natural rights that I wish to make some observations, and though I see my comments as being different from those of Thompson’s, I do think they are complementary.

Strauss claims that when political philosophy in the modern era started speaking of “natural rights,” this entailed an opposition to what is naturally right and morally obligatory.[2]

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin.[3]

The whole point of natural rights in classical liberalism is, first, to uphold their primacy (specifically, the basic, negative rights to life, liberty, and property[4]) when it comes to determining the principal aim or function of the political/legal order and, second, to reject the idea that the fundamental aim of that order is to make people moral—that is, make them do what is naturally right or morally obligatory. Statecraft is not soulcraft. Yet it is also the case that for classical liberalism (and certainly much of contemporary libertarianism) these natural rights are ethical in character and not simply natural powers. Liberty is not license or merely being unimpeded from doing whatever one wants. As John Locke proclaimed:

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.[5]

Strauss’s claim, above, is crucial to understanding neoconservative criticism of natural-rights classical liberalism, for it aims at the individualism that is at the heart of such liberalism. It sets up a conflict between being an advocate for individual liberty and being an advocate for ethical knowledge and a life of morality and virtue.

Regardless of how one ends up interpreting Locke, it should be clear that philosophically speaking Strauss’s claim involves a false alternative. Indeed, it involves many false alternatives. I will note three.

First and most fundamentally, making the individual human being the center of the moral world does not require accepting nominalism, mechanism, or subjectivism. Nor does accepting moderate essentialism, natural (biocentric-based) teleology, or an ethics of human flourishing require rejecting individualism.[6] As Douglas J. Den Uyl and I have noted:

There can be a view of the self or ego that is neither otherworldly nor Hobbesean, but Aristotelian. Further, the achievement of man’s natural end need not be interpreted along Platonic lines. There is no such thing as the flourishing of “man.” There is only the flourishing of individual men.[7]

Strauss’s claim exemplifies a disturbing tendency (also often found among proponents of natural law ethics) to reify the concept “human good” and make it some good that competes with the good of individual human beings. There are no legitimate reasons to follow this tendency.

Second, it is not only perfectly possible for an advocate of individual liberty to uphold ethical knowledge but also it is possible to embrace the thesis that liberty cannot be either defended or understood without such knowledge. Merely saying that some course of conduct ought to be (or ought not to be) done does not mean or imply, by itself, that this course of conduct ought to legally required (or prohibited), and the basic purpose of natural rights theory in the classical liberal tradition is to provide a set of ethical principles that will determine the purpose and scope of the political/legal order but without thereby exhausting all the ethical principles that apply to social life. Or, as Hayek put it, provide “principles that [permit] the coexistence of different sets of values that make it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force.”

For the liberal tradition of which I am speaking, not only is not everything political but also not all ethical principles have the same function or are of the same type. Specifically, natural rights are metanorms that address the ethical problem of how to achieve integrated political diversity in manner that is compatible with the diverse, self-directed, and highly individualized character of human flourishing. They establish conditions for the possibility of playing the moral game, so to speak, without thereby trying to provide directions for playing that game well. Finally, it is not because one is a moral minimalist that one advocates a political regime based on basic negative rights; rather it is because of the richness and robustness of the individual moral life in both its personal and social dimensions that one comes to see the paramount importance of liberty.[8] Thus, natural rights classical liberalism (as well as most contemporary libertarianism) can reject the statecraft-is-soulcraft thesis advanced by neoconservatives (as well as by more traditional conservatives)[9] without either denying the existence of moral knowledge or confining moral discourse to rights-talk.

Third, there is no necessary conflict between accepting individual human beings as the center of the moral world and accepting their profoundly social character. Simply put, individualism is not atomism. One can advocate individualism at the moral level and still acknowledge that there are obligations to others. One can further advocate individual rights at the political level and still accept that there is more to social living than simply respecting liberty. In other words, there is plenty of room for a rich and complex civil society where people create various institutions to meet important social needs. It is both false and unnecessary to think that moral individualism requires a rejection of sociality.

There are also other problems with the overall Straussian approach to political philosophy that should be briefly noted.

(1) When it comes to the claim that the political community is the primary unit for moral analysis, it is necessary to recognize that there is a basic ambiguity in the claim that human beings are by nature political animals, and this stems from the Greek word polis. This term fuses together the notions of society and state.[10] So, when Aristotle claims the human beings are political and cannot live without the polis, he is more plausibly understood as noting the social character of human beings and not that humans are naturally creatures of the state. Thus, as Fred D. Miller has noted, Aristotle’s claim that the aim of the polis is to achieve the virtuous and happy life is correct in one sense and not in another:

The end of the polis qua society is the virtuous and happy life, but it does not follow that the function of the polis qua state is to use coercive force against its citizens so as to make them virtuous and happy.[11]

Clearly, the basic ambiguity caused by the word polis affects all discussions of politics, and this ambiguity is not always fully appreciated by Strauss. Most certainly, it is not adequately grasped by neoconservatism.

(2) Talk of the common good of the political community can be understood in both senses of polis, but insofar as one is concerned with explaining the aim of the state (or the political/legal order) in terms of the common good of the community, there is a sense in which classical liberalism can too speak of the common good. This good is not some determinate end that can be used to direct human conduct, but it can be understood as context-setting.[12] Interestingly, this sense of the common good for the political community was noted by Ayn Rand:

It is only with abstract principles that a social system may properly be concerned. A social system cannot force a particular good on a man nor can it force him to seek the good: it can only maintain conditions of existence which leave him free to seek it. A government cannot live a man’s life, it can only protect his freedom. It cannot prescribe concretes, it cannot tell a man how to work, what to produce, what to buy, what to say, what to write, what values to seek, what form of happiness to pursue—it can only uphold the principle of his right to make such choices … . It is in this sense that “the common good” … lies not in what men do when they are free, but in the fact that they are free.[13]

There is much more that can be said about the troublesome concept of the common good of the political community,[14] but there is nonetheless at least one sense of the common good that classical liberalism can endorse.

I will close these comments by noting that C. Bradley Thompson is certainly correct to reject the neoconservative claim that there is a principled gulf between philosophy and politics. Human beings can learn about what is true, good, and right and take actions to make their lives, societies, and political institutions better. But it is nonetheless possible to reject the claim that there is an unbridgeable gulf between philosophy and politics and still say that the philosopher should realize that the world might not ever listen. In other words, one can admit that, while it is possible for philosophy to change hearts and minds, it may nonetheless fail to do so. This admission does not justify neoconservatism, but it still should cause the theorist to be circumspect.[15]

Notes

[1] Thanks are owed to Douglas J. Den Uyl and Roger E. Bissell for helpful suggestions in writing this essay.

[2] This opposition is sometimes described as the conflict between modern and classic natural right or as the conflict between subjective (individual) and objective natural right. A good way to keep the difference clear is to think of the Moderns as using “right” as primarily a noun and the Ancients as primarily an adjective. The difference is also sometimes signified by the terms “natural rights” and “natural right.”

[3] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (University of Chicago, 1953), p. 248. As strictly a historical report of the philosophical result of the rejection of natural ends by the Moderns and not a statement about what a natural rights theory must reject, it is not necessary to take exception to it here.

[4] These are often known as individual rights.

[5] John Locke, Second Treatise, Chapter 2, Paragraph 6.

[6] See my and Douglas J. Den Uyl’s works on these matters: Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (Open Court, 1991) and Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).

[7] Liberty and Nature, p. 92.

[8] All of these claims are developed and defended in Norms of Liberty. Further, see Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “In Search of Universal Political Principles: Avoiding Some of Modernity’s Pitfalls and Discovering the Importance of Liberal Political Order,” The Good Society 19.1 (2010): 79-86.

[9] Norms of Liberty, Chapter 10, “Communitarian and Conservative Critics,” pp. 225-64.

[10] Fred D. Miller, Jr., Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 358.

[11] Ibid. p. 360. On a related matter, Miller provides a devastating critique of Strauss’s (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s and Michel Villey’s) contention that the concept of rights carries theoretical baggage that is incompatible with the central features of Aristotle’s political theory. Ibid, Sections 4.3 and 4.4, pp. 93-117. Aristotle certainly was no classical liberal, but this is not to say that there are not resources in his thought that cannot be used to buttress an argument for natural rights.

[12] See Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Myth of Atomism,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (June 2006): 843-870.

[13] Ayn Rand, “From My ‘Future File,’” The Ayn Rand Letter no. 3, September 23, 1974: 4-5 (first emphasis added).

[14] For an examination of this concept, see Liberty and Nature, pp. 131-71 and Norms of Liberty, pp. 197-205.

[15] This recognition of the need for theoretical caution does suggest that thought should be given to what is involved in creating a culture that is supportive of the values and ideals that sustain and maintain a liberal political/legal order. There is then an important role for not only rhetoric and literature but indeed the arts. However, it does not follow that such a task falls to the state. See Norms of Liberty, pp. 242-44.

In responding to C. Bradley Thompson’s essay “Neoconservatism Unmasked,” I find myself in the somewhat discomfiting position of wanting to defend neoconservatism. I do this not out of a fundamental philosophic sympathy with the broad contours of neoconservative theory—with which I have some substantive disagreements—but out of the belief that a proper criticism of a school of thought should begin with elementary and charitable accuracy. Thompson’s argument is outrageous by degrees—starting with what can only be understood to be a number of willfully inaccurate and uncharitable readings, and culminating with the jaw-dropping accusation that neoconservatism is comparable to fascism. This latter charge is so over the top that it threatens to obscure what are already a series of moderate to severe misinterpretations. Before addressing this culminating calumny, I will concentrate on attempting to provide a more accurate assessment of neoconservatism, which may then permit fairer-minded but nevertheless serious critique.

Thompson begins and ends his critique by raising the question of the nature of Americanism. He takes umbrage at the claim—taken from Irving Kristol’s 2003 essay “The Neoconservative Persuasion”—that “neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the ‘American grain.’”[1] What we realize by the end of the essay is that Thompson is most upset not because Kristol “politely excludes” such political figures as Barry Goldwater (whom he nevertheless does in fact call “conservative”), but rather that Kristol lays claim at all to the mantle of Americanism. Thompson concludes his essay by announcing that the neoconservatives are in fact the “false prophets of Americanism,” and that what is needful is a defense of “America’s Enlightenment values and the individual-rights republic created by its revolutionary Founders….” At stake, it appears, is a contest over who can lay legitimate claim to a true form of Americanism.

I have some sympathy here for the neoconservatives, inasmuch as I have sympathies for a different American conservative tradition myself. It is one that begins not with the “American Enlightenment,” but with America’s Puritan tradition and its definition of liberty as ordered and moral liberty under God. This tradition was evoked by the Anti-federalist critics of the Constitution (who were in fact responsible for securing the inclusion of the Bill of Rights after the Constitution’s ratification), and it was the one that Tocqueville so much admired in his description of the “local liberties” and “arts of association” that he witnessed in his journey to America. More recently, it has been eloquently expressed in the defense of locality and limits by authors ranging from Christopher Lasch to Wendell Berry. Yet it appears that according to Thompson, views ranging from my strong preference for robust localism to neoconservative support for vigorous nationalism are outside the bounds of legitimate American belief. Evidently the only belief that can be considered American according to Thompson is a narrowly defined form of libertarianism. Outside those bounds, fascism lurks.

This argument is clearly so willfully flawed to hardly merit response, but—resisting the temptation to throw back this accusation on Thompson by pointing out that many of his intellectual heroes tend to be foreign-born, ranging from Thomas Paine to Friedrich Hayek to Ayn Rand, if only to suggest how risible this effort is—let me instead come to the defense of the Americanism of neoconservatism by pointing out that it can trace many of its elements directly to the American Enlightenment tradition that Thompson recommends. Above all, the neoconservative defense of robust and active central government, its belief in the need for a particularly talented and wise set of political leaders who have a concern for the common good, and its recognition of the need for a citizenry that is at least informally schooled in certain civic and moral virtues are beliefs that are all manifested by the Framers of the Constitution, and especially by Hamilton and Madison in various of the Federalist Papers.

Hamilton was an especially strong defender of a robust nationalism and believed that the activities and powers granted to the central government would prove to be magnets for a “select body of men” who would be particularly drawn to opportunities to achieve greatness. In Federalist 17—seeking to assuage Anti-federalist fears of “consolidation”—Hamilton argued that the “regulation of mere domestic police of a state appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition.” Rather, he argued, it was the express powers of the Federal government that would attract the great and ambitious who would seek national greatness: “Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion: and all the powers necessary to those objects ought in the first instance to be lodged in the national depository.”[2] As Hamilton’s actions as Secretary of the Treasury would go on to reveal, he sought to realize a “national system” of ever-greater “circulation” that he had defended in the Federalist.

The attraction of the ambitious and men of “speculative minds” was thought by Madison to ensure that political leaders at the national level would more readily perceive and advance the public good. As he famously wrote in Federalist 10, by means of an electoral system that would enlarge the areas from which national representatives would be drawn, it was to be hoped and expected that such representatives would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” Such representatives in effect would improve upon the political views of the populace in a manner “more consonant with the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for that purpose.”[3] While Thompson’s use of scare quotes around phrases like “common good” and “public interest” are meant to foreshadow the purported fascistic tendencies of neoconservatism, we do well to note that such evocations are well within the bounds of use by main figures in the American Enlightenment, including even James Madison—no student of Strauss, he—who defended the pursuit of “true interest” and “public good” perceived by a “chosen body of men” endowed with particular gifts of “wisdom.”

The Framers were also aware that a society composed solely of self-regarding individuals would not ultimately suffice for the demands of republican citizenship. While the Constitution is silent about the duty of educating a citizenry in virtue—a source of concern among the Anti-federalists—it was clear that the Framers did not believe that the virtues or vices of the citizenry could simply be a matter of civic indifference. As Madison wrote in Federalist 55, “as there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a degree of circumspection and distrust: so there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”[4] The Founders in general assumed the persistence of local forms of education in virtue, particularly within the contexts of communities and churches. They understood that the civic virtue of self-sacrifice in particular was always a requirement of civilized society, if not especially a republic—even at times in charmingly incoherent ways. Consider John Adams, who argued (in defense of the British soldiers charged after the Boston Massacre) on behalf of the unqualified claims of self-preservation and the right to kill anyone who threatens one’s life: “that’s a point I would not give up for my right hand, nay, for my life.”[5] It is at best curious to witness this Adams scholar sneer at the legitimacy of “the higher ideal of service to the common good,” when this was widely understood as an underlying republican requirement by most of the major “revolutionary Founders” who we do well to recall pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in defense of a higher ideal of service to the nation.

In my view, not only are the major figures of neoconservativism well within the mainstream of the American tradition, but in general neoconservatism has a stronger claim to the overarching philosophy of the Founders than Thompson’s somewhat incoherent imaginings of their positions. It is at the very least peculiar to encounter an argument that defends a version of Republican Party isolationist free-market libertarianism by appeal to “Jeffersonian principles,” particularly given Jefferson’s creation of the Democratic Party, which supported a more agrarian, populist, non-commercial and localist society, in contrast to the Republican Party’s longstanding mainstream identification with the expansion of commerce that relied upon an active and vigorous central government devoted to “internal improvements” and drawn to imperialism in the nineteenth century. I begin to suspect that Thompson has conjured up his own vision of Americanism to which, it turns out, no-one can precisely conform because it is largely a figment of Thompson’s wishful thinking.

I greatly admire the frank concerns of many early neoconservatives, and Irving Kristol in particular, over the corrosive tendencies of market capitalism upon the healthy cultural preconditions of a republican society. Thompson confuses genuinely thoughtful and reflective efforts to redress some of those corrosive and inegalitarian tendencies with “socialism” (it’s clear that for Thompson, nearly any government role in the economy is socialism). Kristol states clearly in his essay “What Is a ‘Neoconservative’?” that a fundamental premise of neoconservatism is “a great respect … for the power of the market to respond efficiently to economic realities while preserving the maximum degree of individual freedom.[6] One can admire the legitimate sphere of market activity while recognizing that market assumptions and activities may generate consequences can have a baleful effect on the cultural underpinnings of liberal democracy. Even Aristotle and Aquinas— hardly socialists—argued that public goods could rightfully trump the claims of commerce.

Ultimately, Thompson builds a distorted version of collectivist neoconservatism that trades on Kristol’s youthful attractions to Trotsky (without acknowledging Kristol’s frequent repudiations of his youthful indiscretions),[7] while altogether neglecting neoconservativism’s larger embrace of market capitalism. If anything, a subsequent generation of neoconservatives became far more ardent supporters of unfettered market capitalism, particularly the generation who came of age during the Reagan and subsequent Republican administrations. If they remained proponents of national greatness and an assertive foreign policy—Thompson is right on those scores—they also became more comfortable than the first generation with a significantly freer market. Further, the later generation of neoconservatives became among the most vocal proponents of the American Enlightenment, fundamentally departing in critical respects from Strauss’s preference for the ancients and concluding instead that the liberal democracy prescribed by modern natural right—and its particular product, America —was the only practicably defensible regime in modernity. A prominent school of neoconservative thought—centered at Claremont McKenna College and overseen by Harry Jaffa (who, not incidentally, was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, showing that even first-generation students of Strauss could include Goldwater, not to mention Reagan, in the first rank of the conservative pantheon)—has argued vigorously for fidelity and reverence toward the Constitution and spawned a small industry of adulatory studies of the Founders and Lincoln. Imputing to neoconservatives a reductive version of Strauss’s complex argument in favor of ancient philosophy is a remarkable distortion of developments in the Straussian school. If anything, many contemporary neoconservatives would reject Strauss’s purported “polis-envy” in favor of an embrace of a natural rights philosophy.

In sum, it seems that Thompson seeks to create a socialist straw man to soften his audience into a willingness to accept his eventual accusations of neoconservative fascistic nationalism. The pity is, it is when it comes to neoconservative foreign policy—and its attendant tendencies toward forms of cultural, political, and even military imperialism—that Thompson has the opportunity to score some real criticisms, but instead has already so widely wandered in his attacks that his accusations of fascism are fired from the wrong field at the wrong target. In fact, it is my suspicion and conclusion that he seeks to create this fictive enemy in order to obscure what are the true wellsprings of the imperialistic impulse of the neoconservatives—neither fascism nor socialism, but the very philosophy of the European and American Enlightenment. As has been noted by any number of observant critics, ranging from G.K. Chesterton (who described America as a “creedal” nation) to more recent studies by Walter Russell Mead, Walter McDougall, Ronald Steel, and Niall Ferguson, among others, Enlightenment philosophy proposes a universal ideal of liberal democratic legitimation that places all other regimes under suspicion.[8] It was Alexander Hamilton in the first of the Federalist Papers who differentiated between governments based upon “accident and force” and “reflection and choice,” and proposed that it was the latter that would be founded on a “new science of politics.” By arguing that new republicanism was a product of philosophizing (not also a result of culture, religion, or tradition), and that it could be applied to any place, time, and suitably large scale, an imperialistic kernel was planted that came to full fruition in the Second Inaugural Address of George W. Bush. It is not fascism that is to be feared, but the universalizing and even imperialistic logic internal to Enlightenment philosophy itself that significantly inspired the Founders and animates neoconservative foreign policy.

Thompson has done us a service in inviting a reconsideration of the legacy of neoconservatism. It will be left to a better and fairer critic do the harder work of providing a rigorous and balanced assessment, but perhaps Thompson’s broadside will inspire just that—and if only for that prospect alone, he is to be thanked.

Notes

[1]Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays , 1942-2009. Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb. (New York: Perseus Books, 2011).

[2] Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist. Edited by George Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press, 2001 ), #17, p. 80.

[3] The Federalist, #10, p. 46.

[4] The Federalist, #55, p. 291; emphasis mine.

[5] The Legal Papers of John Adams, L. Kinvin Wroth and Hillel B. Zobel, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 3:254.

[6] The Neoconservative Persuasion, p. 148.

[7] E.g., “Socialism has never had much of a presence in America, and besides, having gone through a brief Trotskyist phase in my college days, I needed no instruction on socialist illusions or the evils of Soviet Communism.” The Neoconservative Persuasion, p. 183.

[8] Chesterton, What I Saw In America; Mead, Special Providence and Dangerous Nation; McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State; Steel, Temptations of a Superpower; Ferguson, Colossus.

Brad Thompson has written a very serious book, which he has nicely distilled for us in his contribution to this conversation. Whereas most critical treatments of neoconservatism and Leo Strauss display outright ignorance of their subjects or, at best, a superficial understanding of them, Thompson has read and thought about both quite deeply. Strauss is an important and difficult thinker, and Thompson is right that he exercised a significant influence on Irving Kristol, and through him the rest of the neoconservative movement. While Thompson’s account of this influence is seriously flawed in my view, it still contributes vitally to the ongoing debate about the topic. And on two issues, in particular, the contribution is especially welcome.

To begin with, Thompson deserves praise for his trenchant critique of national greatness conservatism, the neocon penchant for proposing big public projects—primarily, but not exclusively, that biggest public project of all: war. Unlike most critics of neoconservatism, Thompson recognizes that neocons like William Kristol defend a bellicose foreign policy not primarily for strategic reasons but because they think war is good for America domestically, as a goad to heroic acts of sacrifice on the part of citizens. Neocons want to win the culture war at home by fighting real wars abroad. The target doesn’t really matter. (Has Kristol ever opposed any war or potential war?) What matters is that we have a target—an enemy to call forth moral virtue. This is a profoundly foolish and morally suspect way to fashion a foreign policy, and Thompson is quite right to highlight and denounce it.

Then there is Thompson’s critique of the neocon attempt to place itself at the core of the American political tradition and relegate libertarianism and other forms of laissez-faire capitalism (along with a more realist/isolationist outlook on foreign policy) to the periphery. I’m not an ideologically committed libertarian myself, nor am I attracted to the quasi-libertarian ideas of such authors as Ayn Rand. But it’s foolish and insulting to deny the legitimacy of these traditions within American political history. Far from running against the American grain, there is a strong case to be made that they are the grain—and certainly as distinctively American as the muscular statism of Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, two neocon heroes. (I would also add that the conservative movement, including its libertarian Tea Party faction, is not above doing precisely the same thing to liberals that neocons do to libertarians—that is, excommunicating them from the tradition of “American exceptionalism.” Just listen to the campaign speeches of Tea Party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.)

So much for what’s best in Thompson’s critique. Its problems, in my opinion, are more worthy of sustained attention. Some of these problems have to do with Thompson’s portrayal of Strauss, and others with his account of neoconseravtivsm, its history, and its defining assumptions.

First, Strauss. The simplest way to describe his political outlook is to say that he was an Aristotelian. He believed that human beings are political animals in that their outlook and orientation toward the world are fundamentally shaped by the opinions that prevail in the political community in which they are born and live—and that acquiring both practical and theoretical wisdom requires a critical examination of and an ascent from these reigning opinions. Many of these opinions will be left behind in the process, but there is no non-political shortcut to wisdom, no pathway out of foolishness that does not begin from and repeatedly return to political opinions as a sort of touchstone.

Another way of making the point is to say that, as an Aristotelian, Strauss believed that political communities are wholes composed of parts (individuals), and that the whole precedes the parts in the sense that it determines their character. This holds for all of the community’s parts except for one: the part that rules the whole and sets the moral tone for the whole. If the ruling part rules virtuously and holds out virtuous actions for public praise, for example, the whole will tend toward virtue.

One can certainly dispute this series of assumptions about political life. But there is no denying that they have been affirmed by many thinkers and statesmen in the two and a half millennia since Aristotle suggested them. It was the early modern liberals (including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison) who first rejected them and proposed a different, more pluralistic model of political life. I have tried to defend one version of that liberal model in my own work. I take it that Thompson favors a slightly different version in his. But regardless, the Aristotelian outlook that shapes neocon thinking (by way of Strauss’s influence) is nowhere near are sinister or radical as Thompson would have us believe. It may well be wrong—unsuitable for understanding political life in modern, highly differentiated societies. But that doesn’t make it threatening. On the contrary, I’d say that its prevalence in our history and persistence in our own time points to its plausibility as a theory. It makes considerable sense of a wide range of political, and human, experiences. I think a liberal pluralistic account does an even better job of it, but that’s a matter for debate, not polemical exaggeration.

Beyond theoretical disagreements, I think that Thompson’s account of neoconservatism is indisputably ahistorical in several respects. For one thing, while national greatness conservatism is every bit as pernicious as Thompson would have us believe, it was developed by William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Brooks in the mid-1990s and simply had no place in the thought of Irving Kristol (or that of neoconservatism’s other founding father, Norman Podhoretz, who became fixated on internal and external enemies of the United States for reasons very much his own). Irving Kristol and the other first-generation neocons were run-of-the-mill Cold War liberals who rejected the post-Vietnam liberal critique of anti-communism. That’s why one of Kristol’s first moves after the fall of the Iron Curtain was to found The National Interest, a realist foreign policy journal, one in which the uniformly belligerent essays regularly published in his son’s magazine The Weekly Standard—essays in defense of war against China, Iraq, Iran, and numerous other countries—would have been thoroughly out of place.

But even more ahistorical is the following sentence from Thompson’s essay: Neocons “are repulsed by the moral ethos associated with liberal-capitalism, and they praise the nobility of the ‘barbarian’ virtues such as discipline, courage, daring, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice.” Does Thompson really mean to say that Irving Kristol—whose column in the Wall Street Journal in the late 1970s helped to jump-start the Reagan Revolution—despised capitalism? It’s true that Kristol also authored a book titled Two Cheers for Capitalism, which displayed some ambivalence about the moral consequences of free markets (is such ambivalence impermissible?). But surely that’s balanced out by fellow neocon Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which could well have been subtitled Why Three Cheers for Capitalism Will Never Be Enough.

As for discipline, courage, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice—does Thompson really mean to describe them as “barbarian” virtues? Maybe that’s how they appear to a Nietzschean capitalist like Ayn Rand, but to the rest of us—meaning: close to the entirety to the Western tradition of moral reflection—they are the better part of virtue simply.

Finally, a word about “fascism.” I’m glad that Thompson concedes that neocons aren’t advocates of fascism. But then why invoke it? The Bismarckian social-insurance state isn’t fascist, and neither is the American (or, for that matter, the Canadian or French or Swedish) welfare state. Such states may be ill-advised, even destructive of many worthwhile human goods. I don’t agree, but the claim has been made by serious people. If Thompson wants to join their company, he’ll have to move beyond name-calling and ominous insinuations.

I could say more, especially about neoconservatism’s troubling views of executive power, which do derive from Strauss’s thought—but which also, in my view, follow naturally from the problematic character of political life itself. But I’ll save that for the next stage of the conversation.

In his reaction essay, “Strauss and National Greatness,” Damon Linker makes the following claim:

The Aristotelian outlook that shapes neocon thinking (by way of Strauss’s influence) is nowhere near as sinister or radical as Thompson would have us believe. It may well be wrong—unsuitable for understanding political life in modern, highly differentiated societies. But that doesn’t make it threatening.

This may be so. It depends on to what one is comparing the Aristotelian outlook. But if, as I noted in my reaction essay, “Neoconservatism, Leo Strauss, and the Foundations for Liberty,” the Aristotelian outlook is guilty of not differentiating between the function of societies or communities and that of the state, because its basic term of analysis—polis—conflates society or community with state, then there is a basic problem in the Straussian neoconservative approach to politics. This approach simply assumes that whatever is good, worthwhile, or indeed perfective of human well-being is in principle the aim of the state. This form of political theorizing slides without argument from politics qua social or community to politics qua state, and it leads to “The Perfectionist Approach to Politics.” To wit:

A) Politics is concerned with the promotion of human flourishing or well being.

B) Human flourishing or well being consists in the development and/or use of certain human capabilities.

C) A given capability, call it X, is an example of something necessary for human flourishing or well being.

Therefore, this X must be politically secured.

There is much debate about premise B. Such tough questions as: “What is involved in the lists of capabilities whose development constitutes human flourishing?” and “How does one validate such lists?” Further, there is much debate about what laws and government policies best secure a given capability as well as how to pay for such policies. It is especially in regard to this latter issue that most political debates takes place. Yet there is an important question that only a few have noted—namely, “What is the basis for premise A? The Straussian neoconservatives, as well as many contemporary “liberals,” simply assume that premise A is true, but they offer no argument on its behalf.

Nevertheless, what is it that legitimates a political/legal order? What is the nature of the connection between the ethical order and the political/legal order? There is a prima facie difference between claiming (i) that doing M is good or right (bad or wrong) and ought to be done (ought not to be done) and claiming (ii) that doing M ought to be politically/legally required (prohibited). These claims are not semantically equal, and (i) does not, by itself, imply (ii). Or, as Aquinas suggests: there are demands of justice that are morally binding and there are demands of justice that are morally and legally binding. Indeed, the datum explanandum of political philosophy is what, if anything, entitles one to move from the ethical to the political—from (i) to (ii). What is it that connects these two claims?

One begs the question if one simply assumes that the aim of the political/legal order is soulcraft. There are alternatives. Most importantly, there is the idea that defines the American political tradition—namely, establishing a political regime that secures individual rights.

When libertarians or classical liberals are drawn into debates in political philosophy with those on the left or the right, it is often done in a context in which premise A is just assumed. This is like fighting with one arm tied behind one’s back. This argumentative arena is in large part due to the heritage that the Aristotelian outlook provides for politics. Such an arena is dangerous for liberty.

A roundup of insightful commentary on this month’s issue.

Cato adjunct scholar Timothy Sandefur writes:

What’s good about the Straussians is their close and careful attention to the great works of philosophy—reading these works with the idea that they contain great and important truths, not merely historical influences. This is an inspiring thing, and it makes and encounter with Strauss’ students very powerful. I’ve learned a lot about philosophy from reading these works, and it would be a shame if hasty readers took Thompson and Brook’s book as an excuse to avoid careful and serious reading of these great works.

Nevertheless, the Straussian interpretations are at times unconvincing and even idiosyncratic. Take their bizarre notion that Plato’s Republic is a satire, rather than a defense, of totalitarian government. There’s really no evidence to support such an interpretation, and Thompson and Brook rightly point out that taking such a view requires one not only to disregard much about the text itself, but very important parts of the historical context. Somehow Aristotle didn’t get the joke. Somehow, neither did Dionysus of Syracuse. And the fact that Plato sticks to his basic message in other works—and that it has fascinating parallels in his epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics—are disregarded.

I’d like to hear Thompson… elaborate a bit on Jaffa’s relationship to the neoconservatism that he describes in his book. Jaffa does not reject the pro-freedom conservatism of Barry Goldwater; Jaffa wrote Goldwater’s famous “extremism in the defense of liberty” speech. Nor does he reject the Declaration of Independence, or advocate the intense collectivism advocated by the Progressives whom he and his followers denounce. In some ways, Jaffa’s defense of American institutions has made him an intense critic of neoconservatism. (And to their credit, the Claremont Review of Books positively reviewed the book.) Yet at the same time, he and his followers have advocated many of the anti-individualistic elements of neoconservatism that Thompson and Brook describe. It’s curious to me whether Thompson and Brook regard Jaffa’s interpretations of Strauss as accurate, or whether they regard him primarily as a critic and rebel against his teacher.

Will Wilkinson writes:

[To neoconservatives], war offers ubermeschen the enlarging opportunity to enrich the lives of their fellow citizens by treating them as pawns in a megalomaniacal game, “statesmanship”, we plebes couldn’t possibly understand…

I know. This sounds totally insane. But I’ve spent enough time in Washington wonkland, and I’ve read enough of the Straussian/neocon classics to say that, yes, this is a fair representation of what much of the neocon elite believes. They also believe the elite shouldn’t admit to believing this, so expect denial. But it’s true: there really are people who go on television and argue America should go to war against Libya at least in part to combat the imagined nihilism of modernity.

A blog calling itself Evidence of Control[1] writes:

Thompson pulls back from linking neoconservatism either to the practice of popular history or to fascism. I would do both: the national greatness, divine-right-of-executives view is exactly the view of popular historians, as evinced in the eternal recurrence of “historians rank the best president” polls; the view of fascism as starting with race-hate and devolving to permanent war-and-debt nationalism might well be an historical accident, as in the modern state cause and effect are more likely to run quite the other way.

For those of you who read French, Phillipe Silberzahn has an excellent discussion of Leo Strauss, Francis Fukuyama, and Karl Popper, illuminated by this month’s issue. It comes in the form of a reply to Professor Jacques Rollet — the latter having proposed, in Le Monde, that the recent Arab revolutions could prove the neoconservatives right after all. No, says Silberzahn, they most certainly were not right:

Neoconservatives wanted democracy in Iraq, or so we were told, but they brought it chaos, with hundreds of thousands dead, and that country is only barely getting back on its feet eight years later. They wanted security for the United States, but they weakened it financially, bleeding it white, and morally, launching it into not one but two wars from which it will take years to escape. They thought that democracy had to be imposed, while nations are quite capable of imposing it for themselves. They have not understood anything, and, as seen in the attempt at rehabilitation now underway… they have not learned anything, either.[2]

And finally, Jim May writes:

While neoconservatism and the literal fascists may be traveling different roads, their ultimate destination (as determined by their common root premise) is the same. All that differs is the scenery — and as the destination is approached, not even that. (That, by the way, is why the arguments over whether such as Jared Loughner or the Texas IRS plane crasher were “left” or “right” wing, are such a joke; the “scenery” of their writings would have been unremarkable in any of the following: Free Republic, Democratic Underground, the commenters at Zero Hedge, or the groupies of Lyndon Larouche and Ron Paul.) […]

[Conservatives fear] that looking back up the road would reveal that Americanism, far from being compatible with conservatism of any -eo prefix, was indeed the result of the Enlightenment they and the Left so loathe – while conservatism traces its origins to America’s original enemies: monarchy and the brutal religious feudalism of the pre-Enlightenment.

[1] A euphemism, the blogger says, for corpses.

[2] Translation by the editors.

I shall respond to Patrick Deneen’s reply in three separate posts. This first shall examine his intellectual method. The second will take up the substance of his essay. The third shall present my thoughts on the nature of Americanism.

One of the goals of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea is to expose the neocons’ method of thinking. Deneen’s response is a classic example of one particular instance of that method—the method by which Straussianized neocons deal with their critics. (Deneen’s method is straight out of the Straussian/neocon playbook: i.e., to falsely accuse your interlocutor of the very thing that you yourself are about to engage in.)

Observe his technique. His opening paragraph launches a series of condescending accusations, smears, and insults. At this point, one would expect Deneen to support his charges with evidence, proof, and logic. He does no such thing. Instead, he proceeds to discuss neither the substance of the book nor the essay on neoconservatism, but instead shifts the focus to his, the neocons’, and my views on the nature and meaning of Americanism, a subject that can only be meaningfully discussed in the context of the arguments presented in the book, which of course he refuses to talk about.

Deneen’s method can be summed up in three terms: ad hominem, smear, and evasion. In contrast to Deneen, I shall support my claims with evidence.

First, the ad hominem: Deneen attempts to refute the argument of my book and Cato Unbound essay by arbitrarily impugning my character (e.g., accusing me of “willful” inaccuracies, i.e., of being dishonest; nay, of making arguments “so willfully flawed to hardly merit response,” i.e., of being stupid). Second, the smear: Deneen launches a series of petty insults (I’m accused of presenting “elementary” inaccuracies, “risible” arguments “outrageous by degrees,” “jaw-dropping” accusations, “over the top” charges, “moderate to severe misinterpretations,” “incoherent imaginings,” “wishful thinking,” “distorted” and “reductive” interpretations, an “allegiance to foreign-born intellectuals,” and on and on). A smear, however, is not an argument. Third, the evasion: Deneen overloads his first paragraph with oozing condescension and fatuous accusations, but then he fails to deliver any evidence or proof to support his recriminations. Deneen conveniently evades discussing 99.9% of my book and then evades the proper meaning and substance of the remaining 0.1% that he does takes up. He willfully refuses to identify and repudiate a single argument presented in my book or essay.

And what is the presumed goal of this Trotskyist technique? By impugning my motives and character up front in such a heavy-handed way, Deneen hopes to prejudice his readers against the book and essay so that they need not bother to read either. It is a classic example of the kind of studious dissimulation practiced by Straussianized neocons and their intellectual paramours. Worse: it’s a subtle form of psychological intimidation. The clear message is this: Only the foolish can fail to see that Thompson’s argument is dishonest, false and malicious. Presumably, he thinks our readers will buy the smears and innuendo without demanding the evidence. Deneen’s intellectual method relies on the unthinking credulity of unwary readers.

Fortunately, such tactics will no longer work. One of the great virtues of Cato Unbound is that authors have the opportunity to respond to their critics. More importantly, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea has ripped the mask off neoconservative political philosophy and the rhetoric by which they defend it and attack enemies real and imagined.

Summing up: Deneen substitutes smear for evidence, vituperation for proof, dissimulation for argument, and incoherence for logic. I had expected much more from Deneen. In the future, I will know to expect less.

This was to be a discussion about Leo Strauss and neoconservatism, and from Patrick Deneen we get neither. Douglas Rasmussen and Damon Linker took their responsibilities seriously and addressed the topic in smart and thoughtful ways. By contrast, Deneen says virtually nothing about the assigned topic. How, then, does one respond to a zero?

What readers get from Deneen is neither an analysis of my book and essay, nor even a serious discussion of neoconservatism, but rather 1) a discussion of the nature of Americanism (his own version and that of the neocons); 2) a wildly contradictory discussion of Strauss and the neocons on the Enlightenment, the American Founding, and capitalism; and, 3) the truly bizarre suggestion that I’m actually an unwitting underlaborer for the neocons and the “imperialistic impulse” of their Enlightenment philosophy! Let me take up each of these three major points in turn.

1. Americanism: Deneen spends the majority of his essay discussing the nature of Americanism. (Not exactly the subject of my book!) This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Yes, I argue that the neoconservatives are the “false prophets of Americanism,” but I do so only after spending more than 200 pages providing the evidence and making the arguments for this conclusion. Deneen begins with my conclusion while neglecting the proof, and then tries to build a counter narrative. He does get one thing right: this is ultimately a “contest over who can lay legitimate claim to a true form of Americanism.” (In a separate post, I shall establish the criteria by which to define the concept “Americanism.”)

Deneen wants an Americanism broad enough to include his own version, which he calls “robust localism” and that of the neocons, which “supports vigorous nationalism,” but not one that includes the rugged individualism of Jeffersonian liberalism. Deneen then accuses me of believing that such positions “are outside the bounds of legitimate American belief.” Let me make my position clear: I oppose these ideas, think them dangerous, and I do not think they capture the essence of Americanism. Indeed, I think them in conflict with a proper view of Americanism. And the moment that individuals acting on behalf of these ideas use the coercive power of government or mobs to initiate force against other individuals (which they must eventually), then, yes, I regard such ideologies to be illegitimate. Majority tyranny in Hooterville is fundamentally the same as tyranny of the majority at the national level. The difference is one of degree and not one of kind.

Let’s consider Deneen’s own political philosophy. Deneen’s “robust localism” or “front porch republicanism”—as he calls it elsewhere—is grounded, he says, in the “Puritan tradition and its definition of liberty as ordered and moral liberty under God.” This is, of course, the same ordered liberty that recognized capital punishment for crimes such as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, bestiality, sodomy, adultery, and rebelliousness by adult children. Is this the kind of robust localism that Deneen craves? And of course there is the localism supported by the KKK. Is that the kind of robust localism that Deneen supports? It turns out that Deneen’s “front porch republicanism” is simpatico with what we might call “Bull Connor republicanism.” Why not? The fact that cracker-barrel conservatives have lived in America and existed throughout our history does not mean that they define the meaning of Americanism.

And then there’s Deneen’s understanding of neoconservatism in relationship to the American tradition and the Enlightenment. His major point is this: the “neoconservative defense of robust and active central government, its belief in the need for a particularly talented and wise set of political leaders who have a concern for the common good, and its recognition of the need for a citizenry that is at least informally schooled in certain civic moral virtues are beliefs” are principles all firmly rooted in the Enlightenment and supported by the founding generation. Ergo, the neocons’ Americanism is at the heart of any true conception of Americanism. (Deneen then cherry picks through Federalist essays nos. 17, 10 and 55 to support these claims.)

It is a very curious thing to suggest that these are the defining principles of the American Enlightenment, or that they are Enlightenment principles at all. Were there people—including some Founders—who held these views during the period of the Enlightenment? Yes, of course. Are they typically Enlightenment ideas? Absolutely not, and there’s the rub. To these misguided claims, I offer two responses: first, to the extent that someone like Alexander Hamilton held such views, their provenance was not in the Enlightenment but rather in the classical tradition; second, Deneen has ripped the Founders’ views out of their historical context in order to justify anachronistically their perversion today. Deneen employs a non sequitur in suggesting that because the founding generation wrote and spoke of the “general welfare” that they meant by it something similar to the neocons’ use of the term. The fact of the matter is that the founding generation had an entirely different understanding of the concept. No founding father, including Alexander Hamilton, could have imagined that twenty-first century neocons, Bull Connor conservatives, and various liberals would use their views to justify our Leviathan-like, redistributive-regulatory government. (Whoops, I take that back. Ironically, the very same Anti-Federalists that Deneen likes so much understood very well how the “general welfare” clause might be corrupted in the decades ahead to support the kinds of principles and policies advocated by people like Deneen.)

Surely Deneen knows that the founding generation’s understanding of concepts such as the “general welfare” was entirely different from his and from the way it is used today by the neocons and other welfare statists. The founders’ understanding of the general welfare was connected directly to the principle of individual rights, whereas for Deneen and the neocons the concept is tied to collective political entities (e.g., to Deneen’s localist republics or the neocons’ nation-state). The founders’ view of the common good was summed up best by Tom Paine: “Public good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals. On the contrary, it is the good of every individual collected. It is the good of all, because it is the good of every one; for as the public body is every individual collected, so the public good is the collected good of those individuals.” For the founding generation, the general welfare meant that state or condition in which the individual rights of all were protected, while for Deneen and the neocons the general welfare is whatever democratic majorities or wise men say it is.

The same mode of non sequitur reasoning is also true of Deneen’s understanding of republican virtue. Deneen wants to defend the neocons’ call for self-sacrifice as a primary virtue in order to defend his and the neocons’ advocacy of a communitarian welfare-warfare State (they differ only over whether the primary unit of political value is the village or the nation), so he rips the founders out of their context and turns them into modern-day blackshirts. According to Deneen, American Revolutionaries “pledged their ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ in defense of a higher ideal of service to the nation.” This is simply preposterous. They did no such thing. The fact of the matter is they dedicated their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in defense of certain truths, including if not most especially the protection of their “inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Finally, I must say that Deneen’s attempt to school me on the ideas and actions of John Adams did bring a smile to my face. Some chutzpah! No response necessary on that one.

As should be now clear, Deneen simply does not know what he is talking about, and he has entered a debate for which he is unprepared.

2. Capitalism: Because Deneen is fundamentally a collectivist (of the “it takes a village variety”), he is not surprisingly a fan of the neoconservatives’ analysis of the “corrosive tendencies of market capitalism upon the healthy cultural preconditions of a republican society.” And whereas Irving Kristol gave two cheers for capitalism, we suspect that Deneen would give fewer. He then accuses me of confusing “genuinely thoughtful and reflective efforts to redress some of those corrosive and inegalitarian tendencies with ‘socialism.’” The confusion is all Deneen’s. As I show conclusively in my book, the neocons are critics of capitalism’s moral foundations (that’s why Kristol only gives two cheers). In fact, Irving Kristol judged the moral foundations of socialism to be superior to those of capitalism. He regarded the “socialist ideal” not only as “admirable,” but also as a “necessary ideal, offering elements that were wanting in capitalist society—elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity.”[1] Kristol praised utopian socialism because it is “community-oriented” rather than “individual-oriented.” Or, as Nathan Glazer once wrote on the differences between the neoconservatives and socialists: “It is very hard for us to define what it is that divides us, in any centrally principled way. We might, depending on which socialists, and which neoconservatives are arguing, disagree about the details or the scope of health insurance plans; or about the level of taxation that should be imposed upon corporations; or how much should be going into social security. But where are the principles that separate us?”[2] And to the extent that some younger neocons came to defend America’s liberal-capitalist society, they do so only as the best practical regime given the alternatives in the modern world. Straussianized neocons today still share all the concerns about capitalism first offered by Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol.

3. Double Agent Man: Finally, Deneen accuses me of seeking to “create a socialist straw man to soften” my “audience into a willingness to accept” my “eventual accusations of neoconservative fascistic nationalism.” To accuse the neocons of sharing certain principles in common with fascism is a serious charge and one not to be made without a great deal of supporting evidence. Since Deneen merely asserts this claim against me with no evidence, I simply recommend to Cato Unbound readers that they examine my book to determine for themselves the truth of the matter. As Deneen well knows, I go out of my way to say that the neocons are not fascists. In lawyer-like fashion, though, I build a case with concrete evidence suggesting with appropriate scholarly tentativeness that neoconservative political thought shares certain basic principles with Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism” (ghost written by Giovanni Gentile). My deepest fear is, however, that they are preparing this nation philosophically for a soft, American-style fascism—a fascism purged of its ugliest features and gussied up for an American audience. They make us feel comfortable with certain fascist principles by Americanizing them—by draping them in traditional American manners and mores and in the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln. To make this kind of serious charge requires, however, that evidence be produced. Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea does just that. (My argument here is not, by the way, dissimilar to Strauss’s assessment of Nietzsche’s relationship to Nazism. Strauss knew that Nietzsche was no Nazi, but he did think the philosopher bore some responsibility for the rise of Nazism.)

More absurdly, though, Deneen concludes by accusing me of seeking “to create this fictive enemy in order to obscure what are the true wellsprings of the imperialistic impulse of the neoconservatives—neither fascism nor socialism, but the very philosophy of the European and American Enlightenment.” Wow! It turns out that I’m a double agent for the neocons! Worse, by covering up the Enlightenment philosophy of the neocons, I’m actually working (whether I know it or not) to advance their “imperialistic impulse.” Imagine my surprise to learn such a thing! Should I thank Deneen for this bit of self-knowledge, or should I just state the truth: this is so jaw-droppingly inane that it’s probably best to just leave it standing as a part of Patrick Deneen’s permanent record.

In sum, Deneen’s essay is written in bad faith. Cato Unbound readers will rightly think that Deneen has not fulfilled his responsibility to respond to the argument of my essay and to the content of my book. That was the obligation he accepted in agreeing to be a part of this forum, and it’s an obligation to which he’s failed to live up.

Notes

[1] Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic books, 1983), 116.

[2] Nathan Glazer, contribution to “Neoconservatism: Pro and Con,” Partisan Review 4 (1980), 499.

Douglas Rasmussen’s response to my essay on “Neoconservatism Unmasked” doubles as a significant critique of Leo Strauss and provides an important defense of classical liberal moral theory. Rasmussen supports my interpretation and assessment of Strauss and the neocons while extending my critique by focusing on one crucially important aspect of Strauss’s thought: his criticism of modern natural-rights theory in the light of classical natural right.

According to Strauss, the modern natural-rights teaching focuses on the individual as the “center and origin of the moral world,” whereas classical natural right is concerned with man’s ends and with his duties. As I noted in Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, Strauss laments Locke’s “shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights.” He clearly prefers a world where “resigned gratitude and consciously obeying or imitating nature” is elevated, rather than a world where “man owes almost everything valuable to his own efforts” and where “self-reliance and creativity become henceforth the marks of human nobility.” In Strauss’s view, Locke’s natural-law teaching replaced the ancients’ and the Christians’ transcendent and intrinsic ethic of duty and self-sacrifice with a subjectively materialist and hedonist foundation that is grounded on the right to self-preservation and self-expression. Locke liberated man from the constraining bonds of nature, revelation, and the force of tradition and custom. His acquisitive bourgeois man lives an agitated but aimless life in the pursuit of property, pleasure and recreation. Strauss wondered how a regime founded on these Lockean premises could ever satisfy the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Rasmussen correctly suggests that Strauss was not only an opponent of the modern natural-rights philosophy but also wrong in his understanding of what rights are and the role they play in civil society. Rasmussen astutely notes that Strauss mischaracterized rights as “natural powers” rather than as moral principles. This is a profoundly important point. If rights are powers, then they are simply arbitrary assertions of human will and are therefore subjective. It is on this mistaken assumption that Strauss then reduces all modern thought to nihilism. Rasmussen does not and will not permit Strauss to demote the principle of rights to Hobbesian claims on behalf of the passions.

Rasmussen goes on to note (correctly in my view) that Strauss invokes several “false alternatives,” including reducing individualism and Lockean rights theory to subjectivism, amoralism, and atomism. Strauss’s goal, according to Rasmussen, is to wrench individual liberty away from “ethical knowledge and a life of morality and virtue.” Rasmussen will hear nothing of it, nor will I. In short order, Rasmussen pulls the rug out from underneath Strauss’s feet. Rasmussen (with his long-time co-author Douglas Den Uyl) indicates how the modern natural-rights teaching can be reconciled with—indeed, it must rest upon—a firm moral foundation (e.g., an Aristotelian “natural [biocentric-based] teleology”). In my view, rights make morality possible in a social context. In fact, one might very well argue that the doctrine of “rugged individualism” actually promotes social cooperation and voluntary association, while various forms of collectivism actually promote anti-social atomism.

In sum: Rasmussen’s contribution to this forum proffers a genuine contribution to the defense of a free society by exploding one of the most powerful critiques of its underlying philosophic foundations.

Damon Linker, while appreciating some aspects of my critique of Strauss and the neocons, disagrees with others, and he does so in a thoroughly serious and gentlemanly manner. He is to be commended for writing a model review that is both critical and constructive. Linker identifies what he considers to be three problem areas.

The first concerns my portrayal of Leo Strauss. Linker wants to make Strauss into an Aristotelian. I must say, though, that I find his point here somewhat elusive. He doesn’t identify what he finds disagreeable in my presentation of Strauss’s political thought, particularly with regard to the two chapters in my book on Strauss’s interpretation of ancient political philosophy. The thrust of my interpretation follows Strauss back to classical political philosophy, which means to the thought of Plato and Aristotle. The mature Strauss clearly preferred Plato and Aristotle to all other philosophers. In fact, the chapter in my book on “Classical Natural Right” presents Strauss in a way that was almost as much Aristotelian as it was Platonist. In fact, I agree with virtually everything that Linker says of Strauss’s Aristotelianism and say so in my book. Mr. Linker knows very well, however, that Strauss was a deep and multi-layered thinker who wrote different things for different audiences. Depending on time and place, Strauss could very much appear the Aristotelian. In the end, however, I do think that Strauss thought the differences between Plato and Aristotle were real (though he attempted to smooth them over), and in the end he preferred Plato to the student. This point is well known among Strauss’s best students. In fact, let me rather boldly suggest that Aristotle actually flunked Strauss’s ultimate test as to whether one was a philosopher or not. Recall that for Strauss any philosopher who claimed to actually know the truth (i.e., what Strauss called “subjective certainties”) was a partisan and not a philosopher. Philosophy is a way of life: it is the quest for truth expressed by the zetetic way of life. Simply put, the difference between a philosopher who wrote dialogues and one who wrote treatises made all the difference for Strauss.

One last point of clarification on Aristotle. I don’t at all find his thought “sinister” or “threatening” as Linker suggests. In fact, I regard Aristotle to be one of the three greatest philosophers of all time. His political thought is not as good as his ethics and his ethics not as good as his epistemology and metaphysic, but even his political thought has much to recommend it. Unfortunately, I do think the Straussianized neocons accept the worst elements of Aristotle’s political thought, wrench it out of its context, and then apply it in troubling ways that are potentially “sinister” and “threatening.” I much prefer the Aristotle of Fred D. Miller (author of Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics) to that of Carnes Lord or Harry Jaffa.

Second, Linker finds that certain elements of my account of neoconservatism are “ahistorical in several respects.” First, while agreeing with me that “national greatness conservatism” is “pernicious,” he argues that it was a development of contemporary neocons such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Brooks and has no place in the thought of first generation neocons such as Irving Kristol. Linker might be right about this, but only in the most literal sense. By the time that Bill Kristol and Brooks were publishing their essays on national greatness conservatism, Irving Kristol was in virtual intellectual retirement and wrote little, particularly as it related to the ideas of his son. In the end, we don’t know what he actually thought about national greatness conservatism, but I must confess that I think it beside the point. The fact of the matter is that Kristol père laid the philosophic groundwork for the national greatness movement. It was Irving Kristol who identified and imported nationalism into neoconservatism as one of its central pillars. By 1983, Irving Kristol was prepared to argue publicly, following Strauss’s lead, that neoconservatism was “not merely patriotic but also nationalist” in orientation.[1] It was Irving Kristol who popularized Strauss’s narrative that nihilism and not communism was the greatest threat to America and the West and that nihilism was born in Lockean liberalism. The primary purpose of national greatness conservatism is to combat the cultural and moral nihilism first diagnosed by Strauss and Kristol père. It was Irving Kristol who called for a remoralization of America. And it was Irving Kristol who first launched the neoconservative attack on small-government conservatives.

Third, Linker wants to know if I really meant to say that Irving Kristol despised capitalism. Yes, I do mean to say that because I think it’s true. Part of the problem here is that it’s almost certainly the case that Linker and I have different definitions of what capitalism is, and we presumably judge it in different ways. When I speak of capitalism I mean laissez-faire capitalism and the complete separation of economy and state. Kristol did not, would not, and could not support this view. He supported a mixed economy that sought to combine what he thought was the best of socialism and the best of capitalism. In my view, Kristol’s advocacy of regulated capitalism is a contradiction in terms and not capitalism at all. Kristol’s “two cheers for capitalism” were purely utilitarian in character. He held his nose and supported a form of regulated capitalism because it generates the wealth necessary to sustain the welfare state that he supported as more important and fundamental than the free market. Kristol made it clear that he regarded the “socialist ideal” not only as “admirable,” but also as a “necessary ideal, offering elements that were wanting in capitalist society—elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity.”[2] I do not regard anyone who holds the following view, as Kristol did, to be an advocate for capitalism:

The basic principle behind a conservative welfare state ought to be a simple one: wherever possible, people should be allowed to keep their own money—rather than having it transferred (via taxes) to the state—on condition that they put it to certain defined uses. Policies such as these have the obvious advantage of reconciling the purposes of the welfare state with the maximum degree of individual independence and the least bureaucratic coercion. They would also have the advantage of being quite popular.[3]

Linker is also incredulous that I would claim that the neocons “praise the nobility of the ‘barbarian’ virtues such as discipline, courage, daring, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice.” He asks out loud if I “really mean to describe them as ‘barbarian” virtues?” Again, yes, I do mean to describe them as barbarian virtues because that’s precisely the term that Max Boot used to describe them, and because in the context that they’re being used by the neocons, that’s what they are. In an article published three years ago in World Affairs, Boot praised Theodore Roosevelt for thinking that “only warfare could restore the ‘barbarian’ virtues,” which he clearly thinks is a good idea. With faint echoes of the young Leo Strauss’s antiliberalism and prowar views (see Strauss’s speech on “German Nihilism”), Boot praised Roosevelt for restoring the “great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer” and for believing that it is only “through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.’”[4] As to the virtues themselves, I consider sacrifice to be less than a barbarian virtue. As for the rest of the virtues listed, most of them (e.g., discipline, courage, endurance, and loyalty) can be genuine virtues in the proper moral context. As used by the neocons’ warfare state, however, they are precisely what Boot says they are.

Finally, we turn to the “F” bomb. Linker wonders why I invoke the bogeyman of “fascism” for the neocons if I don’t think they are in fact fascists—which I don’t. Why then the “name-calling and ominous insinuations”? This is a reasonable question? As I hope Linker recalls from reading my book, raising the specter of fascism was not a conclusion that I came to lightly or with any pleasure. Unlike many leftists in recent years, I didn’t indiscriminately and maliciously hurl the epithet at the neocons. Nor did I set out to write a book that would turn the neocons into fascists. In fact, the fascist connection was only something I came to at the very end of my research and writing. But we need to be very precise here, which I try to do in the book. The charge that I have leveled against neoconservatism is that many of its core ideas, when put together in a systematic way, bear an eerie resemblance to the principles of Mussolini’s fascism. (See Mussolini’s essay on “The Doctrine of Fascism.”) I spend chapter after chapter collecting and presenting the evidence, which, when taken as a whole, certainly implicates the neocons in promoting ideas that might one day lead this country down the road to fascism. Analogously, Bismarck and Nietzsche were not fascists, but surely they bear some responsibility for the rise of Nazism in Germany. Leo Strauss certainly thought that was true of Nietzsche. The deeper issue that I’m trying to address is this: How does a nation find itself going down the path to fascism? Neoconservatism, as an ideology, is one way to do it.

Notes

[1] Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xiii.

[2] Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 116.

[3] Irving Kristol, “The Republican Future,” chap. in Two Cheers for Capitalism, 119 (emphasis added).

[4] Max Boot, “True Believer: TR, McCain, and Conservatism,” World Affairs 171, no. 2 (Fall 2008).

If Patrick Deneen wants to discuss the nature and meaning of Americanism, I’m happy to oblige. Before I do that, though, let me make clear in no uncertain terms what is at stake here. I concluded my Cato Unbound essay with these words: “Those who wish to defend America’s Enlightenment values and the individual-rights republic created by its revolutionary Founders must therefore recapture from the neocons the intellectual and moral highground that once defined the promise of American life.” In response, Deneen writes as follows: “It is not fascism that is to be feared, but the universalizing and even imperialistic logic internal to Enlightenment philosophy itself that significantly inspired the Founders and animates neoconservative foreign policy.” In a nutshell, here then are the philosophic differences between Deneen and Thompson: he is an opponent of Enlightenment liberalism, while I am its proponent. Our mutually exclusive definitions of Americanism hinge on this difference.

Consider for a moment what Deneen is really suggesting here. He is staking his intellectual credibility on denouncing publicly what he calls “the imperialistic logic of Enlightenment philosophy.” In other words, what he’s really suggesting is that truth and logic are imperialistic, as are the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, Deneen finds himself in the same company with many radical feminists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, postmodernists, and Islamic totalitarians. They too find America’s Enlightenment values inherently “imperialistic.”

But there’s more. Deneen seeks to find a pre-Enlightenment philosophy of “robust localism” shorn of the “universalizing and even imperialistic logic internal to Enlightenment philosophy.” As he wrote recently at his blog, Front Porch Republic, Deneen supports the creation of a new philosophy that “would be a kind of anti-Enlightenment—one that will recommend not the acquisition of scientific knowledge for the end of human conquest of nature, but rather the cultivation of the ‘virtue of ignorance’ toward the end of a more humble and deeper understanding of nature of which we are fundamentally and inescapably a part—and which, we are able to frankly acknowledge and accept, will kill us in the end.”[1] And so whereas Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss want to begin the long trek back to Platonic political philosophy, Deneen wants to get off the bus somewhere in the Dark Ages.

If we’re to have a serious discussion of “Americanism,” we should define our terms. Americanism is, in my view, something specific, whereas for Deneen it is everything and nothing. His Americanism would include the “robust localism” of Bull Connor Republicans, the national-greatness conservatism of David Brooks, and everything in between. These traditions may have an American history, but they do not define what is unique about America.

So, enough of Deneen and the “virtue of ignorance.” Let me now explain how I understand the nature and meaning of Americanism.

Americanism is a wide abstraction with a complex—if contested—meaning. It’s part political philosophy, part culture, part moral virtue, part attitude. Defined most broadly, Americanism is that political philosophy which identifies and defines the way of life and moral character most unique to the people of the United States of America. It prescribes a certain political philosophy and it describes the unique conditions under which that theory was translated into practice by millions of ordinary men and women in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century America. At a deeper level, Americanism captures the meaning of what Ayn Rand once referred to as the “American sense of life.”[2] Describing what the theory of Americanism is and how it was translated into practice is, however, no easy task.

Americanism is a curious concept that has no foreign counterpart. It suggests that the American identity is defined and shaped by an idea, an “ism,” or an ideology. No other nation has anything quite like it. We may speak of a French, an Italian, or a Persian culture, but there is no French-ism, Italian-ism, or Persian-ism. Americanism, by contrast, is more than just a culture steeped in historically evolved folkways (i.e., the forms and formalities associated with speech dialects, food, music, dress, architecture etc.). America’s traditional folkways (including Deneen’s various localisms) are no doubt different from those of any other nation, but such cultural accoutrements do not capture the essence of Americanism.

What, then, is Americanism? What are its principal characteristics? The answers to these questions will be found most clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was the practical and theoretical symbol of this new ideology. It represented both a heroic action (i.e., a formal declaration to the world of American independence from Great Britain) and a revolutionary idea (i.e., the doctrine of individual rights). It forever associated the American way of life with a social system that recognized, defined and protected the rights of individuals as sacrosanct. Morally, Americanism insisted that men have a right to be free—free to pursue their individual happiness without the interference of others. Politically, it declared that government should be strictly limited to protecting individual rights, which meant creating a sphere of freedom institutionalized by a separation of church and state, school and state, economy and state, and culture and state. Economically, it said that individuals should be free to produce and exchange their goods and services free of government control, and that they should be able to keep and/or dispose of their wealth without it being taken by the government. Socially, it was perhaps best captured by another distinctly American colloquialism: the idea of rugged individualism.

In sum, Americanism meant a principled commitment to freedom. It was associated with the moral and political principles of a society in which individuals were morally sovereign and left free of government interference to be self-owning, self-starting, self-reliant, and self-fulfilling.[3] It meant self-government in the fullest sense of the term (i.e., morally, politically, socially, and economically).

The meaning of Americanism today, however, is very different. To the extent that the term is even still used, its meaning has been highjacked by both the Left and the Right. The Left most often identifies Americanism with multiculturalism, relativism, environmentalism, regulation, and welfarism—in other words, with progressivism.[4] The Right typically identifies Americanism with Christianity, school prayer, tradition, family values, and community standards—in other words, with social conservatism.[5] None of these values are, however, uniquely American. In fact, in one form or another, they all have a distinctly European provenance that is set in direct opposition to the native meaning of Americanism.

How have I arrived at my definition of Americanism? Briefly, my methodology is similar to that of a distillery: it refines, extracts, and condenses the essential spirit of Americanism. My process therefore treats and filters out all of the impurities that have polluted the distinctive qualities that define the concept Americanism. My definition captures that which is most unique to America—that which was not a foreign import or born elsewhere.

We must always keep in mind, however that Americanism in practice (i.e., the reality of life in America day-to-day) has no doubt sometimes stood in stark relief to the ideal of Americanism. It is certainly true that the philosophy of Americanism has not always been applied equally to all Americans at all times and in all ways. Even the most laissez-faire period of American history was full of controls, regulations, and supports of one kind or another. More importantly, the wicked and tragic history of chattel slavery in America followed by the institutionalized discrimination of African-Americans after their emancipation are the most obvious examples of how Americans have not always lived up to the ideal of Americanism.

How, then, do we account for these obvious inconsistencies and contradictions? Abraham Lincoln helps us to understand the inconsistent and paradoxical relationship between the ideal and the real in American history. In his 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln noted that the original theorists of Americanism, our founding fathers,

meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked up to, constantly laboured for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colours everywhere.[6]

The exception, slavery, thus does not disprove the rule or invalidate the concept. In fact, it actually helps to highlight the truth and force of Americanism. Lincoln’s “standard maxim” and the constant effort of the American people to always look up to, labor for, and approximate their freedom philosophy symbolizes the true meaning of Americanism. The great fact of Americanism is not that slavery once existed in this country, as it did in many other places, but that a heroic movement arose in the name of America to end it. The freedom philosophy of Americanism freed four million slaves, it liberated women and others from oppressive laws in more recent decades, and it has extended the sphere of freedom in countless other ways. Sadly, though, while we have gained many new freedoms in recent decades, we have also lost many old ones. Thus the history of Americanism has not ended.

Reclaiming the original and proper meaning of this one word—Americanism—is vitally important today because its definition will play an important role in determining how the American people view their past, present, and future. In a sense, the idea of Americanism captures the essence of who and what we are as a nation not only at the political level but also at a deeper psychological level. At stake in this battle to define a single word is nothing less than the future of America itself. The outcome shall determine whether the people of this nation will continue their descent into statism or whether they will recover the original spirit of liberty that first breathed life into what Abraham Lincoln once called mankind’s “last best hope of earth.”[7]

Notes

[1] “The New Lisbon,” http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/03/the-new-lisbon/

[2] In her essay “Don’t Let It Go,” Ayn Rand defined the concept “sense of life” as a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and existence.” In Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It? (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1982), 250.

[3] For a classic statement on the relationship between Americanism and a free society from the 1940s, see Ayn Rand, Textbook of Americanism (1946). See also, Leonard Reed, “The Essence of Americanism,” at http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-essence-of-americanism/.

[4] Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The classic liberal-socialist critique of the original idea of Americanism is contained in Louis Hartz’s, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955).

[5] David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

[6] Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” in The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Richard N. Current (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967), 88-89.

[7] Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 1, 1862.

C. Bradley Thompson makes a number of points in his rejoinder to my critique, and many of them worthy of their own reply.

First, Strauss. Thompson and I agree that Strauss’s views were far more complicated than I portrayed them in my two paragraphs on Aristotle. For a much fuller, though still inadequate, treatment of Strauss’s thought and its influence, I suggest my 2006 essay from The New Republic. For now, though, I’ll say that I agree with pretty much everything Thompson says about Strauss’s ultimate allegiance to Plato over Aristotle. The problem, though, is that Strauss’s Aristotelianism captures just about everything a reader needs to know about his political views. Strauss’s (Nietzschean) Platonism has to do primarily with what lies beyond politics, “beyond good and evil” as they come to sight in the shadowy light of “the cave” of the Republic, Book VII. The philosopher who liberates himself from this cave does live a life of radical, open-ended skeptical (zetetic) inquiry, as Thompson notes. But then, what on earth does Strauss’s thought have to do with neoconservatism? The Kristols, Irving and William, were not/are not zetetic philosophers. Seen from the heights of philosophic detachment, political engagement of the kind that preoccupies neocon policy intellectuals is babysitting writ large. So do the neocons hold the views they do because of Strauss’s influence? Or despite that influence?

On the question of how much Irving Kristol should be blamed for national greatness conservatism, I stand by what I originally wrote. I understand why this issue matters to Thompson: His book was written, in part, to demonstrate that neoconservatism is a comprehensive, consistent ideological program. I, on the other hand, think Thompson overstates its comprehensiveness and consistency. Quoting Irving Kristol on nationalism doesn’t make the case, in my view, because not all nationalisms are the same. Ronald Reagan’s effort to rehabilitate American national pride in the wake of the humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate, which is what Irving had in mind in 1983, simply isn’t the same as what William Kristol and Robert Kagan advocated in their critically important Foreign Affairs essay from 1996, in which they propose a bellicose foreign policy as a means to remoralizing American society. Yes, father and son both fear creeping nihilism in America, but their proposed means of combating it are very different. For Irving, the means were, essentially, the policies and rhetoric of the Reagan administration. Yes, in the late 80s and 90s, he began to talk positively about the religious right and the importance of populism. I see that as a decline in the cogency of his thought as he turned himself into a Republican Party ideologist. But it’s not the same thing as we get from his son, which is warmaking as a means to fight nihilism. That’s something new—and its newness shows that neoconservatism isn’t as comprehensive or consistent as Thompson portrays it to be.

On capitalism, here I think Thompson (along with Douglas Rasmussen) and I just begin from very different assumptions. They tend to believe that any moral or even utilitarian critique of autonomous capitalism implies a hatred of capitalism, whereas I think autonomous capitalism is neither possible nor desirable. What we have in the real world, however difficult it is to make sense of in pure theoretical categories, is a spectrum of more-or-less mixed economies with markets more-or-less regulated by the state. The welfare states of Western Europe regulate somewhat more than America’s does, but it’s a matter of differences in degree, not kind. To praise capitalism, as Irving Kristol did with such influence in the 1970s, while also defending the welfare state, places him very much in the middle, if slightly to the right, of the American political spectrum. To claim that this middle position is radical, that it makes Kristol an enemy of economic freedom, is a sign of Thompson’s (and Rasmussen’s) radicalism on this issue, not Kristol’s. Indeed, by this logic, the entire Democratic Party and all but the most extreme Tea Party wing of the Republican Party would be equally or far more anti-capitalist, equally or far more hostile to freedom. Maybe Thompson and Rasmussen think this is so. I don’t. So I’m not sure how much more there is to discuss on the issue. We simply begin with different assumptions and interpretations of the world we live in.

Finally, on fascism. I agree that the strong second-generation neocon emphasis on nationalism and warmaking as a means to overcoming domestic nihilism does lean in the direction of fascist political ideas. But I would still counsel against using the term because the similarities are mainly formal. Political analysis must go beyond noting formal likeness to examine the content of ideas. A political program that advocates war as a means of spreading democracy and overthrowing dictators (like the homicidal maniac who’s run Libya for the past 40-something years) is very different from a political program that advocates war as a means of territorial aggrandizement and/or racial and ethnic oppression, domination, and genocide. That means that however much William Kristol’s foreign policy views resemble fascism on one level, they diverge from fascism pretty fundamentally on another. That complication, combined with the polemical overuse of the term in our political discourse, makes its invocation exceedingly ill-advised, in my view.

In writing a tough criticism of C. Bradley Thompson’s essay “Neoconservatism Unmasked,” I fully expected and welcomed a hard-hitting response. I certainly received such a response—and then some. Whether its tenor and content reflects more broadly on Thompson’s tendency to caricature opposing viewpoints—including not only my own, but his treatment of neoconservatives—is a matter I’ll leave for readers to judge.

I will not address his first part, on my “method,” except to note the utter curiousness of his accusation—that one sees in my approach evidence of the “neocon’s method of thinking,” and that mine is a “classic example” of neoconservative subterfuge. As I stated at the outset of my previous response, I am in rather profound disagreement with many of the positions of neoconservatism. I am not, and do not think anyone (other than C. Bradley Thompson) would mistake me for, a neoconservative. Yet I maintain that such disagreements should arise from an accurate assessment of their position, something I found wanting in Thompson’s treatment. The fact that I disagree with Thompson, or even (at points) offer some sympathetic words about some neoconservative arguments (without subscribing the philosophy as a whole), evidently makes me indistinguishable from neocons, even an exemplary case of their “method.” This is a worrisome and even wild conclusion that throws into doubt the ability to make important intellectual discriminations.

Let me rather respond to the substance of some of Thompson’s criticisms, in the hope of fostering productive and civil discussion.

First, I offered an overly brief synopsis of my own view not to make my view the subject of debate, but in order to establish for readers that my own views differed from those of both Thompson and the neoconservatives. In so doing, I wanted to establish the fact that I was writing not as a sympathizer with neoconservatism, but as someone with some rather severe disagreements. I sought to demonstrate that one can disagree with neoconservatism without engaging in the effort to caricature its position by defining it out of the American political context. While Thompson regards my effort to raise the question of the neoconservative claim to “Americanism” as beside the point, his multi-part response belies his claim that the question is irrelevant. His argument hinges substantially on his claim that neoconservatism is essentially a direct embrace of a certain interpretation of Strauss, in which leaders seek to deceive the masses and foster national spirit by means of encouraging war and attendant acts of self-sacrifice. He thus attributes to Strauss the goal of “national greatness,” and seeks to deny such a view can be seen to derive from the American tradition itself.

In concluding that neoconservatives were “the false prophets of Americanism,” Thompson aligns neoconservatism with European fascism. I believe this to be a false and irresponsible accusation, and in my response I offered some brief evidence from the American political tradition that suggests that neoconservatism’s support for “national greatness” is well within the orbit of American political thought, particularly the Hamiltonian ambitions expressed both in and beyond the Federalist. Thompson may believe me to be “cherry-picking” evidence to that effect, but I am prepared to offer a more extensive defense and explication of this position, though space constraints preclude such an undertaking. In briefly delineating the way that the neoconservative philosophy is consonant with the Hamiltonian tradition, I do not endorse that tradition. I merely think accuracy demands its recognition.

I also sought to suggest that my own position is an alternative to that of Thompson and the neoconservatives alike, one that can trace its lineage not to what Thompson calls “the American Enlightenment,” but rather the pre-Founding tradition that derives from the Puritan settlement and more deeply from the Christian (and especially Augustinian) tradition. My reason for doing so was not to make this position itself the subject of debate, but to offer additional (passing) evidence that there are multiple streams in the American tradition from which one can criticize other streams. Yet Thompson regards my passing summary as a “gotcha” moment, revealing my alleged propensity for witch-burning and fondness for the KKK. While there is a longstanding historiographic, philosophical and theological tradition that traces the close affiliation of Puritanism and democracy (e.g., Ralph Barton Perry and Perry Miller), my brief precis was meant to indicate a shorthand acknowledgment of Tocqueville’s analysis and commendation of American liberty. Tocqueville attributed the American spirit of “local liberty” in Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter 2 of Democracy in America to the Puritan understanding of liberty which found its best and fullest manifestation in the New England townships, where he witnessed “the spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion” to be admirably combined. Tocqueville admired not the oppressions of “Hooterville,” but local self-governance based on high degrees of civic participation and self-imposed law. My point was not necessarily to debate the merits of my own views (which I am happy to do, but I’d think in a different forum), but to point out that there are legitimate contesting traditions that can lay equal claim to full membership in the American narrative. I reject Thompson’s efforts to purify or “distill” the story of America to fit with his preferred narrative, defining his own view as “the proper view of Americanism” and anything outside that view as unworthy, and even unpatriotic.

He discloses that he regards his view as a kind of “distillation,” a process that extracts all impurities. Such a process can result in some fine alcohol (though, as a bourbon drinker, it needs to be noted that bourbon’s flavor comes from the barrel, after distillation)—but it makes for bad history. Take, for instance, Thompson’s claim to the Jeffersonian tradition. It seems to me that all three of the “traditions” I’ve mentioned—neoconservative liberalism, libertarianism, and my own preferred localism—can and do rightfully lay claim to parts of Jefferson as witness. After all, it is Strauss himself who begins Natural Right and History with an admiring account of the American belief in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration, and a subsequent generation of American neoconservatives fully embrace this “natural rights” tradition. Libertarians admire Jefferson’s deep mistrust of central government and his suspicion toward “monkish superstition.” And I particularly admire those parts of Jefferson which express suspicion for what we might know as the servile and virtue-depleting tendencies of commercial capitalism, in favor of the widespread ownership of productive property and the self-sufficiency of “yeoman farmers.” While Thompson is dismissive of concerns about commercial capitalism—whether those of someone like Irving Kristol, or me—to invoke the spirit of Jefferson is implicitly to acknowledge that these concerns have a long and legitimate history in the American tradition. I would argue that to “distill” away any parts of Jefferson that are regarded as impurities does violence to the complexity of this tradition.

Thompson states that I have not fulfilled my duties to this forum by failing to address his criticisms of neoconservatism, but he fails to note that I spent some portion of my response pointing out that the main currents of contemporary Strauss-inspired neoconservatism have a complex and refracted relationship with Strauss’s own (complicated) attractions to ancient natural right. I would be more than happy to articulate at length my own best understanding of Strauss’s analysis of ancient and modern natural right, based upon many years reading and teaching Strauss’s texts. However, space and expectations of the readers’ limited patience preclude such an exercise. Let me make one point that is altogether missing in Thompson’s analysis: Strauss is neither simply a proponent of the ancient city nor the enemy of modern liberalism. Thompson engages in a simplistic and reductionist reading of Strauss, attributing to him a preference for the ancient city and seeking to transfer its features to the modern nation-state. This is a caricature about as accurate as attributing to me a pining for the KKK. Strauss understands “ancient natural right” to be a teaching about the limits of politics, especially the limits of ideology. Strauss’s admiration of the ancients is especially directed at the ancient philosophy, not especially the ancient city. A far suppler reading of the complex thought of Strauss is needed—beginning with his understanding of “the art of writing.” One point might be raised on that score: since Strauss writes about this kind of writing (predominantly present in non-liberal philosophy), and publishes his work openly for anyone to read, can it really be concluded that he sought to teach a select group of elite philosophers how to deceive the masses? This is patent nonsense.

As important as it is to “get Strauss right”—a worthy project—nevertheless it’s more important in light of Thompson’s argument to recognize that there is hardly a seamless continuity between the work of Strauss and those of his students, including various neocons. As I sought to point out in my initial response (a point Thompson ignores in his three-part response, during which he claims I ignored his critique of neoconservatism), the reception of Strauss by his American students tended to downplay his preference for ancient natural right in favor of a fervent embrace and defense of modern natural right—particularly the Enlightenment tradition that informed the Founders of the United States. I pointed to the strong endorsement of the Enlightenment tradition (and, in particular, the philosophy of Lockean modern natural right articulated in the Declaration) that can be found among numerous scholars and political actors who have been influenced by the Claremont school, and not only among them. If there is any Straussian neoconservative tradition that has had influence at the higher levels of government, it is this iteration of Straussianism especially. The reasons for this particular reception of Strauss are doubtless twofold: first, these students were Americans, and hence inclined to stress Strauss’s positive regard for liberal democracy as the best and only viable modern regime; and second, because in the midst of the Cold War, there was no doubt of the need to defend liberal democracy against its great ideological opponent. Thompson would benefit from reading a growing number of studies of Strauss or scholars influenced by Strauss who are encountering him outside of these contexts, in order to see the varying ways that Strauss can be received and interpreted. Mark Lilla has written an excellent two-part essay (here and here) on this subject that might encourage Thompson to approach this subject with more subtlety and nuance.

But let me turn in conclusion to the most important point of contention between us. I argued that there is a “universalizing and even imperialistic logic internal to Enlightenment philosophy itself.” Thompson responded that I hold that “truth and logic are imperialistic” and affiliates me with “radical feminists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, postmodernists, and Islamic totalitarians.” Apparently, when I’m not loafing in “Hooterville” or putting on sheets, I’m associating with every evil group and philosophy known to man. Again, Thompson evinces the tendency to paint with a very wide and inaccurate brush, and in the process, not only wildly misstates my own views and arguments, but proves incapable of considering what may be some legitimate arguments that have been made by some voices in these very groups that we are apparently immediately to dismiss—such as the defensibleness of the variety of culture, or the dangers that contemporary economic and scientific activity pose to nature and humanity. In some cases these groups—often deeply problematic on the whole—have pieces of what are deeply conservative arguments, arguments which adherence to a certain view of Enlightenment logic precludes acknowledging. And, what’s striking, this inability is shared fundamentally by both the libertarian Thompson and the neoconservatives.

When I spoke of a “logic” within Enlightenment philosophy that tends toward a kind of imperialism, I meant exactly the way that Enlightenment philosophy tends to be dismissive of cultural variety, tradition, religion, and the deeper preconditions for Enlightenment philosophy itself (even the extent to which it derives from a particular cultural and religious context). I was not criticizing “logic” per se, but nor was I associating “logic” with “truth,” as Thompson does. Thompson’s confusion on this score in fact perfectly demonstrates my point: in thinking that human life, culture, civilization, and politics can be reduced to “truth” based upon “logic,” one can see precisely the imperialistic tendency of Enlightenment philosophy. This was exactly the impulse against which Edmund Burke wrote in response to the French Revolution, where it was the effort to purify society on the basis of logical principles that led to the Terror. Burke was no less critical of the “logical” approach of the social contract tradition, which tended to dismiss a cautious concern about the future, as well as the legitimacy of tradition and culture. Instead, he called for a contract that included “the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.” And, in praising “the virtue of ignorance,” I was praising not ignorance, but that a deeper form of knowledge that arises from an awareness of our limitations and allows us to proceed in the world with a deeper understanding born of humility and a cognizance of our tendency to overestimate our powers to control circumstance, humanity, and nature.

Various neoconservatives have recognized that they had succumbed to the liberal Enlightenment impulse in the invasion of Iraq, and in particular the embrace of a single vision of legitimate political order (the liberal Enlightenment constitutional order) that was uncognizant of the many cultural preconditions that made such a constitutional order possible. It is important to stress that the mainstream of neoconservatives justified the invasion of Iraq for reasons having everything to do with their belief in advancing the universal legitimacy of the Enlightenment (and their understanding of the American) tradition, and nothing to do with Thompson’s supposition that neoconservatism was channeling Strauss’s preference for the ancient city. For instance, the neoconservative John Agresto, in a post-war book entitled Mugged by Reality, admits frankly a gap between the neoconservative (a.k.a., “neoliberal”) effort to advance and even impose an ideal of liberal democracy aimed at the protection of rights, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness (17-18), and the conservative awareness of the deeper cultural preconditions—even, at points, pre- and non-liberal preconditions—for such a society. At the book’s conclusion, Agresto writes that “our first limitation as liberators and occupiers was our failure to understand the nature and preconditions of democratic society and the difference between democracy and freedom, our second limitation was a bizarre inability to understand what human nature truly is like…. If there are neoconservatives who believe that in overthrowing tyrants we will call forth the better angels of our human nature, then those theorists need to listen to more old-fashioned conservatives who know something about the fallenness of our natures, conservatives who know the ease with which we war against each other when not held in check by moderating institutions, civic virtue, and mild rather than furious religious teachings” (181-2, 186-7). This is precisely the “virtue of ignorance” that is to be commended, a virtue that recognizes the limits of our logic in politics and points to a deeper truth and more profound knowledge about our human condition. It is a kind of “ignorance” that is helpful in drawing necessary and important distinctions—the kinds that Thompson is altogether too willing to ignore or elide in his self-certainty about his distilled version of the American tradition. It is the very opposite of the kind of ignorance that results from a distilled version of politics that is unmistakable as anything other than ideology.

I would like to respond for myself in regard to the following two claims Damon Linker’s makes in Strauss, Nationalism, and Fascism:

1. “On capitalism, here I think Thompson (along with Douglas Rasmussen) and I just begin from very different assumptions. They tend to believe that any moral or even utilitarian critique of autonomous capitalism implies a hatred of capitalism, whereas I think autonomous capitalism is neither possible nor desirable.”

I am not sure why Linker thinks that I tend to believe any moral or even utilitarian critique of autonomous capitalism implies a hatred of capitalism. I said no such thing, and I don’t know how he can legitimately make such a claim. Linker cites nothing I have written in this forum or elsewhere. Moreover, “hatred” is a strong word, and I tend not to use it lightly.

2. “We simply begin with different assumptions and interpretations of the world we live in.”

Of course we do, and that is why we are having this conversation. Since I am an academic, a professor, a philosopher, an “egg-head,” I try to think carefully about these matters. But so do others. I assume Damon Linker does. So, I would like to know the following: (a) what Linker means by “autonomous” capitalism; (b) why he thinks it is neither possible nor desirable; and (c) what is his standard for determining desirability. Moreover, we can talk about this in terms of ideal types or actually existing systems. This discussion can be done on ethical, political, social, cultural, and even religious grounds.

Linker can have his opinions. I can have mine, but what we are after is what is true and why. Is not that what we care about? If not, then let’s make that the topic of discussion.

I shall bring my exchange with Patrick Deneen to a close by tying up three unresolved issues.

1. Americanism Redux: On the issue of Americanism, Deneen suffers from a fundamental confusion, which I’m happy to clear up for him. He confuses my use of the concept “Americanism” with the general story of American history. According to Deneen, “there are multiple streams in the American tradition from which one can criticize other streams.” This is obviously true, but it does not justify the inclusion of such “streams” in the concept “Americanism.” Americanism is not synonymous with American history. If it were, the concept would be so open-ended as to be meaningless. Deneen, however, takes the next step and reveals the real meaning and direction of his moral and political commitments: he says that the inclusion of these “multiple streams” in the American narrative justifies their laying “equal claim” to inclusion in the definition of Americanism. This is a fatal mistake. Deneen has applied moral relativism to historical judgment.

On Deneen’s premises, there is and can be no such thing as objective moral rightness. It’s all an illusion. To elevate the “equal claims” of all streams is to pronounce indifference on moral good and evil. By Deneen’s criteria, there is no standard to distinguish between Bull Connor’s Birmingham dogs and hoses in 1963 and the non-violent actions of Rosa Parks. Both have an “equal claim” to being included in his definition of Americanism. More: Deneen’s moral relativism must, by his standard, give equal status to the KKK when defining the nature and meaning of Americanism.[1] The problem with Deneen’s neo-Confederate theory is that it has no fixed standard of right and wrong, independent of mere opinion and local prejudice. He’s left with nothing but positive right writ small—small enough to fit on his front porch republic.

In the end, Deneen’s historical and philosophical methodology, like that of his nineteenth-century predecessor Stephen A. Douglas, legitimizes and gives informal sanction to ideas and actions that are objectively wicked. Readers here will recall that Douglas declared that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or down, and that he cared only for the right of the people to decide how the slavery issue would be handled in their local communities. Deneen’s localist, front porch republicanism is just the latest version of what Abraham Lincoln characterized as Douglas’s “don’t care” policy. Deneen stands for the positive right of local majorities, while I stand for natural right, that is, objective principles of moral right. He therefore has no means, no moral compass, by which to distinguish a good “stream” from a bad “stream,” and thus he has no principled ground on which to oppose that which is objectively immoral and unjust.

With no absolute, permanent moral standard grounding Deneen’s definition of Americanism, we’re left with nothing but the right of “robust” local majorities to superimpose their values on those of the minority, and sometimes by force. In the end, however, it matters not to the oppressed individual or minority whether their rights have been violated by national, state, village, or front porch majorities. Whether it’s hanging or stoning witches in New England or lynching blacks in the south, Deneen’s “robust localism” and “don’t care” policy of historical judgment leads to a kind of moral indifference that would slowly lead to moral atrophy and the undermining of America’s individual rights republic. Deneen’s historical and moral relativism is a direct assault on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and his feudalist localism shares more with radical postmodernity than with Lincoln’s adherence to the “ancient faith” born with the Declaration of Independence. In my view, the same principle that condemned slavery was the same principle that condemned the Declaratory Act of 1766.

Indeed, I use the concept “Americanism” in a very precise way, i.e., as a noun and as an “ism,” which means that it must have a specific definition and a concrete meaning. To repeat: that definition seeks to identify and isolate what is most unique to America. A concept such as “Americanism” is not the same thing as a tradition or even a history. They perform different functions, and they identify different things. A definition—by definition—requires a process of conceptual distillation. Using the western, Enlightenment logic that Deneen disparages, I establish a method for defining the concept “Americanism” that specifies its distinguishing characteristics and then differentiates it from those characteristics associated with other concepts. It is a definition with a genus and differentia. At the core of my definition of Americanism stand the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This is the distillation process of which Deneen is contemptuous.

2. The Enlightenment Redux: Deneen is right to suggest that the “most important point of contention between us” concerns our different understandings and evaluations of the Enlightenment. And it’s here that Deneen makes his most extraordinary claim. It turns out that I am “incapable” in his view “of considering what may be some legitimate arguments that have been made by some voices” in various ideological camps that include “radical feminists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, postmodernists, and Islamic totalitarians.” This is very true. I do not share Deneen’s concern with the “dangers that contemporary economic and scientific activity pose to nature and humanity.” I’ve heard all the anti-Enlightenment arguments from the aformentioned groups before, and I do in fact dismiss them—and proudly so. It is a most interesting state of affairs that Deneen should share more in common with the ideologies of these sundry groups than with my defense of Enlightenment liberalism and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

3. Strauss Redux: Let me also say a few things about Deneen’s questions concerning Leo Strauss and the Straussians. First, I do not believe—not for a moment—that Strauss or his students (including Harry Jaffa and his Claremont followers) have been philosophic (as opposed to political) defenders of the modern natural-rights philosophy. (My friend Michael Zuckert is one possible exception but even then with very real qualifications.) I know of no work by Strauss or any of his students that argues for, and validates philosophically, the natural rights teaching as both true, and right, and superior to ancient and/or Christian natural right. Jaffa and his students have spent the last forty years attempting to shore up the principles of the Declaration with Aristotelian and Thomist natural right—indeed, even with the views of Pope John Paul II—precisely because they don’t think them capable of standing on their own.[2] Furthermore, Jaffa and his students have clearly drifted to the mainstream conservatism of the Heritage Foundation rather than to the neoconservatism of the American Enterprise Institute. Harry Jaffa is a remarkable scholar and a profound thinker in his own right and I have learned much from him, but I do not share his particular defense of the Declaration of Independence.

Notes

[1] This is not to suggest, however, as Deneen does, that I attribute to him a “pining for the KKK.” I did not say and do not think—not for a second—that Patrick Deneen pines for the KKK.

[2] For Jaffa’s attempt to infuse the meaning of the Declaration of Independence with the theology of Pope John Paul II, see Harry V. Jaffa, “The False Prophets of American Conservatism,” February 12, 1998. Jaffa writes: “For John Paul, like Jefferson and Lincoln, the rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, being rights with which we are endowed by our Creator, are not to be understood blindly to emancipate the passions, but rather to direct them towards the ends approved by that same Creator, ends which are in the service of the common good no less than that of private pleasures.” One naturally wonders how it is that the inalienable rights discussed in the Declaration will lead individuals toward the “ends” approved by the Creator. Will each man determine for himself what God’s ends are or will some one person (e.g., the Pope) decide for him? Likewise, who will decide for our ordinary Americans what the common good is? In the end, Jaffa’s moral intrinsicism is just a different form of the same moral subjectivism that he criticizes so effectively. One also wonders why America’s founding fathers didn’t attempt to reconcile the principles of the Declaration with the theology of the then-reigning Pope, Pius VI.