This episode needs a warning label.
We recorded on the road in a hotel lobby, and so the sound called is authentic, and that's it.
I'll go with authentic with.
The coming Fame, my Pain, the moneys, my Brain, Oh Whiskey. Why think alone when you can drink it all in with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders Steve Hayward, John U and the International Woman of Mystery, Lucretia Where this lapsapp and David ain't easy on the shows?
Have you got to give me? And let that whiskey?
The Three Whiskey Happy Hour is back on the road for the second week.
In a row.
Lucretia and I are here in Tampa, Florida. John you was supposed to be here, but he flaked. But this gives us the opportunity to catch up with someone we've been wanting to catch up to you for a long time, and that's Glenn elmers Hi.
Glenn, Welcome, Leks, Steve Hei, Linda, thank you having for having me very happy.
Right right, So we've got to catch up with what you're up to in a bit. But let's punch out a couple of news stories quickly and then use a new story to get into some serious things. And the first one is just an observation. I'm not sure it's
worth discussing much. But this week two Supreme Court justices made news, one by having to make an apology for making a personal attack because a fellow justice doesn't go on feelings, you know, right, Soda Mayor has a case of the feelings, that's your jurisprudence.
And then of course she rec yeah, I do exactly, she letting up to it.
And meanwhile you had Clarence Thomas talking about the Declaration of Independence and giving a very substantive view of constitutionalism and the contrast there. As I say, it doesn't require much comment, but the flora is yours if you want to.
Yeah, I mean, isn't it astonishing that it Since the left has no regard for precedent and jurisprudence, they also have no regard for precedent in decorum either, Right, So I guess it's not a surprise that it's always someone from the left who breaks these long standing norms.
Right. Well, the other thing that's really great I would expect Lucristy would say this is that she's not even the dumbest member of the corps.
She has been surpassed in that she used to be.
She has been surpassed, right, Yeah, the dumbest and the most loquacious. I get such a kick out of someone who did these word counts. And the youngest and clearly most inept justice is by far the most talkative.
I know she's gonna be the you have that keeps on giving for a very long time. On the front, I.
Have to tell you I have a little bit of I don't know if envy is quite the right word, but I kind of look at people like that, and you know, I remember being a young graduate student in Claremont and being kind of, for the longest time afraid to say anything just because I don't know anything and all of these people are smarter than me. And it's
something I don't know that I ever got over. I know I got over acting that way, But you know, it's often the case that that I just wonder, how do people just open their mouths and not realize how stupid that they sound?
Yeah?
Is it an incredible level of stupidity that allows you to do that?
Could this be our first Supreme Court justice afflicted with dunning? Krueger's injury.
You know what, I wish you could get a case. It's dunning versus wish a test case and watch her trip all over that.
Okay, So now the other story of the week that's more serious on two levels, the low and the high, is the Pope and our president are in a I don't want to use the.
Bar the locker room phrase, but they're having a fight. And so, first.
Of all, Lucasiu may remember, I resisted the view partly because of respect for Catholic doctrine.
I resisted the view that.
That Pope Leo was chosen because he's an American and they wanted somebody who could stand up to Trump. And I thought, look, Trump's only around for three more years. The Pope is supposed to be the age of the Holy Spirit. The Pope is going to be around for at least twenty years. Why would you have short term thinking like that. I'm rethinking this though. That's point number one.
Point number two is, boy, what a contrast between this pope and say Benedict the sixteenth, Ratzinger or John Paul two, who are both against war in the general sense that, of course we deplore war in the abstract, but believed in just war, understood that there were real enemies in the world.
Who needed to be defeated peacefully if.
Possible, but by just war means, if necessary. And this Pope seems to have no grasp of that.
It seems to think well, and I would probably concentrate even less than the just war that one sort of sailed. I think last week when the babylon Bee came out with that great thing that said, Pope Leo says that the Bible doesn't that nothing in the Bible supports war if you leave out Moses, you know, and it goes.
Through all this people.
But that's actually what Trump said either yesterday or today, to me, was even in many ways more profound. When they asked Trump what he thought about Iran executing a female protester, a young female protester, and he says, why don't you ask the Pope about that? And I think that that has been the most frustrating thing for me as a Catholic, as a practicing Catholic, is that the Pope is this Pope is willing to go put his
hands on a block of ice for climate change. He's willing to go visit he's willing to let Muslims inside the Vatican for a special prayer room. There's all of these things that he's doing as an outreach to the Muslim community. He will not acknowledge in any serious way what's been happening in Nicaragua to Christian's in Nicaragua. I'm especially does especially close to my heart. We now have another priest from Nicaragua. One of my favorite priests ever
in my parish was from Nicaragua. And I know what I know. I mean, his family's entire family was murdered, and the Pope doesn't care. The Pope cares about I guess politics. But the last thing I want to say is I want to bring up something Tom Honan said, who's also Homean homan Ya, who's also a practicing Catholic, and he talked about I've talked about this on the podcast before. I lived near the border. I know the
human suffering that is caused by unrestricted illegal immigration. The You know, I have told the story before, but I'll tell it again. There's many, many others just like it. Of a good friend who's I went through a whole bottle of whiskey with after he rescued a four year old girl whose grandmother had sold her into sex trafficking. You know that happens all the time when you have all of these other illegal activities going on across the border.
And the idea that the Pope would just, you know, slam Trump for his supposed cruel policies to illegal immigrants, it's just stupid. It's I don't know how else to say it, and I'm sorry, but it's stupid. And then of course we won't talk about the one point two billion dollars that the Catholic Bishop's got for a refugee resettlement. Anyway, I'm done. I doubt I'll have to go to confession now. But I did talk to my There's a priest in my parish who was the chaplain of the year for Arizona.
Very conservative politically. He keeps that to himself, but he and I are very close. Who was his first duty station was with the IDF. And I asked him, I said, follow the rob tell me tell me how I'm supposed to think about this pope. And his argument was that the Vatican is such a cesspool that maybe I should give the pope a little bit of grace for a while and just see what happens. That was before the whole David axel Rod thing. So I don't know, I don't know anyway.
Well, I mean again, just to draw from history, you go back to the eighties, right, and so you have the Cold War, you have the nuclear freeze going on, you have all the Catholic bishops condemning nuclear weapons as a sin.
And there's John Paul two, who what was he doing?
He was not not signing up for that, and he was, I mean, he had to let them give free range. He kind of have to, you know, being an archaic church in some ways despite the hierarchy. But the German bishops pushed back very strongly an interesting time about something that's much more cosmic than immigration, even quite a bit more so. I think, so the contract, then the other one is and this will draw into Glenn the theological political problem.
So first of all, I.
Did find this quote from Benedict the sixteenth.
I think there's a word missing in this quote we got in front of us here.
He said, an absolute pacifism that denies the law that any and all course of measures would be a capitulation to injustice, would sanction its seizure of power and would abandon the world to the dictates of violence. There's a
man who had his head on straight. And I also remember we were talking before we started recording briefly about Churchill and thinking of that passage in his reflections on the Munich Agreement in the Gathering Storm where he has that quote at the end, and I forget the exact wording, but he talks about how.
I'm gonna paraphrase, I understand that Christians are for peace and.
Individually can be pacifists, he says, everyone admires the Quakers. Still it is not on these terms that government officials assume their seals of office. That was Churchill's way, I think in pointing at the theological political problem, and since you, along with our pal Ben some you Know's and two or three others, are one of the best thinkers on this subject, I'm going to now point to you and say.
Go, well, I mean, I don't know, I explained to listeners.
We've pried and failed at it, but I mean, do whatever, however you want to reflect on this from the high.
Point of view.
Yeah, well, I mean, just on the on the pope question, it sort of reminds me in the old days when the New York Times used to say that a certain politician had grown in office, which meant that they had fallen in line with the narrative of the blob and it. You know, Linda just mentioned what this Vatican is like, and it seems like this pope has now grown in office, which means fallen in line with the official narrative. Yeah, the larger theological political problem, I.
Mean it sort of ties in.
I don't know if this is what you wanted me to mention, but I have one book coming out that's in production with a publisher at Sundia University Press that Steve is actually a contributor to nineteen chapters on Leo Strauss's most influential Students that will be out in the spring from SUNI I'm excited about that. But I'm working on another problem about what I'm calling the First Crisis of the West, which is the collapse of piety in
ancient Athens. So by the time Socrates is out questioning authoritative opinion in Athens, already elite opinion in Athenian society was starting to question the Olympian gods. Right, Zeus and Apollo and Athena are not really that believable. There's already
a kind of enlightenment going on in classical Athens. And I think many of the serious thinkers at the time, Plato certainly, but Thucydides, the great historian of the Pelponnesian War, the comic player at Aristophanes, are looking at this question of what happens when the gods are no longer believe And this goes to what Strauss understood is the theological political problem is how can you have law without divine sanction?
Right?
There, nomos in the classical world is always divine nomos. Right, the law comes from the gods. But if the gods are no longer believable, if the gods are not authoritative, then what is the source of the law. And we're going through this now. Strauss talked about the crisis of the West, and in part it's the collapse of faith in Western civilization, in reason, but also faith in the Bible.
And it's interesting to me that I think this has already happened to some degree, and although in a slightly different way, in classical Athens, and that the classical thinkers are thinking about that and so I'm curious to see if there's anything from the collapse of Athenian piety that might be relative to understanding our own crisis of the West today.
Okay, go ahead, Okay, Well, I'm trying to think of my hit my Greek history, which I don't actually know that well.
I mean to make a long story short.
Does Athens fall apart when piety falls apart?
It doesn't fall apart.
But remember we're not that far off from Alexander. And you know, as our teacher Jaffi used to talk about the ancient polist collapses basically when the empires begin to rise. So you've got Persia, but really Alexander and then Rome.
And starting with Alexander, but then certainly with Rome, the ancient polis, with its own special gods of the city falls away, right, And so the rise of empire coincides with the rise of the first universal religion, which is Christianity, and so the collapse of the polis is in a way codominious with the collapse of the gods of the cities. And you know, if you think about the causes, there's a lot going on. As I said, there's already a kind of enlightenment, you have this rise of the sofas,
you have the presocratic philosophers, you have the tragedians. I mean, it's not the blame is not all on Socrates in the way Socrates is more of a symptom than a cause. There are already a lot of factors going on, uh to cause this crisis of faith, not just an Athens, but but particularly because it's the most cosmopolitan city.
Well, so I'm trying to piece it theeter to get to the problem of the current pope.
So, I mean, one way.
This is it's simple. In some ways it's simple. I would just say this, Stephen, I don't want to I don't want you to fall silent. Here's the difference. When you have a universal god, uh, you don't. You no longer have gods of the city, and so you either have universal rule. We sort of tried that and it didn't work out so well. And then you have, of course the Machiavelian uh revolt against that idea of of you know, a religious universal rule. That's probably a little
bit oversimplified. But what you have to get to today is looking at the American situation, where this whole thing with Trump is kind of silly. I suspect that it's a deliberate effort to separate the Catholics, who are very much in favor of Trump at the moment, from Trump and trying you know, I suspect that. But nevertheless, there are serious, serious things happening in the background. Why is it that Americans can in fact criticize the pope? Why can we criticize the Pope?
Well, I mean, yeah, well this is right. Sorry, this is the hypocrisy. Here is the left right now? You mentioned David Axelrod going to see the Pope. It sort of looks there's a lot of visible fingerprints here.
It looks like what they're trying to do is to.
Agitate against an institution that the left hates more than.
Any other institution. Right.
Oh, the Trump is attacking the Catholics like we do before breakfast. I mean, it's just breathtaking the hypocrisy and the opportunism of this right. But what I was thinking about is, Okay, you've a universal religion, the separation of you no longer have your political duty and your religious Dude, you're separate, righty, And the Pope will.
Unknowingly perhaps is.
Trying to erode that that distinction I think. I mean, he really is making a claim for how we should be ruled, and he may not claim the right to rule himself directly, but he's certainly very different again from Benedict, who remember his famous Regensburg.
Address that upset the Islamic world because what.
He say, essentially you're saying is the Islamic world does not recognize the logical political problem. They claim a universal religion with a universal uniform mode of rule and prescription, and you know, no individual liberty, no limited government.
Right.
So that's what I'm sort of getting at that this has blown this whole question up in ways that are hard to get.
Let me just say one thing, which is why the Pope's embrace of Islam and Muslim religion and so forth is so insidious.
I'm sorry if.
John the Second he he he fought against a true evil in the world. He didn't embrace communism. And I'm not even saying that there can't be some overtures by the Catholics to the Muslim world. But what the Pope is doing is just appalling and like I say, insidious, I think, but go ahead, please.
So I dashed out into left field talking about my book without really making the connection back to what we were talking about. But there is interesting. I mean, I'm not defending the pope, but if you go back to the ancient world, one reason that this crisis of piety that I'm talking about was so such a serious problem is again there had always the idea of separating church and state would have been inconceivable in the.
Class exactly.
To be patriotic and to be pious was essentially the same thing. Right to obey the law is to obey the laws that came from the gods of your city. And that's in a way what Strauss called natural politics.
Right.
The theological political problem takes a really dramatic turn with the rise of Christianity, which is not only universal so it transcends all political obligations, but also a political in a way, right, because secular authority is distinct. It's a religion not of obedience to the law, but of doctrine.
Right.
What matters is not that you follow the rituals and ceremonies of the city, but that you believe in certain theological tenets. And so in an odd way, although I'm not defending the pope, he's in a way reverting back to a kind of assumption that law and religion are not really separable. Right, How can you be the head of the church, How can you speak authority on matters
of morality and yet stay out of politics. Our American inclination, because of our heritage of the separation church and state, which did in fact solve a very serious problem, is in a way complicated because the natural human inclination, from the ancient's point of view, is to keep politics in religion together, and it's actually a hard thing to separate them.
Isn't that the problem at the heart of Lincoln's lyceum address as well? Yes, that you simply do not have the respect the tradition, the I don't know that even the awe of the law, if it does not have some sort of religious foundation. If you can, Jefferson, even can the liberties of a people be thought secure if we remove their only firm basis that these rights are the gift of God. But remember what Lincoln tries to
substitute it with. He calls it this political religion, religion called sober reason will have to be our guide from now on, you know. And yeah, so there's problems from both sides of it.
Yeah, so you know, I brought up that phrase from Lincoln once with David Horowitz. Of course, he reacted very badly to it for an entirely sensible reason. He was thinking of twentieth century political religion meant the messianic, utopian, totalitarian ideologies that fought against through the second half of his life right now, and what that represents in a certain way is also a dissolve of the theology, right.
I mean, look as not just Jaffa, but a lot of people recognizes that Marxism was a Christian heresy in a lot of ways. So that understanding of political religion in the twentieth century of the horrors, And I said, no, no, Lincoln is a completely It took a while for me to get through to him that no, it doesn't mean what you think it means. I understand why you think that, and why that phrase would be incendiary to someone who came out of the radical world as he did, right, and recognized it.
So there is that it's hard to recover.
Yeah, I mean, Lincoln draws. Of course, he says at one point all my political opinions ultimately come from Jefferson. And when I teach this question in the Clermont Fellowship programs, I always point out that the Framers solve this problem and try to fix it in a way that's quite ingenious. And this I learned from Jaffa by establishing what Jaffa called a natural theology. Right, And so in the Declaration,
you have the laws of nature and Nature's God. So there is a sacred transcendent authority, right, but it's a ecumenical it's not tied to any one particular church. So you can have a natural authority, you can have a divine or transcendent source of the law and still maintain the separation of church and state. But that's actually a complicated and difficult thing to do, and it depends, among
other things, on having a virtuous educated populace. And once you lose that, then the whole complicated structure of maintaining that really is hard to sustain.
And I think you can't just say that that it's a lack of an educated populace. Also have to I think I think you have to admit that the project of the left has been to destroy any possibility that any sort of religious influence or even some sort of you know, think about our great presidents like Regan and Lincoln. I don't know, you could Trump, you could maybe even include in this Jefferson, who had no who belonged to no specific religious sect. And for that reason we're able
to be somewhat more pro religious. But but you compare that to what the left has tried to do, which is destroy any possibility that that that there's a standard of goodness outside of the human self, and that the each human being can essentially be his or her own God. And I know that's really taking in a whole lot, but I think that that's part of why we've seen the destruction of any religious influence from the youngest possible ages. What it really does matter.
Remember a few decades ago when the ACLU devoted enormous energy to getting the words under God out of the pledge. And that's a you know, that's a good example, because the American conception of religious liberty did not preclude the recognition of some divine authority, right, it was not a violation of the separation of church and state to say
there is a God. I mean, it's in the Declaration of Independence, after all, Right, But as you say, Linda, the left has driven even this very minimal natural theology out of our public life, and it's very hard to sustain republican self government when that goes away.
Now, I just would mention it's a little bit off topic, but I wanted to talk about it a few weeks ago, and we just never got to it. And that is all of Right before Easter, there were lots and lots of news reports, news stories out there about how young people are sort of rejecting that nihilism and turning to They were talking specifically in most of the stories I heard about Catholicism, but much more traditional views of religion, not even like what was very popular you knew in
the sixties. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual, you know that sort of thing. Anyway, I just I think that the crisis we find ourselves in has probably caused a somewhat I don't know if i'd call it a reawakening, but it is interesting to see that some of that young people are sort of rejecting that nihilistic view will to power of the world obviously not wholesale.
But now the good news is John, you being absent today is listening and if his head hasn't.
Exploded by now, he's surely reaching for some hemlock. That's good, a right. Let's use that to pivot on to a couple other fun things. One is, I didn't get a chance to reread.
And assimilate your review of Laura Field's book or Michael's scorching review. So listeners, do you want to summarize the book briefly for listeners since we haven't mentioned it much, I don't think right.
Go ahead.
So Laura Field is this left wing Straussian who studied with some Straussian scholars and then bounced around a little bit in academia, but then sort of found a home, as I say in my review, a self appointed inquisitor writing for The Bulwark and other outlets, attacking all sorts of renegade opinions and excommunicating people from acceptable thought, in
particular the Claremont Institute. She's now written and published a book by I'm sorry to say, Princeton University Press called Furious Minds, which is a long, sustained, in many places, quite nasty attack on what she calls the Maga intellectuals. And the whole point is to delegitimize and again excommunicate all sorts of thinkers and institutions who do not bye
by which he regards as acceptable liberal opinion. It's it's really it's it's passed off as a work of scholarship published by a university press, but it's really does not engage in any kind of serious argument. It really cannot deal with disagreement and good faith. Uh, it doesn't try to understand people as they understand themselves. All the MAGA intellectuals, you know are dismissed as racists and sexists and and
haters of liberal democracy. So it's really it's actually quite a disappointing.
But well it's quite an ad hominem.
I mean you you quote her in your review talking about Harry Jaffa that I find Jappa's later writings unreadable.
Well, that's because she's too lazy to actually work through it.
And the other thing she mentioned, Yes, she picks on our you know, on us and our friends, but she also picks on the postliberals, Patanine and.
Rebewal, who's the and the national conservative convatives.
Now, then you could have written, even from a critical point of view, you could have written an interest somewhat interest book about their differences, and can.
These guys understand them first well.
Okay, exactly right, or at least try even if you didn't understand them.
Very well, you could have at least tried. And there's not even.
Attempt to that because there are some clear tensions there, right, I mean, I think we have serious disagreements with the post liberals, right.
And I really I think it may be one of the most important questions right now we as we're thinking about the anniversary of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and if it even matters,
who is it that can carry the torch forward? And it's not liberals at all, but the debates between conservatives about and mostly you know, our friends, about what is the appropriate way to understand the natural law basis of the Declaration of Independence that I think the future of the country depends upon it.
Now actually, now it just occurs to me that recurring briefly to our previous topic of the Pope. The post liberals they love the Pope. They always do it, right, I mean, because.
They're they're serious Catholics, and so what are the end But they're also by by Trump. I think somewhat, so they must be having They're being very silent about this.
I just realized as we're sitting here.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, watch one of the one of the really lamentable things about this book is she attacks people for contradictory reasons. I mean, she attacks the post liberals for neglecting the importance of Lockian protection of equal natural rights. But then you know, in the very next breath attacks Clermont for it supposedly hagiographic defense of America's the Lockian found it. So you know, she's not even consistent in her in her criticism.
I think the only thing I found consistent is just that she has fully embraced most aspects of left wing ideology and the argument that she's she's living. Her book is living proof of why women don't make good political philosophers. I'm sorry, but you can. I can be sexist in a way you two can't. You know, her book reminds me of a full length manuscript that is the functional equivalent of those women who who left got up and left in the middle of Larry Summer's speech at Harvard
and and and you know said, I almost fainted. I was so upset.
You know, you know, Mike's review Bring This brings this out much more than I than mine does. It's a fair criticism because she herself talks all about her psychological state and her emotions and how she felt about this, that and the other thing. So she invites this criticism that she wrote this book as as an emotional woman, which is the point that that Mike makes in his review.
But one of my favorite parts of Mike's review, and I go in for things like this is she refers to us as Claire Monter's.
As Mike points out, no one uses that.
You can say clairemont conservative, but really we're Claire Monsters proudly. What's wrong with her? I mean that would seemed like a layup, but.
No, that's not. That's how sort of okay.
It's it's a kind of faux objectivity. I think that she's going for there.
Right, Maybe yeah, she does. She does do that over and over again, pretend, Oh, look, I went to an AEI conference. I was once a right winger.
Well, but that that one that's worth mentioning because it wasn't just any old AI conference. It was a conference to celebrate Harvey Mansfield. And she talked about Oh, I couldn't wait to get out of the suppressive air.
Seriously, I mean, and then then her nasty little comments about Harvey and his wife.
Oh yes, Mike picks up on that that is just his younger wife after his previous wife died of cancer.
Yeah, well, I mean talk about.
Okay, Yeah, I mean she got the vapors from listening to these notorious right wing maniacs like Bill Crystal.
And I mean, come on, I wonder.
If I wonder she's some sort of re embraced Bill Crystal.
Probably, Oh, I think they've been on like podcasts and stuff together, right, right, it's a I mean, I know you've all I like him, but I would never confuse him with a firebrand, right, Usually when he goes in the room, the fires go out.
Yeah, and even Harvey himself is pretty conservative. He's also very genteel. You know, he never says anything really incendiary or over the line, although he has very strong opinion, so you know.
Or if he says that, people don't understand it.
Right.
So if so, if a conference at AI in honor of Harvey Mansfield is you know, beyond the pale, that shows you where she's coming from.
Yeah, well that's probably all we need to say about that. But well, let's put it this way. I have this vague.
It's a vague idea that's not even an idea yet. It may better be a concept looking for an outline. But as what he Allen once put it, I think, and it's I'm thinking about some of the next generation of young thinkers, some of them Eustrassius pulled philosophers, some just decent thinkers and in other disciplines.
And what I notice.
About them is there's a kind of detachment from the crisis of the West.
I'll put it that directly.
It was very cute for us when we were coming along in the eighties because that was the climax of the Cold War again, the nuclear freeze, the theological political problem we've already referred to with the pope and the bishops.
And all the rest.
Uh.
And now I see a lot very smart. I like some of these younger guys. I'm not going to mention any names, but you know, we both know some of these people very well.
And I think they're very smart. But they tend to remind me of Seth Bernardetti. They want to do sort of pure philosophical abstract Exte Jesus and texts. Not there's anything wrong with that in and of itself, but there seems to be a lack of this. Well, Lucretia would say thumos or famos whichever which.
Do Yeah, I see themis, but I would before Glenn gives a serious answer to this, I would say that maybe they're just trying to distinguish themselves from Manisphere side of suppose that the crazy nutty right wing like the guy who got taken out. I don't remember some influencer, some Manisphere influencer, but if you read about some of those nutjob young men, do you know that that care. I can't say what the guy was saying when when somebody just punched him and took him out, but it
was something along the lines of that. I'll say the last part, which is you shouldn't be putting your your man force, your manly life force into a sock, and if you do, you should get the death penalty.
Look, I do think we want to make a distinction between some of the people we call the alt right, or people like Athenian Stranger.
We both know him a little bit.
Yeah, he's very engaged he's very serious about what's wrong with things, and they're in the bodybuilding and masculinity.
I'm not thinking of them as much. I'm thinking of the people who are sort of aloof from it.
And partly I have actual serious interpretive questions to generated all this.
But am I just taking crazy pills or I know what you're talking about?
So I think in the case of the Straussians in particular, you know, they're too serious and they're too well educated to leap over into the BAP world, right, Yes, bronze h pervert, which is a little juvenile and a little extreme. You know, they thought seriously about political questions. But I think, you know, I'm a little reluctant to say this, but I think their view is the West has declined so far.
They're pessimistic about the possibility of any real political action informed by serious, thoughtful political philosophy, and so they retreat in a way into the study of texts. I mean, during the Cold War, the fight was real, you know, and by the way, you know, we won. It was a fight worth fighting. It was, you know, the seriousnessness of it was evident. Now I think, you know, for anyone under forty you know, they never even experienced this directly.
And you know, they've seen the decline in the culture, They've seen the disintegration of our political institutions. There's no clear external enemy to fight, and so I think that they just disengage from politics because they don't see a fight that they can bring their political philosophy background into.
I remember reading a year or so ago an argument that said, these young people, because they've never experienced, say, the Reagan era, the Trumpet era is a bit chaotic, shall we say, But because they've never actually seen what I would call maybe good conservativism, They've never that there's nothing in politics that they can that they have experienced that they could embrace. It's much like what you're saying.
But it's also a lack of experience with any of those embrace you know, the conflict of the century kind of this Western civilization versus world annihilation, whatever it might be. There aren't those great problems that they've ever had any experience fighting on behalf of or four or against right, and so they don't have that experience.
Yeah, I think Trump has changed that a little. I mean, I do know quite a few Straussians who are more right wing than you'd suspect, and are even more supportive of Trump than you might suspect, and keep that to themselves a little bit for various reasons. I think the phenomenon is these a lot of these people came to the age you might say, between Reagan and Trump, right, and so they came of age in the worst wishy
washy part of the Republic. And so they didn't see anything in American politics admirable or noble to attach themselves to, because all they saw was the wishy washy block way to put it. And so it's interesting, you know, a few years down the line, whether Trump will change that, and if there'll be a turn response to the Trump phenomenon.
Yeah, well there's a Then also an interpretive question comes to mind, and this is another half forne thought, and I'm not sure I'm even on the right track. But so, first of all, we're against radical historicism. We're against interpreting the thinkers of the.
Past according to our own horizons today. Okay. On the other hand, I don't think Straus. I always have a hard time making in my mind how to express this.
I don't think Strauss was against understanding the context. I mean especially the blatonic dialogue, so the setting is always.
Very sure, right.
So it's not that that's a complaint I heard from well meaning, friendly people like Fred Siegel, a historian.
He said, no, And you know, we've talked about Roger Scrutin this way too, right.
They both say it just that methodology, not just esoteric writing, but also just the isolation on the text, letting it speak for itself as a timeless truth.
That seems a historical to me.
And I'm thinking that that's not a correct understanding, I think, but there is something to it to the extent that to what you just said.
What strikes me is during those Cold.
War years, there was an urgency of things that made an extra seriousness to our increase. They were necessarily going to be more political in the high sense of the word, and there wasn't time to fiddle around with a.
Couple of verses of sophocles about beauty or something right, And that seems to be this is the missing.
Part of the soul of so many younger people who want to be intellectual or serious about political philosophy. I don't know if I'm right about that, but it does mean that to what extent.
Do we then look back.
At Strauss because look, I mean you read the autobiographical preface about it being a Jew in Weimar, Germany, and then all the things he talked in other words, I can't imagine.
I'm not sure you put Trowser a time machine.
But I don't see him as successors writing something today like his introduction to the City in Man, which where the overlay of the Cold War was so central to it while he was transcending it in lots of movie.
Okay, there's a mouthful. Is that you're not in your head.
I'm not shaking your head, So I'm not making total nonsense.
I don't know. I think that's all true.
And you know, I did a piece for Perspectives on political Science not that long ago, and it's not just the introduction of City Man. But then if you compare also the introduction to liberalism mantion in modern you can see a progression in Strauss's thought and he actually becomes a little bit more pessimistic about the crisis of the West, and he's he's engaged in looking at policy issues. He
talks about contemporary political controversies. So it's funny how historicism is so easily misunder It doesn't mean ignoring historical context.
That's silly.
The real thing is does the truth change according to right? Is the truth historically contingent? It doesn't mean ignoring I mean, one of the reasons I'm writing this book is I'm interested in the context. What's going on in Athens when Plato was writing, and that matters. The only real danger is assuming that Plato couldn't have said anything true, or that whatever truth he discovered is you know, trapped in
classical ethics. That's but it certainly doesn't. Yeah, that's the problem with the stories is it doesn't mean ignoring context in which things happens.
Stress had always said the opposite, always said the opposite. But but if you cannot, if you cannot discover in ancient Athens that what might have been the factors that have that would have led ultimately to the rejection of the gods is the lawgivers of the city and all of that. What that meant, What I think that means for us today is then Athens doesn't matter because nothing, you know, it is historically contingent, and there is no truth that we can learn from Athens and apply to today.
But of course good Straussians know better than than coming to that conclusion easily, I guess, is the way I would say, because we otherwise, what's the point other than reminds me of the end of the Fukiyama's book, you know, where now that we've solved all the problems of history, what do we do? We have these fancy Japanese tea setups, and we just work to make sure every tiny detail it is right, because nothing else matters right. That's why
Athens matters right right. And you know, I'm patting you on the back for doing it.
Just a very prosaic observation, which you know all of your listeners have heard many times. But it's been a long time since we've had a real statesman in the West. You know, we tend to see Lincoln and Churchill as coming from two vastly different worlds, but they're not that far apart in history. And you know, it's been many, many decades when we've had a statesman of that caliber. And I think that also leads to a kind of
disillusionment with politics. That amazing thing that Churchill wrote that Strauss wrote about Churchill, that he shows the political phenomena. He shows what meglosukia can mean. And when you don't have any example of that in living memory, you know it affects people.
But I would go one step further and say, what distinguishes one group, Maybe it's the Western Staosians, I'm not quite sure, from the other Straussians. Is the belief that that that idea of statesmanship is in and of itself a matter of prudence. And you can embrace a Trump because only someone with Trump's what should we call them, only Trump's chaos, only Trump's bomb bombastic nature, only his narcissism. In many ways, it would allow him to do what he's trying to do.
You know something to that.
I mean, that's why I've compared him to de gaul a few times, similar personal characteristics. Right now, you said something, Oh, by the way you use the P word, there are three subjects banned when John's and our presence.
The Clean Air Act, natural law, and prudence. We've done all three. So his head's now exploded for the third time. You said something a minute ago.
You know Strauss commenting on contemporary issues. I know he does a lot of that in the transcripts of his classes. You've been reading a lot of those, I think, yes, have it just struck me that there could be a great article written about Strauss on the issues, drawing from.
All that I have thought about that, I mean the transcripts. You're wonderful he talks to even about television shows. Yeah, he was like, as you know, from gun Smoke last week, because he loved gun Smoke, Perry Mason and other things.
And he does bring that up.
And it would be wonderful to call all those out and put them together and see. You know something I pointed out. Also, people forget Strauss signed a letter endorsing Richard Nixon in nineteen seventy two along with a few other so he was not quite entirely as removed from politics as some people seem to think.
That's right, Yeah, and.
You give him a little credit for some modesty. Also, I told Steve that the guy that I sent you the article about the from the guy who wrote the stuff about the decoration of Independence, that it was good marketing but otherwise nonsense. And I told you I was offended that, you know, shut up, go fix your own good country and of London. I'm sorry, And you know, so I think that to some extent, the idea that Strauss would have commented extensively on American politics would have
been presumptuous. Does that make sense?
Now?
His best student, in my opinion, was probably the very best commentator on American politics ever. And I don't get the sense that Strauss ever disavowed him for that. But is that an impossible view of the matter. There's nothing he was going to be able to do about German politics, right but where it mattered, and he said it, he said it mattered, and you know, in natural rite and
history it mattered. But for him to have been a commentator about American politics I think would have been again a bit presumptuous.
Well maybe my sense of it, you think then?
My sense of it is he thought that he would more effective and exactly the mode that he operated, which was teaching right and making people think.
And I think maybe he had some confidence, especially as time went on in the fifties that.
There's a big debate ab whether he understood himself as founding a real school, and some people say he did, some people say didn't. But at some point he had to see that, Oh, I see how this is going to play out? Is the fact that you know, the book he was assembled of essays about his students, most of whom I think this is fair to say, concentrated on American politics, whereas he did very little of that himself.
Right right, right now.
It is surprising how many of the students were interested in America and wrote about it. Yeah, No, I think you're both right. Strauss certainly didn't make any sort of principled stand, you know, opposing any discussion of policy issues. But he thought he had other fish to fry, and that was rescuing political philosophy from the oblivion into which it had been cast by value free social science, right,
and that was the crucial thing to do. There's a wonderful passage I wish I could quote from mem in one of his lectures, where he says that true Socratic philosophy is rising above the hurly burly and the vanity fair of every day and looking at the permanent questions. And I think that's what he wanted to direct his students' minds.
To let me ask you one closing question here, and then we'll do a wrap up. And it gets back to something that Lucretian I've been involved in lately, we did this goofy little debate with a Saving Elephants blog people on Burke and Strauss's chapter on Burke.
What's your opinion about I don't really go through the whole argument of the chapter.
But why do you think he decided to pick on Burke at the end of the book instead of sey Kant or somebody else.
Because really it's kind of when he comes back to the.
Subject in a certain way in the three Waves of Modernity and what is Political Philosophy, he drops.
Burke at all.
He already ever talks about Burke ever again. So why, I mean, what's your theory of that? Do you have a theory or a rumor?
I've actually sometimes had this discussion with John Marine and John's theory, which I'll offer with credit to him, with the proviso that I may not be giving it to justice. Is Strauss is pointing to the problem of conservatism, and that sounds like an odd thing to say. But what he means is am I allowed to use this abstract metaphor?
The second cave I.
Think Strauss is pointing to the crisis of the West is that we've descended into a kind of ideological politics. Both reason and revelation are under attack, and so he points to Burke in the sense that we can't be conservatives in the ordinary sense because the crisis of the West means that we have to resurrect political philosophy. We we can't simply be in a mode of conservating, since
reason and revelation are inner attack. And so I think what he means is the Burkean mode is not adequate to the crisis of the time.
Okay, I could go with that. I think I probably agree with that.
I definitely agree.
With that. You have some baton here.
You'll stop me before I get very far. Some politics we didn't get to, but our readers, our listeners will be completely fluent in newsom reinstates the death penalty for anyone caught investigating fraud. I know that sometimes since I get them both now, it can be Mandonmie looking into whether he can taxt residents of other cities. The Somali community of Minnesota would like to remind America that Wednesday was tax Day. Yeah, yeah, those are my favorite, though
this one. You had to be have been paying a little attention to the news. Hi Barack yells Biden as car passes House with the lawn jockey. Sorry, okay Trump, Trump complains he's being crucified for comparing himself to Jesus. And then this was my favorite. I told Steve, Catholics find common ground with Protestants in ignoring what the Pope says.
Master the time.
Well, without John here, I've got to do both parts of the ending, which is always drank your whiskey and eat buy more books because you should. And finally, you have been listening to The Three Whiskey Happy Hour, the only podcast devoted to single molt whiskey, metaphysics and the higher end of Sydney Sweeney's studies. We're sponsored by the Cimitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, produced
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Leave the gets in a child bringing gets him them say that sorry kids back there.
And Ricochet join the conversation.
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