Liberalism and movement conservatism are both essentially conservative forces right now

Thoughts after reading Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History

Hello friends. One thing you may have noted is my tendency to get converted by the last thing I read. Three weeks ago, I was like, this Nietzsche guy has all the answers. Two weeks ago, it was Freud. This week, it's Leo Strauss!

To a large part of the left, Leo Strauss is the devil. He’s a University of Chicago philosophy professor who's viewed as the intellectual forebear for modern right-wing nationalism (a la National Conservatism in the US or Fidesz in Hungary). Moreover, his style of esoteric reading (he thought that many philosophers didn't fully spell out the implications of their teachers, because they were worried about being persecuted) encourages his opponents to read all kinds of unsavory stuff into his own writing.

According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e., regarding their soundness or unsoundness; our ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and hence blind preferences

—Leo Strauss

I've been reading his Natural Right and History, which is a combination of a history of the concept of natural law (i.e. that there is a higher law that can be used to judge whether our real-world laws are just or unjust) and his attempt to rehabilitate the concept. It's certainly not as direct as it could be. You're about halfway through the book before you realize that, to him, the real natural law isn't the natural rights model of the Enlightenment (everyone has the right to safety, health, autonomy, etc)--the real natural law springs from classical notions about the ideal human being. The ideal human being is the person who embodies certain virtues: magnaminity, kindness, courage, wisdom, etc. And the natural law is the law of a state (a largely ideal, impossible, utopian state) that would encourage the development of ideal human beings.

My favorite quote about Leo Strauss comes from Mortimer Adler, another University of Chicago professor (I’m quoting here from Alex Beam’s A Great Idea At The Time).

“[Bloom] and his master, Leo Strauss, teach the Great Books as if they were teaching the truth. But when I teach them, I want to understand the errors,” Adler railed, as if public television viewers had the faintest idea who the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss was, or what errors Adler was talking about. “They indoctrinate their students with the ‘truth’ they find in the books,” Adler continued. “Strauss reads Plato and Aristotle as if it was all true, i.e., women are inferior, and some men are destined to be slaves.”

Leo Strauss is very associated with the modern right-leaning conception of the Great Books--the idea that you read these old books specifically to be educated about these ideals that modern society ignores. Reading Strauss has allowed me to decode a lot of other stuff that I've read in various books by right-wing and Christian writers. Like in The Liberating Arts, when they talk about the search for truth, beauty, and goodness, they mean very specifically that there is a conception of these virtues, rooted in human nature, that we can learn from the Great Books.¹ Chris Rufo uses the same rhetoric.²

Their view is these books contain some determinate content: they teach people to understand the telos, the purpose, of humanity. From these books you gain a sense of the ideal human being. But of course Strauss himself did not think that Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau could teach truth, beauty, and goodness (except perhaps through their errors)—he believed only the classical Greeks could do that. By limiting his Great Books to a specific tradition (the Aristotleian one, running from Classical Greece through the medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions, and continuing, in the modern day, only within the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition), he builds a much stronger argument that there is some determinate lesson to be learned from these books.

Using the Great Books as his touchstones has three fascinating effects, rhetorically. First, it saves him from having to prove anything. Like, he doesn't demonstrate that human flourishing is synonymous with certain virtues: he merely explains that this was how the ancients conceptualized human flourishing, and he goes on to contrast this with how Hobbes and Locke conceptualized virtue, and the differences between each, etc. The second effect is you're never totally certain what he believes. You gain a sense over time, from his rhetoric, that he considers certain ideas better than others, but he's never really explicating his own ideas: he's always just describing those of someone else. It strongly resembles medieval Scholasticism: a Scholastic wasn't going to tell you what HE thought about the eternity of the universe, oh no--instead he'd tell you what Aristotle and Cicero and St. Augustine and Tertullian and Origen thought and try to divine a consensus. Strauss doesn't attempt a consensus, which is to his benefit, because he's free to heavily critique certain conceptions of natural law, while giving free rein to other conceptions. He can stack the deck, in other words, making one ancient's arguments seem much better than another one's.

But his most interesting move is the esoteric reading. This, I think, is rooted in an underappreciated aspect of Strauss, which is that he viewed himself as being engaged in the same activity as all of the ancient, medieval, and Enlightenment philosophers. He thought that all philosophers, by virtue of their profession, tended to want the same thing: they wanted to be left alone and to be free to contemplate the world in peace. Thus, when he reads, say, Locke, he imagines himself living in Locke's time, and he thinks that he knows Locke's aim, which is always, first and foremost, to be left alone.

In the common view the fact is overlooked that there is a class interest of the philosophers qua philosophers, and this oversight is ultimately due to the denial of the possibility of philosophy. Philosophers as philosophers do not go with their families. The selfish or class interest of the philosophers consists in being left alone, in being allowed to live the life of the blessed on earth by devoting themselves to investigation of the most important subjects.

Therefore, he reads all of these works through the lens of "Was the philosopher worried that someone would disturb their peace?" This means that whenever there is an aporia or contradiction in their thought, his point of view is not that the philosopher made a mistake, but that there is something here that they are purposefully not spelling out, because it would've been troubling.

This method of reading is fruitful because it makes you give the philosopher as much credit as possible--it makes you assume that every sentence, every point, is there for a reason. But it also gives you room to discard some of what's there and to develop other points to their logical conclusion. It's very similar to how theologians read the Bible: they don't read it, as secular people do, as a mash-up document created by consensus and written by people (like St. Paul) who clearly had no idea who Jesus had been or what he'd done in his earthly life. Like, they might view it as being those things, but the theologian also views it as divinely inspired--so even the contradictions must have some meaning.

My sympathies are certainly aroused by Strauss’s vision of natural law. I think human beings do possess considerable agreement about what constitutes virtue and what constitutes vice. You could survey a hundred people, and all one hundred of them would say that courage, charity, honesty, and prudence are virtues, for instance. A lot of the so-called disagreement between systems of morality is really the disagreement between systems of law--between different penal codes and different social mores--it's not truly a disagreement about what is good and what is bad. And I also agree that liberal democracy has a tendency to flatten or ignore certain virtues, particularly those associated with prudence and self-restraint. Strauss says that liberalism tends to extol peaceableness above other virtues, with predictable consequences:

If virtue is identified with peaceableness, vice will become identical with that habit or that passion which is per se incompatible with peace because it essentially and, as it were, of set purpose issues in offending others; vice becomes identical for all practical purposes with pride or vanity or amour-propre rather than with dissoluteness or weakness of the soul. In other words, if virtue is reduced to social virtue or to benevolence or kindness or “the liberal virtues,” “the severe virtues” of self-restraint will lose their standing.

Strauss writes that Enlightenment political philosophers wanted to create a regime that could be implemented on Earth, one that would be true for all people, everywhere--that's why they based it on mankind's most basic desires--the desire for autonomy and self-preservation. Whereas classical philosophers didn't imagine that there was one correct regime--they thought all regimes ought to aim at the perfection of mankind, but that what a given people might need in order to achieve that perfection--to be brought closer to virtue--might differ widely.

This rings true. Clearly secular liberal democracy is not what all people need. I'm sure we can all think of one recent example where a twenty-year experiment with secular liberal democracy was replaced by a authoritarian religious regime that seems to have sprung more organically from the needs and desires of the people being governed.

I'm not sure that I buy the notion that Strauss himself wrote esoterically. He didn't want to become an object of public controversy, I am sure, but he was pretty up-front about the idea that he did not hold egalitarian views. Some people were more fit to rule than others.³ I think that he, like the ancients, believed that the best practical form of rule was rule by an aristocracy, precisely because a small class of people who are expected to exercise power can be educated from an early age in truth, beauty, and goodness. Our current society has an elite that is much too large--no individual person can grow up expecting to wield power. Even people born into wealth and power, like Donald Trump, don't necessarily feel a sense of ownership over the system at large (although others, like Mitt Romney and Al Gore, both the kids of successful politicians, clearly have more of a sense of social responsibility and a stronger sense of integrity).

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I really enjoyed reading this book. I feel the way a member of the ancien regime must've felt after reading The Social Contract--Oh! So this is where all the trouble came from!

Over time, Straussianism seems to have fed into common-good conservatism, or what I'd call Christian nationalism: the notion that the role of government is not to preserve individual rights or freedoms, but to protect the common good. As Strauss puts it, the ancients felt that a human being could only exist within a society. To talk of individual rights was meaningless--man could not flourish individually, but only as a part of society. Hierarchy was integral to the classical conception of the state: some ruled and some served, and the rulers ought to guide and shape the populace so they would increase in virtue.

This is a bit scary, but it's sort of something that even left-liberals believe, no? Like, we dress it up with the idea of negative externalities (the notion that some things have a negative cost for society that's not accounted for in their price), but what is a soda tax other than the elite attempting to make the populace more virtuous?

The idea that the government (or, to use Strauss's term, the regime, which is more or less synonymous with "ruling class") should attempt to shape the populace and make them more virtuous is a pretty creepy idea, but there's a way in which it seems unavoidable. We make decisions, using government policy, that encourage a certain life. Look at, for instance, the student loan system: the government systematically encourages people to go to college. Look at the mortgage system: the government encourages people to buy houses. The government encourages people to invest in their future, because it wants to promote a certain kind of bourgeois lifestyle. If it didn't do those things, we would have a society that looked very different.

Edmund Burke disagreed with the classics in regard to the genesis of the sound social order because he disagreed with them in regard to the character of the sound social order. As he saw it, the sound social or political order must not be “formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design” because such “systematical” proceedings, such “presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances,” would be incompatible with the highest possible degree of “personal liberty”.

The book closes with a critique of Edmund Burke. While Strauss lauds Burke for his practicality, with the other hand he criticizes Burke for refusing to attempt to reengineer society. One hallmark of Strauss's intellectual descendents is their critique of movement conservatism, which is almost wholly concerned with personal rights and personal freedom. In this, it stands directly opposed to common-good conservatism.

Reading this book, it strikes me that left-liberalism and movement conservatism (what common-good conservatives nowadays lambaste as 'right liberalism') are essentially both conservative movements right now. It is clear that a large part of America's population and of its intellectual class want dramatic changes in our way of life, but both right- and left-liberalisms are united in our intuition that, you know, America has worked out pretty well! Like, it's got problems, but we've done okay. For a while there it looked like maybe Europe had things figured out, what with social democracy and everything, but America's recent economic growth and comparative lack of racial tension (despite far greater ethnic and racial diversity) give us a lot of reason to be proud. Americans have a worse quality of life, in many ways, than Europe does, but in 2023, our society seems healthier, more robust, more innovative, and certainly more productive than Europe.

Right- and left-liberals also share similar intuitions about human nature. We both think that: a) human nature is pretty intractable; and b) human beings are more good than bad. To take the first point, liberalism, as a political philosophy, grew out of the West's inability to resolve religious differences. England, in particular, could never figure out how to make everyone the same faith. Other countries only solved their religious differences through expulsion of Protestants (Austria and France are key examples here). It's just really hard to force people to change their minds about things!

And when you DO manage to successfully crush the human spirit, you destroy the spirit of innovation that makes nations prosperous and powerful. Look at the Soviet Union, look at North Korea. Very successful at preventing dissent, very bad at being economically productive.

To a large extent, liberal democracy has survived through victory on the battlefield. Another conservative book I've read recently is Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. Schmitt, I should note, was a literal Nazi.⁴ Not a literal Nazi like Tucker Carlson is a literal Nazi. Not even a literal Nazi the way the Proud Boys are literal Nazis. No, he was a literal card-carrying Nazi. He was a leading political philosopher and legal theorist in Weimar Germany--after the Nazis took power in 1933, he loudly came out in support of Hitler and of the purging of Jewish people from the legal profession.

Anyway, shortly before all that, he published this book called The Concept of the Political, which is a critique of liberalism. He says that liberalism has no concept of the political, and therefore tries to steal things from the realm of the political and put them into other realms. Most notably, through its concept of individual rights, liberalism takes issues of governance and policy out of the realm of the political and puts them into the realm of the law.

I'm going to make a terrible botch of summarizing Schmitt's argument, but he says that politics is the realm where different groups of people fight over what is right and what is wrong. He says that whereas the determining value in art is the difference between the beautiful and ugly, and in morality it's between good and evil, in politics the determining value is between friend and enemy. The political arena is where core values are hammered out on the basis, essentially, of pure power. Whichever group fights longer and harder and more violently and is more willing to die for its values--they are the group that will win.

This is a concept of the political that superordinates conventional politics.⁵ Indeed, liberal democratic politics are an attempt to tame the political arena. In liberal democratic politics, any view is tolerated so long as it doesn't lead to violence, but because the liberal democratic regime prioritizes personal safety it is unable to ask people to die in its defense, and, therefore, in liberal democracies people are unable to practice true politics.

You get the idea.

The ironic thing is...democracies seem to fight wars pretty well! America and Britain had no trouble asking people to fight and die for them, and people responded to that call. If you look at history, you'll note that in the pre-modern era, most states were extremely weak--participatory forms of government were associated with greater ease in collecting taxes and levying troops. For instance, in the 1200s, Venice, a republic, was the only state in all of Europe to have a standing navy! The organizational apparatus needed to project force was much easier to maintain if it had an element of free participation. The same seems to have been the case in Republican Rome--it was a city state that, because of the ancient settlement between patricians and plebs, could raise citizen armies much more easily than its neighbors. And when that settlement broke down, in the Augustan era, Rome weakened and ceased to expand (the only two provinces added through conquest after Augustus's death were, I believe, Britain in 45 AD and Dacia a hundred years later--Dacia was, of course, also the first to be lost a hundred years after that).⁶

The Soviet Union was not a democracy, and it was the lynchpin of victory in World War II, but the Soviet Union itself, in the long run, couldn’t motivate its own people (or even its own leaders) to fight for it. Now, with the slowdown in China, we are seeing the incredible possibility that America might continue to remain the world's most productive large country for many years to come. Nor is it at all unclear that America is unable or unwilling to defend itself militarily. Maybe there's some legs to this liberal democracy notion!

I don't want to engage in triumphalism--that is far from merited. America has problems--biggest among them the fact that some large percentage of Americans may very well be willing to use violence in order to change our form of government! We will be put to our own test of whether liberal America is capable of defending itself. I strongly suspect, when push comes to shove, that liberal America is capable of dying for its beliefs.

Right-liberals are a bit of a rump party at this point. Although they dominate right-wing journals and intellectual circles, it's clear that when you elect a Republican government, you are voting for a government that plans to legislatively restrict individual rights, especially those regarding expressive freedom, medical privacy, sexual morality, and religious freedom. Left-liberals, on the other hand, are firmly in charge of the Democratic party. There is no major move on the part of Democrats to legislatively restrict opposing viewpoints. However, this is a place where Strauss might be careful to distinguish between government and "regime."

The reigning "regime"--the class of people who dominate the civil service, universities, and, increasingly, corporate management--are, in the opinion of many common-good conservatives, bent on imposing left-wing viewpoints onto the populace. This is why Christopher Rufo and his ilk feel justified in claiming that left-liberals are just as powerless as right-liberals.

It's unclear to what extent they actually believe this claim. But if it was true, I would regard that effort as comprehensively failed: the country has rejected extreme-left viewpoints, particularly those surrounding prison and police abolition.

The lesson here would be that it's not possible to force something onto people. They will stubbornly persist in refusing to change their views.

Which brings us to the second point that right- and left-liberals share. We both believe that people are capable of choosing for themselves what is good for them. The critique of liberalism seems to be that, given unlimited personal choice, people choose badly. Both men and women seem frustrated by the modern dating world. People don't go to church, have weaker community ties, and yet don't find work particularly fulfilling. Depression and suicide are way up, etc. Central to Strauss’s viewpoint is the idea that under a democracy, people will not choose what is good, because most people do not have an awareness of the good.

The right- and left-liberal both believe that greater freedom is preferable to less freedom. There are only two points of difference here. The first concerns racial prejudice and misogyny: the left-liberal thinks these should be banned by law. And the second concerns economic freedom, which the left-liberal also thinks should be secured by law. Both right- and left-liberals don't really advance positive programs for human development: we don't know what people should do with their freedom--that really isn't a concern of government--we simply trust that people will do well.

I think what Strauss and his ilk fail to recognize is that technological change has simply brought about greater personal autonomy. You cannot live in a modern technological society AND successfully limit peoples' expressive and personal freedom. You can do the latter, but at the cost of harming economic growth and innovation, which eventually puts you behind the curve when it comes to political conflict (in the Schmittian sense), so that you ultimately lose whatever wars still exist to be fought between nations and peoples.

Which is a long way of saying that, whatever its flaws, liberalism may simply prove to be superior than the alternatives.

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But I don't know for a fact that that is true. I simply suspect it to be true. I suspect that everything good we have in modern society is somehow tied to the personal freedom we experience. And I don't think it makes sense to tamper with something that's 'worked' pretty well for a pretty long time.

That is an essentially conservative impulse. It's not grounded in any revolutionary ethos or any grand promises about the future. It's grounded in a fear that we will lose what we have. It’s this faith in providence—in the idea that the natural development in human institutions is superior to their planned development—that Strauss criticizes in Edmund Burke.⁷

I'm not totally sure that a winning coalition can be built around that fear. I think that Biden is essentially the embodiment of that fear. He won the nomination in 2020 because of the Black vote. People of color feared the kinds of changes another four years of Trump would bring, and I think ultimately fear of another four years of Trump barely edged out the desire for greater change. But I'm not sure that enough people in 2024 really have that conservative impulse.

Indeed, what we've come to realize is that for most Republicans, movement conservatism was simply a way of idealizing a time before racial and gender equality. They didn't really care about individual rights or freedom--they simply hated what government power had come to stand for--rule by their enemies. And it's the same now for Democrats. I and most Democrats, I think, simply fear being ruled by our avowed enemies. There is more at stake, and I think that what I believe is objectively correct, and that it would be in the best interest of all Americans, but the fact is, I have come to feel that the Republican party is now aiming at the destruction of myself and people like myself. Our difference is not over policy; it is an existential difference. Politics has come to feel very life-or-death.

If we see California as a symbol of the old regime, and Florida as a symbol of the new one, then how can we imagine the conflict between the two regimes ending? One or the other will need to fail decisively. I think that's why California is so often portrayed as a failed state, and San Francisco as a violent dystopia. I had some friends visit recently--they'd lived in the UK for ten years, and they wandered around the Mission, trying to see if it really had gotten more dangerous than it was when they lived there. (They couldn't really see a difference.) They said even in Europe there is a fascination with SF’s purported disorder, and I think it stems from the idea that perhaps rule by the meritocratic elite--what Marxists call the PMC--has failed on its own terms, creating a city that is uninhabitable.

In the struggle between regimes, the new regime has acted decisively to handicap the old one, most notably with Trump's tax reform, which, by ending the state and local tax exemption, tremendously increased the tax burden on households in high-tax blue states. The old regime, on the other hand, hasn't acted to curb federal spending in red states (blue states in America essentially subsidize the red). But I think federal involvement in state and local affairs is sufficiently minimal that each regime more or less has the ability to govern on its own.

I don't really know who will win. The new regime certainly won't ood for people like me. The Straussian notion of common-good government is relatively abstract and non-partisan, but if we say that the aim of government is to bring out humanity’s innate telos--to make sure that each person is able to fulfill their purpose and be as excellent as possible--then there is absolutely no way this doesn't end with a reinstatement of traditional gender roles. Any attempt to theorize about what "natural human flourishing" involves for women will, almost unavoidably, end in reducing women to our biological capacity for motherhood. Ultimately it's not impossible that in the long-run a return to gender essentialism will be positive for trans women, so long as we conform to the gender role that's expected of women--the idea that someone can be essentially a woman in a way that goes beyond their biology is deeply attractive to a certain kind of reactionary, and perhaps we would end up with a situation like in Iran, which performs more sex changes per capita than any country besides Thailand. But in the meantime, common-good conservatism also has no place for gender and sexual minorities--we are regarded as a deviation from mankind's true telos.

Moreover, inherent in the Straussian critique of democracy—the idea that the mass of people is uneducated about and unable to choose the good—is the promise of oppression. The mass of people will need to be reeducated. This isn’t even a case of the majority oppressing the minority—it is precisely the majority who cannot be trusted with power. This is about the majority signing over their sovereign power to a small number of people, who now have the power to oppress the majority for its own good. This is the theory (insofar as it has one) behind “consensual” authoritarian regimes in Hungary, India, and other places (i.e. regimes that are popular, but illiberal)

If the new regime fails it will either do so on the battlefield or because it fails in it's own promises to it's people. Oppression of women and racial and sexual minorities is part of the program, but I don't know if the supporters of this regime understand the extent to which their own freedom will be abridged. It's always possible they will come to their senses and decide that mere victory isn't worth a materially worsened condition.

Moreover, I think it's possible that the new regime will fail in Schmittian terms. What happens after you promise greatness, but you fall economically and culturally behind your self-appointed enemies? At that point, violence of some sort becomes inevitable, but is the new regime really capable of winning a violent confrontation? In the modern world generally the more economically productive and populous power is the one that wins a war, particularly a defensive one.

I don't think it'll come to violence--I simply think the new regime will suffer a spiritual collapse, as the Soviet Union did, once they realize that they simply have no path to victory.

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All of this, of course, leaves aside the question of how to renew liberalism.

It’s not a question I have the ability or desire to answer. Strauss believes in personal freedom, he simply believes it should only be given to those who deserve it—to philosophers, in other words. Personally, I think personal freedom is great. I like being able to do what I like. I don’t think it’s particularly harmed me. The crisis of depression and meaninglessness that illiberal philosophers like Vermeule or Deneen or Schmitt see as being endemic to liberalism isn’t something that I really understand.

Personally, while I agree that becoming virtuous should be the goal of every person, I see that goal that as inextricable from personal freedom. Hedonism is meaningless and certainly not virtuous, but if you punish hedonism, you don’t create virtuous people, you just create thwarted hedonists. Indeed, the fact that sex, alcohol, drug use, are all on the decline among youth despite the lack of barriers to consumption could very well be interpreted as an increase in virtue. Increasing depression and anxiety could also serve to demonstrate to people that happiness is not a true end in itself.

I don’t want to be Panglossian—modern America contains numerous barriers to human flourishing, and I think that nothing would increase human virtue more than economic freedom. But I think the Straussian view—that only a few are capable of using freedom—is needlessly dark and not really consonant with observable reality.

Despite these critiques, reading Strauss was an absolute pleasure. I always thought the age of readable philosophy—the sort of philosophy embodied by the Great Books—was over, but Strauss presents radical ideas in comprehensible and thoughtful for. One of the best books I've ever read. Destined to be up there with Rousseau and Locke. Just an incredible text. Highly recommend.

1. “This is where I suspect that institutions devoted to the liberal arts, and particularly those with Christian commitments, have a unique vocation or even charism, to borrow a theological term. We have a deep moral vocabulary to draw on for moments like the present. We have a tradition of inquiry, oriented toward the pursuit of truth and beauty and goodness. We have centuries of wisdom to draw on, with voices from Confucius, Plato, and Aquinas to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Marilynne Robinson, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.” (David Henreckson, The Liberating Arts, “Amid the Ruins”)

2. Rufo’s Twitter: “…free inquiry is a means, but not an end; it must be tethered to an actual desired outcome or higher pursuit. These have traditionally been truth, goodness, and beauty; now they are, in practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This is pure Straussianism.

3. “That is to say, every society regards a specific human type (or a specific mixture of human types) as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts. What is true of the society ruled by the common man applies also to societies ruled by the priest, the wealthy merchant, the war lord, the gentleman, and so on. In order to be truly authoritative, the human beings who embody the admired habits or attitudes must have the decisive say within the community in broad daylight: they must form the regime.”

4. You can tell how close to the center a right-wing writer is by how much they go on about Carl Schmitt’s Nazi-ness. For instance, Nina Power mentions him with no mention of the Nazi part. This Commonweal article just mentions he’s a Nazi in passing. Meanwhile, Blake Smith, in Tablet magazine, dwells extensively on his Nazi past and even metonymizes him as “the Nazi”.

5. As Schmitt puts it in his most poetic passage: “No program, no ideal, no norm, no expediency confers a right to dispose of the physical life of other human beings. To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It is a manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never again be war. War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy—all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically.”

In other words, the political is that for which you are willing to kill. And because no aim could ever logically justify killing another person, the political creates its own justification. Something is worth killing for precisely because you are willing to kill for it.

6. Don’t come at me to say this is a simplified account of Rome’s territorial expansion. I know that. After the Augustan era, they largely expanded by annexing client kingdoms, rather than through outright conquest, but obviously annexation was only possible because of the threat of force.

7. There’s no way this point will come across in this quote, but Strauss is here saying that Burke’s fault is that he can perceive God’s hand in the development of the British constitution. Burke believes that even the bad or silly things in the Constitution were themselves put there by God, and that he can perceive which bad things are useful and which bad things are bad. But Strauss argues that this is not the typical theological understanding of how providence works. We can never truly know which chance events are good or bad, which is precisely why we need to follow God’s law and always pursue good. Ultimately Strauss praises Burke for understanding that the French Revolution was evil, but he faults Burke for not believing that it is possible to consciously to see and pursue what is good and to embody it in a rational constitution. Strauss writes:

“‘Secularization’ is the ‘temporalization’ of the spiritual or of the eternal. It is the attempt to integrate the eternal into a temporal context. It therefore presupposes that the eternal is no longer understood as eternal. ‘Secularization,’ in other words, presupposes a radical change of thought, a transition of thought from one plane to an entirely different plane. This radical change appears in its undisguised form in the emergence of modern philosophy or science; it is not primarily a change within theology. What presents itself as the “secularization” of theological concepts will have to be understood, in the last analysis, as an adaptation of traditional theology to the intellectual climate produced by modern philosophy or science both natural and political. The ‘secularization’ of the understanding of Providence culminates in the view that the ways of God are scrutable to sufficiently enlightened men. The theological tradition recognized the mysterious character of Providence especially by the fact that God uses or permits evil for his good ends. It asserted, therefore, that man cannot take his bearings by God’s providence but only by God’s law, which simply forbids man to do evil. In proportion as the providential order came to be regarded as intelligible to man, and therefore evil came to be regarded as evidently necessary or useful, the prohibition against doing evil lost its evidence. Hence various ways of action which were previously condemned as evil could now be regarded as good. The goals of human action were lowered. But it is precisely a lowering of these goals which modern political philosophy consciously intended from its very beginning. “