National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Things get more muddled when you look at where some of these people come down on the key issues of the day. Here is John O’Sullivan giving a speech about Ukraine at the most recent conference. He clearly knows nothing about the Ukraine or the war, but he is happy to defend the Global American Empire’s meddling. Here is someone writing the “national conservative case” for arming Ukraine. He thinks war with Russia will help in the war with China to come.

Those two are not outliers. Here is Yoram Hazony making the rather farfetched claim that Ukraine was just minding its own business when for no reason at all Russia decided to invade them. If one were to take Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, at face value, you would expect him to take the opposite position. After all, Hazony’s book is an argument against empire and it is the Global American Empire that is the cause of the war in Ukraine.

Of course, no one can read Hazony’s book and not see that it is mostly a way to give Europeans the language to defend Zionism. The prevailing ideology of Western elites is explicitly anti-nationalist. An ethnostate like Israel falls far outside of what Western elites consider acceptable, so you can see the problem. Israel ethnically cleansing the West Bank does not fit the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pogrom. The Hazony project is mostly a way to square that circle to Western conservatives.

As an aside, Hazony makes the claim in his book that a people have a right to a homeland if they have the ability to keep and maintain it. He makes this qualification for two obvious reasons. First, it sets a size limit for a nation. Otherwise, three people could get together and demand independence. The other reason is it allows for the easy dismissal of Arab claims in Israel. The Palestinians have no claims because they cannot keep their own lands.

The fact that this argument is best applied to Israel is never addressed. After all, Israel would not exist without the British then the Americans. The entirety of Israeli foreign policy for over half a century has been to use any means necessary to gain favor with great powers in order to fend off the Arabs. Israel is the product of empire. Now that the Global American Empire is looking weak, Israel is now cutting the Ukrainians loose in favor of the Russians.

Putting that aside, the question remains, what is national conservatism? At this point, the best answer is that it is a holding area for people not welcome at reputable events who never want to be associated with disreputable events. For example, Jason Richwine is welcome at a Hazony event, but at that same event Hazony will rage against “race science” like a grievance studies major. Mark Krikorian is welcome, but anyone associated with VDare is banned.

The result is that national conservatism is sort of island of misfit toys. The only thing holding them together is a desire to get a seat at the table. Thiel’s money lets them put on extravagant conferences at world class facilities, which draw in famous people looking for some street cred as an outsider. For example, Marco Rubio, a product of Conservative Inc., gave a speech at Hazony’s event and now talks about himself as an implacable foe of the Washington political establishment.

Otherwise, national conservatism is a term without meaning. The nationalism expressed by people like Hazony is situational. Israel can build settlements in Arab areas because it is in their national interest. Russia, meanwhile, is guilty of imperialism when she moves to defend ethnic Russians from Ukrainian fanatics underwritten by the Global American Empire. This sounds like the same old neoconservatism that has plagued us since the middle of the last century.

As for the conservatism, there is not much agreement. Hazony claims that American conservatism is rooted in Burke. The umbrella group that sponsors his activity is called the Edmund Burke Foundation. On the other hand, the Claremont people that freely circulate in these events reject that claim. They are Lockeans, at least with regards to the American founding. Others are social conservatives rooting their moral claims in the authority of their religion.

There is nothing wrong with heterodoxy. In fact, more events where disparate people can socialize and debate is a good thing. As a movement, however, there has to be something more than Peter Theil’s money and estrangement from the cool kid’s table of the prevailing orthodoxy. Without a common goal or even a common narrative, it is just a collection of outsiders desperate to get back in, terrified of the ominous sounds coming from the darkness to their right.

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In America, Right and Left are relative terms in that the Right is defined by its relationship with the Left. While the Left flits from novelty to novelty, the Right shouts, “please slow down” while following it around. As Robert Lewis Dabney put it a century ago, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” His observation has remained true to this day. It is why yesterday’s radical idea is today’s conservative principle.

This is not true in other parts of the world. Radicalism exists, but it throws itself against the defenses of tradition and history. It may break down those walls, as we see in Europe, but the contours of the Right remain in place. European conservatism is the appeal to hierarchy, tradition and permanence. Joseph de Maistre would be shocked by modern Europe, but he would still be able to make out the borders that define the modern conservative forces of Europe.

The opposite is true in America. Take someone from the founding generation and transport him into the middle of the 19th century and he would recognize the forces of radicalism quite easily. After all, the radical abolitionist would look strikingly familiar, having come from the same stock. Transport that man further into time and he would recognize the New England roots of the progressive. Conservatism, on the other hand, would make no sense to him in any age.

That is the problem for conservatives. The rest of the world has traditions, habits of mind and institutions with roots into the mists of time. America is a young society, so the ancient customs are not all that ancient. Most of those were borrowed from Europe during the colonial period. Others were trampled under the hoofs of one prior radical pogrom or another. Modern conservatives are left to conjure an authority due to a lack of tradition and history.

You can see the dilemma here in this speech Michael Anton delivered to Hillsdale College on the end of conservatism and the beginning of a new politics. Anton is part of a project to build a “new” conservatism. Like the “old” conservatism, his starting point is Lincoln and the “second founding” as imagined by Harry Jaffa. Note also that the person introducing Anton is careful to insert the Athens and Jerusalem line into his remarks, signaling his membership in the cult of Jaffa.

The cult of Jaffa and Lincolnism has been discussed at length here and other places, so there is no need to go over it again. Of interest here is the selection of Lincoln as the Abraham of modern conservatism. This is a bit like picking Karl Marx as your starting point for German conservatism. In his time, Lincoln was a radical and not just the bourgeois coffee house variety. He was willing to kill as many of his fellow citizens as needed to impose his radical vision on the country.

The “new right” would no doubt dispute that characterization of Lincoln, but you cannot place Lincoln on the Right during his age. Abolitionism was a radical idea, one that the radicals of the founding generation rejected. John Adams opposed the idea on the grounds that it was worse that slavery. Like many of his generation, he personally opposed slavery, but he understood the danger posed by the abolitionists. Adams would have viewed Lincoln as a dangerous fanatic.

Of course, in his own time Adams was a dangerous fanatic. The people trying to form up a new conservatism love waving around the Declaration of Independence, but that was the most radical document produced to that point. In fact, the entire founding of the United States was a great experiment in radical politics. It is not an accident that America is often called an experiment. The very basis of America is the praxis of radical thought and it continues to this day.

The truth is America has never had much to work with for anyone trying to create a genuine conservatism, because America lacks the history and traditions that would naturally anchor conservatism. Compounding it is that the limited history and traditions that are available are nothing but a long journal of one radical experiment after another in the vain hope of creating that city on a hill John Winthrop imagined when he and his fellow fanatics landed in the New World.

This lack of necessary ingredients with which to fashion a genuine conservatism in America is probably why conservatism has been a failure. When you are reduced to conjuring a novel history in support of novel ideas, as we see with the current “new right” experiment, all you are really doing is engaging in your own form of radicalism, just without the force of authority enjoyed by the Left. Conservatism becomes nothing more than a parlor game for outsiders.

This is why any effort to produce a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy needs to start with an honest inventory of reality. What can be produced from the materials at hand to create something that can resist the acid of liberalism? The answer cannot lie within the liberal tradition. To go back to 1950, 1850 or 1750 looking for answers to the problems created in those times inevitably means explaining away the defects of liberalism in order to preserve it.

The place to start with fashioning an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not in 1950, 1850 or 1750, but in 2050. Given the current demographic trends, imagine a continent filled with versions of Orania and then contemplate the ideology of a people who can maintain it. This is one lesson we can take from the founders. They tried to fashion a practical solution for their people at the time. The next founding will have to do the same thing, but for a different people.

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There are men who are remembered for what they did. There are men who are remembered for what they said. Then there are men who are remembered for who they have influenced or the chain events touched off by them. This last group is unique for the simple reason it is hard to say exactly why they are remembered. They are history’s version of the popular figure who is famous for being famous. One such example is the late philosopher, Leo Strauss.

That last sentence provides a clue as to why this mediocre philosopher and historian is a figure who looms large of contemporary politics. Serious students of philosophy take exception to calling Strauss a philosopher. Historians dismiss him outright. Students of Greek philosophy roll their eyes when they the man’s name. Even his followers will spend hours debating how to properly label the man. Despite this lack of distinction, Leo Strauss is an important figure in our politics.

For those looking for an accessible explainer on Leo Strauss and his work, Paul Gottfried’s book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America is a straight forward summary and analysis of the man and his work. For those looking for an even shorter introduction to the topic, here is a good review of the book. At the end of that review, the reviewer touches on the central question of Strauss. Why does this mediocre academic cast such a long shadow?

The main reason anyone talks about Strauss is that his followers have been central to American politics for half a century. His most famous acolyte was Harry Jaffa, who created the cult of Lincoln that still animates conventional conservatism. His reimagining of American history allowed contemporary conservatives to get to the left of their opponents on the issue of race. It is why the modern conservative cannot shut up about Abraham Lincoln. He is their get out jail free card.

That does not explain why we have lots of middlebrow intellectuals announcing themselves as Straussians rather than Jaffians. Modern conservatism owes far more to Jaffa than Strauss, but the conservative intellectual space is littered with people flying the flag of Leo Strauss. Additionally, there are flavors of Straussianism, as in the East Coast Straussians and the West Coast Straussians. What is so magical about this man that half a century after his death he still casts a shadow?

This is where Marx comes into the picture. Like Strauss, Marx was a mediocre intellectual, but he cast a huge shadow. There were many smart men working the communist and socialist circuits in the 19th century, many smarter and more reasonable than Marx, but it was Marx who towered over the rest. Despite having been wrong about pretty much everything, Karl Marx remains a respected thinker and philosopher on the Left.

One reason Marx rose above the rest was that he provided intellectual authority to the socialist movement. His theory of history turned a collection of moral preferences into scientific fact, which gave the believers an unquestionable authority upon which to base their economic and political claims. To this day we hear people on the so-called Left claim that they are on the right side of history. This means their opponents are on the wrong side of history, so they can be dismissed.

Similarly, the Straussian method provides the believer with a set of tools to instantly create the needed authority for their normative claims. Strauss taught that you must learn the true intent of a writer. The Straussian, of course, has the special skill to see through the esoteric writing of genuine philosophers, who out of necessity always cloak their real meaning from the casual reader. Strauss allows his followers to divine the real meaning of historical texts.

At first this does not sound like much, but it allowed Harry Jaffa to tease out the real thoughts of the Founders, which to that point had been called the Framers, because they wrote the text of the Constitution. Jaffa claimed that their real thoughts were contained in the Declaration. From that he could turn the Founders into Moses and Lincoln into Joshua. The former led his people out of bondage, but not into the Promised Land, while the latter completed the journey.

That is a clever trick, but as Gottfried noted, this was not simply for the amusement of bored intellectuals, but part of a political strategy. By casting Lincoln as the real founder of the American republic, conservatives, who were clustered in the Republican party, could claim him as their own. Not only does the “great emancipator” become a shield against the charge of racism, but he also becomes a license to turn egalitarianism and the blank slate into conservative principles.

That is a major appeal of Strauss. His method provides a set of tools for rhetorical combat within practical politics. The Straussian method allows the user to flit from one tine of Hume’s fork to the other. They can conflate those things that are axiomatically true with those things that are contingently true. Decorated with their own interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, gratuitous assertions become immutable fact. These tools let the users win the debate, rather than reveal important truths.

Probably the main appeal of Strauss is the same as for Marx. For the initiate, the system of thought provides a framework to answer every question. This in turn elevates the believer’s sense of self. When you are on the right side of history, you inevitably are filled with confidence. When you can divine the intent of the great minds and use this secret knowledge against your opponents, you become a god. The appeal in both cases is spiritual, not intellectual.

The comparison between Marx and Strauss works because of the people who were most attracted to the two men. The people who rallied to Marxism were not the urban proletariat, but the urban bourgeois intellectuals. Similarly, those rallying to Strauss are not highbrow political thinkers. His appeal is to the middlebrow bourgeois intellectuals that grow like a fungus on the modern age. Both provided a purpose to idle men without an obvious role in life.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. That should be the lesson of Marxism. Leo Strauss was a clever man, for sure, but his bad ideas have given us a half century of political agitation and subterfuge. One would think the embarrassing catastrophe that was the Bush presidency would have relegated Strauss and his followers to the dustbin of history, but when you are untethered from facts and reason, the facts never get in the way of your next argument.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.