We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump’s movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America’s role in the world. They explore whether U.S. influence has shifted from leading a global order after World War II to carving out its own “sphere of influence” alongside other major powers. The discussion looks at attacks on government expertise, the idea of “restraint” in foreign policy, and how fringe thinkers on the right are shaping real political choices. What happens when leaders value absolute freedom of action over laws, expertise, or alliances? Tune in for a clear look at the ideas driving today’s high-stakes political battles.

Below is a slightly edited version of an AI-generated transcript of this conversation.

Transcript

Eli Karetny 

With the Trump administration pursuing authoritarian policies that seem designed to transform America’s democratic political order and upend the post world war two liberal international order, some commentators are asking whether we are witnessing the deliberate acceleration of American decline. Welcome to international horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetny. I teach politics at Baruch College, and have for years been the deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with our director, John Torpey, on sabbatical this year, I have the privilege of serving as the institute’s interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast here with me today to kick off our podcast season. Is Damon linker, who asks provocatively, in an article published this week at the persuasion sub stack whether the Trump administration is choosing to pursue policies that will hasten American decline. Damon Linker teaches politics at the University of Pennsylvania. Is the author of notes from the middle ground at sub stack. Is a senior fellow at the niskanen center and is working on a book about Leo Strauss’s influence on the American right. Today, we will discuss that influence, as well as related reactionary trends in American politics. Hi Damon, thanks for joining us on International Horizons.

Damon Linker 

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Eli Karetny 

Let’s start with the piece you wrote for persuasion. Can you state your case that the administration is quote, unquote, slitting the nation’s throat and hastening American decline, and that this is happening not as a result of incompetence, but as a consequence of decisions being taken that radically expand executive power, decisions that are guided by a coherent theoretical vision, a vision that you argued in a New York Times article in May is influenced by the writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Today’s announcement the Department of Defense will be renamed the Department of War, seems in line with such a vision.

Damon Linker 

Well, that last bit about Department of War, I think dove definitely speaks to my point, because it used to be called the Department of War. It became the Department of Defense after the Second World War, because we were then in the Cold War, which wasn’t a real war, and yet we were going to maintain a very large, complicated bureaucracy to oversee our defense commitments around the world, and they would, in most cases, fall short of actual waging of hot wars. So therefore we had to call it something else, namely a Department of Defense, but Trump wants to go back to the old Department of War, which I think points to the fact that, you know, one way to talk about this is to just note that when Trump speaks about, you know, making America great again, there’s a real lack of specificity about exactly when he thinks we were great. You know, a lot of people assume he must mean the 50s, because that’s what the Republican right has often looked back to, from Reagan on, as kind of the best America ever was. And then we had the cataclysm of the 1960s that ruined everything. So the trick is to catapult ourselves back to the great 1950s, but I don’t think that with the Trump movement and the MAGA movement, that’s necessarily true. I think there are elements of the 1920s, there are elements of the 1880s in this. There are a lot of people in the MAGA Coalition who are deeply uncomfortable with America as an empire. You know, Pat Buchanan, who I think prefigured a lot of this, wrote a book in the late 90s called a republic, not an empire. This is a vision of small America compared to what we became in the post war period, when we ended up having defeated the Axis powers, kind of by default, responsible for the defense of these defeated countries in Europe and in Asia, and facing what we thought was a very formidable New totalitarian threat in the form of the Soviet Union, and in that context, we kind of took up the mantle of providing a kind of base level enforcement of order around the world, and a lot of the right then it. The descendants of the old right that opposed our intervention in World War Two during the 1930s, the so-called America First movement, which of course, echoes very directly and obviously with Trump. They were not happy with this, and they went in that faction of the right went into Eclipse with the rise of, kind of the right wing version of waging the Cold War with Bill Buckley National Review and the people they influenced and so I mean by way of just sort of talking around all of these subjects, I’ll stop so you can redirect us back to where you would like us to be in the conversation, I just feel like relative to the apex of American power, which I think was reached probably around, say, 1992 in the immediate aftermath of The United States winning the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think the Trump vision is clearly a diminishment of American power relative to that point. It’s a vision of kind of America having a sphere of influence. We’re still a great power. But Russia is a great power. China’s great power, India is a great power. Each of them should be permitted their sphere of influence, so will largely take over the western hemisphere. It’s a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, and then combined with that as the domestic policy side of it, you know, the whole science based executive branch project of the post war period, where, where you know, the two parties in our system believe that. You know, winning the Cold War, defending America and free countries around the world required having a very active administrative state with expertise, with educated people in positions of authority in the government from both parties, you know, a public health apparatus With informed experts there as well, and so forth. All of that the Trump administration seems to want to dismantle in favor of, again, relative to that high baseline of competence, expertise, lack of corruption, transparent government services will all be taken apart and replaced by something that much more would resemble kind of the spoils system of the late 19th century, where you have rampant corruption government posts handed out as kind of favors to political Friends, not people who have any kind of specialized expertise that would qualify them to make decisions about about public matters and so forth. So I’ll leave it at that, but that that’s kind of my vision of of what’s really going on here with the Trump administration.

Eli Karetny 

That’s fantastic. Damon, thank you, and so much there to tease out one place to start, you paint a picture of a kind of turn away from Empire, a turn away from the expansive us role in the world, an imperial role in the world, managing global affairs, and towards what some realists would call a kind of vision of restraint. That’s not a term we usually associate with Trump, especially in the context of, you know, the Maga rhetoric. So, wherein lies the greatness, if there, you know, and where does executive power play into this? If this is a a turn away from Empire and kind of consolidation of American power and a focus inward. Where’s the greatness in this?

Damon Linker 

Well, it’s complicated. I mean, I think you mentioned realism and restraint. You didn’t pair them immediately, but they were in adjacent sentences, though that’s a slogan that some on the mag or right really tried to disseminate and kind of make a regular talking point over the last, especially the first Trump administration, and under Biden. I think it’s a little misleading. I there is a way of understanding what a lot of people on the Maga right would like to see in foreign policy, in terms of realism, just simple calculation of America’s self interest, without any moral or legal obligation to allies and others around the world, no overarching vision of human rights that should guide. Where we intervene or not and how, but it’s not really a restraint. There’s like no reason to assume that Trump, or anyone close to Trump, cares about being restrained. What they want, in fact, is a kind of lack of restraint, in the sense that that Trump and the people around him, and but especially Trump as a person, the thing he wants most of all is freedom of movement. He wants, no international law, no expectations of our obligations to others through treaty, treaty obligations, or simply the kind of more sort of informal way that we tend Americans to think that, you know, we’re sort of friends with anyone who’s a democracy, and so we’ll like come to their aid and call them an ally, Even if, technically, we’re not allies, because there’s no treaty obligating us to do it. But you know, if terrorists attack a democracy on the other side of the world or, you know, an authoritarian regime, we’re sort of inclined to think we should have a stake in that, because it matters to us that democracies thrive and democracies enemies do not thrive, and that, of course, has led us astray into all kinds of bad decisions and foreign policy down through the decades. So I don’t want to make it sound like I’m giving a blanket endorsement to that, but that is sort of the paradigm that has governed a lot of our foreign affairs, at least at the ideal level. But now Trump wants to be free of all that. He wants to be free to do whatever he wants anywhere in the world, to make a decision to do X or Y or Z based on whatever he feels is right in the moment, and that doesn’t imply restraint. It implies total freedom of movement by the great statesman who’s running the show. And that’s why I see this as a vision that goes back to to the late 19th century, because that’s really the last time that the world operated according to these rules, I would say, late 19th century to the eve of World War One, pretty much, because it was in the wake of World War One that we had the first halting attempts to create a League of Nations, some sense that, like the major powers, need to get together and talk things out to avoid a cataclysm like World War One and all of the death and kind of pointless suffering and destruction that it brought. And obviously, we didn’t settle into an order like that of any kind until after World War Two, when we finally were like, All right, yeah, that was bad enough that we really have to figure something better out, but Trump wants to go back to that now. What makes this great? I mean, it means that we’re not ultimately guided by anything impersonal, like a law or a principle or an ideal that applies, potentially to all people of goodwill everywhere in the world. It is purely one guy sitting in a place in the White House saying, Do this, and people saying, Yes, sir, okay, we’ll do that, even if the professionals, the experts, the people who know the languages and the politics of other regions and countries in the world, even if they are thinking to themselves, boys, this stupid boy is this counterproductive boy, if Trump chews out, the president of the Prime Minister of India because the Prime Minister of India refuses to endorse Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for supposedly helping to deescalate a conflict with Pakistan a couple of months ago. And if that scuttles our, you know, decades long rapprochement with India, and attempt to kind of bring them into the Western democratic fold for both moral and geostrategic reasons, to help check China, to help keep them on our side against Russia, if he blows all that up because he’s a narcissist and just wants Modi to say, Oh yes, the great Trump, we could never have averted nuclear conflagration with our neighbor Pakistan, without Trump helping us here, then that’s fine, because at least Trump is just doing whatever he wants. Yes, that is a vision of greatness of a kind. I think it’s a kind of authoritarian notion of greatness where our guy has the muscle power to just sort of insult anyone he wants, do anything he wants to humiliate our friends and allies, to say to a treaty ally in NATO like Denmark, yeah, we want to take Greenland too bad to say to our neighbor to the north, Canada, you know, the longest peaceful border in human history, probably between the United States and Canada, to kind of constantly rib them and threaten them that we’re gonna, like, turn them into the 51st state. That makes a lot of people on the right really giddy that like, Haha, he’s such a bully, and he’s our bully. This is fantastic. That is there. That’s what they understand by greatness, as far as I can tell,

Eli Karetny 

Really appreciate that Damon. You said some really, really interesting and thoughtful things there. I want to kind of push a little further on the argument you make that that far, far from a kind of vision of restraint, or what others call a kind of transactional attitude. I think you persuasively argue that there’s there there’s there’s a higher principle guiding him, if you can call it a principle, and it’s a kind of authoritarian principle, and that the greatness is somehow in their mind tied in with this freedom of action and freedom of movement on the part of a bold decision maker. And I use the term, you know, carefully the decision, you know, the decision of the leader. And maybe here we can kind of push a little further in thinking through some of the intellectual influences, and here thinking about, as you had written, the influence of Carl Schmidt, and maybe filtered through Strauss’s work. So where does in what you’ve said so far, where, where do you see the hand of Carl Schmidt’s idea of the state of exception, of the kind of the leadership principle you know, the fewer principle, and where you know where the authoritarianism might be, not just about kind of the narcissism of a supposedly bold leader, but that there’s, there’s, at least in the minds of some you know on the intellectual right, that there’s a principle here, and part of that principle is opposition to, even rebellion against the administrative state liberalism, kind of procedural liberalism, in the way That Schmidt talked about that there’s, there’s, there’s a cause here. And it’s not just the power of the narcissist that there’s a anti administrative state, anti global state, anti liberalism imbued in this kind of decision.

Damon Linker 

ISM, yeah, yeah. This goes back to an op ed I wrote for The Times a few months ago, where I tried to sort of trace an intellectual historical lineage from Carl Schmitt through Strauss as a conduit to the Claremont Institute, which is a kind of the Strauss world, and then from there to the Trump administration. The case is, is something like this. In Aristotle, in John Locke, and in lots of other political philosophers, there is an acknowledgment of and an awareness of the fact that the rule of law, so defined for our purposes, is following established rules and procedures and limits on executive decision making, such as like okay X or Y is happening in the world. What can we do in response? Well, here are the guidelines, follow the rules. There’s an acknowledgement in a lot of these political philosophers that this, this is a good procedure to do, that it’s good to ham in executive power by settled rules. However, this is in some respects, a second best solution, and we can know that meaning to the political problem, a solution to a problem. And the problem is that there are plenty of situations, especially emergency situations, in politics and. Where you actually can’t rely on pre-written guidelines. You need someone to be the decider in the moment, looking at the specifics of the situation and deciding given all of these unanticipated variables of this moment, what is the best course of action? And you know, block talks about this in terms of a kind of freedom of prerogative of the monarch to, you know, have a privy council of advisors, and then in the moment to make a decision without relying on prior restraint of the rule of law, and that you sort of have to admit that this is going to arise from time to time in politics. And I think this is clearly true. I agree with Aristotle on this. I agree with Locke when he writes about this, and there’s really no way around it, that there are situations where you just sort of have to put your faith in the person you’ve put in the decider role. Now, the role, the importance of Schmidt here is that Schmidt takes this true insight of politics, and he says, in effect, this gives us an opening for a kind of politics that is basically run exclusively on emergency powers by an executive who will rule entirely in this Way, and he associates liberalism with a kind of dithering in kind of indecisive, regulatory, managerial rule following. And he wants to destroy that form of politics in favor of a kind of dictatorial decision ism, and you get there by, well, in the Weimar, the context of Weimar, Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, where Schmidt is is is writing by the fact that the Weimar Constitution had a provision in It that permitted exactly this. They actually kind of anticipated the need for this, and they built into the Constitution an emergency provision that in a sufficient emergency, the chancellor can govern as a dictator. And so he uses this as a kind of open door to push through into dictatorship, and Hitler did exactly this after the Reichstag fire in the spring of 1933 shortly after Hitler took charge, he said, This is that emergency, and therefore I will now govern without the need for a legislature. I will simply dictate what we need to do. And Schmidt loved this. He basically followed Hitler. Was following what Schmidt said he should do. So what Strauss does is in in his his most well read book, natural right in history from 1953 he uses on a few pages in the middle of the book. And Strauss is a very slippery writer. He writes in a very kind of dialectical way where he’ll like raise points that he doesn’t necessarily 100% endorse, but it’s like on the way to getting to what he really does endorse. But what that is is itself kind of murky. But in a few pages of that book, he kind of lays out the Schmidtian position and says, in effect, that there is, as I did of myself a few minutes ago, there’s no real way to avoid there being a need in certain emergency situations for a rule of basically a wise man. You need a kind of philosopher king who will be able to size up the situation and decide what to do without being previously restrained by being restrained by previously authored rules and restrictions on that power, because it’s not possible before the fact to do to kind of predetermine what may or may not be necessary in the moment of emergency. Now I don’t again. I think this isn’t Locke. I think it’s an Aristotle, and it’s in Strauss in these few pages. And I don’t think that this like means that Strauss is advocating for the role of dictatorship in the way that that Schmidt did. In fact, Strauss wrote a critical review. Of Schmidt’s concept of the political that goes at him exactly in this way, pointing out that, rather than trying to like, deal with this perennial problem of politics and make politics better, Schmidt shows signs in his writing of wanting to bring about this very emergency for the sake of enhancing executive power. But because these passages are in natural right in history, they kind of bequeath to the Straussian community, and especially the Claremont faction of that community, this vision of a president who is governing unconstrained by any prior limits of law or ideology, because ideology is itself a kind of constraint on what a president will do. If you know George W Bush, I think that all kinds of terrible things, bad decision-making in the wake of 911 around the Iraq War and some of the domestic surveillance stuff, but there were limits to what he was going to do. Like he wasn’t. He wasn’t threatening to invade Canada or Denmark or Greenland or Panama, just to assert American power over the world. He, he, his vision of it was that we, we had a kind of divinely ordained mission to end tyranny in our world now that can be used in all kinds of bad ways. It was in Iraq, and it could have potentially, you know, you had some Neo cons like Norman podor. It’s advocating for toppling seven governments in the Middle East in that period. So it could have gone much, much worse, even. But that’s still a kind of limit. It’s not like Bush would have been like, Okay, and next we’re gonna, like, go to South America. We’re gonna, we’re gonna topple the Maduro regime in Venezuela like Trump, sometimes sable rattles about doing so. I’ll leave it at that. But like this, is the idea, this vision of a president who sort of resides above any limit or constraint and is just sort of looking out at the world and deciding on the basis of his own prudence, as Aristotle would say, or in Greek, phronesis, practical wisdom, and the last thing I’ll say is that the

Damon Linker 

that the a lot of the Maga intellectuals Who are come out of this kind of Straussian tradition. They see Trump as a kind of genius, and in the sense that, like here we were in this world of George W Bush, you know, twice president, then McCain, then Romney running. Both of them lose, but like their general vision of America and the world was pretty much the bush vision, which was itself an updated version of Reagan, and they see Trump becomes on the scene, and he just this seeming moron guy, real estate developer from Queens, comes on the scene, and he just demolishes the entire commitments of the Republican Party and says, No, actually, we’re not going to fight wars for democracy. We’re going to close the border and get rid of immigrants. We’re going to have, you know, executive orders specifically attacking Muslims, which, of course, Bush never did. Bush tried to be very universalistic in the wake of 911 to tamp down any violence that would have arisen against Muslims. Trump reverses all of that, and it works. And so a lot of those people look at him and they’re like, Man, that guy saw things nobody else sees he he was a kind of statesman, a brilliant, perspicacious thinker. He understood things nobody else did. All the wise men of the Republican Party got this wrong. So he’s the wise man, and therefore, why not just give him free reign to basically tell tell us what to do everywhere. So that’s the weird way in which the contingencies of Trump the person, and how he came on the scene and took control of the party and reversed the polarities on all of these long standing ideological commitments on the American right plays into this classical, subtle, and I think, like true distinction that comes down to us from Aristotle, Locke, Schmidt, Strauss and and and it ends up with. A kind of deference to Trump doing pretty much anything he wants, anywhere.

Eli Karetny 

Wow, so much there to respond to, I want to, and I want to get to what you said about the kind of Claremont folks and maybe the West Coast Straussianism and the differences from maybe the East Coasters and how they influence the neoconservatives in a post-9/11 world. But before, before I get there a question I’m so glad you brought up, not only natural right in history that those few pages where you detect, you know, Schmidt’s hand, but also the review that Strauss wrote about 20 years beforehand, think he was still in Germany, hadn’t yet immigrated to the US, that review of the concept of the political which was really brilliant, Schmidt acknowledged its brilliance by saying something like, you know, Strauss, you know, with X ray vision, saw right through me, yeah,

Damon Linker 

he did. And then and Schmidt repaid it by giving Strauss a letter of recommendation that helped get him a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to flee Germany right at the correct moment when Hitler was coming to power. And he let Strauss leave with a kind of letter of introduction to Fellow Scholars around Europe. So he was a great benefactor for Strauss for like, two years. But then Strauss kept writing him letters. Once he was abroad and Hitler had taken over, he kept writing him to, like, get him to continue this intellectual discussion. And by that point, Schmidt didn’t respond anymore, because now Schmidt was a Nazi, and he was getting close to the Hitler regime, and he couldn’t be, he couldn’t be in correspondence with a Jew. So Hitler Strauss actually, like, writes to one of his friends in this period, I think it’s Jacob Klein, and he’s like, Schmidt’s no longer responding to me. Is this, did I Was it something I said and, and I think it’s Klein, it responds basically, like, well, you know, he’s being a little cagey. They’re watching his mail. He can’t be in a conversation with a guy like you and Schmidt and Strauss is like, okay, yeah,

Eli Karetny 

so in that review, in the early 30s of the concept of the political one of the things that I always found interesting that the critiques that Strauss levels against Schmidt is that in His, in Schmidt’s anti liberalism, he he essentially negates liberalism. He puts a, you know, what Strauss calls a kind of minus sign, in front of liberalism, but is unable to achieve, quote, unquote, a horizon beyond liberalism. And it seems, you know, you mentioned in the piece, I believe in the New York Times piece, that Strauss, quote unquote, tamed Schmidt’s view of politics. And I think there’s truth to that, looking at it politically, but if you look at it philosophically, there’s a sense in which Strauss was seeking a more radical kind of horizon than what stress Schmidt was able to achieve. So I wonder kind of where Strauss turned in seeking that horizon beyond liberalism, and where Plato plays into this and if not Plato’s vision of philosopher kings themselves as rulers, is there a kind of second best alternative from Strauss’s mind in the way that philosophers or philosophical advisors and writers can can guide the hand of the decision maker, you know, and where, where handlers and kind of those whispering in the ear of of the leader are playing the role of the wise man, yeah.

Damon Linker 

I mean, it’s obviously complicated stuff. I mean, I guess I would say, and the argument of the book that I’m writing on Strauss is going to really try to make this case that the horizon beyond liberalism that Strauss is groping toward at the time he writes that review, but he had, he didn’t yet. He hadn’t worked it all out yet. He didn’t figure crack. He didn’t crack it until late in the 30s, once he was in this country around 819, 3839 is where I’m tracing it to in the book. But what it has to do with is basically leaving politics behind. What it ends up being is a profoundly, I won’t say anti-political, but a political stance that ultimately Strauss comes to affirm a view of philosophical reflection that involves Lee. Leaving politics behind as something that always will be, will be mired in, in lies, in necessary lies, in distortions of the truth that there’s really no solution to that, like you can’t make politics become perfectly transparent, perfectly good, perfectly fulfilling for human beings that instead, the best you can hope for is that you can, if to speak in platonic terms, that you can leave the cave to see it for what It is. Maybe, if, there’s a particularly open minded and wise person in charge and they ask your advice, you might be tempted to come talk and give a little advice about what to do. But ultimately, the philosopher seeks to understand and achieve wisdom, which is always extra-political wisdom. It’s wisdom that shows that there is no political solution to the problems of the human condition. And so in that respect, hit looking back on that critique of Schmidt from the stance that he eventually develops about nine years later, Schmidt still is looking to kind of find the salvation of his soul in supporting a kind of dictatorship, because he believes that in a dictatorship, everything will be ordered as it ought to be. And we, we will, we will fix the problems of the world this way. And Strauss’s response to that is to say, essentially, no, you won’t. You’re, you’re, you’re going to maybe even make it worse by endorsing this thug who’s going to commit the most unspeakable acts of in human history and jeopardize the survival of Western civilization itself by going to war with the entire world and, and kind of You know, leading us to the precipice and, so that’s my view of Strauss. Now I also have an account in the book. I mean the subtitle of the book will be something about Strauss, Leo, Strauss and the hidden truths of the American right now, I will briefly summarize that in a minute, and then turn it back to you, so you can either follow up or turn in another direction. I’m fine with either. But my interpretation is not just that Strauss sort of leaves the cave of politics behind by the late 30s. It’s also that he believes that the only path out of the cave is to first become a conservative that he believes, reside, meaning we, in the modern world, reside in a cave beneath the Platonic cave, which is liberalism. And you can’t get out of the cave from liberalism. It’s a kind of dead end. You have to first educate liberals, either ideological, committed liberals, or default liberals who have never really thought seriously about anything, but just grow up in a liberal regime like the United States and sort of believe in rights and equality and the you know, the stories that Americans tell themselves about politics, you have to first get those people to question those liberal pieties by becoming conservatives who think in terms of kind of classical hierarchical moral distinctions, noble, base, honorable, dishonorable, just and unjust, which, obviously there’s a version of justice and injustice within liberalism too, but a kind of more fluid version of justice and injustice that it has to do with fights over the common good within a particular regime, beautiful and ugly, like there are all of these hierarchical moral distinctions that liberalism sort of doesn’t have anything to say about like, for liberalism, morality is always egalitarian. It’s about, you know, universal equal recognition, alright? You you have rights. Okay? I’ll agree you have rights if you acknowledge and recognize that I have rights, all right, and I’m recognizing your. Rights are recognizing my rights, and we go back and forth about that, and then we sort of have all of our moral and political disputes about like, who has rights and who doesn’t have rights, and how to expand the rights to the people who’ve been excluded, and always expanding that sphere of rights. That’s a little kind of cross section of morality for Strauss, but morality is also about this group of people is degraded, this other is exalted, these people are honorable, those are dishonorable. Some are noble, others are base. These hierarchical moral distinctions need to first become accepted as the vocabulary of politics and morality in a full way. And doing that brings us back to Plato’s cave. And only once you’ve done that can you then engage and Strauss, I think, in his books, in his lecturing and in and and his public speaking in his lifetime, shows an example of how one takes those moral categories, the hierarchical ones, and subjects them to a kind of dialectical criticism that ultimately points beyond politics to a kind of a political philosophical life. And you, you can’t get there unless you first go through that intermediary step of becoming conservatives, and then briefly, in 10 seconds. How does that tell us anything about the American right? Well, there are a lot of people who have been influenced by Strauss who are quite content to stay in that hierarchical cave. They actually don’t realize it’s a cave. They think that’s philosophy, and that’s basically the Claremont faction, mostly, although, you know, so you mentioned the East Coast Straussians. That’s really getting into the weeds to for the listeners. But basically, like, Strauss Ian’s like, you know, Bill Kristol, who’s a student of Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. He’s a particularly prominent Neo conservative. And you can tell, you can tell the East Coast Straus who are politically engaged, because they tended to be very pro Iraq War, very pro Bush, very involved in the Republican Party, until they got to Trump, and then they, they’ve become basically like, what Neo liberals, and we can’t use that term, because it means something else in the discourse, but like they’re like Bill crystals now Democrat. He supports Biden in 2024 he hates the Republican Party. Wants to see it destroyed. How did that happen? Well, because he was more of that other faction of the straussians. But according to my argument in the book, Bill Kristol might be like a more decent human being than some of the kind of nasty Claire monster types, and I do think he is, but he’s also not really doing what Strauss ultimately cares about because he’s still just doing politics. He’s just switched teams and and, and, you know, Strauss has respect for that. You know, it’s it’s better than other things you could be doing with your life, maybe, but it’s still not what Strauss himself cared most about, which was reading, reading philosophy books and trying to figure out the meaning of existence, if you will.

Eli Karetny 

Well, where to respond? I leave them speechless.

Eli Karetny 

So political philosophers in the kind of the School of Strauss, despite differences, you know, between these different schools and the different approaches, there’s an element of politics as a way of doing philosophy. Strauss talked about how philosophers need to first be political philosophers, partly or made mainly to protect the project of philosophy at its highest, the kind of the the engagement with truth with a capital T, and that permanent, that permanent quest, that commitment to searching for the truth as The as the highest kind of way of life when Strauss talked in kind of grand terms, and you talked about how the political Strauss seem to dismiss that side, the higher side. Side of the project and engage in politics and remain in the cave. And I want to just kind of focus there for a moment, as we shift to, you know, in the slide last segment of the podcast, towards how this, all you know, hits the regime, how this affects the Trump administration and the American regime. So you had talked about how the Claremont folks have their own kind of reading of history. Maybe say a few words about that, because that’s part of my understanding, the kind of the inevitable and even necessary kind of deceptions, the noble lies that even serious philosophers, you know, when they’re playing politics, need to be engaged in readings of history. And so maybe say a few words about where you know, where Lincoln plays into this, where the fall with Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and the shift towards the administrative state, how that plays a role in the Straussian imagination.

Damon Linker 

Yeah, yeah. Well, most of this goes back to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who was a Strauss student who studied with Strauss in the 1940s at the New School, and he developed over the course of his career. He’s the guy who founded the Claremont Institute. So when I say Claremont or Claire monsters, which I love, I’m talking about the the people in and around that institute which isn’t affiliated with Claremont Graduate University, although some of the people there sometimes have taught at that Institute. But suppose you go out there and you meet people from the actual university. In that case, they bristle at the fact that their name is now associated with these people, and what they really mean is this independent institute that Harry Jaffa helped to found, and he promulgated a kind of just so story for the right and it goes something like this. You sketched it very briefly yourself, Eli, but it’s basically the American founding was fantastic. It had one defect, and that was slavery. Finally, we were fortunate enough, in the person of Abraham Lincoln, to get a great world historical statesman who took charge at exactly the right moment rightly saw that we had to wage a civil war to resolve this issue, he was on the side of the angels in in kind of RE, founding America as this new birth of freedom based on a kind of purge, a purging of what was defective in the founding about slavery and kind of re founding the country and dedication to equality among all citizens. So up to that point, that sounds like generic American happy story. That’s not really distinctive. I mean, some of Jaffa’s reading of Lincoln as a kind of philosopher statesman who’s like engaging in platonic analysis and dialectic in his debate with, you know, Stephen Douglas. That’s distinctively Jaffa, but the general view of a new birth of freedom with Lincoln, that’s standard stuff. So that means that in the in the decades immediately following the Civil War, America achieved what Jaffa referred to as we became basically the best regime. We are the best that can be attained in politics in the United States. So what was America like in those years? Well, that was the Gilded Age. It was the time where the south sort of reverses itself after refuses reconstruction, holds the country hostage in 1876 77 holds a gun to its head and says, You got to let us do what we want with our blacks down here, down here, we’re not going to let you pick a president. And it gets sorted out, and we get Jim Crow and all kinds of nastiness. None of that really bothers Jaffa. I mean, in the sense that he doesn’t highlight it as a major problem. What he really dislikes. And then the people he influenced at Claremont have developed a lot further beyond Jaffa, is this narrative that the real problem is Woodrow Wilson and the progressives. Woodrow Wilson, the first and only PhD to ever hold the presidency is a political scientist. He has all these ideas that America needs to become more of a galvanized nation, and that requires the president to kind of go over the heads of. Congress and speak directly to the mass of the American people and get them to support a much bolder and more expansive view of federal power and and then part of that involves needing to create what becomes known as the administrative state, which is basically the rule in the executive branch of experts who will regulate modern life, to make to protect workers, protect children, protect safety, do all kinds of things that the government never did before to kind of make this juggernaut of a modern industrial society runs smoothly. The Straussians at Claremont, the Jaffa ites hate this. They think this is a kind of undermining of self-government. It ends up, they claim, creating this class of unaccountable bureaucrats who are kind of moral busy bodies who regulate progressively more and more elements of American life. This got a huge kind of quantum leap in threatening this kind of threat to democracy by the happenstance at the Great Depression and the New Deal, which then gives it exactly what Wilson hoped it would, which was overwhelming popular support for this vast expansion much further of federal power. And basically, according to this faction at Claremont, this, this become, this is like their their their moment of break. So like everything from roughly Wilson and the progressives to the New Deal after that, it’s all downhill, and an accelerating downhill of getting worse and worse with the government getting bigger and bigger regulations, more and more onerous, ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats, more intense over time. And what is needed is, they think, an utter reversal. It’s, it’s, I mean, my my teacher, Mark Lilla, you know, was wrote a very, very critical review of, I think your mentor, Corey Robin’s book back around 13 years ago. And I think that the review was unduly harsh, but in that review, he Lilla makes a lot of very useful distinctions that I like to draw on. One of them is to say there are two kinds of reactionaries in the world there are either there are restorative reactionaries who want to kind of go back to a past and kind of redo things by catapulting to the past, and then there are redemptive reactionaries who think we can’t any longer get back To that past, it’s too gone, too far gone and destroyed. We have no alternative but to level the skyline and create a kind of open field of rubble and then build a new on that from scratch. Well, the Claire monsters, up until around 2016 were very much restorative reactionaries. They just wanted to go back before Wilson, just just, just ignore, get rid of the administrative state, deconstruct it, as Steve Bannon said later, and return to before, those before times. And then, if we could do that. Everything would be great. We’d be the best regime again by the time we get to Michael Anton, who’s a very prominent West Coast Jaffa Eitz straussian, who writes this famous essay the flight 93 election, arguing that every conservative America, in America, if they really are conservative, must support Donald Trump. He, by the way, is the outgoing Director of Policy Planning at the State Department right now. He also served in the first Trump administration for a time on the National Security Council. He basically, he announces, in effect, he announces, we have to become redemptive reactionaries. We have to empower this guy who is going to destroy everything and and then we can build a new and kind of recreate something of the old excellence of the past on the ruins of the administrative state that will be will be either leveled to the ground or will also seize it and use that power to do what we want. So that’s kind of the just so story behind all of these people. Now what all of that has. To do with the earlier stuff about Strauss is, I have no freaking clue like that, that how you get from Strauss to that. Like, is, is, is, you know, I’m going to tell the story of how it happens in my book, but it is not obvious to me in any way other than Wow. Like, like, that’s a that’s an implausible reading of where it originates. But boy, it, it, it’s, it’s pretty amazing. It’s a very, very different kind of approach to things.

Eli Karetny 

Thanks, Damon, I know I promised an hour, but I can’t let you go without asking you at least one question about bat. So let me do that, but I just want to briefly say that was a wonderful day on the West Coast, a great story, and I’m flooded with memories. You know, whether it’s Lilla’s review of Corey ‘s book. And remember, Corey reacting to being called a lumper. All political philosophers are, in one way or another, lumpers. But that was, that was actually, you know, a thoughtful, if harsh review, but one, one thought in terms of the kind of battle against the administrative state on the part of, you know, would be great, great leaders and great wise men. I’m reminded of on tyranny and Strauss’s engagement with Alexander Kozhev and the idea of the universal and homogenous state. And where kozhev ideas, you know, filter down to to Fukuyama and in the end of history. And, you know, so I’m flooded with lots of ideas. You know, maybe in another conversation we can pick up on some of this. And one name, which we haven’t had, hasn’t come up, and it needs to come up. And maybe now, as we say a few parting words about BAP Nietzsche is somewhere hovering here in the background, and there’s no way to engage in a conversation about Strauss’s influence without saying something about about Nietzsche. So maybe I’ll leave the Nietzsche question to kind of address that, maybe through bap, but maybe just say a few words about Costine Alamaru, better known as Bronze Age pervert or bap, who you’ve written, written about as a quote, unquote, rogue disciple of Alan Bloom. So maybe, you know, connect a few of those dots. And you know what? Why should we, you know? Why should we care or be paying attention to Bap and what he says on social media? You know. Why does it matter? I think it does. But I’m inviting you to say a few

Damon Linker 

Yeah, well, I mean, briefly, so listeners can follow custom. Almario, also known as Bronze Age pervert, is a guy who has a PhD in Political Science from Yale. He studied under Stephen Smith, who’s a Straussian, and also Brian Garston, who is not a Straus and although I believe Harvey Mansfield served on the dissertation committee as well, and I’ve actually seen the written comments from the dissertation committee to his dissertation, he’s a guy who graduated, I think he got his PhD from Yale around 2015, something like that. And he, over the next couple of years, self published a book called Bronze Age mindset that became a kind of fluke, runaway best seller among the further right male readers who worked in the first Trump administration. So I would say the reason to pay attention to the guys and so much is social media presence now, as it is that he’s read by a lot of young male right wingers, and the piece you mentioned where I talk about him as a rogue disciple of Alan Bloom is, is I was actually responding to an essay that somebody else had written making that claim, and I tried to argue that it’s like not quite fair to bloom, to to blame him for for bap, and it’s also not really fair to Strauss, although I do think that that there are disturbing things in this, not that they deserve blame, like he’s like their child. But, you know, I mean, Alexander the Great studied with Aristotle Alcibiades was a Socrates student, like there is a long, ugly history of people who encounter the, what Strauss called the mania of philosophy, namely, what philosophy is. When you leave the cave, you sort of you get exposed. To what radical questioning of everything really means, including radical questioning of morality in all of its aspects. And some people come back as sociopaths, and that is an eternal risk for philosophy. And BAP is one of our sociopaths. That’s kind of the way I would prefer to frame it. He’s a guy who substantively disagrees very strongly with Strauss, like his reading of Plato’s Gorgias is completely absurd from the point of view of the way Strauss read that dialog he sort of sees, I mean, I’m not going to get into the weeds of this on this for your listeners, poor listeners, but there’s a character in the Gorgias who’s very Nietzsche and very bap, like called Callicles, who’s like A total nihilist believes justice is just whatever the strong do and can get away with. Doesn’t believe in any kind of common good or obligations to anybody, and so forth and so on. At great length, Socrates refutes him repeatedly, sort of exposes to everyone listening to the conversation that Callicles’ soul is monstrously disordered, and that’s kind of the lesson of the dialogue, that this guy is a mess. Well, Bronze Age pervert thinks actually Callicles is the hero of the Gorgias, and he shows that Socrates is a sap sucker and Trump and chump. That is not Strauss’s reading of the dialogue. And frankly, I think it’s an insane reading of the dialog, but, but, you know, there are some, some young people who you know do on the right. You do get young people to, like, read Plato for fun. That’s just the way the right is, and that he has like minions who, like are devoted to thinking this is the right reading, and Callicles is a hero, and we should all basically become little tyrants who try to conquer the world and make everyone else our slaves. So again, bap is our is our sociopath. And that doesn’t mean that we should, you know, we should execute the philosophers like Socrates is fate. It also doesn’t mean we should even demonize them, necessarily, but it means that we should be reminded that radical philosophical questioning of everything is potentially a dangerous business, and Strauss did it very radically. And you’re going to, you know if, if you’re unfortunate enough to live at a time where there are actual live political options for these sociopaths to gain a foothold among staffers in the White House in the West Wing. Then there are moments like our own where that philosophical mania can have a kind of ominousness to it. You can end up generating, as Strauss thought you needed to, not just conservatives, but maybe fascists. And that doesn’t mean Strauss wanted to generate them. He was writing and living in 1950s and ’60s America, and his students were nothing like that. But we now live in a different cave. Our cave has evolved, or perhaps devolved, such that creating a bunch of people who think philosophy means hanging out and trying to rule the cave, trying to manipulate the little cutouts behind the Chained prisoners on the floor. If that is a cave where, where, like the leader is Donald Trump, then you know, creating all of these would be cave dwellers, and having them associate hanging out in the cave and ruling it with philosophy, again, can be a little ominous. So this is now become the greatest, the greatest public airing of what the book will be saying that anyone has ever heard beyond my agent and my editor.

So lucky all of you, I guess,

Eli Karetny 

Thank you. Thank you very much. Damon, with that ominous image in mind, I want to thank you for joining us on International Horizons. This has been a very thought-provoking, interesting, in some ways, scary conversation. I very much appreciate your time.

That’s my brand.

Eli Karetny 

So good luck to you. The start of this the fall semester. And thank you again for joining us.