In Caribbean rhythms episode 162, what is nation defined by? What define pygmy Negrito people of, let's say, small Andaman Island Indian Ocean versus the Polish people who according to Toussaint Louverture, this is the Haitian Moses, okay, but according to him, the Polish or the blacks of Europe. But what defines them though, as opposed to, let's say, ancient Romans of the early republic or Ashkenazi Jew, 18th century Galicia, versus a Hebrew living under one of the captaincies of the twelve tribes, versus a Bedouin in the year 1800, a Russian in St. Petersburg in 1900, or a charioteer, knight of the Mitanni Empire of the Bronze Age, I mean, I'm not just trying to name drop various peoples, but this incredible variety of human types

of the past, and then you consider that, you see this question from different points, because if you limit what defines a nation only to modern types, you realize how poverty is poverty of diversity. On one hand, you have a kind of very significant diversity in the sense that the weakness of the wasp, let's consider that, of the Anglo who does not realize that not everyone in the world has his moral sentiments or his intellectual capacities, and so maybe unwilling to recognize that he holds them to a standard they can never reach with predictable results. But on the other hand, when it comes to way of life, most everyone today lives more or less the same when compared to the great variety of the tribes of the remoter past. I'm saying it's relative.

And even by Spinoza's day, in the 1600s Dutch Republic, he has a line to the effect that the Muslims there, the Jews and the Christians, despite whatever, they actually more or less lived exactly the same way. It makes me think it's interesting, you know, why the yellow star thing on the yellow marking on Jews would have been necessary at all if they would have been easy to spot. But it comes from a medieval pope, I believe, and a similar marking was required for Muslims and it was because in Italy of that time, they could not be distinguished. Now part of this is the fact that all were of Mediterranean race, but it isn't just that. It's normally if people live a different way, you can see it in their clothes, even in their way of walking and their bearing and everything else.

But for quite some time, I would say maybe even at least six, seven hundred years, people have lived more or less, well, let me not go there. But I don't mean this question as intellectual abstraction, what is your definition? But big question in political life, what is important in life? Is it political constitutions or principles, is this word propositions, ideas of justice, what is right or wrong and so on? Or is it, on the other hand, culture defined in 19th century, let's say German, a romantic nationalist way, where it is the folkways of the people that, of a people that are theirs only that define them, that are particular to them? Things like folk stories, folk dances, local art styles, cuisine even, and of course now

culture has come, this word, to refer to peculiarities of even non-national groupings. culture, gamer culture, download nigga culture, and so on, you know, you know what to find down, you know what download nigga culture is, you want to go to Chicago, look I can't talk that, but this indicates, yes, this is about the expansion of this concept, degeneration you can say of this concept and word culture, that actually originally didn't refer necessarily to anything in particular to one grouping, it referred, it comes from agriculture, the cultivation of soil, the cultivation of man or the human animal as such, or let's say of his higher functions and abilities, but then Kultur came to mean something quite different is what I'm saying in the 19th century nationalist view of things.

And some of you may guess that here I'm referring to a famous debate between culture and civilization. This was very important in 19th century Germany and then spread elsewhere. Spengler and others, Tonnies, but this was otherwise recast in variation, you may have heard, in conservative debate magazines between particularism and universalism, where at times if they invoke historical examples, the stand-ins would have been, let's say, Greek city standing in for, you know, the pillars and so on, standing in for culture, and then Rome with its citizenship, ideals and so on standing for civilization, a universal civilization, or the Hellenic idealizing and Hellenism-loving Germans standing for the side of culture, while at times the

French and at times the Anglo standing for civilization, this would have been in the 18th, 19th century, although in this case it would have been a universalism or a civilization of different types, with the English supposedly representing commercial, liberal, capitalist civilization and the French a different type originating in ideals of the French Revolution. I'm not saying by the way I agree with the scheme of things but just as a very quick refresh of main positions that were held on this I like rather the distinction between what Nietzsche calls Alexandrian scientific civilization referring to the post Alexander the great Hellenistic world world, its forms of organization and ideals, which includes Christianity as a later, you

can think of either as a side branch of Alexandrian Hellenistic civilization, or an alteration or a new form of the same Alexandrian civilization, against which stands the possibility of rebirth of Hellenic culture of classical and archaic age that preceded it, again in different form of course he was not and it wasn't just him there were other Germans they were not interested in historical role play and reenactment but I mean a rebirth of its spirit or you know a mindset but why I say all this preamble because I was thinking how two episodes ago I mentioned uh I think it was two episodes I told you problem uh social history this idea social history I speculated that the focus on pottery styles in ancient archaeology it was in part yes it's just

necessity because pottery is one of the few distinctive ancient artifacts left in pre-literate societies left from them I mean and it becomes a handy tool even if it's a wrong one but a handy tool to identify this or that people or culture I think in the end it's not legitimate because just to remind you of example I I gave a military elite takes over a large settled population to essentially farm them as serfs or because that area might have rich natural resources. But this elite wouldn't be interested in, you know, basket weaving and pottery making and making its own pottery. The natives might have just as good pottery that they can use, at least to begin with in a primitive state. Later on they could have vases and so on.

So for example, you can't use the continuity of pottery in prehistoric Greece as evidence of the continuity of anything, but, well, the continuity of the people, the people with a capital P, that's what the continuity of pottery would represent, the serfs or helots, that is to say. But anyway, that's just speculation though. It's more ambiguous in the case of archaeology, but I'm speculating that a part of it isn't just motivated by convenience, but I guessed that part of the focus on this everyday type material like pottery is related to the new historical methods or rather the orientations that appeared after World War two and really actually has taken over especially after 1970s in academia where now anthropology is entirely a

Marxist exercise in openly pushing for these things like decolonization or a decentering of European so-called priorities but what it really means is you know I'll just read you I'll read you recent this is funny I'll read you recent dissertation titles from let's say the Princeton Department of Anthropology and here's a sample I didn't pick them I didn't pick and choose this is just the first if you go and look 2023 dissertation titles these are the first ones that show up a sense of radius gender conviviality and Poetics in India's Muslim communities wonderful the ICL cohort an ethnography of International criminal justice. I have no life after death in New York City an ethnography of public administration Oh God, this is the kind of thing

I would jerk off to in the not jerk off to but jerk off in in the library and I'd leave it there Yeah, poetics in India's Muslim communities, you know, you know what they do there with the trains I don't want to get into this they burn trains but becoming responsible adults aging out of child welfare in Kentucky you know I can't keep a straight face leading these black Muslims in the Colombian Pacific race religion and the regimes of citizenship Yeah, they love these words regimes of but but yeah black Muslims in Colombian Pacific. You know it's a real niche afterlives of welcome and counter contact and the refugee incorporation in berlin the fear that lasts forever food and time in an altai village they

love that they love showing uh pontificating it's not just the marxoid uh of course the agenda is always this lefty you know everyday people lesbian basket weaving whatever but um it's not just that they they love pontificating in this post-heideggerian post-modernist way about what this people's experience of food, what their food tells you about their experience of time, these kinds of questions, you know. I keep reading from you, but I am interested in food in Altai village. You know, they think that vegetables in that region of Russia, in Tuva, and further south in the Altai, they think that vegetables taste like wood. They don't eat them. I need to stop going on tangents. I'm going to keep reading for you. These are titles, Past the

End of the Road, Aesthetic Senses of Place Along Kachemak Bay, Alaska. See, this is what I'm telling you. Minding Time, Healthy Living Amid the Clinic, the Church, and the Homeland in the Republic of Cameroon. Do you want to know about healthy living in Cameroon? Have Have you ever heard of Gaetan Dugas? I think that was Equatorial Guinea or Guinea-Dissau, I don't know. Solidarity in the sand, labor, capitalist development, and the contestation in Mexico was Maya Riviera. Okay, so I think you get the point. You may, well, no student who would go in a doctoral program is that delusional, but maybe when they're 17, 16, and they want to become an anthropologist, and they think they're getting Indiana Jones, but actually they're getting what I just told you.

And Indiana Jones is a dirty word in modern anthropology and archaeology departments. This kind of social history, that's what you get, and it's all ideologically motivated of course to support Marxist point of view. And I want to go on another tangent for a moment. Every single one of these people, I can guarantee you, who wrote these theses, these dissertations would go off about the deleterious effects of capital, about hyper capitalism, about consumerism, colonialism, Zionism. Again, it doesn't matter if it is correct to connect this with those other things, but they are connected in the minds of the left. Every single one of these people would support the Floyd riots and talk about the problematics of heteronormative patriarchy and white supremacy.

So it might hurt some people who are looking to seem original or for new takes online, but in fact the typical hard-right boomer, his opinions about the problem of the far left and his concern over cultural Marxism, which the people I just read, they understand what they are doing as Marxism by other means, self-consciously. That is a word they use, not cultural Marxism, but they understand it as an extension of that fight. that's fundamentally correct and if you hope to have any political relevance on the right you have to tackle what's going on in not just universities but in tech and in also now other fields like finance where the creeping takeover of crucial registers of society by freaks like this over the last 10-15 years or I

guarantee you you will have a beige lesbian in 10-15 years check your house for evidence of air-conditioning and the like and I'm not exaggerating that's a very real possibility I would bet on that unless this problem I just told you is taken on the spread of these people within these institutions which a lot of even billionaires are unable to take on or have been caught blindsided by you become even high up in a company and these people are already part of the HR department and part if you're in tech of much of your programmers might be trues even who are like this even ask you to put a litter in the bathroom because they identify as a cat now and so what can you do with that well shit it's not it's not the fault you know you understand of what I am saying the

spread of this thing people thought that Jack or Zukertface were the ones directing it but they are in large part captive to their staff they can't they do not have monarchical power why was Brendan Eich ousted from Firefox it's because it's not just how can I put this nicely he didn't have the power he his His staff believes in these things to a large extent and he didn't have that confidence. He couldn't continue as head of that company because of it. How to do it? How to take on this problem? That's a different question, but adopting these people's rhetoric on capital, on hyper-capitalism or the alienation caused by liberal consumer society might not be the best way, but sorry for tangent. I return to topic.

You see the concerns of social history, of the Marxoid kind, it's this kind of petty, the low history of the humble, the last shall be the first, undertaken out of desire to center the supposedly marginalized and exploited, and to de-center the epistemes and worldviews of the exploiters and the privileged. But there is a parallel debate that touches actually on these same matters, which is conservative in origin, conservative in intent, orientation, call it whatever you want. But it can be quickly summarized as the debate between civilization and culture, which again is a 19th century, very important 19th century German political thought, especially around debates regarding nationalism. And now, this is middle of first segment, but this is what I actually intended to get

to, and on this show we'll discuss. I am going to read from a book by Paul Gottfried, where he is attacking Leo Strauss, but this section of the book, it's one of the parts where he's friendliest to Strauss. He concedes or acknowledges that Strauss was aware or maybe even sympathetic to the conservative or nationalist case. But listen, I'll read you, maybe in order to make the matters I'm discussing clear, but my point is I think both of these positions are wrong, and whether they're self-consciously wrong or not, if they're fronting or if they're ignorant, that's not my concern. But this episode is in part criticism of American conservative intellectual scene. It's fruitless debates, and the way that the debate over what a nation is and how a people

is defined, which is very important, but the debate over so-called universalism versus particularism, I think it became rather stupid in American conservatism. It's exemplified in what I'm about to read to you from Paul Gottfried. I read now. Fairness, however, dictates that we mention that unlike his followers, Strauss in the 1960s foresaw the true lines of division between liberals and conservatives, in quotation marks liberals and conservatives. In his preface to liberalism, ancient and modern, he abandons his customary distinction between liberal democracy and its enemies to observe the tension between modern liberals and conservatives. Strauss tries to narrow this difference by stating that most people are moderate in their identification with either of the two ideological poles.

Therefore the distinction between them might not amount to much in the end. Strauss then muddles the water by telling us that the conservatism of our age is identical with what was originally liberalism. Indeed much of what goes now by the name of conservatism has in the last analysis a common root with present day liberalism and even with communism. All of this repeats what are merely truisms. No one but a historical illiterate or a hardened time-bound ideologue would deny that the current right looks like some form of the archaic left, whether it is celebrating a crusade for human rights or preaching some variation on 18th century anarchism with appropriate attributions to Tom Paine. I actually think Gottfried, I'm interjecting, I actually think Gottfried is being a little

bit unfair here because I think even what goes by name classical liberalism without these excesses regarding human rights and so forth, even that would have been considered leftism before, let's say in the 19th century and so on, but let me not get into that debate. What is more interesting, however, than these references is Strauss's pinpointing of the diametrically opposed worldviews. Partisans of the left, according to his interpretation, look toward the universal and homogenous state – a creation that Strauss correspondent Alexander Kozhiev defended in his writings. Any approximation to the universal and homogenous state is for liberals a move in the proper direction, although they may conceal their enthusiasm by pretending to be advocates of

hard-headed politics who believe that that state has been rendered necessary by economic and technological progress, the necessity of making nuclear war impossible for all the future, and by the increasing wealth of the advanced countries. Against this liberal vision, Strauss opposes an essentialist conservative one. Its advocates regard the universal and homogenous state as either undesirable, though possible, or as both undesirable and impossible. Conservatives may have to accept in the short run a united free Europe as an alliance against the Soviet Communist threat, but they are likely to understand such units differently from liberals. I think that here Gottfried is quoting in this next paragraph, I mean Strauss, directly.

So what I'm about to read for you, this paragraph that's central to what I'm saying on the show, this comes from Strauss directly. They are likely to understand such units differently from liberals. An outstanding European conservative has spoken of the Europe of the nations. Conservatives look with greater sympathy than liberals on the particular or particularist and the heterogeneous. At least they are more willing than liberals to respect and perpetuate a more fundamental diversity than the one ordinarily respected or taken for granted by liberals and even by communists, which is the diversity regarding language, folk songs, pottery and the like. Furthermore, inasmuch as the universalism in politics is founded on the universalism

proceeding from reason, conservatism is frequently characterized by distrust of reason or by trust in a tradition which is necessarily this or that tradition and hence particular. Finally, conservatism is therefore exposed to criticism that is guided by the notion of the unity of truth whereas liberals, especially those who know that their aspirations have their roots in the Western tradition are not sufficiently concerned with the fact that that tradition is ever more eroded by the changes in the direction of the one world which they demand or applaud. It would be hard to find a more perceptive analysis than this for one addressing the distinction between left and right. That's Gottfried's judgment of what Strauss is saying.

He thinks, even though the book is a criticism of Strauss, he thinks he's the most perceptive in the distinction between left and right. The underlying insight goes back to Carl Schmitt and his criticism of the universal homogenous state. Strauss is repeating here Schmitt's critical observations for the benefit of Anglo-American readers. He assumes Schmitt's famous equation of the universal state with universal tyranny, and he incorporates this distinctive perspective into his delineation of the conservative worldview. Strauss also cites Charles de Gaulle, who as French president in the 1960s argued against an overly close union of European states in favour of a continued national consciousness among European peoples.

Strauss presents this conservative type as the exact opposite of the liberal, with his unrealistic and utopian expectations. This conservative antithesis is nothing, however, that he finds disagreeable or which he feels threatens liberal democracy. Look, I'll stop reading here and you get a good – I think this is actually excellent introduction to the state of conservative intellectual discourse in America. With Paul Gottfried as the presumed opponent of the position Leo Strauss holds, which I'll say more in a moment, I need quick break tea. I'll be right back. Add my tea. And in this case, what I read for you, and point of contention between these two camps within American conservatism. you want a shorthand, Leo Strauss would stand in for the neocon position of propositional

nation and Paul Gottfried would be paleoconservative position or let's say, although actually I think that followers are mostly unworthy of them, they would be the figureheads of this, at least from a popular perception, a journalist's perception. I think, if I can make a side, that I will return to some other time if there is interest, But calling Strauss a neo-con or the originator of neo-con ideology is false, is a distortion of what he's saying. And in fact, what I just read from you in the previous segment, what Gottfried is reluctantly sympathetic and willing to admit that Strauss understood, maybe better than anyone else, the organic, let's say, historicist, conservative position, or at least was able to encapsulate

it in a short paragraph better than anyone else, and that he even showed a penchant alike for it. That alone may show you a story of Strauss as progenitor of neo-cons, which it is gut-freed purpose to make that case in this book is not really accurate story. But in what I read, particularly the mention of pottery styles, that's just coincidence. I had a dream a week, two weeks ago, or maybe it was a year ago, I don't remember if it's after midnight, but my head was made of a pottery vase and someone took hammer and completely it shattered in a million pieces, it pulverized. But inside there was a luminescent jellyfish type thing, it became my head. It was an amazing feeling. But look, the point remains, Strauss points out, it is conservatives who define nationhood

and the being of peoples by things more fundamental than these small types of cultural diversity like art styles, music style, cuisine, pottery, and so on, which is the maximum difference that liberals and even Marxists are willing to consider. And yes, this is an impulse that, as you can see, the Libtards, and especially, I mean, as Leftoids, the Marxoids who practice social theory have, to focus instead of the great political moments, the forging of constitutions, the diplomacy between great states, and especially actually a history of warfare, the affairs of courts and kings that determine the future of nations. They want to focus instead on these bottom-up things, which shouldn't be a surprise because

ultimately what is Marxism but in the best form of Hegelianism, which yes, it wants to deny the importance of nationhood or race or local culture and to replace it by consideration of material conditions, ownership of means of production and many such, but the fundamental orientation I'm saying is still historical in the sense that the bigger questions of what defines a society are taken to be historically emergent things, in the case of Marx being modes of production or other material conditions that constitute the base, whereas the superstructure is only an ideology or justification determined by the material economic conditions. But the interesting part of this is the connection between this view with that actually of the

conservative nationalist who sees the nation as something historically emergent as well for the historicist nationalist of this type. It isn't as crude as it is for Marx because the higher registers of a people's cultural and intellectual life aren't understood as mere justification or emanation, call it what you want, of modes of material production. But it's related only in the sense that notions of justice or what is right and wrong and ultimately the political and legal organization of a people or a nation isn't something that's determined by decision or top-down by, let's say, a founder imposing a rational constitution or such, but that it emerges historically from the customs, the folkways, the local modes of being and such of a people that adapt over time to an environment.

And yes, not directly that it emerges from a people's pottery style, that would be obviously an absurd thing to claim, although I think there are some who almost become dummies when they try to define nations by their song styles or pottery forms. But yes, there would be a connection reasonably made in the sense that the people's historical local adaptations to its place and time give rise simultaneously to its customs and art folkways which include its pottery or whatever, but also, from the same source, bring its higher modes of social, legal, political organization. Whereas in Paul Gottfried's opinion, for the Straussian type of conservative, the one who stereotypically would believe in a propositional nation, a people or rather a country or society

is determined by the principles of justice it believes in, by its constitutions and its declared notions of rights, things like the Declaration of Independence in the case of United States, and many such things. And this then appears as a neat division, you know. In the passage I just read, Godfrey doesn't mention it, but in some book, mighty natural right in history, Leo Strauss is aligned to the effect that great societies don't go to war over differences in art styles, which is a kind of polemical joke, and it's true and cutting in the sense that it takes the knees out from other people or specifically scholars and intellectuals who want to pretend that the nation is most of all represented or defined by cuisine or such trivialities, but it's a distortion

because that is true, but they also don't really go to war over differing notions of justice or even over religion. I mean, have you ever seen such a thing? It happens, but it's very rare. The Cold War was really an exception in history where you had, for example, centers for deprogramming or deep brainwashing those who had been infected with Marxist ideology in Vietnam and other hot places where Marxism and United States were fighting against each other. There were these programming and deprogramming, you know, essentially brainwashing centers on both sides. So it may have seen at the time that the conflict of the age and maybe future conflict was primarily ideological over differing notions of justice as part of even a rational argument and debate and such, with detransitioning centers.

But in general, that's not why nations go to war, and I don't even know that you can say it was for that reason during the Cold War. They go to war over much the same things that two opposing gangs go to war over, and I don't mean to reduce it to competition over resources, but that's what people usually think. Gangs fight for turf resources, but turf doesn't really mean resources. It's matters of honor, of perceived insult, perceived threat to your existence, or also especially desire to protect friends with maybe material as well as ideological considerations playing, I think, supporting often actually patently cynical roles in rhetoric only. So I need to hint to you that there's obfuscation in that neat division that Gottfried reads

into Strauss regarding the opposition of liberalism and conservatism and what makes the two supposedly fundamentally different, fundamentally opposed. I think this neat division, what makes liberals and conservatives oppose each other, is wrong. And this whole scheme Gottfried laid out in what I read to you is actually a dumb distortion. I'm not attacking Gottfried, he himself is not dumb, but the way this has been understood in general intellectual discourse, in political discourse in Europe as well as America is very revealing of most things that are superficial and polemical about intellectual debates among conservatives. I mean, I don't want to even comment on the left, but among conservatives I'm saying now,

I don't mean that Gottfried himself is just wrong, because Strauss is also wrong, as well as every other conservative commentator who pontificates on these abstractions. So I'll go on a tangent, it's not even related, I don't know why I think of this now, but I wanted to tell you, I was in Istanbul and I met a white Turk. He looks almost exactly like Ataturk. They have this brow ridge and eyes kind of close together. It's a very white Turkish Istanbul look, probably from the Balkans, some kind of characteristic mix from the Balkans. And we are talking and playing chess. I went to chess club and I tell him about the Military History Museum in Vienna and how it had trophies from their victories in the Battle of Vienna and other victories over the Turks

because they followed that up with conquests further south and so on. he looked in the late 1600s and he looked very displeased with me telling him this and who do you think it is who is interested by the way in battle of Vienna type military history museums which by the way if you are in Vienna that's a great place to see I normally find museum very boring I don't but them but the military history museums in Vienna and Lisbon very much worth seeing exciting places and yet I mean to say that the day-to-day intuition you might have is that the conservative boomer and even actually very erudite conservative intellectuals often well maybe they would have some interest in the folkways and local cultures of their nations but they are the ones who are

primarily intensely interested still the only ones in traditional history of this type about the affair of affairs of kings and princes courts and especially wars and such and in matters of when they do approach intellectual and cultural history, they would be focusing on the great figures and poets that define national spirit as they see it, and that's, you could say, the man who would, in this scheme I just discussed, be called a particularist, you know, whereas it is the supposedly universalist cosmopolitan libtards and the leftists who actually want to reduce history to, you know, extremely localized, you know, barrio, micro-history of micro-cultures. What did a peasant woman in the French come to eat day to day in 1810 and how does this

reflect on their mode of being and their conception of space and this kind of, you know, inanity and in this simple, maybe you say, bat being, you're being too naive, but I will tell you why in more detail in a moment, but in this naive observation that I'm making here, you You can see that the opposition Strauss posits or Gottfried bizarrely then accepts is not quite true. I've heard it said that the Grimm Brothers collected all those wonderful German fairy tales. I don't know why I go on such tangents, but the Grimm Brothers, I like Grimm, they collected Grimm fairy tales out of a nationalistic and devoted impulse to preserve the German people's childhood fairy tales. But the good thing they did, I couldn't get enough of these as a small boy myself.

Have I been spiritually Teutonized, converted to Teutonic spirit because of this? Maybe so. But look, what I'm getting to is that the conservative intellectual mind in America especially traffics in these kinds of abstractions like particularism versus universalism and so on, absolutism versus relativism. And it's not just conservatives who do this, but since I'm talking about it now, I find is completely, uh, almost useless to describe the real world. It's a great distortion of political life because again, just let's take this case particularism versus universalism, right? Supposedly so relevant for deciding what is a nation, supposedly a great debate, you know, and it has immediate consequences. You might think for great political issues of our

time. For example, the line goes, the line goes that if you believe in propositional type universalism or the Constitution is what makes a people or a notion of justice the written Constitution or you know then you can import export that okay so you can get Iraq or Pakistan or whatever to be like you if you only install an American Constitution there and get them to maybe avow belief it's something like the Declaration of Independence and send people to teach Iraqis about democracy in seminars as America did in the 2000s after the conquest of Iraq, whereas if you believe that, you know, in so-called particularism and that liberal society in this case is an outgrowth of centuries of Anglo or other kinds of European practices, then you can't transfer that so well.

So of course a similar argument then can be made about immigration. So these are emotional trigger issues, actually, despite the abstraction implied in the words. I remember once I was teaching Tocqueville, and I like to troll students with what Tocqueville said about Mexico and Mexicans, and how unsuitable their society is for Anglo-style democracy. And I often had, you know, libtard girls that freak out, where, why does it say that? I can't see that, so I say, here, please, read this part, okay, and chimp out. They would not chimp out because they're nice, polite people, but they were seething. So anyway, so the line goes, although Gottfried is wrong that Strauss believed in democracy exportation or such, some of his followers maybe, but not Strauss.

But anyway, you see the importance of these questions then, and its old question, as mention of Tocqueville implies, its very 19th century question, has existed at the time partly as the famous debate of culture versus civilization, and it took various formulations. So Ferdinand Thunis came with famous distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community versus society, in which society, Gesellschafts, corresponds to what I'm calling civilization on this show, a kind of rationalistic association based on some type of public objective interest or at the national level, let's say, on merely egoistic self-interest, whereas, Gemeinschaft refers to a community based on natural or organic bonds of blood ties

or family ties of other kinds, but also brotherhood, friendship, intense friendship it could be. And it's interesting in the wake of this distinction, Max Weber also talked about this, But you forgive me tangents, but it's interesting how let's say Germany different organizations chose to self-brand According to each of these words so you take the hard right for example You'd have the Thule Gesellschaft which was mystical hard right some say it was proto-nazi organization secret society founded 1919 I think and they probably bequeath the swastika to the Nazi party I think Rudolf Hess and some others came from this occult secret society, but they call themselves Gesellschaft, a society, whereas you have things like the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, which is very funny

It was a hard right pro-homosexual organization around the year 1900 or after and maybe the theorizing about the pink swastika should come back It's very funny. Maybe someone should make a troll account about that. It would be hilarious You could probably get Alex Jones to re-tweet you, but they chose to brand as a Gemeinschaft a community based on – anyway, this is just a tangent, but this debate is reflected at multiple levels in German sociology and political thought in the 19th century, though just to take the legal side of it, to show the historical and institutional schools of legal theory. So von Savigny and Bakoffen were resisting the mechanistic positivism of Napoleon. My friend, second city bureaucrat, tell me of this and he write of this.

But yes, these you could say nationalist type or particularist type legal theorists, legal historians, they were resisting French statutory top-down, you can think, law, Roman law, because the Volksgeist, the spirit of the folk, the spirit of the people produces law organically over time and in adaptation to historical circumstances. I'm sure you're familiar also with parallel debates on this from Burke or in general in Anglo world between statutory law and common law, you know, Norman law and common law exception for Anglo-Saxons. But in Germany, as what I just said imply, it had much to do with pro-German nationalist sentiment as yes, let's say even a point of butthurt about French conquest and the Roman

law imposed by Napoleon, around which they tried to get, as a kind of supposed criticism of the universalism of the French Revolution, they tried to get around this with these various theories that I've told you just now, Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, culture versus civilization, the concept of the folksgeist, the folk spirit, and these other types of things. But maybe you can see what I'm getting to hear, that these concepts were not born in a kind of objective, cold, consideration of political life and what it is that define a nation, but actually in a very polemical setting where people took very passionate sides. After all, had the Germans adopted, let's say just in the case of legal theory, if they

had just adopted the Napoleonic Code, they wouldn't have thereby stopped being German. Napoleonic law was not about homogenizing them into being something else in that sense. So the thing is, the thing is, it's all rather dishonest because nobody ever died for universalism or for particularism, you know? That's what I'm saying. Nobody died for a diffused belief that the folk's soul creates sufficient law and so we don't need that foreign French Napoleonic code law. But what they actually died for is their homeland, in this case Germany. They died for this or that particular universalism and for this or that particular particularism. In other words, it's not a disinterested and objective appreciation of the importance

of history and of local conditions to produce organically grown, so to say, laws and customs and morals and so on. It's done actually out of attachment to a certain particular tribal orientation, which is then felt to be threatened by so-called universalism or by Hellenism. And that's it, you know. And then this kind of smelled to me to be dishonest. It smelled dishonest. Because what these people really cared about is the assertion of their own ways against the foreign encroacher that had defeated them. And in such cases, the dishonesty comes from the dishonesty of victimization. Well, other people are like me too, and every people deserves to have its own, you know. And this kind of thing where you take your condition and try to, actually they are universalizing it, you understand?

This is of course the pleading and saccharine self-justification that Zionists use to justify, you know, their kind of a people each in its own nation, this kind of sentimentalism. I find it to be lying, it's stupid and dishonest. It comes from tribal attachment and again the threat you feel from so-called Hellenism from the outside. But if you are successful at your particularism, you'd also be universal, you see. So I also think, on the other side, a case for so-called universalism in the abstract, I think that can also be dishonest and superficial, I'll tell you why. least the way it's understood by most shallow conservatives who actually do believe in propositional nation nonsense, which doesn't just include neo-cons, by the way.

I've met many mainline, mainstream American conservatives who would not call themselves neo-cons, don't like, maybe it's for practical, rhetorical reasons, but they don't like the Iraq war and many such things, but they would get annoyed and offended when I would say say that some peoples across the world cannot become American, and maybe that's just a point of imperial pride even, but it's really part of it is born out of genuine belief in this stupid propositional nation idea that's often identified with universalism. So I will try to show through example, I mean, consider the life course of a great people, X from moment of foundation or mythical foundation a man comes a great genius who sees he must appear as a prophet and voice of the gods and he sees the people

people X in some particular situation and moment of history that needs or is ready to accept such a divine foundation let's say best-case scenario he is a real genius a political genius he sees things outside history outside the He is bigger than his age. Great men are not determined by their age. They determine their age. He sees what is good and great and then adapts what he has seen for the people among which he finds himself, for people X, who are bound by a particular historical circumstance. He doesn't just adapt the presentation in divine dress. He doesn't just put the kind of miraculous bells and whistles on it to impress the people, but he also adapts what part of greatness is accessible to this people, given its

capacity, its geography, and so on, including its possibilities for the future. So let's say he does a good job. He's a great warrior king born of a wolf, and later on he's followed by another king, an intellectual man of peace, who is also a genius and gives further loss to this people and refines them as they've settled down somewhat. I mean, yes, Numa Pompilius, but you know already the people in question aren't so much attached to some abstract notion of justice even at this stage or to a proposition that can be easily transferred to others. He may have been at the point of foundation the founder is or the great re-founder, someone like Numa Pompilius, might be conscious of those principles of justice, those propositions, but for the people and for

But even the leadership actually, the attachment is mediated through myth, through religion, and through especially their bonds of loyalty to each other, which have to be able to endure great stresses, warfare, near losses, and many such things. And then over time, if the act of foundation that I just described is successful, what will happen is the man who ends up doing well in such a society, each constitution favors a particular type of man because it favors particular notions of what is good and great, particular abilities, therefore habits. And over time, think if you want Darwinian type, certain men end up having more children because they're more favored by such societies or more surviving children. And so their manners, looks, many such, become hereditary.

In other words, each constitution, whether it wants to or not, ends up breeding certain types of men. So, a universalist, you can say proposition nation, okay, let's say it starts that way, but if it's successful, actually it has to end up creating this type of society where the unwritten law is much more important than the written law or the rational proposition. As Rousseau and others say, the unwritten law is the law written in the heart. It shows itself in the manners, the habits, even the tastes in music and many such things that then determine also the art styles of that nation. So even, you know, in the end, the entire culture ends up reflecting that supposed proposition or constitution in the highest sense, but it's obviously then something that can't really be transferred

in the way claimed by superficial proponents of this, want to use it to justify either democracy promotion or migration and assimilation being easy, because if it actually works as a propositional nation, if it's not just a surface level cover, It leads to what I'm describing here, where it's reflected even in the blood or the physical outcome, let's say, of a people. Should they actually genuinely be devote over generations to that constitutional regime, that diet, you know? So in a sense, successful universalism is a kind of particularism. And on the other hand, the opposite is also true. Well, I need more tea break, I'll be right back. But my point here is that when each concept bleeds into each other this way, it's not

really useful concept. I'll be right back. Successful in adapting to its location so well that its laws, habits, mores, so on, become so awesome and so rich and so that the people proliferates, they adapt so well to their particular, their laws, their particularist, this word, right? The particularist laws adapt so well to their environment and they become so smart and strong and great, but then they will inevitably take the next step and expand and dominate other nations somehow, even if, by the way, they do not necessarily want to conquer them, wholesale and incorporate them or assimilate them. I know these mawkish types of nationalists talk about, yes, just if every ethnic had their own nation, there would be peace on earth. I can't tell you how loathsome I find that.

It's not in this case delusion, you know. It's just pretend wholesome type of lying. I'm not opposed, as you can see from discussion I just gave, to each nation becoming great, but don't pretend that it will lead to peace, that universal peace can be achieved by the brotherhood of man in each one being in its own nation. But yes, let's take this from the particular side, a successful particularism would actually look very much what I described regarding the founding of a people. Even if you deny the reality of founders like Moses or Romulus or Lycurgus, and you say people develop organically in their abode of geography over generations, etc., etc. And in the end, a very similar process to what I described takes place.

In the end, a successful particularism actually then becomes universalist because it expands, it is able to incorporate other peoples the way the Greeks and the Romans did, which is – it's not just – the Jews didn't call the universalism of their day Romanism, they called it Hellenism. And to oppose it, they didn't in the end offer any kind of particularism as modern day Zionist and conservative propagandists claim, they offered their own universalism, proselytizing and things like this. Judaism at that time in the Roman Empire was massively proselytizing. So what I mean to say is that the very notion of particularism is actually disingenuous. It comes from a sense of tribal victimization, narcissism, and butthurt, as in, oh, we weren't

the ones who were able to impose our own vision and empire on others. We're just the good guys. We just want to be left alone. It's just this mawkish pretense that's totally inconsistent with history and human nature, where as soon as any tribe can, it does precisely that. Now, I'll say this, there are different universalisms, there are particular universalisms, right? You see this whole scheme of thinking is conceptually flawed, aside from being mendacious. But yes, various peoples or states have had various competing imperial visions or offers, you can say, for others to join them, whether on some equality or reciprocity, as in feudalism and vassalage, or as subjects, and of course not all are attractive types of imperialism or good or attractive universalism.

In the case of the Greeks, who you could say are the height that they used to be taken as the ultimate in the case for culture, for so-called particularism, for the perfection of let's say one city as the ground for the perfection of the individual. Nevertheless, as I tell you, their name became a synonym among contemporaneous peoples for universalism. Hellenism meant a kind of universalism. And yes, you can make all kinds of arguments that it was only because of Alexander that their imperial phase actually belongs to a later and a decaying period of their history where they sacrificed political perfection of the city, they sacrificed that for the the sake of empire, but I see all of these imperial and universalist elements actually

from their earliest history and even at their classical height, they were looking to expand, they had extreme contempt for barbarian outsiders, they imagined themselves their natural rulers and many such things, there's a line, is it from Rousseau, I do not know, they put something in my brain and I forget, but that the Greeks found their gods among the nations, among other nations, because they imagined themselves the rulers of all nations. Now maybe they didn't act on it, or they couldn't, or they didn't try to be a so-called universalist in the stereotypical way that people do now, where you try to conquer or assimilate them, But they still were, you know, they imagined themselves as rulers, not to speak of their

expansion all over the Mediterranean, but yes, in every colony they mixed locally with various peoples as their leaders, taking local wives and such. So this whole story is just the history of the world, that you can speak of a history because I mean in all this, I don't take the view of this binary I discussed. I take more the side of someone like Gobineau. And I mean, in the history of the world, it's just the reason there is any history at all is because of people they just described trying to expand and form coalitions and empires. If it wasn't for that, you would have grass-hot perpetually. And I think that's an unfair end of the world, a particularist. But Gobineau, you know, I take side of someone like Gobineau, who, although he's somewhat

still he was fixed in this conceptual scheme I've been talking about so far, but nevertheless he said it is basically the defining feature of great races that they are universalist and imperial, and it is through this that they become mixed and degenerate, and so then history takes on a tragic aspect. But particularism insofar as it exists is the province of only the most benighted and stupid racists who aren't universalists because they can't be. So you see, for example, his description of Haiti, which, you know, I'll read. You can't get enough of this. I love this. At San Domingo, the independence is complete. There are no missionaries to exert a veiled and absolute power, no foreign ministry to carry out European ideas. Everything is left to the inspiration of the people itself.

Its Spanish part, he means the Dominican Republic, consists of mulattos, of whom I need say nothing. They seem to imitate, well or badly, all that is most easily grasped in our civilization. They tend, like all hybrids, to identify themselves with the more creditable of the races to which they belong. Thus they are capable, to a certain extent, of reproducing our customs. It is not among them that we must study the question in its essence. Let us cross the mountains that separate the Republic of San Domingo from the state of Haiti. We find a society of which the institutions are not only parallel to our own, but are derived from the latest pronouncements of our political wisdom. All that the most enlightened

liberalism has proclaimed for the last sixty years in the deliberative assemblies of Europe, all that has been written by the most enthusiastic champions of man's dignity and independence, all the declarations of rights and principles, these have all found their echo on the banks of the Artibonite. Nothing African has remained in the statute law. All memories of the land of harm have been officially expirged from men's minds. The state language has never shown a trace of African influence. The institutions, as I said before, are completely European. Let us consider how they harmonize with the manners of the people. We are in a different world at once. The manners are as depraved, brutal and savage as in the homie or among the felatas.

There is the same barbaric love of finery coupled with the same indifference to form. Beauty consists in color, and so long as a garment is a flaming red and aged with tinsel, the owner does not trouble about its being largely in holes. The question of cleanliness never enters anyone's head. If you wish to approach a high official in this country, you find yourself being introduced to a gigantic negro lying on his back on a wooden bench. His head is enveloped in a torn and dirty handkerchief surmounted by a cocked hat all over gold lace. An immense sword hangs from his shapeless body. His embroidered coat lacks the final perfection of a waistcoat. Our General's feet are cased in carpet slippers. Do you wish to question him?

To penetrate his mind and learn the nature of the ideas he is revolving there? You will find him as uncultured as a savage, and his bestial self-satisfaction is only equalled by his profound and incurable laziness. If he deigns to open his mouth, he will roll you out all the common places which the newspapers have been inflicting on us for the last half century. The barbarian knows them all by heart. He has other interests, of course, and very different interests, but no other ideas. He speaks like Baron Holbach, argues like Monsieur de Grème, and has ultimately no serious preoccupation except chewing tobacco, drinking alcohol, disemboweling his enemies and conciliating his sorcerers. The rest of the time he sleeps. The state is divided among two factions.

These are separated from each other by a certain incompatibility, not of political theory, but of skin. The mulattos are on one side, the negros on the other. The former have certainly more intelligence and are more open to ideas. As I have already remarked in the case of San Domingo, the European blood has modified the African character. If these men were set in the midst of a large white population and so had good models constantly before their eyes they might become quite useful citizens. Unfortunately the Negroes are for the time being superior in strength and numbers. Although their racial memory of Africa has its origin in many cases as far back as their grandfathers, they are still completely under the sway of African ideals. Their greatest pleasure is idleness.

Their most cogent argument is murder. The most intense hatred has always existed between the two parties in the island. The history of Haiti, of democratic Haiti, is merely a long series of massacres, massacres of mulattoes by negroes, or of negroes by mulattoes, according as the one or the other held the reins of power. The constitution, however enlightened it may pretend to be, has no influence whatever. It sleeps harmlessly upon the paper on which it is written. The power that reigns unchecked is the true spirit of these peoples. I end reading, and he goes on to say, and he says at other times too, how the people of Haiti would, left to their own devices, devolve to a tribe alone in the middle of the jungle, and how the defining quality of such tribes, whether in Haiti or Africa, is

hatred of the outsider and this kind of, if you want to see particularism, it is that. Whereas the opposite would be any higher drive to civilization becomes almost inevitably so-called universalist again I'm only using these words because I want the ideas the underlying phenomena are important but the way they are categorized by these two words I think is not true it's false but as you can see Gobineau here and what I read for you it's an amazing image of Haitian rule right but as you can see he does away entirely with so-called propositional case for constitutional constructionism or whatever you want to call it and yes adopting a constitution or a set of principles and propositions that it makes you this or that,

but it's not really at all possible anyway to call him a particularist or a national chauvinist historicist or any such thing either. It's a fake distinction. And I went on for a while about this, what defines a nation, a people, before I told you my views just now. But really this episode, I wanted to talk about the poverty of the conservative intellectual movement even actually at its height where it's a traffic and abstractions that then become slogans. Which team are you on? Are you on Team Universalism or Team Particularism? Are you on Team Nietzsche or Team Christ? Are you... you get several decades of this kind of not effective even demagoguery and posturing. Anyway I'll be right back. Talk about Stendhal but I beside know the red and

a black novel deserves its own episode, I leave for next time, is the ultimate insensitive young man depiction at the beginning of this book and yet something written from a spiritual Bonapartist, Stendhal was, an image of life in any case that likely is unwelcome to both the left and the populist right today, who seek either to have city life and society reduced really to universal peasantry by means of excluding excellence and individual distinction and of course then the proxy they have for these things which is white men or on the other hand the populists who as far as I can see mostly are trying to demoralize young white men and to tell them to drop out move to countryside to abandoned cities as well as any kind of drive to eminence even in the

countryside and to have essentially have yourself become a demi rustic in the kind of location that the main character of this novel the red and the black he tries to get away from that. Anyway, I'll talk about that next time. But I'm rereading my favorite novels in anticipation of entering the right writing frame of mind for my own. Many say to write well, you read the best type novel before you write. You don't need to talk about novel. If you are trying to write prose, you pick up your favorite prose writer and just read a few short essays or articles. I know it's in translation, but there are decent translations of Schopenhauer. He's a very clear writer if you want to, it can get you very much in the writing mood. But yes, I was thinking though since I've gone

about the conservative intellectual movement and its problems, that I would discuss instead now a touchy matter, which is Leo Strauss and his letter to Karl Löwith in 1933 and maybe introduced to, I want to write something longer on this but I haven't had the motivation. I'll do it if there is enough interest. But introduce you to some of this debate around Rios-Strauss if you don't know it, which I've been reluctant to do this only because in fact I don't think he's that important. Most people outside the United States, I mean most people interested in politics and history I mean, have no interest in him, have hardly heard of him. And I find a little distasteful the way his sect is kind of solipsistic and they assume

the whole world cares or must care about this professor and I've seen things. Let me be indiscreet for a moment. I was at dinner once and Camille Paglia was there as guest of honor and a couple of people around table who are Straussians started to talk about him in this kind of way that assumes He must be a really important and well-known character, and it all revolves around. And I could see immediately on her face a stone-cold boredom as in, you know, here we go with these dorks and their makeshift rabbi and such. Sorry, I don't mean to impute to Camille views on that naughty matter as such, but she found very tedious. I could see. And if you read her review of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, I think she got it right.

of the American mind, I'm not saying you shouldn't read, I liked it first time I read, I was upset at what universities were, I was 18 or 19, and it's a kind, well, no actually I think I was 20, because yes, a kind of dour book, and he didn't really get, it is a kind of dour book, as she says, he didn't really get the meaning of rock musics or many other things, I'm not saying, I don't even like rock musics, but I think she's right, he didn't, And I find her attack on academia, Paglia's attack, junk bonds and corporate readers, Academy in the Hour of the Wolf, I think it's a much better treatment of the failure of modern universities than Bloom's kind of dour and little sentimental takes in retrospect. It's an essay I've posted a few times, Paglia's.

I mean, while on the other hand, Paglia's cultural and artistic commentary in the beginning of sexual personae is far more vivid and appreciative of art on artistic grounds. So, for example, Bloom has this kind of very dour interpretation of art as essentially an allegory for, again, notions of justice or art as a kind of adjunct to a philosophical system, which is part of what I was talking on previous segments so it just seems autism isn't the right word it's a problem of the Straussian sect in general that they just refused to have any appreciation of visual arts on their own terms but it's only as a proxy for some text and I imagine Paglia finds that not only wrong but spiritually uncongenial and kind of petty fogging and I agree with her now

anyway that reaction told me and then since I've periodically asked all friends in various chat rooms around the world. Some of them are European, some from Japan. I asked them, are people really interested in this? I see some conservatards or libtards are reviving these fake debates from the 2000s about the supposed influence of Leo Strauss. Anyway, I mean to say, when I ask friends, they've always told me, no, we don't really want to hear about Strauss, and most people don't, and so that's why I try to avoid this. But I think now there are revived these fake debates from the 2000s about the supposed influence of Strauss on American neo-cons or on conservatives or whatever, and so should I write something on this?

Yes what I asked them and the result has been consistently the same across years. I am told by friends he's not that important, nobody cares and that answer combined with my own experiences where it just seems solipsistic to comment on it so I didn't want to. But to justify what I'm about to do on this segment, if you don't know of him and don't know what debates I'm referring to. In the early 2000s in the United States, there were absurd theories by people like Shadia Drury, making the case that Leo Strauss was the mind, the eminence crease behind the Bush White House push for world conquest through the Middle East or something like that, and that Strauss was so-called a Jewish Nazi and he was promoting Nazi conquest ideology, white supremacist that he got from his friend Carl

Schmidt and this kind of thinking, you know, the dilution of all this in the unintentionally funny formula, Leo Strauss was friends with Hitler's lawyers, Karl Schmidt, which is repeated by journalists at the time, which, you know, as with the Russia hoax, actually is the leftist establishment in media and government that believes in lurid conspiracy theories like this. Of course, it's false. And one of Gottfried's good points in the book that I read from the beginning is that this is obvious falsehood, actually, that the Straussians, and these are followers of the Strauss, mostly in American academia, but not only, more on this in a moment, but that the propaganda in the early 2000s was something the Straussians were giddily willing

to engage, because it was an easy-to-disprove allegation that Strauss advocated any kind of Nazis in the United States. But he adds, however, that they were not willing to engage critics like him or others from the reactionary or historicist or paleoconservative camp because their criticisms were truer, more substantial. And he may be right, but I think a bigger reason is that a series of people like Drury, and it wasn't only her, she's just one example, but that whole kind of conspiracy theorizing and your secret SS Superman Nazis actually gave them a thrill, it boosted them, because everyone actually is flattered to be thought of as a Machiavellian operator pulling the strings of governments and world events, especially in this case where in real life these people

are ladies leading group, but this is bigger matter that's maybe lost on many especially populist commentators, that in general you have a lot of these figures now who are public intellectuals at times, at other times their defense or other kinds of consultants or governments or they may hold minor positions in this or that foundation or even occasionally in an administration and this is the life of the public political intellectual and operator which actually this word grifter, it's a dumb word but it's very appropriate in this case and all of these guys are to some extent hustlers, okay, they are actually trying to get their name more prominent excuse me and they fan these conspiracy theories about themselves because it's better to be thought of as exceptionally powerful and

influential godfather type figure then you know you're a guy living in North Virginia who gets a gig sometime and you make a living and so even Klaus Schwab who is glorified party planner but many populists are doing his marketing PR for him with these theories, he must be a very powerful mafia don shot-caller type, you know, Bond villain. It's better to be thought of as Bond villain, right, than he does the menus and functions and this kind of thing. But anyway, this is a small introduction for those of you around the world who may not be familiar or interested in why Strauss's name appears so often, but it's mostly because of these leftist journalist theories about some people in the Bush administration who

were neo-cons and supposedly planned the Iraq invasion, although I think in fact people like Wolfowitz and others, they weren't really Strausians, they followed other political thinkers whose name actually I forgot and don't care, I don't want that in my brain, but the impulse actually is this is very attractive to journalists and people of that persuasion. You see similar efforts now to pretend Dugin is the brain behind the throne in Russia Kremlin and many such because people of this type like to posit an intellectual string puller and intellectual provenance to world events of leadership and whether that it's because it makes more fun writing this as Hollywood script or because they are dorkoloids and

they want to feel that other dorkoloids like them are always the only actors and deciders in human history, but that political men, and you know, chads, are actually, they're really my plaything, you know, and this kind of thing, like, yeah, Putin, and Putin doesn't have a brain, he needs a brain, he needs Dugin to tell him, you know, so, or whether it's out of culture, you know, this kind of rabbinic model, which rabbi do you follow? I don't know, it could be some mix, regardless, Leo Strauss himself was a German Jewish academic who wrote Political Philosophy and its History and if you want to read him, I read Natural Right and History soon after I read Closing of American Mind. I think I was 21 and I did

like Bloom at that time and it's not a bad book by the way, but I understand Paglia's criticism of it. I think she's right on many things. But anyway, it was kind of a publishing hit at the time. This is late 1980s, I think, or early 90s, that closing of American Mind got published. This is when political correctness was really starting off. Actually, let me correct that. It started earlier, even in the 70s, but it really became dominant in American universities in the late 80s, early 90s, and it was Steve Saylor mentioned on recent episode it was not different than Woke Now. Woke Now is just the campus pomo postmodern political correctness of that time filtered through the minds of bright lights like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tumblr culture and other times it's

simply a repetition like Me Too in the early 90s there was a craze about date rape on campus and this kind of is the same thing but this book Closing of American Mind became a big hit and Aaron Bloom had been a disciple really student okay let's call it but this was disciple of Leo Strauss was I don't want to give you introduction but that's Strauss's best-known book natural natural right in history he wrote a many other thing on Plato Machiavellian Xenophon and so on is a contemporary with Hannah Arendt as he did not like each other and their students hate each other to this day it's one of those those petty academic rivalries, but both had similar life history, you know, Jewish German who left, I think in his case, he left in 1933, and then he established a school or

sect of scholarship of political philosophy in the United States. And it's interesting, I know many European intellectuals who read him, but without the school aspects, you know, and I mean that in the sense of sect school, I mean without being aware that he's the guru of a sect. To them he's just another insightful commentator from 20th century, and they comment on him as they would on any other thinker, whereas in the United States, you know, you're either for or against, which team are you on, and this kind. But he's most famous for idea maybe of esoteric writing, which I think very much misunderstood, including unfortunately by many of his academic followers, who wanted to mean something else, But to be brief, he was saying, to put very short, that pre-modern authors, in part because

of censorship, but not only, that they wrote between the lines, okay? And so that in many famous texts of famous philosophers, there is an inner meaning as well as outer, and that they use certain literary devices to write between the lines, essentially. Although, again, the way this goes through the big snoot filters is that you may be justified in reading lesbian subtexts in Plato or whatever, or that this or that philosopher is trying to trick people, yeah, trick people. But so the way he does it is, he makes this case quite nice, but in the hands, not just the way he makes this case, the way he reads esoteric, yeah, secret messages, it's not like that. The way he uses these techniques of really philology, of reading, he does it very well,

others not so much. Fundamentally, it is just a kind of philology, 19th century philology, and he did not invent this idea. In fact, many authors before 1900 point out that philosophers wrote this way. Strauss, I think, got this idea initially from Nietzsche where it is displayed very prominently in his writings. He writes a lot about philosophers using esoteric writing and the technique of the noble lie and so forth in Plato and I think, personally I think although some of his commentaries on Plato and such are interesting, there is nothing fundamentally in Strauss that's not already in Nietzsche and what's new in Strauss is wrong and if I wrote about this I could explain in some detail but on this episode I actually want to discuss something else.

said in some letter that until the age of 32 or 33, his mind had been completely dominated by Nietzsche. So being born in 1899, that would be around 1933, 1932 or such, I don't know, I've never really met anyone who changed their minds on fundamental matters at the age of 32. You could change on all kinds of other things, you realize you're wrong about something or write about, you know, you go in a different direction, but on something this big and to have to be able to pinpoint a year and to say I had a revelation or something, it's extremely rare that such a thing is genuine and it's rarer still among intellectual types who tend to be extremely devoted actually in terms even of love and affection for a philosopher who seduces you that much.

It's not my intention to probe into the soul of Strauss and question this. It may be that he thought he had gotten over his mind being dominated by Nietzsche and that he thereafter thought he started to do his own thing. But I don't think that's really true. His book, Natural Right in History, is written in the 1950s. It's an account of how the modern doctrine, ideas of natural right that you find for example in Hobbes or Locke, the modern idea of human rights that people believe in now is quite different and has less basis, but his point was the natural right doctrine of the early moderns was very different from the ancient or classical ones, the modern one being developed by Hobbes or by Hobbes out of Machiavelli and thereafter he traces through Locke and

later through Rousseau and implicitly through the German romantics or the German thinkers of the Romantic period, he traces the ways that the modern conception of natural right, because of its redefinition of reason, as let's say in shorthand, as a kind of calculating scientific or mechanistic reason that seeks certainty, that because of this redefinition primarily by Hobbes, then a kind of unfolding of this conception of history, it broke down to where it was replaced, rightly or not, by historicism or a kind of relativism, which in turn is a kind of modern restatement of ancient conventionalism in which the human mind was considered no longer able to transcend its historical moment, its horizon. The mind then becomes something determined by its own age.

And so to a large extent, the mind, what means determined by its age, the mind is actually determined by the political system or somehow the community and the language of the time and in the case of Marx this takes the form of prominently it's the economic organization etc you get the idea but what Strauss is essentially trying to do in this book is to exonerate Socrates from Nietzsche's judgment of him in books like Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and to say no it was not Socratic or Platonic reason that led to our present problems Nietzsche was right that it was a kind of reason but it wasn't Socratic or pre-modern reason to blame but it was Hobbes and it was his redefinition of reason together with men like Bacon and some others and so the whole book I

think is really effort to replace Nietzsche's Socrates as the progenitor of modern decadence to replace this with Hobbes and to blame it all on Hobbes and and to salvage, therefore, the classical or Platonic reason. And you can see from just this how it would be attractive, also especially to Catholic political philosophers, or there are no philosophers today, Catholic political thinkers, who were the first actually to become Strausians. I'll get to this in a moment. I hope this is not too boring. This is supposed to be a sex radio show. I was going to read erotic stories on this show. show, next time I read Dominate by Doug and Locker Room Lesson, next show, but anyway, so he claimed at some time that around 1933 or slightly before that he had changed, that

his mind was no longer dominated by Nietzsche. You must realize in part what this means because before 1950, 1940, Nietzsche was the prophet of the far right, especially in Germany and Europe, the radical right, to the extent that already before 1940, England, America were trying some kind of vulgar propaganda against Nietzsche evil influence and so on, and I think they would have banned him if they could have gotten away with it, but they figured they couldn't. But here I will read for you what I promise. This is Leo Strauss' letter to his friend Karl Leavith in 1933, and it's funny, Leavith I think he was Jew also, but he was the only academic to teach in all three axis countries during World War II He started in Germany, then Italy, then Japan. It's very funny

He also has very good book meaning in history But he believes things quite different from Strauss. Levitt, by the way, is the one who called Marxism secularized Judaism Anyway here, I will now read Strauss letter. Paris, May 19, 1933 Dear Mr. Glovith, on your behalf, I have in the meantime made the necessary overture to growth season who is in London. Besides, I had on occasion to speak with Van Sickle, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, and informed him about you, your situation, your work, and your interests. He made a note of your name, so I am sure he will remember it when he comes across it in Fehling's letter. As for me, I have the second year after all. Berlin, apparently Karl Schmidt, recommended, excuse me, the translator of the letter interjects to say

it was Karl Schmidt who did this, not just Berlin, has recommended me and that was decisive. I am staying in Paris for this second year as well and I will attempt to accomplish something during this time that will permit me to continue working. To be sure, the competition, in quotation mark, the competition is considerable. The entire German Jewish intellectual proletariat finds itself here. It is awful. I wish I could run away to Germany. But here's the catch. Surely, I can't opt for some other country. A homeland and above all a mother tongue can never select it, you can never choose it. In any case, I will never be able to write other than in German, even though I'll be forced to write in another language.

On the other hand, I see no acceptable possibility to live under the swastika, which is to say under a symbol that says nothing to me except you and your kind. You are subhuman, Pusey, by nature, and therefore true pariahs. There exists here only one solution. We must repeatedly say to ourselves, we men of science, for so people like us called ourselves during the Arab Middle Ages, non habemus locum manentem, said Querimus, we have no abiding place, but we are seeking one. And as to the substance of the matter, that Germany, having turned to the right, does not tolerate us. That proves absolutely nothing against right-wing principles. On the contrary, only on the basis of right-wing principles, on the basis of fascistic, authoritarian,

imperial principles, is it possible with integrity, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to the unwritten rights of man. He writes in French, but I am peasant and I cannot read French, I am afraid. But only on these principles, as you just said, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to the unwritten rights of man, this libtarded phrase, right? Only on right-wing principles is it possible to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar's commentaries with deeper understanding, and I think about Virgil. To regire imperio, parcere subeectis et debelare superbos. rule an empire to spell the vanquish and crush the proud. There exists no reason to crawl to the cross, to liberalism cross as well, as long as somewhere

in the world there yet glimmers a spark of the Roman thought. I therefore do not fear the emigrant's destiny. At the most, according to the flesh, hunger and the like. In a sense our kind is always emigrant, and what concerns the rest the danger of embitterment, which certainly is very great. Klein, who in every sense was always an immigrant, is for me the living proof that it can be defeated. My wife sends her thanks for your greetings, I have spoken to save my soul, etc. Okay, but look, what does this sound like to you? What sounds like to you? I'll be right back. I'm just guzzling gallons of tea. There are debates back and forth on the meaning of this letter. Harvey Mansfield, who is a good man and gentleman and great scholar, has rebutled to the usual

interpretation that you might have on reading this letter. I don't remember if it was Brian Leiter and I don't remember who he was arguing. Frankly, I will not check who he was arguing. I don't want to pollute my beautiful brain with the names of nobody academics. But it was one of these creatures who were like, you know, yes, disprove the Nazi conspiracy in the Bush White House. And Mansfield, if you're interested, has a rebuttal, which I I did not find so convincing, though. His point was that Strauss was aware that limtard societies of the time, especially in Europe, were powerless to stop communism and Nazism because they were weak and cucked. And so Strauss, it wasn't that he was a fascist, but he just wanted the defenders of liberalism to have more of that fascist spirit in them.

like a fascist vibe then, to be strong and stop both Nazism and communism, you'd think, which by the way would not be so different from what Schmidt believed. Carl Schmidt would have been very happy if the social democrats in Germany had found the means to stop parties like communists and Nazis that wanted to use constitutional means to destroy the constitution. But then another interpretation of the letter I heard to, you know, excuse Strauss' obvious words in this, is that when he wrote this, the only effective opponents of Nazism in Europe were actually the fascists, specifically the fascist regime at that time in Austria. This is why Strauss liked fascism, supposedly, you know. But really both this and Mansfield's explanation sound very unlikely to me.

Maybe you read the letter again yourself or I'll post it, but look at the verb with which it was written and the extreme hostility to liberal morality, to humanitarian morality, the great awe and respect for fascism, for right-wing principles and so on. I don't think there's, you know, there's nothing in it in the tone like what is suggested by those cope explanations to try to explain it away like I just gave it. This was in a private letter to a friend. Strauss wanted to say that he was just trying to defend liberalism or something that he could have said so but it's you know it's this very much he admired fascism and even Nazism in this letter and he was only sorry that he couldn't join it because he was Jewish

I mean the letter I remember reading something else from him elsewhere but I forget but the letter goes even beyond the kind of flirtation with fascist aesthetics that Zionists of the Jabotinsky camp had. These were, let's say, very radical Zionists who, some of them, maybe not Jabotinsky himself, but this man, Abba Ahimair, who is, you know, a Zionist fascist, you could say, and he actually was a mentor of the Netanyahu family, I hear, but they They maybe only had fascist aesthetics, you know, but in this case, the specific tone, the words that are used, and you know, I like Nietzsche, I've read other people who like Nietzsche from various countries in Europe during this time, these are the words that

evoke admiration for fascism and Nazism, at least spiritually, as a spiritual war against First there's a disagreement in the letter that I think is legitimate. Is he referring to shabby abomination? Is he referring to the Nazi regime or is he referring to the last man of liberalism and so on? But not to speak of what's in this letter regarding his contempt for the Jewish intellectual proletariat, I will get back to this in a moment, what a wonderful phrase he uses to refer to the nebbish pile drivers like Hannah Arendt and those petty ethnic moralists. But so, anyway, what do you think is, I'd like to give a brief explanation for what I think Straussianism was or was intended to be in the United States, this school he

founded, and if there's interest I'll write something longer and more detailed on it. But after he got to America, the way I see Strauss, forgive if I've told this story before, I don't remember, but I was in Buenos Aires once and an old guy driving cab, he starts telling me from Latvia that he had been in the SS, and then he starts going off about how he wanted to continue to fight commies and so he came to Argentina after the war and regularly attended the American World Anti-communist Congress and things that was called something like this and he became actually a big booster of the United States because they supported him. He wanted to continue combating Bolshevism and the left has, you know, wonderfully loony

theories totally insane of course about how the Nazis took over the American deep state after World War II through things like Operation Paperclip. I like to joke that yes, yes, they did that, and things like trannies are their revenge on America for World War II and Stalingrad or whatever. But well, that's obviously false, but it's true that a lot of Nazis even became actually relatively enthusiastic pro-Americans after the war because America was only game in town, and many of them were not, in fact, insane murderers or whatever is told, but they just were patriotic men who some loved their countries, some loved the idea of Europe, but they all hated communism. They saw Bolshevism as a civilizational threat and they wanted to continue fighting because

they loved the fight also or whatever. And there was an organization Western Goals Germany, you may want to look into this, actually I didn't mean to make long thread on that, it's very interesting organization of this This type of pro-NATO hard right, essentially not even just spiritually Nazi, but basically Nazi pro-NATO organization, you've seen that it's not direct descent, I'm not aware of any operational links or any tradition between the two, but you are seeing the same thing now with the Ukraine so-called Nazis who are pro-NATO. orientation, because they want to be fighting Bolshevism because of Russia, which still has Bolshevist aesthetics. But this position, it's a term that's relatively unknown now, that after World War II, you

had basically Nazis who became very pro-American, but it was very common at the time. And I claim that Strauss is exactly like this, which is also complicated by the fact that he was Jewish, but in terms of his opinions of liberalism, liberal democracy, his orientation toward modernity, it would have been basically the same or close to what the Latvian SS men I mentioned, which, and I'm not saying this to attack Strauss because that's my orientation and that was the orientation of many pre-World War II hard-right intellectuals as well, many great artists and so on, and this doesn't mean that Shadia Drury though is right and that Strauss therefore wanted to inject the United States with the specter of Schmittian nihilist Nazism or whatever these retards say you know any more than

the Latvian assessment wanted to turn Argentina Nazi like the New Order Star Wars you know it was more a continuation of the fight against Bolshevism and so I mean to say his project in America would have had two elements at least maybe even unrelated maybe even entirely unrelated one is simply his honest desire as a scholar to perpetuate classical education and protect let's say Plato and Aristotle and Rousseau and yes Nietzsche and Machiavelli from the desire of modern scholar to historicize them to say that they're products of their own time and therefore you never have to take anything they say really seriously right this is a real problem if you're in America it's very annoying the scholar is trained to assume a superior attitude to the subject so that

that Heraclitus is studied only in terms of what this showed about his age or how his age affected him. So there's always an attempt, even when there's not a political Marxoid attempt to explain in terms of class or otherwise now race or gender interest, there are anyway also knowing little attempts always to say, well, Rousseau is part of this or that intellectual school and he's important because he is part of this or that intellectual movement. He is the first, he is a link between this and that, and to try to actually to explain his thoughts in the terms of a supposed history of thought, which is never explained why that would be important, or in terms of lesser minds of his time, or just preceding his time,

who he is supposed to have been influenced or taught by, rather than just seeing that for Rousseau, Plato was much more important than any of his contemporaries, I think Strauss rightly says this and that he was like all great philosophers, a man out of time who saw eternal truths and this and I think that's correct and this could be is just an honest desire to save the possibility of at least the study of philosophers of the past from people who seek to deny that the human mind has any access to truths beyond historically conditioned ones. On the other hand, there is a definite political or let's say school sect project in Strauss's attempts in America specifically, but they're not what Shadia Drury says, they're not what

Gottfried says either, as in that Strauss would have been especially concerned with preserving liberal democracy, so-called, for its own sake. You saw what he thought about liberalism in what I just read. I'm sorry, his tone in that was not, oh, liberalism would be great if it would have some stronger spirit. It's pathetic as such. I think he had a very negative attitude toward liberal modernity and again somewhere he says that in terms of civil rights, the United States isn't that different from the Soviet Union. There are many remarks like that throughout his books. But his political project was this, what I'm about to say now. I think when he came to America, he noticed the problem of the leftist Jewish intellectual,

which he was very acquainted with, a very real problem in Europe and really is the cause of the Holocaust. The leftist Jewish intellectual – by the way, I'm not just saying that to be provocative. The types of hard-right Zionists I've mentioned always blamed the Holocaust in Europe on the Jewish intellectual left, and that's part of the political milieu out of which Strauss came. It would have been natural for him to have that attitude toward the Jewish intellectual left. And you heard what he said about them in the letter. And the Jewish leftist intellectuals, what he had called the Jewish intellectual proletariat and he noticed the same in the United States, and a large number of the transplanted European

ones who had fled before the war and found a ready audience among this same social group who for sociological reasons I think is especially attracted to leftism. And so for example, Elena Kagan in the Jewish community, it's something that produces Elena Kagan's by factory design, you know, it's like a factory for producing Elena Kagan's. And I don't want to get into it right now into the deep reasons why this is. I think most of the explanations that circulate both among some pro-Jews and among anti-Semites are wrong explanations. Kadehi is the most correct, but that's for another time. But it's just a sociological given, right? Which Strauss would have sensed very fast, he probably knew it already.

Furthermore, there are also Catholic intellectuals for similar reasons, have similar orientations, and I think he self-consciously directed his, let's say, evangelical, his conversion evangelical work in the United States, his political work towards these two groups. Because again, in the 1950s and such, the first people to become Strausians, it was actually most appealing to Catholic so-called, conservative so-called, I mean, intellectuals, and only after that some so-called conservative Jews. But actually the two groups, for people outside America who don't know, the two groups have long been in a kind of social symbiosis, and even in the neo-Khan world, the Jewish intellectual who converts to Catholicism is a very common occurrence, but regardless, I'm saying think

of it this way, you're a Nazi guy, spiritually Nazi guy who feels sorry, he couldn't be a Nazi because he was Jewish, but he's otherwise sympathetic entirely to that orientation, the war happens, and at the end, like so many people from that side, you become an American booster because America is there to continue the fight against the Soviets. And by the way, because it had to face down the Soviets, a lot of people who now talk about the post-war order being the same as today, I think they're wrong. They forget this, that in America and Germany, it was actually extremely conservative in the 1950s. It had to be to oppose the Soviets. These nations emphasized religion, church, family, maybe not so much tradition as such,

But this kind of 1950s patriotism, the unity of God, family values, country, anti-Soviet hawkishness, and pro-capitalism, which was again almost designed to, designed in rhetoric I mean, to oppose the Soviet Union, designed as part of this party platform I'm describing. That's a very 1950s thing, and the 1950s, because of what I just said, are a kind of hell to the left today, in movies and so on. The left sees the immediate post-war order as a kind of hell to them. They see it as the ultimate in retrograde and what they are there to fight, whereas they have in fact very hoary memories of the 1930s and even 1940s with FDR and labor unions and this kind of leftist, hoary struggle, they're okay with that. But the 1950s, spiritually, that's what they really hate.

So it's not right to speak, I think, about a post-war order as many anti-liberals are doing now. hardcore, hard-right boomer I think is right that it's a post-1960s order, a post-Greek society order, and really, it should be called a post-JFK order, sorry, I think JFK was one of the most anti-European presidents America ever had, and is in part, a large part I think responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the French from Algeria, for example. But leaving this aside, I'm saying think of yourself in that position, you're in this new country with this new orientation and you're trying to first of all, I mean not you with the new orientation but the new orientation in this new world, you're trying to first of all find a way to show gratitude to this regime that is continuing the fight against

Bolshevism and that seems at least to be, even if it's a kind of a joke, but still a role plays as preserving some elements of classical culture in, you know, yes it's, I don't mean to insult and say it's a joke, but the American role playing of Rome and such and second of all and this is crucial part you see there in this new country you see the Jewish intellectual with his attraction again I think it's sociological explanation but the deep attraction to Marxism and I think basically that the whole of what gets called Straussianism in America I think is the kind of orientations I'm not talking about his interpretation of Plato or Xenophon which are quite good objectively and in Europe are considered on their own merits but the

The school or sect aspect of Strauss, its so-called political or social activity, the fact that you can speak of Strausians, that movement apparently, or really you can call it a kind of academic school, it's an exoteric project to try to get the American intellectual Jew to support America against the Soviets and to not be Marxist any longer, right? If I had to design a series of propositions or doxies, how do you turn the American Jew Jew away from Marxism and toward patriotism. You can't do better almost than what Strauss came up with. So it's a kind of sociological, exoteric political project and that it worked also on Catholic intellectuals. It's no coincidence both of these are alienated from mainline WASP society.

You know when such have certain old running attractions to Marxism, but it's very funny that yes, it's actually a way, I don't want to say to trick, but to entice and seduce the American intellectual Jew away from his semi-natural path into Marxism, with the rhetoric about, the rhetoric Strauss uses about philosophy and philosophers and the classical tradition and so on, which in his telling of the story isn't quite what they actually are. I mean, I think he knew that very well. And as you can see, it is unfortunately an entirely historically socially bound and conditioned thing this Straussian project, where it's conditioned by the Cold War, time bound to that situation, which is why I think a lot of Gottfried's and other objections are

unfair because Paul Gottfried, when he tries to recast Strauss as a kind of booster of liberal democracy on such and whose primary concern would have been to attack historicist conservatism, I think that's very wrong. He's not taking into account what Strauss was trying to do, a situation he found himself where if you want to talk propositions, again, the Cold War, unprecedented time in history, you had, as political institutions in some countries, deprogramming, ideological deprogramming centers. It was an extreme propositional, ideological time in the East Block, especially so. Watch this Netflix show about an ex-East German spy, a girl spy called Cleo, and it actually captures this aspect quite well.

I left when I was a small boy, but I remember it was a strange mix of cynicism and yet at the same time the overt outward language was extremely ideological and there were certainly old believers, people who still believed, and this kind of propositional thing makes a lot of sense for that time, this focus on propositional, so there were times and places where political debate did become almost intellectual debate about the tenets of Marxism versus those of Locke or a transformed Locke or other kinds of anti-communism. So actually, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. It was more like a feeling of, you know, God, how do I get rid of these nebbishes to not be into, you know, Hannah Arendt and become anti-American moralistic, you know, oblivious

ethnic faggots that so many of them seem to do. And anyway, that's my view of what Straussianism is, so that he himself may have been, and I mean, I think he was quite Nazi spiritually, but his project in America was something much more realistic and moderate than, you know, yes, I'm going to corrupt it to get Bush to be Hitler or, yeah, whatever, I'll get Barry Goldwater to be Hitler or this. But Shadia Drury is a retard, but other studies of what Strauss did and was in his youth are around which are legitimate, they are scholarly studies, I don't keep up, but I can ask friends and I will post these recent studies such that I think it's almost indisputable he was this kind of Nazi in his youth and his students, his first generation of students, they are

very cagey and insecure about a lot of aspects of his work so you know his background also so it's really I heard the rumors that Joseph Cropsey and Werner Dannhauser these are two of his students who were at the University of Chicago where his archive is that they They actually burned things that was in Strauss' archives there, parts of his letters and such, because they are very insecure about, oh no, the master's name and legacy will be dismerged, people won't be able to understand and we'll get the wrong idea and so on. So they burn, you know, the funny part of it, you know, we can't let it known, he was a ferocious Nazi or something, but the funny part of it, I don't think they're aware that The cult aspects of Strauss, I don't think they are aware of what I'm saying now, which

I think I can prove as far as it can be proven, that the cult or school sect aspects of Strauss, the thing people call Straussianism, was a means tailored to their temperaments and capacities in sociology to get them at least not to be anti-American Marxist snakes, to get them not to be that, I mean. Because otherwise, and I can't treat this here, but I will in writing if there's interest, but Strauss's claims about political philosophy is a series of kind of half and 75% truths and kind of veiled parts of Nietzsche that he edits for this new aim that he has. And even when there are full truths, they are couched and tailored to that audience and with that purpose, which is in a way impressive, but again, it's a lot of work for a very temporary

aim and a very temporary success because many of the Strausians who are today, the ones on the East Coast, especially Gottfried is unfortunately right about many of them. I heard there are others on the West Coast, there's a kind of split, West Coast, East Coast gang of Strausians in the United States. I did not know myself the ones on West Coast, but they seem to be quite different. But I'm talking about the young Straussians today certainly are what Gottfried says, which is they are fanatical believers in libtardism. But I don't think it's fair to say Strauss was that. But yes, impressive, but a lot of work for an aim that turned out to be noble but temporary and temporary success, and it was easy, however, for people to think the Cold War would continue for hundreds of years.

You couldn't blame that, and that in any case, even if there were changes in terms of Soviet Union and such, but that it was easy to think that the new age had come for mankind, where ideological thinking carried such weight. I mean, I show friends photos sometimes of myself as a young pioneer in the East Bloc, this young pioneer was commie equivalent of Hitler's youth, and just the scenery, not just the uniforms and so on, but the scenery, the people, the background, the way the monuments look, the people's faces in the photos. And this was right at the end, right? I'm a product of late-stage Marxism. But when I show this to American friends now, they say, wow, this looks like another world. It looks alien or science fiction, everything about it. Things can change very fast, I'm saying.

you can't blame but this is another way I mean in which American conservatism of whatever kind and even when I think you had a genuinely great mind like Strauss but he had to tailor the political parts of it to a kind of polemical sociological sphere that is the modern world of the intellectual and so regardless of the merits of the inherent merits of any such thinker when they do scholarship or such whether it's him or James Burnham or others not to speak of the varieties on the left but all these schools and ways of thought in conservatism I mean which is what I'm talking here are relics of the Cold War and actually are they're unable to process what's happening after and what's happening now which is why they're

always trying to reach again for some type of ideological opponent to construct one that's the same right it has to be understood according to the same scheme as the Soviet Union versus United States, why boomer cons always sound the way they do almost. Well, this was light show or just more criticism of intellectual scenes such as it is in the West, moribund and dull thought ultimately on all sides, abandon all abstractions, break all words, tarnish everything. I believe this, mock and tarnish everything and see what come out the other side. next time I talk novel and stand out and more pleasant thing. Until next time, Bap out!