A Modest Interpretation of Straussianism in Action

LOL

Hah. You may have made a mistake. A Straussian nods to power (money); never to objective truths. But your hypothesis here is he is nodding to the reality based crowd, who do not fund him, and who are the targets of his funders.

The simpler explanation is that now many more people understand his game and he is unhappy about it.

Tyler Cowen speaks for a generation of libertarians who began their adulthood sympathetic to the “marginalized” (don’t like that overly vague word): immigrants, LGBTQ, atheists and religious minorities, etc. Now they have at least made their peace with if not actively joined the Musk-Thiel et al. bubble. What we really need at this point is a critically-minded but not doctrinaire account of how this came to be. It’s not a huge part of the political moment, but it’s worth understanding.

I missed my chance to make this (perhaps obvious) point in the comments of the last Strauss post, but these days it really seems like the crypto-fascists in American political life have imbibed Strauss’s lessons far more thoroughly than the neo-cons have. Superficial treatments of Straussianism often treat it as a purely interpretive approach to reading the classics, but several of Strauss’s most important works explicitly invite the reader to adopt these rhetorical stylings and join the Great Conversation. Read in this light, books like Persecution and the Art of Writing can be useful guides for any writer who wants to say one thing to a general audience and another thing to the select few in-group members equipped with the knowledge to decode the text. This idea obviously appeals to the crypto-fascist, who more than anything wants to signal like-minded individuals for coalition-building and spread his ideas into the broader body politic while maintaining plausible deniability and avoiding total lockout from non-fascists.

Of course, this esoteric-exoteric approach to writing is nothing new. But Strauss’s interpretation of the phenomenon and his recommendations for would-be writers who want to operate in this mode are specific in several important ways that I think make his work especially useful as a guide for understanding the rhetorical goals of fascists.

-First, Strauss’s view is fundamentally a paranoid one that sees human society as a series of totalizing regimes. Strauss allows that authoritarian regimes are more vindictive of taboo speech than liberal ones, but he sees both as children of Enlightenment thought that have turned inwards towards nihilism and created a set of mechanisms– some obvious, some subtle– that suppress and punish capital-t Truth in philosophical and political discourse. This idea obviously appeals to a fascist operating in a liberal democracy, who imagines vast, sinister apparatuses of social control that prevent ideas like his from taking root and sees the hidden hand of the puppet-master (usually the Jew) everywhere.
-Secondly, Strauss sees history as cyclical. He sees social progress towards equality as essentially illusory and believes that true wisdom about ordering political life lies in the past. Of course, those past thinkers were ALSO unable to honestly articulate their thoughts due to the omni-present regime looming over their heads, so Strauss’s thought here encompasses both the fascist fetishization of the past and their need for an idealized version of it that has been hidden from the public’s memory. Incidentally, this mechanism also gives the crypto-fascist a way to reconcile the paradox that’s created by their enthusiasm for the sort of authoritarian speech control that I mentioned Strauss condemned in point #1: these dangerous, nihilistic ideas can arise and gain influence if left unchecked, so once a proper order is created we’ll need to guard against backsliding.
-Finally, Strauss is primarily concerned with communication between elites rather than communication from elites to the masses. Unlike other types of esoteric-exoteric communication like dog-whistling, which are often deployed to lay the groundwork for a taboo idea gaining acceptance, Strauss’s paranoid version of this rhetorical approach prioritizes avoiding detection over persuading outsiders. It appeals to speakers and writers with views so extreme that they would instantly be shunned and rejected by the uninitiated if they came to light. As a corollary to this, Strauss’s approach to writing flatters both the reader and the writer (like Dr. Farrell noted in his last post) by saying “we, the elect, understand these coded messages, but the foolish sheep who follow the folly of the current age are totally oblivious to our actual discourse!” All of these qualities make Straussian writing a natural choice for a self-aggrandizing, secretive crypto-fascist.

I don’t want to suggest that the crypto-fascist movement in American political life today is operating this way because some critical mass of its leaders have read Strauss and consciously adopted his methods. (For one thing, the man was far too Jewish for many of these people to look to him for inspiration.) There are a few groups in American politics like the Claremont Institute where the influence IS obvious, but for the most part I think this is a case of convergent evolution. Strauss’s version of coded language appeals most to speakers who are paranoid about discovery or punishment, smug or self-aggrandizing in their posture towards the public, and primarily concerned with finding one another and gaining influence in movements or institutions that are not yet open to their true views. The letter that Brad DeLong cited in his reply to the Mother Night post where Strauss argues that the Holocaust can only be opposed on “fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles” is perhaps symptomatic of these parallels.

The previous post suggested a possible distinction between Strauss and Vulgar Straussianism (Leo Strauss: “All I know is that I am not a Straussian”). Today a post on Bluesky introduced the idea of West Coast Straussianism, in the form of the Court of Owls, sorry, Claremont Institute. Presumably this implies the existence of East Coast Straussianism – and what about Chicago (Originalist?) Straussianism? Not to mention Toronto…

I think the truth is kind of the opposite of what you say: like a lot of people in the “rationalist”-adjacent sphere, Cowen presents himself as a disinterested, clear-thinking science-type guy (“solve for the equilibrium,” etc.) … but it just so happens that his disinterested, clear, science-type thinking always ends up with fairly right wing conclusions.

So yeah, he is kind of a Straussian because he is presenting himself to his readers as one sort of person (“I’m not a conservative”) … but I strongly suspect that when he talks to his buddies Thiel and Musk he reveals his true feelings (the secret meaning of the text).

Incidentally I met Charles Murray 35 years ago as a college student and he played the same game. Friendly, aw-shucks, just a social scientist … then he wrote that IQ book and it turned out he had burned a cross.

Your post meanwhile exhibits the problems of Straussianism insofar as you might have meant the reader to draw exactly the conclusion I drew, or maybe just the opposite, or maybe you are joking. Who knows? There’s a lot to be said for just saying what you think.

I always assumed it was more of a PR strategy, that Cowen makes sympathetic nods towards non-hard-right policies as a sop to his fellow academics, who in general are far less open to authoritarianism than he is. It doesn’t cost him anything to claim to support this or that on occasion, and helps peers believe that he’s less radical than he is. (And in some everything-else-equal, economic modelling sense he probably does “support” some of them. He just also supports a political regime that would make a lot of them impossible or moot.)

To be clear, I’m not calling him a Nazi or any such thing. As a for-instance, I think he’d prefer something well short of the Trump-promised ethnic cleansing of the US. But I also think if it did happen he’d be rather quick to start a list of the upsides for his next column.

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blockquote>Which is fine, but–does anyone outside of DC care

I think this is more bloggy-inside-baseball than DC-inside-baseball.

In the past, there have been well-intentioned liberals and progressives who treated Cowen as an “honest interlocutor” from the opposition — someone with a more conservative outlook, of course, but an intellectually rigorous whetstone for progressive ideas, someone sincerely committed to improving the discourse.
This assessment of Cowen has always struck me as horseshit. He is and has always been a propagandist for the rich and powerful, just like Megan McArdle. He has never been honest, constructive, or worth engaging. Bringing him into progressive conversations simply allowed him to spread the poison of his reactionary ideas.
Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that I have previously been reprimanded for holding this opinion of Cowen, on this very board. I don’t recall the source of the reprimand, but I hope that they have learned better over the years.

Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that I have previously been reprimanded for holding this opinion of Cowen, on this very board. I don’t recall the source of the reprimand, but I hope that they have learned better over the years.

Is this what you’re thinking of?

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/05/26/vindictive-billionaires/

Are we discussing David Brooks? I guess he doesn’t self-present as a political philosopher.
And what’$ all the my$tery about Cowen’s motivation?

“And what’$ all the my$tery about Cowen’s motivation?”

According to Mercatus Center’s tax filings, Tyler pulled down nearly $80,000 in compensation from them in 2021 for one hour of work a week.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/541436224/202330539349300873/full

I’m sure he had to take this second job to supplement the meager $244k he made as a lowly economics professor at GMU:
https://openpayrolls.com/tyler-cowen-109102225

There are lots of people who would prefer a non ethnic cleansed future, who nevertheless when asked to pick teams choose the ones who do prefer that future. Whether they have theoretical reasons for that or just think those people are more likable, the effect is the same. It’s not surprising that outside certain bubbles, conservatism in the US has been left with the people who can live with white supremacy. It’s not surprising that they’ll think maybe Musk is someone to whom attention must be paid.

Cowen strikes me as someone who is consciously attracted to rationalism but has been persuaded that this is limited; who knows economics requires years of study, but thinks stepping into a new form of writing and popular appeal will be easy and all he has to do is correct, in the most obvious way, what he’s been told is wrong about himself up to now. Luckily for him, as a blogger he has a huge audience of people in his audience and his peers whom he can blame if his writing doesn’t come across as he’d planned.

Personal opinion is that Cowen enjoys trolling his readers

A Straussian who insists we take Trump literally, and parse his statements every single time with highly charitable context, so all is viewed as neutral and straightforward?

What does he take us for? But is there any need to ask? As a Straussian, he must believe we’re idiots.

I wonder what Trump means when he says Jews are to blame if he loses. Oh, wait. So this is supposed to be a direct quote:

“If I don’t win this election — and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because, at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy — Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years,”

Someone showed something about 80% of Jewish voters living in blue states. So this is not a lot of voters.

I’m sure Trump means something non-vindictive. He’s not vindictive. He doesn’t threaten people.

I’m not a fan of Strauss at all, but the persecution of writing business seems historically cancelled by, I don’t know, social media, cable tv, porno, what have you. The need to escape persecution has just become a niche ploy: I’ve been cancelled! And on to the next interview on Bill Maher. I think the original motive, to be kind, of Strauss’s perception of the danger around the philosopher was built into the odd cult of Greece in German philosophical culture. But even as Strauss was pondering this, advertising and public relations were taking subtext to whole new levels. If Cowen is shy about his ultra right opiniosn, it is more in the way a conman bluffs about a sure thing – it isn’t Strauss we should consult, I think, but Erving Goffman’s “cooling the mark out” – where the mark are interlocutors who think, hmm, here’s a reasonable conservative willing to debate who, in addition, reads good novels! Except in the grifter’s case, it is a question of cash or valuable goods, and in Cowen’s case, it is a question of laying a fascist egg and calling it my version of Straussianism. So the game can continue!