On West Coast Straussianism and the Imperial Presidency

It is undisputed that Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973), a German exile, who, after a long stint at The New School reached prominence at The University of Chicago, became the founder of a ‘school’ of academics who found a home mostly in political theory, but also in literature and philosophy. Most members of the school write on political theory broadly conceived. His writings are dense and not infrequently commentary on books written by long-dead authors (including, it is worth noting, medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers). Because many of his students, and their students, ended up training public intellectuals, think tankers, and advisors associated with Republican politicians and administrations (including many so-called ‘neo-cons’), the study of Strauss and his school has itself become intensely politicized. There have been Straussians, who have resisted both the rightward drift of the school, and (in recent memory) the rise of MAGA (including “Never Trump Straussians” many of whom once associated with the ‘neo-cons’).

I took classes with a number of Straussians at The University of Chicago. I also played basketball with some of their students. In these courses Strauss was never taught. Joseph Cropsey (1919 – 2012), one of Strauss’ earliest American admirers and collaborators and an important Adam Smith scholar, adored my Bullmastiff. He would indulge me in long walks so he could spend time with my dog, and I could ask him questions about his views on Smith. I have written on his work in the philosophy of economics (here).

Later, at Syracuse University, my senior colleague, José Benardete (1928 – 2016), whose brother (Seth Benardete) was one of the more prominent students of Strauss, became a highly valued mentor. During most of our lunches, he talked about Wallace Stevens. José had many intellectual debts to Strauss, which he did not hide in his work, but he had also embarked on an intellectual career that was not confined to political theory. In fact, on my somewhat quixotic interpretation of twentieth-century philosophy, José helped revive the study of metaphysics during the period of positivist dominance within analytic philosophy (alongside others at Syracuse and Rochester). There is an interesting question why David Lewis went all the way to Australia rather than Upstate New York for his intellectual nourishment, but that’s for another occasion.

One of Strauss’ purportedly controversial claims is the idea that many authors figured out ways to communicate multiple messages to heterogeneous audiences. I have put it like that because anyone who has lectured regularly to a large audience of strangers, who one knows have different life-trajectories and educational preparation, not to mention different intelligence, has had to master this skill. Strauss presented the claim in terms of a contrast between exoteric and esoteric writing, and he insisted that in contexts where freedom of speech was not guaranteed, one should expect esoteric writings. While in polemics with the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ in intellectual history, Strauss is usually presented as treating the history of philosophy in a naive, decontextualized fashion, his hermeneutics requires knowledge of the social and political context of an author in order to decode the esoteric message.

But already in 1941, Strauss also intimated that any society may not be welcome to all truths. This undoubtedly irritated his liberal peers.** He also, thereby, invited the thought that his own writings practice the art of esotericism, whose hidden meanings disclose themselves only slowly to the skillful reader.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that his own school split into different understandings of Strauss’s views and principles. And then there is a further, as it were, downstream split over how these views and principles should be applied to, say, domestic and/or international politics. One such split is the now enduring contrast between West Coast Straussianism (inspired by Harry Jaffa and his students) and  East Coast Straussians. To outsiders it is a opaque what the intellectual source of the contrast is beyond the natural rivalry rooted in the desire for recognition. But I think I can point to one of these.

Strauss himself reopened the battle (familiar to scholars of the Early Modern period) between the Ancients and Moderns. Strauss strongly intimated that the purported victory of the moderns was grounded on shaky foundations. The shakiness had become obscured through tradition and intellectual propaganda. In doing this, he was emulating a maneuver that Heidegger (whom Strauss had met) had used with great success inside the academy on the whole philosophical tradition when it comes to the question of being. Whatever else was clear, the Moderns had lowered the standards for Man. There is a whiff of Nietzsche in all of this, and East Coast Straussians often invite the thought that their fondness for the Ancients really is a means to disguise their Nietzschean obsession with higher men and the philosophy of the future. By contrast, the leader of the West Coast long associated with Claremont College (and the Claremont Institute), Harry Jaffa (1918 – 2015) seems to be an unapologetic partisan of the moderns who are vindicated in the person of Lincoln.

One of the very nice features of Laura K. Field’s (2025) Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton) is the documentation of the very broad and intense embrace of MAGA among so-called ‘West Coast’ Straussianism. I have been blogging about this since 2015, but because of her inside knowledge and detailed rapportage, I found it eye-opening. To be sure West Coast Straussianism is not the only intellectual pillar of the MAGA coalition. She also points to integralism (represented by Adrian Vermeule), national conservatism (represented by Yoram Hazony), postliberals (most prominently Patrick Deneen), and what she usefully calls the ‘Hard Right Underbelly.’ What follows is not a book review of her work, but my only high level criticism of it is that through patterns of omission her work minimizes the internationalist dimension of all of these pillars. There is a lot of global copying and sharing of ideas and strategies among international collaborators. MAGA’s megaphone is loudest, but it is not the first mover and often not the source of the ideas or rhetoric promulgated. For example, the great replacement theory is mentioned, but its genealogy is not really explored.

Even so, she leaves us with a kind of puzzle. How could the author of the (1959) Crisis of the House Divided (hereafter Crisis)— who celebrates Lincoln’s embrace of the self-evident truth that all are created equal1 — have become the Godfather of MAGA’s road to perdition? (This is my second post on Crisis; recall the first one.) This is not unfair to ask of her because she returns to Harry Jaffa and the way Crisis (and its representation of Lincoln) is evoked throughout her book, especially when dealing with Jaffa’s heirs within ‘West Coast’ Straussianism, but not only them. It’s also an intrinsically interesting question—as at least I hope to show in what follows.

Field’s answer rests on the idea that Jaffa was a kind of moral zealot who argued from “moral conviction” (p. 39); for whom the founding rests on a “strong moral consensus” (p. 36) with a “singular moral core” (p. 38) and this prevented him from embracing “actual religious pluralism, political liberty and contestation, and philosophical freedom” (p. 38) Now Field admits that she finds his “later writings unreadable” (p. 38) so I want to cut her some slack about how she would answer my question. Jaffa’s later writings, which are often unusually polemical, do seem to be centered on two unpleasant obsessions: first to show his closeness to Strauss and to imply he is the true heir of the Straussian mantle. Second, an uncompromising embrace of the moral teachings implied by traditional natural law not the least in sexual ethics. I find early Jaffa superbly interesting and his account of what looks like Aristotelian natural right in Crisis is subtle; late Jaffa an angry bigot. Yet, Jaffa is not infrequently the most penetrating critic of other conservative thinkers.

Be that as it may, Field’s account deepens the mystery: how do intense moralists end up as the intellectual shock-troopers of Trump? Field addresses this issue when she turns to Charles R. Kesler (one of the intellectual leaders at the Claremont institute). Field is alert to the fact that a potential change of let’s call it ‘elite ideology’ opens up lots of jobs and quick paths of advancement among bold intellectuals willing to get her hands dirty. Field does not ignore the potentially base interests to jump on the MAGA train. But on the whole Field suggests that Kesler is a true believer even if he sometimes has qualms about the means (pp. 162-163). Crucially, on Field’s reconstruction of Kesler’s views there is a sharp contrast between the Founders’ Constitution and the Progressive one, and the latter has wrecked the original (pp. 162-163). And, in particular, what’s needed was a ‘new founding’ and ‘counterrevolution’ (p. 163). Lurking here is, I think, a road to a more satisfying intellectual analysis, one that involves Machiavelli and Willmoore Kendall.

As regular readers know (recall, especially, this post), I am a genuine admirer of Willmoore Kendall’s original interpretation of Locke in his early (1941) [1959] John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. I very recently learned from Claire Rydell Arcenas’ fascinating (2022) America’s Philosopher that “Kendall’s book was the first full-length study by an American scholar published in the United States that focused specifically on Locke’s political arguments as advanced in his Second Treatise.”2 In short, this book treats chapter 1 of the Second Treatise as crucial, and (to simplify) reads Locke as claiming that it is the majority that establishes the nature and content of a society’s rights in light of the majority’s shared view of the common good. (I admire this as a reading of Locke—not, to be sure, as a view we must pursue.) Of course, who on this view constitutes the demos for Locke is a bit restricted.3

In so far as Locke is indeed a big influence on American political thought, this helps explain the rather unliberal nature of nineteenth-century practice and the common good constitutionalism that Adrian Vermeule has found in it. (Vermeule is in the grip of Locke as a liberal view, so he disassociates all of this from Locke.) It also helps explain why eighteenth-century readers as far apart as Blackstone and Condorcet read Locke as a democratic majoritarian (recall this post, also with some salient stuff on Tucker). About that some other time more (since I am working on a Locke-related project with John Trasher now at OSU).

Crisis treats Lincoln’s debate with Douglas as much more central to the character of American self-understanding that Lincoln’s debate with the heirs of Calhoun. And that’s because Calhoun seeks to ground rule in natural inequality. To simplify greatly, Douglas can be made to stand for self-rule in which democratic procedures (if properly followed) become self-legitimating. Lincoln stands for the idea that democracy must be guided by fundamental norms of justice.

So, when in Crisis I was reading Jaffa’s fascinating account (recall) of Douglas’ treatment of ‘popular sovereignty,’ — which is basically a political application of Kendall’s majoritarian Locke — I wondered how Kendall interpreted Jaffa, if at all. (Somewhat unhelpfully, later, after polemics start, Jaffa treats Kendall as a follower of Calhoun—but I am going to leave that mostly aside here.) In Crisis, Kendall is never mentioned. Locke doesn’t figure much more prominently; he is mentioned only to register Locke’s criticism of slavery (p. 75), and to note in the context of Lincoln’s criticism of Tawney (and Dred Scott) and Douglas that the Founding generation understood the Declaration’s embrace of human equality at all times and places as (to simplify) evoking Locke. (Crisis, pp. 314-315)

Kendall’s review of Jaffa appeared in The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery 1963; I’ll be quoting from a 2022 reprint).4 Between 1947-1961, Kendall (1909 – 1967) had been at Yale (where he was one of Buckley’s mentors). Yale eventually bought out Kendall’s life-time tenure, and Kendall eventually moved to Dallas for the remainder of his life. As we can surmise from the Strauss-Kendall correspondence (reprinted in Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives; hereafter Maverick),5 Kendall had a drinking problem and must have been a (ahh) challenging colleague. He himself clearly despised many of his colleagues. Because Burnham had left the academy, Kendall and Strauss were the only major non-libertarian intellectuals on the American right  unmoved by Burkean conservatism. So, there is a natural affinity between them. (Strauss’ politics are not so easy to discern, but his correspondence with Kendall shows he was not a friend of the New Deal.)

Kendall learned of Strauss between 1947 (when Strauss’ essay (here) on Rousseau appeared) and 1949, when Kendall writes Strauss that his “piece on Rousseau” gave him “quite a jolt” (Maverick, p. 191). But at the start of 1959, Kendall becomes a rather deferential admirer of Strauss after he reads Strauss’ (1958) Thoughts on Machiavelli, which he reviews for Philosophical Review in 1966 (here). Reading Strauss also leads Kendall to revise his own reading of Locke (here). At the start of the original version of Crisis, Jaffa alerts the reader that Strauss was his supervisor. So, undoubtedly Kendall reads Crisis, in part, in light of Thoughts on Machiavelli, as shall I.

There is no mention of Machiavelli or Machiavellian terminology in Crisis nor in Kendall’s review of Crisis. (Jaffa’s much later book, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, does make the connection to Machiavelli more explicit.) But as Kendall surmises, one of the central themes of Crisis is that the constitutional “system elaborated by the Framers” contains a “Caesarist potential.” (The Conservative Affirmation, p. 331). And the question is how can this danger be dissolved. This is a topic that stayed with Jaffa and Jaffa is by no means unique (recall this post, too). As I have remarked elsewhere, the diagnosis that the American system of government is vulnerable to Caesarism is shared by thinkers as far apart as Woodrow Wilson and Vincent Ostrom (recall here). The real mystery is why Americans have refused to tackle the problem (other than imposing term limits on the President and some weak sauce Watergate-era reforms).

Be that as it may, in his review Kendall elaborates on the theme as follows:

As for the status of Abraham Lincoln vis-à-vis the Signers and Framers, Jaffa’s Lincoln sees the great task of the nineteenth century as that of affirming the cherished accomplishment of the Fathers by transcending it. Concretely, this means to construe the equality clause as having an allegedly unavoidable meaning with which it was always pregnant, but which the Fathers apprehended only dimly…

Jaffa’s Lincoln (and Jaffa) has a crystal-clear answer to these questions: Caesarism can be avoided, and the take-over by passions at the expense of reason circumvented, only through the ministrations and ultimate self -immolation of an anti-Caesar, himself as indifferent to power and glory as Caesar is avid for it—an anti-Caesar capable of transforming the fundamental affirmations of the Signers and Framers into a political religion that men can live by. (Kendall, p. 331; emphasis in original)

This is a fine reading of Crisis. However, in Kendall’s hands, Jaffa’s Lincoln becomes a Christlike figure. And while this is surely intended by Jaffa, too, Kendall downplays the degree to which Jaffa treats Lincoln as the exemplary magnanimous type who struggles to prevent the rise of an American Alcibiades. Either way, Kendall is right that for early Jaffa (in Crisis) the Constitution was defective in non-trivial ways and had to be transcended (even if Jaffa also notes that political necessity shaped some of the Constitution’s original features not the least all the compromises over slavery).6

While Kendall thinks Jaffa’s Lincoln successfully transcended the Framers (p. 332), on his view Crisis does not imply that Lincoln eliminates the Caesarism inherent in the Constitution. This is correct as an interpretation of Jaffa (and reality).

Now, against Jaffa, Kendall proposes to understand “Lincoln” as “the Caesar Lincoln claimed to be trying to prevent.” (p. 333)7 In particular, and crucially for my present purposes, Kendall worries that Jaffa might have launched “the nation, upon a political future the very thought of which is hair-raising: a future made up of an endless series of Abraham Lincolns, each persuaded that he is superior in wisdom and virtue to the [Founding] Fathers, each prepared to insist that those who oppose this or that new application of the equality standard are denying the possibility of self-government, each ultimately willing to plunge America into Civil War rather than concede his point—and off at the end, of course, the cooperative commonwealth of men will be so equal that no one will be able to them apart.” (The Conservative Affirmation, pp. 332-333)

I have no idea if Marcuse and Kendall knew of each other’s writing. Either way, Kendall’s lines are written during the rise of the civil rights movement, which, unlike Jaffa, Kendall finds it altogether difficult to have any warmth toward. So, Kendall is definitely not the hero of my story. But he is prescient in seeing that Jaffa’s position (“endless series of Abraham Lincolns”), rather than closing the door to Caesarism in American life, actually opens the door to those who might have missed it to a permanent series of ‘New Princes’ engaged in ‘re-foundings.’8 To Kendall’s credit, he also saw the danger of American Bonapartism (as I prefer to call it), and he is fairly unusual in being a principled defender of the legislative branch in the American system (and shockingly rare for this stance on the American political right). [This is why I am interested in Kendall.]

One way to understand Claremont’s embrace of MAGA is that they have found their New Prince to accelerate the path toward a proper refounding. If I had recognized the Machiavellian background, I could have seen this in real time. Because in September 2016 (my first post on Michael Anton’s Flight 93 essay, when his identity was not known yet), I noted that if he “is right that the status quo is heading us off the cliff, then it seems we are given the choice to step off the cliff quickly (Trump) or in slow motion (Clinton).”

And so, and get to the real point — and, thereby, tie together a lot of dots that had been puzzling me over the years — if your diagnosis is that what America needs is a New Prince rather than preventing its rise, you will argue not just for a disruptive president, but for a presidency relatively unchecked by others and so capable of being engaged in a re-founding or to make it possible.

To be clear, Jaffa does not imply that Lincoln is the originator of the imperial presidency. All he shows in Crisis is that the possibility is inherent in the Constitution, and at least sometimes desirable. But his (‘Claremont;) students, prominent Federalist judges, and even many of the East Coast Straussians did, in fact, and relentlessly promoted an imperial presidency.9 In Russell Vought (here; and here), the Machiavellianism and the imperial presidency of the “Radical Constitutionalism” are fully out in the open. And so here we are descending into structural regime-change, hurtling toward our own moment with destiny.

• A much shorter version of this piece was published at Digressionsnimpressions (here)

** Later he and his students went on to annoy his social scientific colleagues, but that’s for a different time.