"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"
--Reagans Law
For the past ten years, the liveliest and most interesting debate within conservatism has raged between two camps of Straussians — the so-called "Western Straussians," clustering around Harry V. Jaffa and the scholars associated with the Claremont Institute, and the "Eastern Straussians," among whose leading figures are Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, and Thomas Pangle (although the distinction is more a state of mind than of geography — there are "Western Straussians" in the East and vice versa). In books, scholarly essays, letters, columns, and not least in the pages of National Review, the two sides have clashed — occasionally with angry words and personal vituperation — over the nature of political philosophy, the character of America, and the status of revealed religion. The majority of Straussians, to be sure, have remained either in the middle or on the sidelines of disputes, watching them with a mixture of fascination and regret. But however sharp the personal exchanges may have been, the issues involved are of supreme importance for the future of American conservatism.
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Perhaps most profoundly, the disagreement concerns the meaning of political philosophy, the central theme of Strauss's writings. Is political philosophy, as the "Easterners" maintain, a politic presentation of philosophy, basically a way of shielding philosophers' radical questioning from the disapproval of the many, of society? Or is political philosophy meant also and emphatically to offer philosophical guidance for political life? The point at issue is the meaning of the famous "Socratic turn" in philosophy, which boils down to the question of the status of morality. Does the philosopher dwell in a world beyond good and evil, or is morality a good in itself that he too must respect?
Taking morality seriously involves taking patriotism seriously, and so it is not surprising that the most obvious disagreement between the two Straussian camps concerns America. Now, the Straussians have helped to effect, over the past thirty years, a remarkable revival of scholarship on America, particularly on American political thought. Martin Diamond, Harry Jaffa, and Herbert Storing, to name the most prominent, showed that it was both necessary and proper to try to understand the Founders, Abraham Lincoln, and other American statesmen as they have understood themselves; that the condescending revisionism of Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, Richard Hofstadter, and other historians would not stand critical scrutiny. Out of this common rejection of Marxist and progressive history, however, has emerged a significant split between the Straussians over what the Founders intended the American way of life to be.
The Eastern Straussians see America as fundamentally "modern," by which they mean that America stands for the renunciation equally of the wisdom of classical political philosophy and of Biblical revelation. Walter Berns, Thomas Pangle, and others assert that America is fundamentally Hobbesian. In other words, America was conceived in hedonism, atheism, and materialism, and dedicated to the pursuit of comfortable self-preservation. However glorious the Founding may have been, the nation organized on this founding principle had sooner or later to abandon all glory in favor of a descent into the life of self-interestedness. As George Will, profoundly influenced by this line of analysis, puts it, America was "ill-founded," doomed to moral and political decay by the logic of its own principles.
In contrast, the Western Straussians see America as broadly continuous with the classical and Biblical traditions. Indeed, in some respects they see it as perfecting those traditions, giving due public regard for the first time in history to the "laws of nature and of nature's God" — i.e., both to the moral common ground and to the moral and theoretical disagreements between the great defining principles of the West: Reason and Revelation, Athens and Jerusalem.
This is pretty abstruse stuff.
All I can say about the p[aleo-con philosophy is "That way lies madness!")
And a little stupid too. Paleo, Neo, pink, green.....Over all, it beats the vision of the (self) annointed.
To understand the Paleo case requires familiarity with Greek and Roman thought and the development of the European legal and religious tradition, and an historical imagination far beyond that associated with the standard version of history. (Called the "Whig version of history" by some Paleos, though the wit behind this description is lost on most.)
If you are of curious nature, interested in how things actually work, and seek the truth, the Paleo tradition has much to offer.
Of course Bradford is dead wrong. It is in fact the prevalence of anti-universals that has caused degeneration. This the substance of the political fugue, flaw in the application. It's so simple. Why not just shout "Republic!" a few times and go home?
ArchConservative btt
I don't know what this guy's idea of a paleoconservative is, but no one I've come across who identifies himself as such, comes even close to the description above.
For paleocons, the success of republican government is so resounding that it can spread purely by example. It's the neocons that seem to have such little faith in it that they need to militarily impose it everywhere they can.
And what little they do disagree on is made up.
Both sides agree that....universal truths of the sort expressed in the Declaration of Independence (or in twentieth-century liberalism: they tend to see the two as continuous) are ultimately destructive of authentic, historically rooted human communities;
How are the universal truths in the Declaration of Independence destructive?
As much as Kesler may desire to think that his school is rooted in "the hallowed ground of reason," reality paints a much different story. Jaffa is about as much to "Lincoln and the Union" as Khomeini was to Mahomet and the Shari'a.
Both rejected the tools of reason long ago and, in its place, adopted a quasi-religious blind adoration for their respective idols and dogmas. To attempt to pass either off as exercises in reason is no more valid than calling war "peace," day "night," and up "down." As is so with each of these items, blind idolatrous adoration and reason are mutually exclusive of each other - the presence of one precludes the presence of the other.
That statement too is a falsehood. Beard et al aside, the pro-Lincoln responses to him are hardly a rejection of "Marxist and progressive history" that the Jaffaites claim. No more explicit and direct form of Marxist history exists than that written by Marx himself, and far from rejecting Marx's own arguments about Lincoln, the Jaffaites have embraced many of them. Marx personally adored Lincoln and wrote so at length many times. Much, if not most, pro-Lincoln scholarship ever since has echoed with Marxian concepts.