The soul of Strauss: On Leo Strauss & the crisis of modern liberalism. (Glenn Ellmers, June 2024, New Criterion)
It was Rousseau, Strauss explains, who fundamentally transformed the meaning and relationship of nature, freedom, and the self. For Rousseau, “freedom is identical with goodness; to be free, or to be one’s self, is to be good.” In this new understanding, “it is not virtue which makes man free but freedom which makes man virtuous.” Here we find the source of today’s celebration of the uninhibited self, the notion of the “ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed and unjustified,” bound to nothing higher than the self-conscious conception of his freedom.
In a coruscating passage from an essay titled “Perspectives on the Good Society,” Strauss takes aim at the impotent rage that is the inevitable consequence of this flight from all authority. The self, Strauss explains, “is obviously a descendant of the soul”—meaning “it is not the soul.” The soul “is a part of an order which does not originate in the soul.” Those who believe in the self, however, see it as sovereign. It “does not defer to anything higher than itself; yet it is no longer exhilarated by the sense of its sovereignty, but rather oppressed by it.” Finding no purpose within or without, the self becomes “nothing but the accusation or the scream.” Strauss certainly seems to anticipate the oppressive negativity of today’s ideologues of systemic racism, who “constitute themselves by this condemnation; they are nothing but this condemnation or rejection.”
Rather than leave the matter there, Strauss connects the psychological to the political (and the philosophic). Those who can only scream about cosmic injustice behave as if they are in hell, and for them, Strauss notes, hell is “life in the United States.” They act as if they are rebelling against “a holy law; but of this they appeared to be wholly unconscious.”
Strauss’s reference here to law, and especially holy law, is critical. Human beings, when not deranged by ideology, do in fact find their purpose in and through a community that sees itself as holy. Every premodern society was grounded in a sacred law that insisted, as Strauss explains, that “not everything is permitted.” (This sacred community could well be, by the way, a polity deriving its authority from “the laws of nature and nature’s god.”) It is the confrontation with these divine codes, which define all premodern regimes, that first made political philosophy possible. Strauss famously referred to this as “the theological-political problem.”
MAGA is nowhere more connected with the Left than in its belief that America is Hell.