Right-Wing Antisemitism, Liberalism, and Leo Strauss

The new right’s fomenting of contempt for all things liberal and the swelling antisemitism among its members are of a piece. To reverse the rising tide of antisemitism within its ranks, new-right factions will need to reform their tendency to treat liberalism in all its manifestations as a blight on humanity.

Modern – and classical – liberalism

New-right intellectuals – national conservatives, common-good conservatives, and postliberals – like to conceive of liberalism as one long nefarious scheme running from John Locke’s 17^th-century classic, “Second Treatise of Government,” to today’s woke progressivism for emancipating individuals from morality, politics, and nature. It is puzzling why those of a conservative persuasion would embrace the reduction of a rich and multifaceted tradition to its worst excesses. It’s especially hard to understand why American conservatives would join in the demonization of liberalism since in the United States liberalism in the large sense forms an integral element of the American constitutional order and remains deeply ingrained in the American people’s common culture and everyday judgments.

Liberalism in the large sense refers to the modern tradition of freedom, which emerged in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and revolved around the revolutionary convictions that human beings are by nature free and equal and that government’s first task is to secure for its citizens the rights inherent in all persons. Woven into the nation’s political institutions and laws, these convictions have enabled Americans of diverse backgrounds and beliefs to preserve the nation’s great experiment in ordered liberty for going on 250 years. Repudiating the tradition’s core convictions opens the door to bigotry and persecution. It also paves the way for a government that serves tribal norms, advances the interests of the ruthless and vicious, and institutionalizes authoritarian rule.

The antisemitism of Nick Fuentes

At the center of the storm over new-right antisemitism stands Nick Fuentes, who – along with the Groypers, a very online group of disaffected Generation Z right wingers who follow him – takes pride in loathing liberalism. While evidence mounts that Fuentes’ rise has been in part “manufactured,” he has recently attracted considerable attention. Tucker Carlson’s amiable late-October interview of Fuentes has drawn over 5 million views. Within two days of its release, Piers Morgan’s Dec. 8 Fuentes interview had amassed more than 3 million views. Fuentes himself has some 1.1 million followers on X.com and around 559,000 on Rumble, and millions of accounts view his livestreams.

In 2020, at age 21, Fuentes created the America First Foundation, whose members “champion the role of God in society and upholding the principles of nationalism, Christianity, and traditionalism.” The gravest threat to America stems from, AFF declares, “foreign and immoral ideologies like zionism, nihilism, and liberal multiculturalism,” which “have embedded themselves within our society and have undermined our nation’s sovereignty.”

Antisemitism on the right is a grave mistake

Fuentes and the Groypers detest America as it is. They disparage the universal rights on which the nation was founded. They scorn toleration, civility, and pluralism. They want to replace separation of church and state in America with a Christian confessional state. They attack mainstream conservatism and swathes of Trump world as irresolute and weak. They accuse the conservative movement of abandoning white Americans, subordinating U.S. interests to Israel’s interests, toadying to GOP mega-donors, and accelerating the nation’s cultural rot. And they equate an America First foreign policy with an America-alone stance, coupled with sympathy for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin whose Christianity, they seem to think, outweighs or complements his despotism and imperialism.

In “Defeating Groyperism on Conservative Terms,” published in late November by The American Mind, Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, argues that much conservative criticism of the Groypers “only fuels the phenomenon” because it is rooted in liberalism. Quelling Groypers’ antisemitism and reining in the vituperation they direct at polite – including polite conservative – society depends on taking seriously the element of justice in the Groypers’ rebellion, counsels McCarthy. They properly reject, he writes, “a rigid morality,” the liberalism that stretches from Locke to woke progressivism,

that imposes itself on everyone, and on some – young men in particular – more than others.

However, McCarthy contends, the Groypers wrongly suppose that loathing liberalism obliges them to loathe world Jewry and Israel, too. He suggests that Groypers can overcome their antisemitism by learning from postliberals to loathe liberalism more intelligently.

Liberalism (classical) isn’t the problem

From McCarthy’s postliberal perspective, liberalism’s pernicious influence on conservatives received expression in their wrongheaded response to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ public affirmation of his institution’s friendship with Tucker Carlson following the Fuentes interview. I suspect that McCarthy would view my contributions here and here as illustrating the problem.

But McCarthy mischaracterizes matters. He charges that conservatives adopted anti-racist icon Ibram X. Kendi’s tactics, seeking “the cancellation not only of Nick Fuentes but of anyone who dares question or resist attempts to cancel Tucker Carlson as well.” By and large, however, conservatives have not criticized Roberts for failing to speak out but rather for sanitizing Carlson’s ugly and invidious antics.

McCarthy does conservatives another disservice by arguing that liberalism’s deleterious effects blind them to Israel’s capacity, as a state that embraces its national sovereignty, to serve as an antidote to right-wing antisemitism. A distinctive nation faithful to its own traditions rather to universal norms, Israel, contends McCarthy, embodies the very ideal that Groypers espouse in juvenile and resentful ways and postliberals advocate in modulated tones and erudite writings. “The Right,” therefore, “should see Israel, and Jews as a particular people, as allies against self-annihilating liberal universalism.” Instead of harping on the new right’s antisemitism, advises McCarthy, conservatives should adopt its antiliberalism, the better to make common cause with the new right and the Jewish state.

Israel does not repudiate liberalism

Israel, however, no more repudiates liberalism in the large sense than does the United States. Indeed, like the U.S. Declaration of Independence in establishing America in 1776, the Israeli Declaration of Independence in announcing the Jewish state’s birth in 1948 affirmed that the nation would be based on basic rights and fundamental freedoms and would safeguard them for all citizens.

Contrary to McCarthy, moreover, the liberalism in the large sense that the United States and Israel share counters antisemitism while forming a broad political framework in which men and women of different faiths and competing interpretations of the same faith – the political reality in Israel as well as in the United States – can live together in harmony and prosperity.

In passing, McCarthy suggests that “Leo Strauss might also yield answers to the nihilistic tendencies among today’s young Right, not least with his prescription to return to classical political philosophy.” McCarthy is correct but for reasons contrary to his broadsides against liberalism.

In February 1941 in “German Nihilism,” a lecture delivered at the New School for Social Research, Strauss indicated that a return to the “classical tradition” teaches that the modern tradition of freedom makes an essential contribution to preserving civilization in the modern world.

Leo Strauss

A towering student of the history of political philosophy, Strauss argued that a distinctive form of nihilism – Hitler’s National Socialism was the most heinous and fateful version – had deep roots in German intellectual life and had crystalized among young, right-wing critics of the Weimar Republic. Their nihilism, maintained Strauss, originated not in a rejection of morality but rather in a “moral protest” against modern civilization, exemplified for these young men by liberal democracy in post-World War I Germany. They detested liberal democracy’s “irresponsibility and lack of seriousness” – its celebration of enlightened self-interest and demotion of virtue and duty, preference for the comfortable and pleasurable over the bold and daring, and focus on equal rights rather than national greatness. But their repudiation of modern civilization and liberal democracy was “not accompanied by any clear conception of what one wants to put in its place.”

Yearning for an alternative, these young German men – Strauss characterized them as “adolescent” in spirit – lacked “old-fashioned teachers” who disciplined the mind through traditional liberal education. Consequently, they succumbed to “romanticism,” by which Strauss understood “a judgment which is guided by the opinion that an absolutely superior order of human things existed during some period of the recorded past.” The young German nihilists condemned liberal democracy unequivocally based on, and sought to replace it with, a supposed “absolutely superior order” that reviled bourgeois virtues and revered courage and the military conquest it enabled.

Classical liberalism, not the modern woke variety

In “Beyond Good and Evil” (Sect. 252), Strauss observed, Nietzsche gave authoritative expression to the judgment typical of German philosophy that Locke deserved to be despised for his seminal role in elaborating “the ideals of modern civilization.” But Nietzsche, Strauss argued, misread Locke and misunderstood the English: Their embrace of political and economic freedom was not unqualified. Nietzsche failed to recognize, wrote Strauss, “that the English almost always had the very un-German prudence and moderation not to throw out the baby with the bath, i.e. the prudence to conceive of the modern ideals as a reasonable adaptation of the old and eternal ideal of decency, of rule of law, and of that liberty which is not license, to changed circumstances.”

America’s new right could use a generous dose of the “prudence and moderation not to throw out the baby with the bath.” By recovering the modern tradition of freedom, not in opposition to but guided by the classical tradition, they will gain an appreciation of how countering antisemitism and conserving liberalism in the large sense go hand in hand.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.