Perhaps no group of scholars has investigated the principles of the American Founding more seriously than the students of Leo Strauss. The bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution produced notable Straussian commentaries, including the still-influential essay by Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way.” Although those who studied directly under Strauss have, for the most part, retired or passed, we can expect the students of those students to take the lead as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and, in a few years, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Yet Straussians, famously, disagree about the meaning of America. Following Diamond, so-called “East Coast” Straussians contend the founding was “low but solid,” grounded primarily and essentially in preserving life, liberty, and property and nothing more, thus eschewing or at best downplaying the cultivation of virtue and morality. So-called “West Coast” Straussians interpret America more favorably, even claiming that it is the “best regime” of Western civilization, as Harry V. Jaffa argued in these pages. West Coasters maintain that America, properly understood, aims at goodness and nobility. Why so much disagreement? More importantly, who gets America right?

The intellectual stakes are considerable. Ought we to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and its principle of equality, or should we de-emphasize it and substitute an alternative understanding of America? Should we embrace natural rights or minimize what Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon called “rights talk”? Do we return to the founding or imagine a “post-liberal” future?

Though he didn’t call attention to it, Jaffa is actually the intellectual father of both East Coast and West Coast Straussianism. In his chapter on “The Universal Meaning of the Declaration of Independence” in Crisis of the House Divided (1959), Jaffa outlines the basic premises of the East Coast’s “low but solid” interpretation. Thomas Jefferson, Jaffa argues, wrote the Declaration within the “Lockean horizon” of the state of nature, and within the state of nature, there are “no real duties” but only “rules which tell us to avoid doing those things which might impel others to injure us.” Jaffa continues:

[I]f we conceive these rights [of life and liberty] as operative within the Lockean state of nature, we will immediately see that no man is under any necessary obligation to respect any other man’s rights. For example: because I have a right to life, I have a right to kill any man whom I have reason to believe might kill me…. The same holds true of liberty: I have a right to liberty, which right permits me to enslave anyone who, I fear, might otherwise enslave me.” [Jaffa’s emphasis]

“In short,” Jaffa concludes, “there is little beyond an appeal to enlightened self-interest in the doctrine of universal equality when conceived in its pristine, Lockean form.”

Jaffa learned from Strauss that the Lockean state of nature was essentially Hobbesian. In Natural Right and History, Strauss explains how Thomas Hobbes and Locke’s modern doctrine of natural right departs from classic natural right. To oversimplify, the ancients hold that goodness for the individual meant having a well-ordered soul, one in which reason governed the passions. A well-ordered polity, similarly, aims at virtue and is governed by the wise or the “best.” Modern natural right lowers the aims both for the individual and the state. The moderns hold reason to be in service to the passions. A well-ordered state channels individual self-interest through institutions that separate, check, and balance power so as to provide security and comfortable self-preservation. The early Jaffa interpreted the Declaration through Strauss’s “Ancients vs. Moderns” framework and placed America on the side of the moderns, given the founders’ obvious intellectual debts to Locke. America might be our regime, and it might even produce an Abraham Lincoln (who, in Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa said creatively interpreted and departed from the founders), but America’s founding principles are rooted in self-interest, and, hence, neither noble nor truly admirable.

The “post-liberal” critique of America, which a few years ago captivated so many young intellectual conservatives and still resonates among some, takes its bearing from East Coast Straussianism. In his blockbuster Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Patrick Deneen, who studied with the notable East Coasters Allan Bloom and W. Carey McWilliams, assumes the accuracy of Jaffa’s initial depiction of America. Deneen’s novelty lies in to where and when he would like to return. Whereas Strauss’s efforts were directed toward resurrecting a serious intellectual encounter with classical natural right and reviving political philosophy from what he called the “cave beneath the cave” in which the moderns have placed themselves, Deneen and the post-liberals wish to move our politics in a more medieval direction. Deneen in Regime Change (2023) and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule in Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) sketch a vision of a less restrained, more comprehensive, and more religious polity, one in which the state shapes souls more than it secures rights.

The post-liberals’ star has faded a bit with Donald Trump’s re-election, DEI’s fall from grace, and the Supreme Court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) (which overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade) and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) (which outlawed most forms of race-based affirmative action). The political rejection of the most aggressive elements of cultural progressivism has, at least for the time being, suggested to young conservatives that America is not as fundamentally corrupt as the post-liberals contend. But one election and a handful of Supreme Court appointments do not mean America is philosophically well founded.

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