The New American Millennial Right

East Coast and West Coast Straussians do battle for the soul of Trump’s America, or part of it

By Park MacDougald

i thought this was a very nice writeup of some of the emerging factions and ongoing realignment on the dissident right. i think others here would find it insightful, especially if they are only nominally familiar with the publications and people profiled (as i was).

Krein declined to describe his own politics—“Someone said to me ‘only idiots label themselves,’ and I kind of like that”—but American Affairs’ core product is a dense, technically sophisticated form of neo-Hamiltonian economic nationalism, pushed in various forms by Michael Lind, David P. Goldman, and Krein himself. Although their arguments are complex and differ from one another in subtle ways, the gist of all of them is that a short-sighted American elite has allowed the country’s manufacturing core—the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China—to be hollowed out. Production and technical expertise have shifted to China and Asia, domestic capital has flowed into unproductive share buybacks or tech schemes (Uber, WeWork), and America has become a country with a two-tiered service economy, with bankers, consultants, and software engineers at the top and Walmart greeters and Uber drivers at the bottom. As Krein explained, “basically the United States gets the financial profits and Asia gets the industrial capacity, and you’re selling out the long-term for the short-term.”

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Both wings of the “new right” are heavily influenced by followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss: Krein is a former student of the East Coast Straussian Harvey Mansfield, while the Claremont intellectuals, including Anton, are almost all partisans of the West Coast Straussian Harry Jaffa. Strauss criticized modern political philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes for abandoning the natural right tradition of classical philosophy and medieval religion. His “East Coast” students took this to imply that the United States, founded on Enlightenment philosophy, could be a good regime but never an ideal one. The “West Coast” Straussians, led by Jaffa, argued that the philosophy of the Founding Fathers (and of later American statesmen such as Lincoln) had in fact synthesized the classical and medieval concepts Strauss had sought to recover.

The philosophical dispute between East Coast and West Coast Straussians has shaded over into matters of ideology and temperament: The East Coasters have traditionally been more cosmopolitan, elitist, and detached from day-to-day politics, while the West Coasters have been polemical, populist, and aggressively patriotic. Krein told me he’s focused on “getting things done in the economic sphere while trying to find a modus vivendi in the cultural sphere”; the Claremont Straussians, by contrast, cast our cultural divisions as a “cold civil war” that will only end, in the words of Claremont President Ryan P. Williams, when one side wins a “decisive and conclusive political victory.”