Masters of War
Added 2022-08-18 13:13:03 +0000 UTCMatt and Sam bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement, discussing two recent articles in the New York Times. The first: Sam’s profile of Arizona GOP senate nominee Blake Masters, who, like J.D. Vance, is bankrolled by his former employer and mentor, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. And second: an in-depth look at the Claremont Institute by Elizabeth Zerofsky, whose excellent reporting gives the boys an opportunity to refine their thoughts on the West Coast Straussian legacy of Harry Jaffa.
It’s KYE classico. Enjoy.
Cited:
Adler-Bell, “The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters,” NYTimes, Aug 3, 2022.
Adler-Bell, “The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right,” The New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.
Elizabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” NYTimes Magazine, Aug 3, 2022.
Marc Fisher & Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute triumphed in the Trump years. Then came Jan. 6.” Washington Post, Jul 30, 2022.
Glenn Ellmers, “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” The American Mind, Mar 24, 2021.
Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2019
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, U Chicago Press, 1982.
Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, Roman & Littlefield, 2000.
David Tucker "Why Did Harry Jaffa Change His Mind?" Law and Liberty, Jul 3, 2019.
Past episodes on Claremont/Jaffa:
KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes" Feb 2021.
KYE: The Long Farewell to Majority Rule (w/ Joshua Tait), May 2021.
KYE: A Second Civil War? (w/ Jamelle Bouie), March 2022.
Comments
May be of interest : https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trashfuture/id1261944206?i=1000588373013
Thomas Donnelly
2023-01-15 09:22:32 +0000 UTCGreat ep! Thanks guys. Also funny tangential connection I came across today after I listened: the opening anecdote of the NYT Magazine feature on Jones Day is about a party Amy Coney Barrett attends thrown by Jones Day partner Traci Lovitt and her husband, Ara, who does something in finance. They met while clerking for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor (Traci) and Scalia (Ara). Traci it seems was pretty close in on the Jones Day/Don McGahn push to “infiltrate” the “administrative state” and Ara is, as of this year, a Lincoln Fellow. True to what Matt often says, theirs is a pretty small world.
Ryan Erickson
2022-08-26 00:17:38 +0000 UTCHave you all done anything on René Girard? Obviously Thiel is a big fan, and he comes up often from Tyler Cowen. But it's hard to tell if there's anything more substantial to the influence than repeating "mimetic desire" a bunch.
Tim boom
2022-08-24 19:29:09 +0000 UTCI find the folks at Claremont deeply confusing. Just what is the Great Corruption of the Republic they always are alluding to but never quite make explicit? Are they trying to restore a set of ideals, or a particular people, in a specific place with a specific history and culture? Are they civic republican idealists or ethnonationalists? They revere Lincoln for making the formal promises of the Declaration a substantive reality (however incompletely), yet reject every subsequent movement that came after Lincoln as some sort of perversion of our founding ideals (even though they too sought to make the promise of equality more substantive and less legal/formal). In other words, they're a bundle of contradictions and I don't know what their true beliefs or motives really are.
bdyeates
2022-08-22 22:11:52 +0000 UTCI had to look up Bronze Age Pervert, and it's always amusing to see the self-proclaimed hyper-masculine 'manly men' of the right wail, "We're living in the hellhole of Nietzsche's decadent last men!" And their next thought is, "... I know, I'll post anonymously on the Internet."
Taylor
2022-08-22 16:53:13 +0000 UTCClaremont’s use of Lincoln reminds me of Modi exploiting the legacy of Gandhi who was opposed to Hindu nationalism.
erik w bjorke
2022-08-21 22:57:20 +0000 UTCJacobin rule was batshit, the Directory was worthless but First Consul Bonaparte got things done; and you have to admit he did.
erik w bjorke
2022-08-19 23:40:45 +0000 UTCA provocative hour. I believe many of us would like to ask the Great BM a question or two as he pursues his quest for Senate ignominy. One question was it a simple aside, or do you believe either Ron of Florida or Greg of Texas would go against the conventional wisdom and risk “everything Trump touches dies” in exchange for the ultimate prize in an uncertain future? There are so many insects . . .
Bill Spater
2022-08-19 19:50:13 +0000 UTCDid Sam express sympathy for open borders?
Paul Meyer
2022-08-19 16:33:57 +0000 UTCI appreciated the passing mention of Ezra Klein's "supply-side liberalism." I know it doesn't fit your format, but I would love to hear a critical discussion of THAT -- younger left-wing writers whose frustration with the rising cost of housing especially has led them to see deregulation and union-busting as a way to bring prices down costs and increase access. It's a pointedly contrarian turn on the left that you see a lot now. For instance, on today's nytimes.com Farhad Manjoo has a column entitled "California Needs More Housing. Unions Might Stand in the Way." (And of course there's Paul Sabin's recent book, "Public Citizens," which a lot of these people cite.)
Sebastian Lecourt
2022-08-19 13:17:32 +0000 UTCGreat episode! Regarding the desire for a government that acts, we ought to consider the legacy of the War on Terror, perhaps the one moment in the last 20 or so years when the government acted seemingly without constraint. While it's true that libertarians like Masters tended to be antiwar, the influence that the post-9/11 era has had on our current politics can't be denied -- "The Flight 93 Election" being the most prominent example. In an emergency, as we saw, niceties like civil liberties can be swept aside. I think that has to frame a lot of how the right is thinking about the current moment, and why bogeymen like CRT or "groomers" are presented as such dire threats that democracy itself can be seen as but one more impediment to the security they seek.
Isaac Smith
2022-08-19 00:48:54 +0000 UTCIf you want to look at the silicon valley libertarianism that Thiel sort of comes out of there's a book called "The Sovereign Individual" you can check out, written in the 90s but I still see quoted approvingly by cryptocurrency guys
Blue Squid
2022-08-18 18:15:17 +0000 UTCOne thing I would contest is that Lincoln wasn't also a big proponent of democracy, and who denounced the dictatorship of a minority in one of his inaugural addresses
Nico Villarreal
2022-08-18 15:58:52 +0000 UTCMasters is the last face you see before they shove you into the mass grave. Fucking scary
Lou Guberti Ng
2022-08-18 13:48:32 +0000 UTCCount me among the sycophantic listeners
Scliff Bartoni
2022-08-18 13:23:06 +0000 UTC
