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The 1776 Report seems like the maudlin Americanism and conservative demonology of West Coast Straussianism at its most cartoonish. 1/
West Coast Straussianism, in large part the thought of Harry Jaffa and his students, comes primarily out of the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College, where 1776 Chair Larry Arnn is president. 2/
You'd think an emphsis on equality would lead to a gentler conservatism. Where the neocon and East Coast Straussian narratives suggested America as a decent, bourgeois regime, West Coast narrative proposed a strident, millenarian conservatism based on a sacralized America. 3/
WC Straussian view is that social and political accretions that contradicted their reading of equality must be overturned as violations of natural right. This argument was initially developed about slavery... 4/
but has expanded to include many of the political developments of the past century denoted by West Coast Straussians as “the administrative state,” a violation of democratic rule, and included opposition to gay rights and defense of immigration restrictions. 5/
In this framework, for eg, “‘All men are created equal’ means that every people, every nation, has a right to rule itself, for the same reason that every individual has a right to self-rule,” which extends to its borders and immigration regime. 6/
The idea that equality justifies allows an ingroup to justify exclusion strikes me as surprisingly close to Stephen A. Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine that Harry Jaffa refuted in his 1959 book Crisis of the House Divided but whatever. 7/
WC Straussians see the US as betrayed by progressive politicians and that virtuous statesmen acting in accordance with natural right ought to have the responsibility to act decisively against the illicit administrative state. 8/
As one president of Claremont put it, the aim was to “overthrow the reigning orthodoxy” by training a “Franklin Roosevelt who will then overthrow the New Deal.” The Claremont Institute has been one of the major intellectual backers of Trumpism. 9/ https://www.scholarsandwritersfortrump.com/
"Nihilistic” politicians who do not subscribe to a Jaffaite natural right interpretation are regarded as existential threats. WC Straussians struggle to consider their political foes as anything but would-be tyrants. 10/
See the 1776’s listing of progressivism and identity politics alongside communism, fascism and slavery. 11/
The nes plus ultra of this attitude is Michael Anton's Flight 93 essay, published by the Claremont Review of Books and a summary of Claremont's pathologizing of progressivism that resonated deeply on the right. 12/ https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-election/
The 1776 Report soft-pedals the American past, which is rich, complicated, beautiful, powerful, but also wicked and painful. But the Report is also, in a very real sense, the opposite side of the coin to Anton's rage and paranoia. 13/13
