Readers of this newsletter will have noticed that the close family relationship between democracy and loneliness has been bothering me in recent weeks.1
Media has been one of those essential compensating forces to collect democracy’s wandering spirits, as Alexis de Tocqueville said. But I’ve gotten curious about different kind of community coping mechanism, the secret society.
The secret society is an exclusive club. Not everyone is allowed. (I use the term “secret society” here as a general concept, not something very specific and literal, like the Skull and Bones club.) It forms after some of democracy’s wandering spirits have been gathered, but the gatherees are seeking shelter against democracy’s other social pressures. These days we talk a lot about needing more community — admittedly a term whose vagueness is in high abuse on LinkedIn right now — but the secret society is not a community we think of as respectable. The secret society is a democratic contradiction, the club that doesn’t want more members.
The secret society I’ve been thinking about this week are the Straussians, one of our strangest sets of observers and critics of modern democracy.
In Francis Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man,”2 the famed political scientist talks about why he put his name in support of the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. While all memoirs are inherently suspect — as has been said since olden times, no man can be judge in his own cause — Fukuyama blames his own participation in groupthink. His intellectual fellow-travelers were supporting the war; so would he.
Turning against the Iraq war later would not just require changing thinking. It would require Fukuyama making a public break with longtime friends, putting himself through a kind of self-exile. But what was he exiling himself from?
Fukuyama belongs to a famous, strange (and famously strange) set of thinkers, many but not all of them conservative, who were influenced by the esoteric 20th century philosopher Leo Strauss. Straussian thought can’t be summarized easily3, but to oversimplify in my own words: Strauss believed, like some ancient Greeks, there was such a thing as eternal truths that philosophers of all eras can pursue. However, these truths are not accessible to just anyone: Societies of all kinds have been resistant to philosophizing. Socrates lived in a democracy that made him drink the hemlock for corrupting the youth. Strauss was a German Jew who had to flee the Nazis. The Straussian story might say that philosophers sometimes live and write obscurely to protect themselves from their given social regime, even sometimes democracy.
And Straussianism is concerned that modern democracy indulges an anything-goes attitude toward truth that leads to nihilism, the nihilism of the Nazis.
One of Strauss’ most famous students was the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, who in turn had taught Fukuyama about those ancient problems as Plato wrestled with them in Athens. Bloom was one of the weirdest characters America has ever produced. He was an archconservative gay man who passionately defended the emanicipatory power of a liberal education, who was addicted to luxury shopping but hated the business school, who saw it as his life’s work to pass on the Straussian insights to those elect few students ready to receive them.
Bloom was loved and despised by many, even moreso after writing the shocking runaway bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy an Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students” (1987), one of the first and probably still the most sophisticated of the conservative “campus books.” Bloom’s bestseller status, which made him fabulously rich and even more cartoonishly spendy, was shocking because his big book was filled with dense passages like this one, about the detachment between individual and collective life in modern democracy:
The modern economic principle that private vice makes public virtue has penetrated all aspects of daily life in such a way that there seems to be no reason to be a conscious part of civic existence. … The petty personal interests of youth — “making it,” finding a place for oneself — persevere throughout life. The honesty of this generation of students causes them to laugh when asked to act as though they were powerful agents in world history. They know the truth of Tocqueville’s dictum that “in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself,” a contemplation now intensified by a greater indifference to the past and the loss of a national view of the future. The only common project engaging the youthful imagination is the exploration of space, which everyone knows to be empty.
The implicitly anti-conservative messages in the book didn’t sink in with Bloom’s newfound fans. Bloom wasn’t rah-rah about capitalism or traditional family life. Here was Bloom’s Straussian suspicion of a nihilism inherent in modern democracy, from which Bloom tried to rescue his students. Bloom’s close friend, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, described Bloom’s esoteric teaching methods in his loosely fictionalized 2000 novella, “Ravelstein”4:
This is what [Bloom’s character] Ravelstein’s books and articles had to tell us. He took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment, and then — by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche, Heidegger — to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech America, its culture and its entertainments, its press, its educational system, its think tanks, its politics. He gave you a picture of this mass democracy and its characteristic — woeful — human product. In his classroom, and the lectures were always packed, he coughed, stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their feet and debated, provoked them to single combat, examined, hammered them. He didn’t ask, “Where will you spend eternity?” as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?”
But Bloom’s true method was less to rescue students from nihilism book by book or class by class, but one by one. Bloom was democratic in that his protégés could come from anywhere; he was undemocratic in that he thought not every student could be reached. Bellow in “Ravelstein” again:
[Bloom’s character Ravelstein] himself had very important secrets to keep, information of a private, dangerous nature which only a few could be trusted with. Teaching, as Ravelstein understood teaching, was tricky work. You couldn’t afford to let the facts be generally known. But unless the facts were known, no real life was possible. So you made your choices with a jeweler’s touch.
This created intense loyalty among the elect, as secret societies often do. Handpicked grad students, having survived Bloom’s close gaze under the jeweler’s loupe, in Bellow’s accounting, got to come to Bloom’s apartment to watch NBA games and eat pizzas, while powerful fellow Straussians resembling Paul Wolfowitz phoned in from the Pentagon to gossip about war and Great Politics. Amid democratic nihilism, here was community.
It was a boy’s club.
Wolfowitz would be one of the central figures of the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion. Fukuyama — who had drawn from Strauss’ correspondence for his own surprise-bestselling philosophical book, “The End of History” — was, in my reading, left wondering where all this collective genius had led everyone. Fukuyama doesn’t think Strauss or Straussianism was to blame for the war, though Straussians were certainly personally involved. For all that reasoning, old-fashioned peer pressure turned out to be an omnivore that eats the rationalist and the unthinking alike. An eternal truth, known by the ancients, is that wherever there are people, there is folly, terrible folly.
Note: The views here are mine alone, but they could also possibly be eternal truths passed down by the ancients.
To be released by MacMillan in September 2026. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374620431/intherealmofthelastman/
The “Know Your Enemy” podcast recently did a 2.5-hour episode delving deeper into Strauss’ “Natural Right and History,” for the true sickos: https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/know-your-enemy-leo-strauss-natural-right-and-history/
“Know Your Enemy,” again did an excellent 2021 episode about Bloom and Bellow’s friendship: https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/know-your-enemy-unraveling-allan-bloom-and-saul-bellow/
Hi - just wanted to say I've been enjoying this recent series of posts on the nature/structure of our society and the effects we see.
While perhaps not directly related, I've tried to start reading Lippman's Preface to Morals in this similar vein, but every time inevitably do not get very far into it. But I feel like it is also trying to tackle this topic of what are a set of secular guiding principles so people do not feel stranded and lost with their freedom.