 to resonate through the room with this gadget that Hans just attached to me. The book that I have been asked to discuss is an autobiographical work called Encounters, and it comes with the additional feature beside my beautiful, carefully crafted prose of pictures of my parents, wife, children, and above all my basset hound. And I urge you to buy this book if you're no other reason than to contemplate the beauty of the animal in the pictorial part of the work. That's not why I've been asked to speak today. I've been asked to provide you with, I suppose, what would be called the political teachings of my work. I ran across that absolutely ghastly term, political teachings, while doing research for a book that I'm now laboring over on Leo Strauss' disciples and their political influence, and anything they like is a political teaching. Anything they don't like is dangerous to democracy and fascist or something like that. But my book has good political teachings, so I'm very happy to send up here and present them to you today. In addition to the anecdotal parts of the work, the biographies of famous people, which was part of the obligatory assignment that the publisher imposed on me when I signed a contract, there are two, should we say, sort of crucial political teachings to use the term again, or political doctrines, which come through to anyone who reads this book with some care. One of them is a very detailed and often sarcastic discussion of the various lefts. The other, which I'll get around to afterwards, is an attempt to distinguish right and left. And I've always been interested in the problems of political terminology and political epistemology and, you know, exactly what distinguishes one political position from another, and also with the mutations of right, left in the Western world in the last 150 years. And as I indicated in the book, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, it is not entirely true. I became interested in the Neoconservatives because they seem to be an interesting case of what is essentially a leftist group that has been able to present themselves effectively as conservative opposition. But what I do is sort of look at the left at the time that I was a graduate student, and I think you can see in Nuche sort of in sort of outline form what becomes characteristically leftist afterwards. If you read my chapter on Herbert Marcuse, it is more than simply a celebration of a fellow German Jew who was part of a very humanistic, a humanistically educated generation who ended up in the United States, who was in some ways very conservative, culturally conservative, despite all the goofy things that he wrote. And it was very nice to me personally. It also is an attempt to understand him as a kind of transitional figure between an older left, real left, I mean a kind of Stalinist communist left, as it exists at least in the Western world, you know, in the Parti communiste de France or the Partito communista in Italy, the two largest Western Communist parties. And somebody who always, you know, has a warm spot for Stalin is always willing to justify his crimes on the basis of the principle that it takes. You have to break eggs to make an omelette or something like that. But at the same time, at an intellectual philosophical orientation, that seemed to come out of the old world at an earlier period, out of the 19th, even 18th century. And in some ways he seems to be almost emblematic for this left that I encountered as a young man. And I cannot say that I was terribly fond of their politics, and I said I was absolutely nauseated by Marcuse's willingness to defend Stalin's crimes. On the other hand, I was impressed by what I saw of a traditional humanistic kind of learning that was mixed with this obviously repulsive political stance. But by the end of his life, particularly after he failed to obtain a post-retirement graduate position at Yale, where I studied with him, he went off to California and became totally bonkers. He just went off the deep end and helped possession his last few years to fashion the new left in its ugliest forms in the United States. I remember at the time that he died, National Review wrote some very nasty obituary. Almost as nasty as the one that Bill Buckley later penned about poor Murray Rothbard. And I immediately put pen to paper mode of defense of him, which National Review of course never published. Because he was viewed as a bad person because of his pro-communist positions, but of course I had a very different memory of him. And then I write about three different types of leftists that I encountered while sitting in the Yale Sterling Library in the Graduate Hall. And one kind of leftist, and this was sort of what pretended the future of the left, were very whiny New York Jews and they saw anti-Semitism in every gentlemanly wasp who was walking there. He really hates us and so forth. My own impression, as I also indicated in the book, is that the old wasp attrition class was totally disintegrating at this time. And they had been perhaps overly gracious to the newcomers by letting them come in and take over while they, you know, continued to commit suicide as a hegemonical ruling class in the United States. Their influence had actually declined enormously in post-World War II period and much of it was a kind of self-eclipsing that they engage in in this period. And the whiny New York Jews were always complaining about everyone's anti-Semite. This one's a fascist. And when it came to the war between Israel and the Arabs, they all became extreme Zionist nationalists. And so then you had the Catholics who also in America sort of view themselves as a minority and they would generally follow the lead of the Jewish intellectuals. But when the war broke out between the Israelis and the Arabs, their position was, we have to go to church and pray or, you know, we have to be Thomas Aquinas or do something like that or we have to put prayer visual. So that was sort of like more consistent. And then I finally described what I met of remnants of the old wasp attrition in my book and these people would play golf. They tried to get some position in their family business. Yet they seemed to elicit violent hatred, especially from the Jewish Marxists to where, you know, saw them as rivals or people who had excluded them from positions. I disliked them myself. I despised them because they seemed to be a ruling class that had lost any nerve and any sense of command. And my favorite of all political sociologists is Pareto who understood that classes fall from power because they lose their nerve, which is also what my friend Sam Francis taught. And other classes rise because they take advantage of disintegration. And, you know, I feel somewhat sorry for the old wasps, patricians. On the other hand, I feel utter contempt for them for the way they abandoned power and engaged in spasms of self-mortification afterwards. Self-hague, politics of guilt, et cetera. So this is sort of my descriptions of the left. And if you read the work, you know, and then I come to the old conservatives and I see this as a more moderate kind of left. And I post what I call post-Marxist left. I wrote a book on this trying to show how the post-Marxist left is different from the Marxist left because they're not really socioeconomic in their orientation. They're cultural. They're heavily influenced by Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which is an accusation that is sometimes made against them by religious fundamentalist and John Birchers in the United States. It's perfectly correct. It's perfectly correct. You read the authoritarian personality. You have the whole scenario, you know, of what the left intends to do. This is a cultural left. They hate the bourgeoisie, but not because they see them as economic oppressors. They see them as fascist, sexist, religious men. People will have to be entirely retrained if necessary, you know, sent to some internment camp or something like this. And this is the left that will land up taking over in the end and particularly after the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. And the true... But I would argue that in the West this left takes over earlier because this left are basically the kooks who are part of the communist parties between the communist sort of discipline and control. And they're also the nutcases in Eastern Europe whom the communists or the Stalinists are able to... These are the leftists who will take power. The anti-fascist left, heavily influenced by kind of Frankfurt School agenda. And what I suggest in my book is they take over the entire Western world. I mean, the extent of their rule and their cultural hegemony cannot be undone. I mean, they have power over the media. They have power over the state, the state apparatus, public administration. And opposing them is like knocking your head against the wall. And I gave these lectures in Romania. And these seem to be sort of a relatively untouched people because they had the good or bad fortune of living under Soviet rule for a while. Churchesco, I know, is a horrible man. But at least they were spared Western cultural Marxist influences for a few decades longer than the Germans who seem to be the worst basket, psychological basket cases in the world. But the same thing is, of course, tapping France and England, Spain, certainly in Spain. And in the United States. And I think many of the impulses leading to this cultural, this new form of cultural hegemony, come out of the United States. I mean, one of the things I try to show in my book on cultural Marxism, and the post-Marxist left, and I suggest this here as well, is that the United States is a breeding ground for many of these ideas. The authoritarian personality was not considered to work of quirky leftists in the United States. It had mainstream respectability. And people like Seymour Morton-Lipsid wrote in defense of this because this was to be what we, as American patriots, could do to overcome prejudice and build a pluralistic society. So let's say the model for this comes out of American globalism. Globalism and bureaucracy. These are the fatal combination which we now see in the European Union, not only about Europe, but it's about global bureaucracy and the re-socialization of nations. So if you read my book carefully, it is obvious that I'm heavily influenced, or the book shows the influences of other works. And if there are any kind of political teachings there, it's an attempt to show how the left, as we now know it, came to be formed during my youth. I can see these different groups. And the Marxist and the traditional Marxist losing influence to this. And I, you know, I just want this one conversation between Eugene Genovesi, who went from being a sort of, a very unusual, a biosyncratic Marxist to becoming very conservative and very Catholic, is having a conversation with Eric Hausbaum, who has, I think, I don't think he's still alive, if he is. He is still a member of the English Communist Party and will defend Stalin, or did to his dying day. If he's alive, it's about 98. But Hausbaum and Genovesi are lamenting the fact that the Communists, we used to have good Communists. Now there's these crazy people who run around with this exotica, glorifying exotic things and crazy lifestyles. You know, what is the left coming to? And I was at present in that conversation back in 1970, because I was young, I was giving a presentation at the American Historical Association, a panel with Genovesi, and Hausbaum came over and congratulated me for my remarks, in which I showed the difference between true Marxist Leninism and the sort of new leftist sentimentality, which eventually morphs into this cultural Marxist monstrosity in the West. And all the Cathedral Communists liked what I had to say. I always told people, I have a warm spot for Communists after seeing the absolute disastrous types who have taken their place in the West. It's like, you know, you go from the frying pan into the fire. The second, I might say political teaching here, which is sort of interesting to me, and also I was interested in Richard Spencer's remarks, because I sort of recognized in some of them, not as remarks on race consciousness, but as the other ones, the effects of my book on the conservative movement, in which I show to what extent the conservative movement gives up on classes, nations, you know, and becomes preoccupied with values. And it lands, of course, the values change. It's a new value every week. It depends on the election year. And increasingly their values are leftist values. So the argument they then make is that they believe in values and the left has no values. We have values you don't, but leftist values too. They're leftist values, and you have leftist values. You know, what's the difference? I said, if you look differently, your leftist values are 20 years older. They have newer leftist values. And this is the only difference that I can see. But that's what happens when a movement, I think, really becomes disengaged from the bourgeoisie or from traditional nations or nations or something like that. So basically, the right and the left are both peddling globalist ideologies. The right's globalist ideology is human rights, democracy and bombing other countries to make sure they get the message from us. The left's ideology is, you know, is reconstructing everybody's consciousness at home. So this seems to be like the major difference. But they both are operating with leftist values. It seems to me that the right, insofar as it is distinguishable from the left, and that this sounds very basic. It's sort of like the kind of basic definition that one of my intellectual, if not always political heroes, Karl Schmidt, who I did the book, comes up with. And Schmidt, of course, gives you the le sens du politique or the begriff des politiciens. And this really comes down, to the way that the Gianfranco Emilio, who was quoted before, comes up with the essence of the political as friend-enemy distinction. Well, I would say that the essence of the left is equality, egalitarianism. That is what holds everything on the left together. Now, the essence of the right is not necessarily liberty, it's inequality. I think I presented this last year, people were aghast when I said this, but I'll say it again, that libertarians, to the extent that they're on the right, such as Herndon's time on top of that, would believe that inequality is fine. This is the natural state of people. Left libertarians tend to be egalitarians. I would make that distinction. They want equality, they like civil rights movements, quality of lifestyles, the cross-borders, everybody's interchangeable with everybody else, and everyone has human rights or something like that. I would say that even among libertarians there's a very definite, there's a critical distinction that I see. This is how in my book on the conservative movement, I could say that even some fascist and some libertarians belong on the right because they were opposing egalitarian projects. And they believe that human beings are inherently unequal. Now I'm not saying this to praise everybody on the right, I'm just saying this is what distinguishes right from left. The problem now is that what is the legitimate political spectrum and those political parties that are not being denounced as fascist, racist, anti-Semitic or something like that anti-feminist are all committed to equality. And they're all committed to using the state to achieve equality. So the only parties I see in the United States are leftist parties. By the way, I know that this may be an expression of either naivete or senility in my case, but I was struck by the fact that the neo-conservatives and the Republican party then acted Rand Paul for simply questioning Provision 2 and 7, I think, that it gave the government too much power to interfere in private social relations in this. I think of anything that that is a glaring understatement in terms of the effects. This is something which has been used to sue the pants off people because they don't serve blacks or some other group or women and it's not warm enough or whatever. The Civil Rights Act has been the beginning of all kinds of government mischief and social engineering against the private sector. But once he had said this, and of course he cried, he goes back and he expresses his regret he couldn't be on freedom rise with Martin Luther King and he had this, but once he had opened Pandora's Box the entire respectable Republican, which of course means neoconservative, establishment violently attacked. Now I cannot understand how you can get government off your back, that this is what they say they're going to hear Jonah Goldberg who attacked him as the ally of bigots and you know, he always is yapping about economic freedom this guy, how do you have how do you have freedom unless you can push the government out of these relations at the minimum and of course I know the people using it have no desire for any freedom, they just want to bomb Iran I fully understand what this is and they're not going to get rid of Obama's medical plan, they're just going to re-discredit, do something a little bit different. I understand why the Republicans are useless, basically leftist and also bellicose opposition to the Democrats but you would think that a remark like that would be allowable you know if Jonah Goldberg can accuse FDR of being like Hitler and they're all Nazis he says this and nobody cares but as soon as you touch the Civil Rights Act and you notice that it infringes on privacy that does not allow you to form men's clubs, that all the evils that go on in terms of government, social engineering diversity classes all of this goes back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You would think at the very least you'd be able to question this but even this is unacceptable and I think that the reason is that both of our political parties left and acceptable left and right which will appear together in every issue of the Washington Post, you have the Neocons and the Liberals, you open the New York Times, you have David Brooks Ross Doudad whatever what type of pronounces name some silly name even sillier columns but if you read this stuff it is obvious that there's no significant difference between these people and they're all equally on the left and this is something that I became interested in and one of the things I do in my autobiography is I look at people who are generally considered leftists but who seem more conservative to me rightists than so-called conservatives of today and I look at somebody like Christopher Lash who has these crazy guild socialist ideas at first he was a kind of quasi-Marxist later he became a Catholic corporatist although he remained a Presbyterian but if you talk about family issues, he had very traditional men and women and other things and was actually appalled by the cultural books attacking cultural Marxism and I showed that even in the case of Genovese when he was a Marxist and even expressed sympathy for the become he sounded much more like a conservative than any conservative that I heard on Fox News I mean this as you read this work and as I wrote it, I became aware of how far my country had drifted in about 30 years and I think the change in Europe is far greater I mean in a country like Germany or France or Spain or England than anything that we've seen in the United States because for a long time I think the United States while it spread these poisons it was also sort of protected against them because Americans don't take ideas very seriously you know and just the way Romanians have not been exposed to cultural Marxism yet and you know, it doesn't work it's good for business or something like that but I noticed that what happened is that American patriotism became defined because even during the Cold War in terms of whether you support certain kind of radical social engineering I think Richard Spencer mentioned Harry Jaffa and Jaffa of course who becomes one of the major spokesmen of the American conservative movement believes he's a conservative because he favors universal equality and sees the American state as a vehicle for spreading equality everywhere and this is conservative and as he becomes the leading figure at National View in the early 1970's something that I think Peter Brimlow and I would probably have been unaware of for many years after this happened it was obvious that these radical left radical left this even Krootsky as Jack they all became part of the conservative agenda and this is before the neo-conservatives took over the conservative movement and I think this I should say this in closing my discussion of Murray Rothbard shows that although he expressed these very individualistic ideas and so forth that in some ways he was profoundly conservative in his social cultural views there's no question that I have this sort of touching scene in which he and Russell Kirk who is sort of this Berke and conservative come together in the living room of Pat Buchanan I was on his committee when he ran for president in 1992 and these people were there for different reasons obviously Rothbard did not buy Buchanan's protectionism neither did I but he liked him on foreign policy and generally agreed with him on immigration Kirk was there because his wife nagged him into going or something like that a very domineering wife and she generally controlled all of his actions and she told him he was going to serve on this committee but when the two of them began to speak it was obviously agreed on much more than they disagreed about and Kirk had this might interest you Kirk always thought of himself within the American context as a taffoo Republican he was always a taffoo Republican and he was an isolationist and he sort of got draft into World War II when he was put in charge of minding some army base out in the deserts of Utah but he was never really in the war and I think that's when he first read Albert Knott when he was in a situation and as much as he spoke about Berke and European concern he was a small town American and the in the post-war years he writes about the conservative route which then becomes the conservative victory when he's able to sell the books or finds a publisher who changes the title of his book it wasn't the conservative mind you see it's alive and well in America and so forth he didn't believe that for a second but I think his conservatism in the American context was basically sort of anti-New Deal isolationist maybe American republicanism of the taff variety and that was pretty much Rothbard's view and I remember I was in them talking with them and we all agreed so they came to the United States what was best for America politically at that point I don't think there was much disagreement this really is the final point I must take exception with my gracious host on one point I don't think the John Randolph club, which both of us were involved disintegrated over the or fell apart primarily over Pat Buchanan I think actually people on both sides generally supported him and Murray Rothbard was an ardent supporter of Pat Buchanan it fell apart because of a person who remained unmentioned I think that everything he could to seize power within that group and basically drove the rest of us out whether you're on the paleo-conservative or paleo-libertarian side made no difference but I have to agree with Hans that it was a group that showed at one time enormous promise I do mention this in my book I think one can be critical of the fact that I do not deal as harshly with that event as I might have even toward ex-friends former friends in the work but I think the John Randolph club at one time was a very promising vehicle for a paleo-libertarian paleo-conservative alliance there were obviously differences but I think these differences became exaggerated because of the person who eventually caused the break to come about who was not in this room much I feel free to speak about this and I do go into a discussion at the John Randolph club it's a bit superficial but I do suggest that at one time it did offer a significant means for bringing conservative groups together and I also point out you do very well to pick up this book I read it over and I am delightfully surprised by the elegance of my own prose I usually don't write this way I write sort of in heavy Weberian terminology where I'm writing English or German or anything else but this book is very very it's a pleasure to read even for me and for my students to my side in any case thank you for your indulgence