A question that may have occurred to those who have read my book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America is whether Strauss and his followers have influenced the view of immigration taken by what now passes for the “conservative movement.”
We have to address this question indirectly since, to my knowledge, neither Strauss nor his better known disciples have written specifically on immigration. But their picture of Anglo-American democracy and their glowing depiction of American modernity fully support the pro-immigration stance associated with the Wall Street Journal and other organs of neoconservative opinion.
Strauss’s disciples not only have a cozy professional relation with such partisan sources but provide the rhetoric for their emphasis on the US as a “Propositional Nation.” Supposedly, Americans are held together by a human rights ideology and a duty to make the world uniformly democratic.
These ideas or phrases are not directly attributable to Strauss himself, who was certainly less propagandistic than his devotees in commenting on current affairs. But already in Strauss’s Walgreen Lectures of 1949, which were published as Natural Right and History in 1953, we find certain recurrent themes of later Straussian politics—particularly references to the natural rights foundation of the American Republic and a strenuous attempt to dissociate the founding from both ethnicity and specific religious principles.
Strauss scolded Americans for forgetting or slighting the moral foundation of their society, which he maintained was based on individual rights, not on any collective identity outside of the acceptance of certain universal propositions.
In his statements about politics, Strauss also took positions that would be entirely congenial to his predominantly Jewish and passionately Zionist followers.
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