West Coast Straussianism
The American interpretation of Leo Strauss’s philosophy developed by Harry V. Jaffa and his students at the Claremont Institute; holds that the American Founding is the pinnacle of political philosophy and that Lincoln represents its truest fulfillment
What It Is
West Coast Straussianism is the tradition that flows from Leo Strauss through Harry V. Jaffa. Where the “East Coast” Straussians (centered at the University of Chicago, following Strauss’s own emphasis) tended toward ancient political philosophy and skepticism about the American founding’s philosophical depth, the West Coast Straussians took a more affirmative view: America is the regime of natural right, and the Declaration of Independence is the true statement of political philosophy.
The name refers less to geography than to intellectual lineage: Jaffa taught at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, and his students — Michael Anton, Charles Kesler, John Eastman, and others — built their careers in and around the Claremont Institute.
Core Commitments
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The Declaration as Philosophy: The Declaration of Independence is not merely a political document but a statement of universal natural right. “All men are created equal” is philosophically true, not just rhetorically useful.
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Lincoln as Founder: Lincoln, not the Framers, represents the fullest realization of the founding’s promise. His rearticulation of equality in the Gettysburg Address completed what Jefferson began.
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Declarationism: The Constitution must be interpreted in light of the Declaration. Rights precede and constrain government; natural right is the ground of constitutional law.
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America as Exception: America is not just a country but a proposition — a universal political achievement that the world has reason to emulate.
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Crisis Mentality: Drawing on Strauss’s “crisis of the West,” West Coast Straussians believe liberal democracy faces a permanent struggle against relativism, nihilism, and progressive subversion. This produces a permanent sense of civilizational emergency.
Contrast with East Coast Straussianism
| West Coast | East Coast | |
|---|---|---|
| Attitude to Founding | Affirmative: the Founding is the pinnacle | Skeptical: modern liberal regime is philosophically deficient |
| Lincoln | Hero: completed the Founding | Complex or ambivalent |
| Natural Right | Embodied in Declaration | In tension with modern liberalism |
| Politics | Activist; engage in American political life | More scholarly detachment |
| Rhetoric | Populist; willing to write political tracts | Academic; more esoteric |
Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind) is often identified with the East Coast tradition: deeply skeptical of popular democracy and liberal culture, using Strauss’s political philosophy to critique rather than celebrate American politics.
The “Best Regime” Thesis and the Rupture with Strauss
Jaffa’s mature position — stated fully in The American Founding as the Best Regime (2002) — goes beyond what the “West Coast” label captures. He argued that the American Founding is not merely the best available regime but the philosophically optimal solution to a problem that had defeated Western civilization for fifteen hundred years: how to ground political authority without forcing a political choice between reason (Athens) and revelation (Jerusalem). America’s solution — the First Amendment keeps religious questions outside politics; the Declaration grounds authority in natural rights shared by all — is, Jaffa claims, the first regime to achieve this. It is therefore “the best regime.”
This claim is structurally similar to Hegel’s “end of history” and Fukuyama’s liberal-democracy thesis, as Thomas Merrill (see The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory) points out. It differs sharply from Strauss’s own view. Strauss, following Aristotle, held that all regimes have internal flaws that will eventually doom them. The “ancient” view is that no political arrangement is final; every regime carries the seeds of its own corruption. Jaffa’s mature “best regime” thesis abandons this Straussian pessimism in favor of a near-Hegelian confidence that history has reached its political endpoint.
The Strauss-Locke problem: Strauss’s reading of Locke was esoteric — Locke’s hidden views were godless and anti-natural law. If Strauss was right, the American Founding (which drew heavily on Locke) is philosophically much more fragile than Jaffa claimed. Jaffa’s response was to argue that the founders understood only Locke’s exoteric (public, religious, natural-law) teaching, not his hidden atheism. But as Merrill notes, this sidesteps the central question of whether Strauss was right about Locke in the first place. The implication: West Coast Straussianism’s foundational claim about America diverges not just from Strauss’s tone but from his substantive interpretation of the modern philosophical tradition on which the Founding drew.
The Flight 93 Turn
Michael Anton’s The Flight 93 Election represents a radicalization of the West Coast Straussian tradition. Anton uses the founding framework — America as proposition, natural right as the standard — but turns it toward MAGA ends: Trump represents the last defense of the founding against progressive destruction.
This is, as Field notes, a departure from Jaffa’s own Lincoln-centered constitutionalism. Where Jaffa celebrated Lincoln’s rhetoric of universal equality, Anton’s Trump-era Claremonters have largely abandoned the egalitarian strand of the Declaration in favor of demographic nationalism.
Cross-References
- Leo Strauss — the philosophical root
- Harry V. Jaffa — founder of the West Coast tradition
- Claremont Institute — the institutional home
- Michael Anton — the tradition’s most prominent recent figure
- The Claremonters — the broader movement
- Declarationism — the constitutional doctrine that follows from West Coast Straussianism
- Allan Bloom — East Coast Straussian; contrasting figure
- The Flight 93 Election — West Coast Straussianism applied to MAGA
- The American Founding as the Best Regime — Jaffa’s 2002 essay; fullest statement of the mature position
- The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory — Merrill’s identification of the Jaffa-Strauss rupture