The MAGA New Right

Harry V. Jaffa

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Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015)

West Coast Straussian; intellectual founder of the Claremonter movement; wrote Goldwater’s 1964 convention speech

Biography

Originally from New York. Earned his doctorate from the New School of Social Research in 1951, where he was one of Leo Strauss’s first graduate students. Also studied with Harvey Mansfield Sr. (father of Harvey Mansfield) as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

After graduating, Jaffa spent over a decade at Ohio State University, then moved to California in 1964 to join the faculty at Claremont Men’s College, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. He then joined the Claremont Institute as a senior fellow, where he remained until his death in 2015.

Intellectual Significance

Jaffa is the pivotal figure linking Strauss’s academic political philosophy to American conservative politics. He made two decisive moves:

1. Applied Strauss to American politics: While Strauss focused on European and ancient thinkers, Jaffa turned the Straussian method on the American founding — and above all on Abraham Lincoln. His best-known work, Crisis of the House Divided (1959), was a close study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Jaffa argued that Lincoln mounted a moral argument about freedom and equality grounded in the Declaration of Independence that was far weightier than Douglas’s procedural “popular sovereignty.”

Jaffa’s Lincoln is a philosopher-statesman — almost a Socratic figure — who understood that slavery put America in contradiction with its founding principle that “all men are created equal.” Unlike other conservatives of his day, Jaffa did not minimize the evil of slavery.

2. Became politically active: Jaffa joined a grassroots Goldwater group in Ohio in 1963 and ended up writing Barry Goldwater’s entire 1964 convention acceptance speech at the Cow Palace — a fact that emerged fully only in Philip Jaffa’s 2021 memoir (see My Father and the Birth of Modern Conservatism). He wrote it in a single overnight session on a manual Royal typewriter, from memory, without reference books. He had been a registered Democrat and swore his son to secrecy, not wanting it known that “Mr. Republican’s acceptance speech had been written by a Democrat.”

The speech’s central “ordered liberty” passage (the part attributed to Jaffa in secondary sources such as Lee Edwards’s The Conservative Consensus):

“This party, with its every action, every word, every breath and every heartbeat has but a single resolve, and that is freedom — freedom made orderly for the Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature’s God; freedom — balanced so that order, lacking liberty, will not become a slave of the prison cell; balanced so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the license of the mob and the jungle.”

The speech then continued, in the more famous lines:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

The Hidden MLK Source

The most historically significant fact about the speech, unknown until Philip’s 2021 memoir: the “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” line was a deliberate literary allusion to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which Jaffa had recently used in class and memorized. King’s letter:

“Was not Jesus an extremist for love… Was not Thomas Jefferson: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

Jaffa placed Goldwater — who had voted against the Civil Rights Act just 36 days earlier — on King’s rhetorical shoulders. He kept silent for decades when critics falsely attributed the line to Cicero, only denying the Cicero attribution without ever revealing the King source. His private comment at the end of his life: for fifty years he had “watched the left wing of the Democratic party denounce the views of Martin Luther King… while the right wing of the Republican party embraced the views of Martin Luther King, a man they loathed and despised.”

Philip’s summary: “my father slyly placed Goldwater on the shoulders of Martin Luther King and the idea that an oath of allegiance was required of Southerners.”

Goldwater himself “never would have said [the words] if Goldwater had known what he was saying.”

These lines galvanized a generation of conservatives but caused a national firestorm. The Edwards datum is significant for the wiki: Jaffa was therefore not just a Straussian academic but, in 1964, the constitutional theologian of mainstream fusionist Republican conservatism — supplying Fusionism with its central “ordered liberty” formula. His later trajectory (the 1981 Bradford fight; the founding of The Claremonters as an explicit West Coast Straussian movement; the radicalization of Declarationism) is the trajectory of the man who wrote mid-fusionist Republican rhetoric repositioning his theology against the fusionist mainstream as that mainstream lost coherence. Jaffa kept the Goldwater flame burning for decades through the Claremont Institute.

West Coast Straussianism and the “Best Regime” Claim

Jaffa represents what came to be called West Coast Straussianism — distinct from East Coast Straussians in one key respect: where Strauss himself saw modernity as built on “low but solid ground,” Jaffa and his followers believed the American founding was grounded in premodern ideas (biblical, Greek), which saved it from being merely modern. The founders synthesized “Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria.”

This makes the American founding exceptional — a nearly miraculous political achievement that must be defended against modern corruption.

Jaffa’s mature thesis, stated fully in The American Founding as the Best Regime (2002), goes further: the Founding is not merely exceptional but the best regime in the history of Western civilization. His argument: Western civilization has always been animated by the “mutual influence” of Greek rational philosophy and biblical revelation — two irrefutable principles that cannot fully vindicate or refute each other. Every prior regime tried to adjudicate between them politically and failed. America’s unique solution was to keep both alive while making neither politically adjudicable, “bonding” civil and religious liberty. This, Jaffa claims, is philosophically unprecedented and therefore superior.

Jaffa vs. Strauss on Locke: Thomas Merrill’s review (The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory) identifies an unresolved rupture between Jaffa’s mature position and Strauss’s own scholarship. Strauss’s reading of Locke was esoteric: Locke’s hidden views were godless and anti-natural law. Jaffa’s defense of the Founding required claiming that the founders only understood Locke’s exoteric (public, religious) teaching — but this avoids the central question of whether Strauss was right about Locke in the first place. Merrill suggests Jaffa’s feuds with fellow Straussians may have been a proxy for the deeper dispute with Strauss himself that Jaffa could not raise in public. As Merrill puts it: unlike Strauss, who took the “ancient” view that all regimes have internal imperfections that doom them, Jaffa (like Hegel and Fukuyama) believed history had in principle ended at the political level with the American Founding.

Jaffa vs. Rehnquist, Bork, Scalia: Also in The American Founding as the Best Regime, Jaffa explicitly attacks conservative originalists as self-contradictory: “To appeal to the conception of ‘original intent’ in interpreting the Constitution while denying the ideas of natural justice which formed the ‘why’ of the Constitution, is to go to the uttermost limit of self-contradiction.” The founders’ original intent was natural justice — one cannot separate them. This is a fundamental split between Declarationism and Federalist Society–style originalism.

The Bradford-Jaffa Debate

Jaffa’s most consequential intellectual battle was with M.E. Bradford, the neo-Confederate literature professor at the University of Dallas who was the leading anti-Lincoln intellectual in the postwar conservative movement. Bradford called Jaffa’s insistence on “equality as a conservative principle” the “Heresy of Equality” — the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. “There is no man equal to any other,” Bradford thundered, “except perhaps in the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity.” Bradford accused Jaffa of taking the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” clause “in abstraction from its whole” and building a false constitutional theology on a misread phrase.

Jaffa’s counter: Bradford’s constitutionalism had “no worship of the law whatsoever” — it was simply defense of Southern hierarchy dressed up as constitutionalism. Bradford’s Lincoln was a caricature. The real Lincoln was a philosopher-statesman who completed the Founding.

The debate ended institutionally in 1981 when Reagan — who had originally nominated Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities — was forced to withdraw the nomination after neoconservatives (Kristol, Podhoretz) objected to Bradford’s Lincoln attacks. William Bennett was appointed instead. Jaffa had won: the Declarationist tradition, not Bradford’s neo-Confederatism, would be the constitutional framework of the Republican right.

Philip Jaffa (Harry’s son) told journalist Elisabeth Zerofsky in 2022 that the current Claremont Institute has “come to watch the Claremont Institute embody the very things that my father criticized in the conservative movement” — pointing to Christopher Caldwell’s sympathetic CRB essay on Robert E. Lee as direct evidence of neo-Confederate backsliding.

Jaffa’s Feuds and Character

Jaffa was, in Thomas Merrill’s description, a chronic polemicist who had significant falling-outs with nearly all of Strauss’s other students. His pattern: he consistently treated people broadly sympathetic to his project — who disagreed on particulars — as heretics rather than allies.

The most telling exchange: at a 1996 conference in California, Harvey Mansfield accused Jaffa of “shooting at the backs of your friends”:

“What you do is stand behind the front lines, and point your weapon at the backs of your friends and shoot! There is a battle going on in this country between those who want to continue America on the basis of its fundamental and original principles and those who do not. You’re not in the front line. The front line is receiving fire from the enemy. They don’t shoot at you anymore, because you’re not shooting at them.”

Mansfield’s charge: Jaffa couldn’t recognize who his actual opponents were, and so fought those mostly allied with him as if they were enemies. Joseph Cropsey, in a 1984 letter, called Jaffa “a pastiche of Don Quixote and Mrs. Grundy.” Jaffa typically interpreted these charges as attacks on his moral character; both Mansfield and Cropsey meant them as criticisms of his intellectual judgment.

Merrill’s diagnosis: Jaffa’s grandiosity and Manichaeanism in later years — treating every dispute as civilization versus barbarism — directly seeded the institutional culture his students inherited at Claremont. The “temptation of theory” is not unique to his heirs; it was already present in the master.

The Moral Framework and Its Exclusions

Jaffa’s universalism about equality coexists with a sharply moralized understanding of liberty that has important boundaries. In The American Founding as the Best Regime (2002), he writes that the Framers “never conceived the blessings of liberty in nonmoral terms. They never imagined it to encompass the exhibitionism of lesbians, sodomites, abortionists, drug addicts, and pornographers.” For Jaffa, liberty without virtue is not a blessing but license.

This is the internal contradiction that his heirs have resolved in a particular direction: the contemporary Claremonters have largely dropped the universalist equality strand (the part of Jaffa that was anti-racist and Lincolnian) while retaining and extending the moralized exclusivity. Merrill notes that Ellmers “passes over in silence Jaffa’s truly absurd opinions about homosexuality” — a telling omission.

Legacy in the New Right

The Claremont Institute, founded in 1979 by Jaffa’s students (Larry Arnn, Peter Schramm, Tom Silver, Chris Flannery), is the institutional expression of his ideas. Through the Institute’s fellowships, publications, and events, Jaffa’s intellectual legacy shaped the generation of Claremonters who became the New Right’s intellectual vanguard.

Michael Anton — author of The Flight 93 Election — speaks glowingly of Jaffa. The Claremonters’ emphasis on the founding, their catastrophism about American decline, and their willingness to embrace radical politics in the name of restoring first principles all trace back to Jaffa.

The founding of the Institute was driven by the belief that “the reigning authoritative, almost impregnable opinion was that nothing is by nature right or wrong” — and that this view was “radically inadequate.” The Publius and Lincoln fellowships became the pipelines for the next generation of conservative elites.

The irony: Jaffa’s Lincoln was an argument for the universal applicability of “all men are created equal” — an anti-racist argument. The younger Claremonters, influenced by Paleoconservatism, have moved toward positions Jaffa would have found repugnant. His son Philip charges the institute with betrayal.

Harry Jaffa and Trump: Philip Jaffa (Harry’s son) stated both to journalist Thomas Merrill and in his own 2021 memoir that his father would not have supported Trump. This is corroborated by Jaffa’s own intellectual commitments — his Lincoln-centered constitutionalism, his anti-racism, his insistence on natural right as the ground of democratic legitimacy. (This is separate from the institution’s behavior: the Claremont Institute he founded became Trump’s most prominent intellectual defender — what Merrill diagnoses as the “temptation of theory” working itself out in institutional form.)

Key Works

  • Crisis of the House Divided (1959) — the Lincoln-Douglas debates; his masterwork; praised even by critics for its empathetic reconstruction of Douglas’s point of view
  • A New Birth of Freedom (2000) — a sequel, four decades in the making; the full statement of his mature “best regime” thesis
  • Goldwater’s 1964 convention speech — “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”; entire speech by Jaffa, not just the “ordered liberty” passage
  • The American Founding as the Best Regime (2002) — his fullest public statement of the “best regime” argument; contains his attacks on Rehnquist/Bork/Scalia

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