IT’S ALL RATHER COMPLICATED. You see, there are West-coast Straussians and East-coast Straussians, and the West-coast Straussians think that the East-coast Straussians . . . except that Harvey Mansfield . . . still, back at the University of Chicago . . . in Xenophon . . . but when Allan Bloom and Fr. Fortin were in Paris . . . the esoteric . . . and if you compare the Seventh Letter with Aristotle’s account of Plato’s unwritten doctrines . . . Harry Jaffa . . . Machiavelli . . . the Federalist Papers. . . .
Oh, never mind. There are only three people who can sort all this out: The first is dead, the second is insane, and the third is Peter Berkowitz. The point is that the Claremont Institute out in California recently decided to declare war on The Weekly Standard and the rest of the doctrinally impure publications of East-coast conservatism. You can find the opening salvo in Precepts, the Claremont Institute’s weekly newsletter. It’s a 1,500-word complaint from Spencer Warren about the “aesthetic relativism” that allows young reviewers in our pages to “endorse violent, vulgar and even obscene movies that have no redeeming aesthetic values,” and it concludes, with the obligatory more-in-sorrow-than-anger note, “How sad.”
