While there is little use in speculating what the great German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss would have said about today’s campus unrest, it’s worth considering what he wrote about political rage more generally. Glenn Ellmers, reviewing a newly published volume of Strauss’s essays, observes:

Strauss connects the psychological to the political (and the philosophic). Those who can only scream about cosmic injustice behave as if they are in hell, and for them, Strauss notes, hell is “life in the United States.” They act as if they are rebelling against “a holy law; but of this they appeared to be wholly unconscious.”

Strauss’s reference here to law, and especially holy law, is critical. Human beings, when not deranged by ideology, do in fact find their purpose in and through a community that sees itself as holy. Every premodern society was grounded in a sacred law that insisted, as Strauss explains, that “not everything is permitted.” (This sacred community could well be, by the way, a polity deriving its authority from “the laws of nature and nature’s god.”) It is the confrontation with these divine codes, which define all premodern regimes, that first made political philosophy possible. Strauss famously referred to this as “the theological-political problem.”

Recent reports suggest that the White House has at last acted to allow the shipments of weapons that had been withheld from Israel and to end further the delays. On this topic, Elliott Abrams comments, “I don’t know what and how much has been held up, but it shouldn’t have happened. The level of delay should be zero.”

In this interview with Ariel Kahana, Abrams also comments on the failings of U.S. policy toward Iran, and the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce existing sanctions:

According to Abrams, Iran has indeed halted the advancement of its nuclear program on rare occasions. “This happened when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, and when [President] Trump eliminated Qassem Suleimani in 2020. The U.S. needs to be ready to use force in Iran, but credibility is critical here. Only if [Iran’s leaders] are convinced that the U.S. is willing to act will they stop.”

Abrams claims that the U.S. president tried for two-and-a-half years to revive the nuclear deal with Iran until he realized it wasn’t interested. “Iran has benefited from this situation, and everyone outside the administration sees it as a failure.”