On the Heartland Straussian
Essay I: The Return to First Principles- Introducing the Heartland Straussian Project
The classic is characterized by noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. - Leo Strauss
We live in a time that has forgotten the question of first things. Politics has become a contest of power, culture a vessel of resentment, and philosophy a function of ideology. In such an age, the ancient question—What is the just regime?—feels at once too large and too absent.
Yet this question is not optional. It is perennial. And it is urgent.
This essay begins a project—a return to first principles and the cultivation of a political vision grounded not in reaction or abstraction, but in nature, tradition, and order. It is an effort to recover the dignity of politics, and to reimagine our way of life through the lens of what I call the Heartland Straussian.
To understand this new type, we must begin with the thinker who made such a recovery possible: Leo Strauss.
The Recovery of Political Philosophy
Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish émigré who fled the wreckage of Weimar and Nazism, and brought with him a question that modernity had dismissed: What is the best life? He believed that the tradition of classical political philosophy, particularly in Plato and Aristotle, had not been refuted—only forgotten.
Strauss rejected both positivism (the view that only scientific facts matter) and historicism (the belief that all truths are products of their time). He argued that political philosophy had been reduced to ideology, and that this reduction had opened the door to tyranny, relativism, and nihilism.
To resist these forces, Strauss called for a return—not to nostalgia, but to serious engagement with the ancients, and to the possibility that nature, reason, and virtue still speak to us.
But Strauss did not offer a system. He offered a path. His students would walk it in different directions, forming two schools that would shape American political thought in the decades to come.
The Coasts of Strauss - East and West
The East Coast Straussians —such as Harvey Mansfield, Thomas Pangle, and Leon Kass —emphasized the limits of politics, the irony of Socratic inquiry , and the dignity of restraint.
For them, the life of the philosopher stands in tension with the life of the city. They view the American Founding as a noble achievement, but not as a final articulation of natural right. They are wary of moral absolutism, preferring the prudence of the Constitution to the poetry of the Declaration.
The West Coast Straussians, led by Harry Jaffa and advanced by institutions like the
Claremont Institute, affirm the truth of the Declaration of Independence
and the heroism of Abraham Lincoln. They speak the language of natural right, moral clarity, and constitutional redemption. They do not hesitate to declare that America is a noble regime, and that its restoration requires action, not just contemplation.
Each school has its virtues.
The East teaches us to be wary of ideology, to value liberty for philosophy, and to proceed with prudence. The West reminds us that philosophy must eventually speak, that the city must be governed, and that regimes rise and fall by the truths they affirm.
But neither school alone can answer the challenges of our time.
The Heartland Straussian
What is needed now is not a third school, but a synthesis—a recovery of balance.
The Heartland Straussian is rooted in both the philosophic discipline of the East and the moral seriousness of the West. He reads Plato with care and Lincoln with reverence. He respects the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, but does not fear their meeting. He believes that the Constitution is a masterpiece of prudence, and the Declaration a summons to moral memory.
The Heartland Straussian is neither reactionary nor revolutionary. He is rooted—in family, place, tradition, and the permanent things. He knows that politics begins not in Washington, but at the dinner table; not in revolutions, but in the recovery of manliness, motherhood, worship, and education.
His vision is not merely academic. It is civic, personal, and cultural. It spans the levels of life:
At the personal level, it demands discipline, virtue, and contemplation.
In the family, it affirms ordered liberty, hierarchy tempered by love, and the transmission of memory.
In the local and state levels, it insists on subsidiarity, stewardship, and the dignity of communities.
At the national level, it demands a constitutionalism that balances freedom with responsibility, and strength with humility.
In the world, it seeks a posture of strength tempered by prudence—neither isolationist nor imperial.
And at the level of civilization, it is a defense of the West, not as an ethnicity, but as a tradition of reason, revelation, and liberty.
This project—the Heartland Straussian project—is not an ideology. It is a lens, a formation, a way of seeing and living. It is a return to first things, in a world built on last ones.
The Road Ahead
This essay is the beginning of a series that will unfold this vision.
We will explore the Heartland Straussian’s view of human nature, education, statesmanship, marriage, technology, liberalism, and civic renewal.
We will build a political anthropology that does not begin with the rights of man, but with the duties of man, the structure of the soul, and the needs of the city.
We will seek, not to win arguments, but to form men.
We will remember that the health of a republic depends not only on its laws, but on the souls of its citizens.
This is the beginning. The beginning of a return. The beginning of a vision.
A vision planted not on the coasts, but in the heartland—and in the heart.