Taki Magazine

An Open Letter to Leonard Zeskin, or Whoever Will Listen

by Evan McLaren on September 26, 2009

In “An Open Letter to Mark Lilla” at Huffington Post Leonard Zeskind warns his audience about the real Right, a nationalist force that moves darkly through Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Parties. We can be sure that Zeskind is an expert on the topic, since he’s been allowed not only to air his views at Huffington Post but also to publish an undoubtedly penetrating book covering, of all things, white nationalism.

Zeskind seeks to correct Lilla, who has added his to the pronouncements of conservatism’s death. There remains a Right that Zeskind worries about and he wants you to hear of it. Apparently you can locate it in a harassed Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College (where?) named Paul Gottfried. That’s because Gottfried remarked once that “We are all Schmittians now,” and Carl Schmitt was a Nazi, so . . .

Writes Zeskind, “Perhaps we should not make too much of Gottfried’s association with Carl Schmitt, after all a host of other intellectuals including Jacques Derrida have dipped in the Schmittian waters.” Ah, highly judicious. Perhaps we should not. But might I suggest also, perhaps, that we not so casually rip Gottfried’s remark from its context.

“Context” in this instance would include Gottfried’s ethnicity (German-Jewish) and his ties to the Nazi death camps (one learns from his memoirs that several family members of Gottfried’s parents’ generation were not heard from after the war). It also would include Gottfried’s actual intellectual use for Schmittian concepts and his understanding of Schmitt’s Nazi ties. Neither is difficult to glean from Gottfried’s work. Schmitt’s ideas of the political secularization of religious thought and feeling inhabit nearly every sentence of Gottfried’s, and in his biographical treatments he refrains from connecting Schmitt’s party affiliation to any authentic personal or philosophical sentiment. Schmitt did not join the party until it had gained power, and his professional advancement under the Nazis is suggestive of a relationship less sincere than pragmatic. Gottfried points out that Schmitt’s theories do not actually lend themselves to a justification of the Fuhrer state, that Schmitt understood this, and that during his life he carried on fruitful correspondence with Jews (Leo Strauss among them). One doesn’t need to consult Gottfried to know that Schmitt’s work lacked a racial emphasis.

Zeskind wants his audience to imagine one thing—an unhinged professor announcing, in effect, that we on the Right are all Nazis now, and the Right nodding in agreement. What exists is quite another, though I don’t expect this knowledge to penetrate as deeply into the brains of Zeskind and his readers as Nazi scare stories (boogie boogie!). Gottfried is an accomplished scholar; he’s unfortunate enough to be genuinely interested in the life of the mind, especially as it relates to man’s social, political, and historical nature. In that connection he has made qualified use of the work of a now-diabolized thinker whose party connection doesn’t override a certain potential merit to his theoretical take on aspects of modernity.

The joke is on me, though, because Zeskind’s remarks are going to reach and sway a far larger audience than mine. In fact even the audience for his crummy rant carries a combined social force greater than all the real Right’s put together. It’s facts like these that should make Gottfried grateful to be teaching anywhere, even in a third-rate academic gulag.

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