I thank Grant Havers for his thoughtful response to my article, “Christoper Rufo’s Dangerous Wishful Thinking.” Since both my essay and Havers’ reply mention Harry Jaffa, let me quote William F. Buckley’s great line: “If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him.” In that spirit, I’m not sure what Havers and I are arguing about. 

The main point of my article was to warn against prematurely declaring victory over an intellectual and political enemy. My references to the “German villains” Nietzsche and Heidegger were mainly a reminder that this mistake has been made before. Havers concedes that I did not offer a complete genealogy of critical race theory, which—as he rightly notes—has in many ways been coopted by our ruling oligarchy to “serve the interests of the managerial elite.” 

It is slightly amusing that in dissecting todays’ left, both Havers and I rely entirely secondary sources—Jaffa and Leo Strauss in my case; Paul Gottfried, James Burnham, and Sam Francis for Havers. It might be useful then to cite some actual leftists! 

Havers invokes Gottfried’s work to claim there is no evidence that “Heidegger had blazed a trail for the New Left in America.” I must confess to not having read my friend Paul’s book on this subject, but that claim, as presented, is hard to accept. Herbert Marcuse is almost universally acknowledged as one of the key founders of the New Left. Marcuse studied directly with Heidegger for several years at the University of Freiburg. From there, we can trace a direct line through Marcuse’s student Angela Davis to Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter. 

That’s the activist wing of identity politics. What about academic postmodernism? We can agree, I hope, on the enormous role played by Michel Foucault. In his last interview before he died, Foucault stated, “My whole philosophical development has been determined by my reading of Heidegger.”

I certainly agree with Havers’ claim that the managerial elite operates on the assumption that “human beings are malleable or passive effects of their environment”—a dogma that Havers claims was “popularized by T. H. Green in England and Josiah Royce in the United States.” But where did this radical idea originate? No reasonable answer to that question can ignore the long philosophical project of redefining human nature that extends from Machiavelli and Hobbes through Rousseau and Hegel and reaches a kind of apotheosis with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Weighing the relative influence of German existentialism and our own homegrown managerial elite on the contemporary left, can we agree that this complicated story is best understood in terms of “both/and” rather than “either/or”?