It is hard to end without including a slightly different interpretation of why non-Straussians have had to struggle in their dealings with my subjects. My second explanation is by no means incompatible with the first and therefore may be treated as supplemental. It began to take form in my mind as the result of a friendship with a social theorist about my age, when the two of us were teaching in a humanities program at Michigan State in the late 1960s. My friend and I were both disturbed by the antiwar protests on campus, and particularly by the degree to which these demonstrations were turning abusively anti-American. We were even more upset by the willingness of our antiwar colleagues to praise communist governments while running down their own country, indeed a country that permitted them to express their dissent. Such protesters seemed to me and my colleague to have gone beyond moral equivalence between us and the communists. They were emotionally and rhetorically on the other side.

But my friend, who was a self-described Straussian, added to these objections a strange analysis of what was occurring. Supposedly those who offended us were relativists and probably nihilists to boot. They were infected with the kinds of ideas that had poisoned the minds of Germans before Hitler came to power. I responded that what I was witnessing was not pleasant but did not seem related to Weber, notions of value-free science, or the supposed triumph of nihilism in interwar Germany. It looked to me as if the red-diaper babies born to radical leftist parents had grown up. They had found jobs in universities and were now busily creating a constituency among young men who did not want to be sent to Vietnam.