Leo Strauss, Liberalism, and the Crisis of Modernity

You ever feel like the world is just a big joke no one’s laughing at?

You wake up, grab a coffee, stare at your phone, and wonder if this is what civilization fought for.

Democracy, capitalism, the whole shebang—and yet, here we are, lost in some neon-lit nightmare, scrolling through outrage and TikTok dances.

That’s when you find a guy like Leo Strauss.

And suddenly, the joke starts making sense.

Strauss was a German philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, landed in the U.S., and spent his life trying to figure out what went wrong with the West.

He looked at liberalism—the thing we hold dear—and saw a time bomb. His book, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, is a scalpel, cutting through the pretty lies we tell ourselves.

It’s like someone finally admitting the house is on fire while everyone else is still roasting marshmallows.

Here’s what we need to talk about:

1. The Problem With Liberalism

Strauss didn’t hate liberalism. He just thought it had no backbone.

He saw it as a great idea poisoned by its own success. It preaches freedom, tolerance, and reason—but in doing so, it forgets the thing that keeps societies from falling apart: meaning.

When you erase deeper truths in favor of personal choice, you end up with people who believe in nothing.

2. The Crisis of Modernity

We live in a world built on progress. Planes fly faster, machines think for us, diseases disappear with a pill.

Every year, something new, something better.

But better for what? Progress to what?

Strauss argued that modernity wasn’t a victory march.

It was a slow, painful divorce from tradition. Not a clean break, either. More like a long, messy separation where neither side wants to admit it’s over.

We traded the old gods for data, traded wisdom for convenience, traded meaning for entertainment.

And now? Now we’re just wandering, drunk and alone, hoping science or politics will tell us why we’re here, why we wake up, why we keep going.

They won’t. They can’t.

Science can tell you how the stars were made but not why they make you feel small.

Politics can give you laws but not a reason to follow them beyond fear.

Everything we build is bigger, faster, stronger—but inside, we’re shrinking.

No guiding story, no purpose, just movement.

And movement without direction? That’s not progress. That’s just spinning in place.

3. The Ancient vs. The Modern

Strauss loved the old guys—Plato, Aristotle, the thinkers who believed philosophy was a way of life, not just an academic hobby.

They saw truth as something to be pursued, even if it hurt.

Modern thinkers? Not so much.

They broke everything down into power, science, and historical progress. I

nstead of asking, “What is the good life?” they started asking, “How do we keep the machine running?”

4. The Return of Nihilism

Strauss was terrified that modern liberal societies, in their obsession with tolerance and rationality, would eventually destroy the foundations they were built on.

When nothing is sacred, everything is up for grabs.

Enter nihilism—the belief that nothing really matters. And once that sets in, history shows us what comes next: chaos, tyranny, and people desperately clinging to strong leaders who promise to make sense of it all.

5. The Secret Teachings

One of Strauss’s strangest ideas was that great philosophers wrote in code.

They had to. In societies that didn’t like dangerous ideas, thinkers would disguise their most radical points between the lines.

It’s why reading old texts requires suspicion. Not everything is what it seems. A good philosopher, Strauss believed, was a detective.

6. The Danger of Historicism

Historicism is the belief that truth is relative to history.

Strauss saw this as poison. If all ideas are just products of their time, then nothing is universally true.

The moment you believe that, justice, morality, and freedom become temporary illusions.

They don’t mean anything beyond their historical moment. Strauss thought this was how civilizations commit suicide.

7. So… What’s the Answer?

Strauss never gave one. That was the point.

He wanted people to think. He wanted them to go back to the ancient texts, to rediscover philosophy, to stop looking for easy answers.

He didn’t believe in political revolutions—he believed in intellectual revolutions.

The only way to fix the crisis of modernity, he thought, was for people to wake up and start asking the big, dangerous questions again.

Table Summary

Point	What Strauss Thought
The Problem With Liberalism	It’s weak because it abandoned deeper meaning.
The Crisis of Modernity	We’ve lost purpose, drifting in a sea of progress.
Ancient vs. Modern	The old philosophers asked the real questions.
Nihilism	If nothing is sacred, chaos follows.
Secret Teachings	Great thinkers hid their real messages.
Historicism	If truth is just history, nothing is real.
The Answer?	Think for yourself, return to philosophy.

Conclusion

So where does that leave us? If Strauss is right, we’re living in a house with no foundation, propping up walls with optimism and cheap slogans.

The crisis isn’t coming—it’s here.

We scroll past it every day, pretend it’s not real.

But here’s the twist: maybe the real crisis isn’t outside. Maybe it’s inside us.

Strauss isn’t some ancient prophet. He’s just a guy who saw the cracks before most people.

And maybe that’s the point. The question isn’t whether liberalism will survive. The question is whether we still care enough to fight for something real.

Or whether we’ll just keep scrolling.