Strauss looks at the fate he faces in consequence of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. He admits that it is impossible for him as a Jew to live under their regime, since they have adopted anti-Semitism as a keynote of their rule. But while expressing abhorrence at their anti-Semitism, Strauss consciously refuses fully to repudiate Nazi fascism. To the contrary, he accepts fascism as a legitimate bearer of “the principles of the right,” and he embraces them, namely: fascism, authoritarianism and imperialism. He then proceeds to ridicule the Enlightenment values of inalienable rights, quoting the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 (though he could just as easily have quoted the American Declaration of Independence), and he quotes a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, a passage which Carl Schmitt was also fond of quoting.
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