Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Kagan

Kagan’s line lands like a polite dinner-party toast that’s actually a blade. The opening clause, “It is true,” feigns courtroom candor, as if he’s granting a minor concession before delivering the real verdict. Then he leans on biography - “almost all my life” - to claim authority without doing the tedious thing (arguing doctrine). The punchline, “they are wrong,” is deliberately unadorned. No qualifiers, no “on balance,” no list of errors. Just the blunt moral of a childhood lesson. That’s the move: turn an intellectual dispute into inherited common sense.

The subtext is tribal as much as it is philosophical. Straussians, in American political culture, aren’t merely academics; they’re a shorthand for a particular style of elite reasoning: esoteric readings, suspicion of modern liberalism, a taste for hidden meanings and “noble lies.” By framing his view as something he was “taught,” Kagan suggests Straussianism isn’t just mistaken; it’s a family rival, a persistent faction you grow up learning to distrust. The implicit scene is a long-running intramural fight within the U.S. foreign-policy and conservative intellectual ecosystem, where labels operate like passports and accusations.

The intent isn’t to persuade Straussians. It’s to signal alignment to everyone else: I’ve been around them, I know their game, and I’m not buying it. The humor is dry, almost throwaway, but the function is serious - delegitimizing an entire school by collapsing it into a single, confidently inherited judgment.