I also recommend this piece on Straussianism (via commenter srv). It’s a long read, but after reading it, I have a better understanding of why neoconservatism meshes so well with contemporary Washington culture (that is not what the piece is about, at all, btw). For example:
Strauss saw the world divided up into three layers: there are the vulgar, there are gentlemen, and there are the wise. And honor and courage are the virtues of the gentleman; the virtue of the wise is wisdom. The wise need the gentlemen to be governing. And the gentlemen, this elite, do not operate with the categories of wisdom, but with the “simple virtues” that they are able to grasp and assert.
The Village knock on Clinton was, essentially, that he wasn’t a gentleman. (Chris Buckley isn’t a Villager per se, and I often like his writing, but he said this the most explicitly when he said of Clinton, approximately “a gentleman doesn’t cry in public” — I can’t find a link for this.) Not many of those making these judgements were neoconservatives, but there is certainly a shared sensibility here.
I’m sorry if this discussion is tedious and boring, but it fascinates me.
Mark S.
Gee, Leo, did you get that bold insight from The Republic?
cleek
but remember, liberals are the elites.
DougJ
Gee, Leo, did you get that bold insight from The Republic?
It’s not supposed to be a bold insight, I think he attributes it to The Republic. But it’s interesting to see such unreconstructed Platonism.
handy
Sounds like something BOB would say.
DougJ
Sounds like something BOB would say.
Yes, it does.
Likewise, many readers have wondered why Strauss’s otherwise high-brow, abstruse philosophical works were often interrupted by lengthy digressions about the cost of making pizzas.
Maude
They were jealous of Clinton because he was gettin’ some.
inkadu
Isn’t this sort of pontificating better suited to anthropology or sociology? This armchair theorizing is empty and archaic.
New Yorker
Doesn’t that sound a bit like the setup that leads to the Vanguard of the Proletariat?
Again and again and again, it occurs to me how much the neocons are just right-wing mirror images of dogmatic marxists. The need for intellectuals (themselves) to lead the ignorant masses. The elevation of dogma over truth. The equation of dissent with treason. Endless wars of “liberation”. And so on…..
rootless_e
Leo Strauss was a very sick man indeed.
Some of the right wing German Jews wanted to figure out a way in which their support for the far right did not make them out to be self-destructive and evil and naive. Strauss’s method was to invent a psychotic school of philosophy.
valdivia
DougJ, if this whole Strauss/neocon thing really interests you I think you should read this (you can access it without paying if you have a U proxy server, I think). I would also recommend the previous article by Lilla on European thought and their reading of Strauss which is very very different than the American take. Lilla comes from that world but like our John had a big wake up moment, but he knows their ideas inside out. I went to a couple of Strauss conferences a few years ago (no, not what you think, looong story) if you think the devotion to Reagan is insane you have not met the Straussians–they debate the comma placements in his lecture notes (which they all hoard and keep as if it were the holly of hollies)
rootless_e
@New Yorker They are a lot more like The Family. Same monstrous self-regard and wackball cult mentality.
rootless_e
The neo-cons agree with the marxists that religion is the opiate of the masses, but their reaction is “give ’em more, they may be coming to”.
danimal
I haven’t been aware of this point of view, so thanks DougJ. My initial impression is that the only way forward is through sharpened pitchforks.
And they say liberals are the elites, bah.
Jim
How does a gentleman react when his mistress is gauche enough to go public about expecting one to support one’s illegitimate son? (Sorry, couldn’t resist)
wiley
Ideologues (sociopaths), useful tools who are intelligent enough to get the work done and gullible or ambitious enough to stay in line, and the rabble.
beltane
Great. We are trapped in an aristocracy where the nobility are two-bit, cowardly simpletons without a hint of redeeming noblesse oblige.
DarrenG
@rootless_e wins the Internets for the week.
Shamelessly stealing that quote…
Violet
This kind of reminds me of the way things were just before the French Revolution. And then one day “the vulgar” decided they’d had enough.
So keep it up, neocons. No wonder those super-rich folks mentioned in the NYT article in the post below are hiding their wealth. They know the pitchfork wielding mobs are feeling a tad restless.
Doctor Science
Sarah Palin, remember, was promoted by Bill Kristol. It’s fascinating to look at her from the neocons’ Straussian worldview.
Palin is in many ways the opposite of the “wise man” who Straussians think should be running things. Palin is not just ignorant, she is *proud* of it, it’s part of her brand or mystique. She has all the virtues of the “vulgar”: she’s credulous, nationalistic, militaristic, conventional, small-minded, and religious. But there is no stretch of the imagination that can call her a “gentleman”, so why would a neocon pick her to be a leader?
I can only imagine that they thought they could control her, that she would in some way respect them for their “wisdom”. And I bet that part of that was based on her being an attractive woman, the kind who will claim she defers to men while steamrolling right through them.
wiley
@violet
yeah, that’s why it’s so important to have the population divided. North/South. White/minorities. Evangelical/not. Boomers/Gen X. As long as the “rabble” are at each others’ throats, the owning class skates.
Jim Lindley
The problem with the neocon view that they are a self-made elite is that their lives and opinions show evidence of neither architecture nor carpentry.
Jim
@Doctor Science:
Someone had a blog-post on this the other day, an anonymous friend of Kristol’s who said that his fascination with Palin was due at least in part to starbursts. I don’t for a moment doubt that’s true, but remember that Kristol cut his Village teeth as Dan Quayle’s COS/brain. There’s a Bush/Rove element to Kristol’s promotees: An attractive dolt who knows how to rouse the rabble and can be counted on to obey the ‘wise’. Same is true of McCain, his war record taking the place of small-market news anchor telegenic-ness.
wiley
They make reality itself. And you have to admit that they are effective. Bill Kristal can only be perpetuated in a system that has an uncanny ability to perpetuate itself and wield enormous influence in spite of being WRONG all the time.
Violet
@wiley:
Yeah, it’s definitely a win for the rich if the rest of us are at each others’ throats. But the very wealthy bankers are definitely feeling a little bit nervous because people are so angry with them for raking in those huge bonuses while so many people struggle to make ends meet. That’s why folks like Rush Limbaugh spend so much time defending the bankers and their bonuses. Gotta keep people in line. Don’t want the rabble getting restless.
Jim
Here’s the ThinkProgress post on Bill Kristol, PalinBursts, and other matters, including a great title.
Slaney Black
I was a teenage Straussian. True story. Used to run with that crowd during college.
Here’s the interesting thing: The campus Straussian clique was more a jobs bank for wignuts than it was an intellectual school.
The profs used to funnel promising assholes into the Republican defense/intelligence community – much like the proverbial CIA ‘man on campus’ from the Cold War days (think James Burnham and William F. Buckley).
The whole ‘deep reading’ flimflam doesn’t have much use other than to see how comfortable said promising young assholes are with shocking anti-egalitarianism. You start spouting it enthusiastically, you’re considered reliable. I knew one guy went to work on the House Intelligence Committee and another climbed pretty high up in the Pentagon.
Somewhat happy ending though: the latter is now selling real estate.
The Raven
I don’t know enough about Strauss to say anything useful about the man, and it sounds like his students have ended up with conflicting interpretations of his ideas. I suspect interviewing his surviving students would produce fascinating results.
I’ve had the unsettling experience of a response to a question that makes it clear the respondent could not even comprehend the question–heard it, but immediately revised to words into something they could comprehend and bore no relationship to what I had asked. What I understand Strauss to have called “exoteric” and “esoteric” understandings emerge without any effort on the part of the speaker or author. Perhaps Strauss felt it was important to pay attention to the dichotomy.
Yet people who do not understand medicine do not “deserve” malpractice. And because I (or anyone) is better able to “work the system” does not give me the right to raise myself up as oppressor.
valdivia
Little Bill Kristol learned at the knee of Harvey Mansfield. Writer of this gem and a semi Straussian himself. Like we need to know anything else.
Quaker in a Basement
OK, fine. And just where do so-called “gentlemen” come from? What makes them gentlemen?
“Gentlemen” is simply a code word for the sons of wealth and influence, schooled in the ways of wealth and influence, acting in the interests of…you guessed it…wealth and influence.
In short, Straussianism is the direct obverse of “all men are created equal.”
DougJ
@Slaney Black
Were you a Straussian into grad school or just in college?
Slaney Black
@The Raven:
They have. You’ve got disagreements over whether it’s safe to read Nietzsche and Machiavelli, whether the American founding was totally rad or just kind of rad, whether Abraham Lincoln was the greatest godlike genius in history or whether Harry Jaffa should just keep his mouth shut because no one cares, etc.
But on your base level policy implications, it’s still elitism all the way down.
Thing about Straussians is they don’t believe in economics. If they’re for supply side it’s only because it encourages a kind of Dickensian virtue. They’re confident that the mass of people can be shafted ad infinitum and religion will keep them in check indefinitely. Confident is the wrong word – it just doesn’t occur to them that it can be otherwise.
Which, I think, is the real key to how Straussianism played out in the Bush administration – and also why it failed. Economics does exist. People got pissed off about the cost of the war, and the financial crisis happened. Can’t Jesus your way out of that no matter how cynically you try.
Slaney Black
@DougJ: College. Gave it up before I went to grad school.
I got better!
darryl
Whatever your orientation, left, right, or upside-down, when you’re doing stuff like that, you done fucked up.
darryl
Bill Kristol, Ted Kaczynski, GWB, and the inability of Matt Yglesias to distinguish “their” from “there”, made me realize that going to the good, elite, schools, really doesn’t say anything about one’s intelligence.
arguingwithsignposts
@darryl:
darryl, I love you man, but if you click the little arrow to the right of the timestamp, you can link directly to the comment you’re going to be responding to. You don’t have to copy the timestamp.
And DougJ, have you no sense of decency not to interrupt serious business (i.e., NFL open threads) with your political stuff?
Smudge says “no.” (from her new Flickr farm)
Quiddity
Strauss was insane to believe in such folk-tale fantasies about how a modern society can flourish.
MTiffany
Yes, modern-day tyranny, with its ‘science’ and ‘technology,’ what the would-be tyrants call ‘reality.’ What a pompous little turd. Yes, it does indeed explain a great deal about neocons. And philosophers — those who are so wrapped up in the magnificence of their own thoughts that they make rather small bundles indeed.
The Raven
@Slaney Black: Oh, interesting. I wonder to what extent Strauss’s philosophy was shaped by being a victim of the Nazis?
There’s a really interesting question here, buried under all the gobbledegook: suppose someone does, somehow, know something that grants power. What is the ethical response?
I’ve written (a very little) about related matters. And it seemed to me then that the most common responses were elitism, despair, or denial. The great statesman and scholar George F. Kennan, architect of the Marshall Plan, ended with despair, rejected by radical right of his day. The Straussians and Trotskyites who became the core of the neo-cons are elitists. Many political commentators and activists depend on self-validating denial. A figure like Krugman is remarkable in that he tries to teach what he knows for the common good. He has taken a great deal of heat for it too, as we all know.
And yet…
Is this not, exactly, the problem of scientists in our time, defending evolution and climate change against religious and political objections, including the literal charge of atheism? I wonder what Strauss would have made of it.
rootless_e
@The Raven:
The problem being that the straussian philosophers are the very opposite of good citizens.
New Yorker
Kristol and W I’ll give you, but Kaczynski is a brilliant man. He’s just fucking insane.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Neocons are so 2004. We’re busy hippie-punching and Obot-bashing now. We’ll worry about the Republicans after Palin’s elected.
WereBear
That was an interesting article, since I’d always thought the conservative love of black and white thinking stemmed from their religious influences.
Now I see it’s actually Straussian, and dovetails.
Still a dysfunctional thought process, no matter how you frost it.
SiubhanDuinne
This is O/T as all hell, for which I apologize, but the open threads seem to have gone comatose. It just occurred to me — it’s been a good long time since we (well anyhow, since *I*) have heard anything about not-Joe the not-Plumber. Has he finally, mercifully, gone away? Please, if you answer this, don’t disturb him!
Now returning you to your scheduled discussion.
chrome agnomen
and the vulgar do all the heavy lifting.
same as it ever was.
Doctor Science
@Jim:
GWB, McCain, and Quayle are *perfect* examples of Strauss’ “gentleman”: they’re mediocre scions of powerful families. What’s (almost) surprising is how thoroughly the starbursts blinded Kristol to the fact that Palin was never a “gentleman” in any way shape or form, except for intellectual mediocrity. He should have realized that Palin wasn’t someone he could advise and mold, she’s the *enemy*: raw, vulgar populism. And now her fashionable boot prints are on his back.
rootless_e
“ct that Palin was never a “gentleman” in any way shape or form, except for intellectual mediocrity. He should have realized that Palin wasn’t someone he could advise and mold, she’s the enemy: raw, vulgar populism. And now her fashionable boot prints are on his back.”
But he is a mere piker compared to Strauss who, in 1920s Germany, longed for a Leader who would Make the Rabble Obey, found one, and barely escaped being turned into soap as a consequence.
The Raven
@MTiffany:
I think Strauss was reacting to communist, especially Stalinist, claims of having a political ideology based on scientific truth. My impression is that Strauss formed at least part of his ideas in reaction to Stalinism (was he a Trotskyist once? I wonder) and that his political thinking makes more sense–still reactionary, but more sense–when it is viewed in the context of Naziism and Stalinism: both movements which claimed to speak for “the people” and in the end turned into monstrosities.
In any event, that’s all I have to say about Strauss, since I have no intention of studying him.
Now, what about Converse?
WereBear
@Doctor Science: Hmmm, your comment sparked a mental remake,starring Kristol & Palin: Of Human Bondage.
He couldn’t stop loving her! She couldn’t start loving him! The tragedy and the teasing…
MTiffany
@The Raven: I simply detest people – especially philosophers – who mock-quote the word science, for whatever reason they’re doing it. Science has a far better track record of improving the lives of people than any philosophy – or religion, for that matter.
superking
I have a half formed thought that is related to all this Straussian stuff. Conservatives of all stripes really tend to worry about social order. It seems that they tend to worry that if certain structures/institutions lose power, then society will collapse. There are plenty of examples of this–sexism and racism being obvious along with religion in general. We of course know that conservatives tend to idealize the past and worry about the future. That’s why we get so many jeremiads from the Right.
As society has changed, though, it hasn’t fallen apart, despite conservatives greatest fears. Darwin, greater racial equality, women in the work place, and things are still humming pretty good. We’re not living in a dystopia yet.
It occurred to me that there are at least a couple ways of thinking about what happens in society and how different people perceive it. On the one hand, it may be that as society has changed, new structures for social order have come into place and kept society from collapsing, but conservatives maintain their fears because they are incapable of identifying those social controls. If they could identify them, they wouldn’t have much to worry about.
On the other hand, it very well may be that society has never had strong social controls, e.g. in the past the church had much less influence than conservatives tend to assign to it. In this case, Conservatives idea of the past would be flawed. Or to put it another way, liberals see the past without strong social order and are willing to accept a future that reproduces a similar condition but with better outcomes for more people.
Either of these two leads to a conclusion that conservatives have a flawed view of the world, i.e. one that is simply inaccurate. They either can’t accurately see the world around them or they can’t accurately see how the world was in the past.
I personally don’t worry too much about social control. I think the world is pretty wild, people don’t act according to theories, and things have pretty much been this crazy since forever. But I’m a liberal.
What do you all think? Is there a good reason to worry about social order? Isn’t conservatives concern about social order also connected to their worries about personal and ideological purity? What connects all this together?
MTiffany
@superking:
LOL. Conservatives could give a flying f*ck about society. If our society collapsed into a bunch of child-raping cannibals conservatives wouldn’t care so long as their taxes stayed low and government didn’t interfere in “the free market.”
MTiffany
@superking:
Which puts you exactly half way ahead of Strauss himself.
Slaney Black
@The Raven:
No. See article. Winger from way back. rootles_e sums it up best…
Doctor Science
@WereBear: I supposed I deserved those mental images. I’ll just go scrub my brain now …
priscianus jr
And as Shadia Drury pointed out, the problem with Straussianism is not a much that it cultivates an elite — but that the elite it cultivates is “neither wise nor good.” Here is the full statement:
“In truth the education Strauss and Bloom espouse is little more than a blind adherence to a doctrine whose secrecy shields it from scrutiny and criticism. When ideas are inculcated by whispering to boys in corners, the result is not just corruption, but stupidity. I contend that the pernicious influence of Leo Strauss has its source in the kind of elite he cultivates — an elite that is not fit for power because it is neither wise nor good. It is not wise because it cannot defend its beliefs before the tribunal of reason; it preaches only to the converted. It is not good because it is a manipulative elite that eschews the truth in favor of lies and deceptions, and because it exempts itself from the moral standard it imposes on others — and this is the road to tyranny.
Drury, Shadia, Leo Strauss and the American Right, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
http://www.thedubyareport.com/prophet.html
Delia
@rootless_e:
Well, to be fair, most of the German aristocracy, business leaders, and officer corps were hoping for a new, improved Kaiser when the annoying little corporal who wowed all the Rabble showed up.
Church Lady
Doug, I’m sorry, I find I can’t rationally discuss Strauss. I’m too busy admiring the crease in your pants leg.
rootless_e
@Delia:
I used to know a couple of neo-cons. And I used to ask them if they had developed their lamppost pitches.
Q: What’s a lamppost pitch?
A: It’s the quick sale you need to make to the Turner’s Diary reading right wing militia men who have picked you up for being jew/gay/”intellectual” (nobody said intellectuals had to be smart)/owner of a nice wristwatch/etc/ and are smacking the shit out of you as they drag you to the lamppost, in which you explain that you are really on their side. What’s your plan for that?
Q: That won’t happen.
A: Ah, the Leo Strauss theory – which is why he had to run to Chicago. Where do you plan to run to?
They all stopped speaking with me. Wonder why?
Chad N Freude
Until today, the only things I knew about Leo Strauss was that he was German, Jewish, and a capital-C Conservative political philosopher somehow associated with neo-conservatism. The two threads on Strauss today prompted me to start a self-ed project. So far, I have found that Amazon reviewers of books about Strauss seem to be major fanboiz, that (according to the review I found) Drury, cited above, got it all wrong, that Strauss was not elitist or conservative, etc. etc. and so forth. I did run across this defense of Strauss, which I found pretty interesting, but what I’m really looking for is an introduction to Strauss as dispassionate as the Oxford Very Short Introduction series (there doesn’t seem to be a VSI on Strauss). Anyone have any suggestions?
Janet Strange
I’ve been totally immersed in The Battle Cry of Freedom for a while now.
This is why we had a civil war, I think. There is one vision of America in which elites create/preserve civilization and all of the finer things of life and there are lesser humans that labor to make the life of this aristocracy possible.
This is the “Southern way of life” that such a bloody horrible war was fought to preserve. They meant Southern aristocracy literally. And they thought it could not exist without the labor of slaves. So they went to war rather than face the slow decline of this essentially Straussian world. (Slowly declining b/c the North was fighting letting them expand slavery, and the South thought it was essentially a grow or die situation.)
The competing vision is the Northern one, of the common folk having a chance at the good life through their own labor. No hereditary elites, everyone having an equal shot at the pursuit of happiness.
This Straussian thing is not new. It’s an argument America has been having since its birth.
Alex S.
It seems like their (neocons) definition of a great man is a man who projects his beliefs onto the world, and not someone who observes the world to form his beliefs. It’s like a contest of how much you can distort reality and still get away with it.
I think that Strauss was right in diagnosing the decline of philosophy, on the other hand I don’t really care. Every internally coherent worldview has failed the test of time. These views or ideologies only work if you leave a lot of wiggle room. This might be less fulfilling on the one hand but also much more intellectually challenging on the other hand (hmm, a paradox).
Janet Strange
@Janet Strange: Oh, and that explains (to me) why today’s conservatism, which has become neo-conservatism, is only thriving in the South.
Alex S.
@WereBear:
This reminds me of a joke:
The masochist said to the sadist: Please torture me! I want it!
The sadist said: No!
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I am definitely stealing that line.
valdivia
@Chad N Freude:
The Kirsch article you cite tracks a bit with the Mark Lilla stuff I linked to earlier, though Lilla is pretty critical of Strauss. I would read his two pieces on the NYRB (I linked to one above and that article links to the previous one). I am not defending Strauss but I think a lot of people who have never read him (like for example his Natural Right and History) think they know what Strauss is about. Both those who use him to defend their crazy political views and those who use the misconceptions to say things about him that do not track with his many books. Again a big big problem is that Strauss is now understood through the veil of The Straussian Myth created by his students (not unlike what happened with the political thinker Kojeve in France and his lectures on The Last Man.)
I will dissent here and say that if one is looking for a German thinker whose philosophy is very much in line with the neocons and their world view re Foreign Policy one should be pointing to Carl Schmitt.
vwcat
I find this fascinating.
this is a group that is basically dangerous with their flawed thinking and hubris. They see themselves as intellectually superior and those who are neocons as being inferior.
Kristol is the king of the neos now that daddy is gone.
the odd thing is his promoting of the ever stupid Palin.
But, then, I think he is led by other part of himself besides his flawed mind in that respect.
They want to tinker and manipulate. Chances are, Fox is their big experimental playground in which to observe and tinker.
rootless_e
The links between Strauss, Schmidt, and Kojeve are complex. To me, Kojeve is the most french philosopher of all time. First, he was russian. Second he had a famously dense philosophical body of work. Third, his real life was as a bureaucratic mandarin.
As for Strauss, more some other time, but I don’t buy the excuses for him.
Chad N Freude
@valdivia: Thanks. Did I mention that I like reading your comments?
valdivia
@rootless_e:
I agree with you and FYI not making excuses for Strauss. I just don’t think a lot of people have actually read him. I think a lot of people know about Strauss the way they know about Marx, the hit lines etc. But reading his work gives one a much more complex picture than what is usually presented. I find Schmitt much more fascinating, much more dangerous and much more ubiquitous in our political thinking (and now just here, he pops out all over the ideological map and in all sorts of geographical areas as an inspiration).
@Chad N Freude:
you’re welcome. and thanks for your comment, some blushing added for good measure.
Wile E. Quixote
@rootless_e
Yeah, pity that.
New Yorker
@Janet Strange:
Yup. I’ve long seen the American Civil War as a sort of clash between a feudal aristocracy and the modern liberal state. West Virginia seceded from Virginia because they had no feudal society to protect: it was all poor mountain folk and (along the Ohio) an industrial economy more akin to that of Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
East Tennessee, another mountainous plantation-free region, also never recognized that state’s secession.
I also add, anecdotally, that even today, you don’t see a lot of battle flags waving or streets named after Robert E. Lee in the areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
And that brings us back to the modern working-class GOP voter who continues to vote against their own interests. Why should we expect that to change when their ancestors marched ill-clad and ill-fed to be cut to pieces by cannon fire at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, etc. to preserve a way of life that would leave them and their children in abject poverty forever?
Wile E. Quixote
@New Yorker
Well this isn’t surprising given that many neo-cons were Marxists. Irving Kristol, who was regarded as the father of the neoconservative movement, was a Trotskyite. David Horowitz loves to tell stories of how he was a red diaper baby who was so radical that he fellated every member of the Black Panthers as an act of revolutionary solidarity. Ron Radosh is another red-diaper baby and Stalinist who became a neo-con. True Believers one and all.
thag
@Slaney Black: So? There are assholes of every stripe. Ha, that’s a funny sentence.
Delia
@New Yorker:
It’s called distraction. The later Russian Tsars distracted Russian peasants from their very real grievances against the government by whipping up anger against the Jews. The white aristocracy in the American South has always distracted the poor whites from the fact of their abysmal social and economic condition by asserting their putative superiority over African-Americans, thus reinforcing racism for both upper and lower class whites. And now the GOP continues the game with God, guns, and the spectre of soc-ialism. The beat goes on.
Janet Strange
@New Yorker:
Exactly. This is why I’m so riveted by Battle Cry of Freedom. Not because I’m so fascinated by the Civil War (though of course it is essential to understand America), but because the Bush years made me a political junkie.
I’m truly astounded at how little has changed. The politics, the basic ideological split, how ordinary people are convinced that they should fight and die for something that is so fundamentally wrong. Slavery or delusions of a neo-con “New American Century.” Still the same.
Because human nature hasn’t changed, I suppose.
cotterperson
@SiubhanDuinne:
Joe the Plumber is speaking at the VFW in my little Ozark town in the next few days.
Ugh.
Liberty60
@MTiffany:
I disagree. You are not well versed in your Victor Davis Hanson.
Having a society comprised of gentlemen, served by an underclass of child-raping cannibals IS the societal order that they so fervently desire.
cotterperson
@SiubhanDuinne:
Joe the Plumber is speaking at the VFW in my little Ozark town in the next few days.
Ugh.
@Janet Strange:
aimai
Thanks for posting the link to the original article. I remember when the word “Straussian” first popped into my consciousness and those early articles are described in the long essay you’ve linked up above. At the time that we first started hearing about the Straussians they seemed harmful enough, infiltrating their way into the Reagan regime and offering cheap grace to modern american imperialism. But now that we can look back and see the full unfolding of the results in the Iraq war, among other things, the whole thing looks even worse.
The descriptions of Strauss as a teacher make clear that a huge part of his attraction for his students was a kind of almost homoerotic/incestous thrill that young, impressionable, assholic male students can experience when they come into contact with a greater mind capable of impressing them with an endless stream of reminiscences ( “when I met Heidegger”) and classical references (“my own reading of Aristotle…”). These tiny groups, like frats for intellectuals, become all the more intense as the struggle for employment and meaning outside the university gets tougher and more competitive. This is the true source of the discomfort of the straussians with multiculturalism and feminism and atheism, by the way–all these “isms” lead, inevitably, to the rise of a true meritocracy in which the professor and the student lose their accustomed role and relationship.
The professor is prevented from utilizing favoritism, paternalism, nepotism, ethnocentrism and sexism in determining who he shall teach, and how, and with what results (grades, jobs, favors) and his students are no longer certain to benefit from such things when competition is open and refereed.
The small group of those who “knew strauss” and his perfections is nothing more than the kind of tiny, favored, in group that the modern university discourages by its sheer class size. But what a pleasure for the in students, the favored few, to listen to a public lecture and to know that they, alone, of the masses, have been given the secret decoder ring that enables them to grasp the teacher’s true meaning? And imagine the pleasure of that continuing, for Bill Kristol among others, to appear on TV and give lectures and insights onto major political events–to have a hand in shaping (as he sees it) the future of the country secure in the knowledge that he is not speaking to inform, but to manipulate, not to advance knowledge but to advance a strategy. This is the secret to his impenetrable, teflon like good humor: none of us matter to him because we are not members of the elite.
aimai
tootiredoftheright
@Quiddity:
There was a BBC series that had a lot more about Strauss and why the Islamis Fanatics share a lot in common with the neoconservatives.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Northern Observer
I am sure that Strauss is a worthwhile read and has some interesting points to make and I have put him on my long term reading list. I am a political liberal but I too share misgivings about the enlightenment social/political project and I can understand the necessity of elites for the proper functioning of a healthy social order. But what gets me about Strauss and his ‘children’ is how they seem to have created a destructive unwise elite that is steadily dragging the US into the dirt of decline. The little factoid about Strauss that knocked me out of my shoes was when I read that he idolized Whilhelmine Germany as the perfect political and social order; he saw it as the living utopia of Platos Republic. Now this is distasteful enough, since Whilhelmine Germany was very much a managed constitutional monarchy with harsh limits on democratic input and repression of large segments of society, but this is not what gets me; what gets me is how an intellectual can continue to idolize a political social order that self destructed the way the Whilhelmine Germany did. I mean this was the country/regime that was addicted to war with its neighbours, so much so that it blundered into the first world war and brought down the social order conservatives like Strauss lament so much. How can one go on romanticising a political order that destroyed itself so utterly and completely? So there is more than a little irony involved when the US straussians promote “gentlemen” who are steadily ruining America through a series of foreign wars.
tootiredoftheright
@Northern Observer:
Once again http://www.archive.org/details…..Nightmares shows the huge flaws with Strauss mainly put forward myth over reality and truth. If the truth interferes with the myth disregard the truth.
MTiffany
@aimai:
Yes, and then they take it upon themselves to lecture the rest us about the value of the hard work they have never done a day of in their whole corrupted lives.
MTiffany
@Northern Observer:
Give it a mythology which cannot be disproved or is merely dangerous to life and limb to publicly question, eg ‘american exceptionalism.’