Are neoconservatives really linked to Strauss?

[gitfiddle]

Last semester, I started reading Leo Strauss when I was writing a paper on Heidegger, and to this day I'm trying to figure out what Strauss had to do with neoconservatives. I bring it up because someone recently told me that in one of the metro stations here in Paris after Bush was re-elected someone spray-painted "Stop the Straussians."

When I read Strauss, I see much of what he was saying as being opposite of what I would imagine a neo-con to assert. His views on education and philosophy just don't seem that incredibly conservative.

Am I missing something along the lines of what is written in "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Am I misreading what's written between the lines?

Or, is it the fact that neo-cons don't read between the lines? that they took literally Strauss's intentional self-contradictions?

I don't know that I'm smart enough to read Strauss, but I'm interested in understanding the link.

[astorian]

While it would be unwise to give Leo Strauss too much importance, he WAS very influential among a certain segment of conservatives, and has been for some time.

And you're right- that IS odd in some ways, because Strauss' philosophy is not a traditionally conservative one, not at all.

One of the leading Straussians was Allan Bloom, who had a huge (and completely unexpected) best seller with "The Closing of the American Mind." Now I suspect most people who bought it didn't really read it, or read just the chapters on rock & roll (Bloom hated it) and cultural relativism (he thought it was stupid to condemn Western civilization for considering itself superior to all othgers, since EVERY civilization in history has thought itself superior to all others). Those folks assumed he was a traditional conservative and moralist; hence, conservative critics almost always praised the book, and liberals panned it with as much venom as they could muster.

As one of the few who read it all the way through (not easy- much of it was a real snoozer!), I can tell you both sides got Bloom (and Strauss) all wrong. The moronic William Greider of Rolling Stone said at the time that Bloom was an ally of Jerry Falwell. Ha! Bloom was a gay, Jewish atheist who had NO regard for Christianity or traditional morality. But Greider, like many equally wrong-head conservatives, assumed a guy who hated rock music & cultural relativism must be a Moral Majoritarian!

Strauss believed that almost all the great philosophers of history, from Socrates to Heidegger, believed pretty much the same things (that God doesn't exist, that man must make his own moral codes), but had to hide their messages due to persecution. But, he said, these great minds filled their work with little clues that showed what they REALLY believed. So, for example, if you find Rene Descartes' "proof" of the existence of God rather weak, well, that's because Descartes WANTED brilliant folks like Strauss to see through his phony proof, and infer what he was really saying.

Does that sound like something William F. Buckley or Jerry Falwell would buy into?

[Evil Captor]

Ask the Master, (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031212.html) Astorian.

[BrainGlutton]

In the June 2004 issue of Harper's, Earl Shorris published an article: "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception." Text at http://www.lacosapizza.com/shorris.html. His thesis is that the worldview of the neocons is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s. Strauss's thesis is that all great philosophical texts contain "hidden meanings." Philosophers and intellectuals cannot and should not write clearly enough say what they really mean -- cannot because it is too dangerous (Strauss was a refugee from Hitler's Germany, which experience influenced his thinking all his life), and should not because true wisdom is the proper province of an elite. Strauss was also an aristocratic elitist and a natural-law theorist. From Shorris' article:

WISE MEN TELL NOBLE LIES

The President of the United States told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. His secretaries of defense and state made the same assertions. They claimed to be telling the kind of truth that enables good countries to go to war against evil ones. . . .

One of the great services that Strauss and his disciples have performed for the Bush regime has been the provision of a philosophy of the noble lie, the conviction that lies, from being simply a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy. The idea's provenance could not be more elevated: Plato himself advised his nobles, men with golden souls, to tell noble lies . . . to keep the other levels of human society (silver, iron, brass) in their proper places, loyal to the state and willing to do its bidding. Strauss, too, advised the telling of noble lies in the service of the national interest, and he held Plato's view of aristocrats as persons so virtuous that such lies would be used only for the good, for keeping order in the state and in the world. He defined the modern method of the noble lie in the use of esoteric messages within an exoteric text, telling the truth to the wise while at the same time conveying something quite different to the many.

For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that "free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction," this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon.

ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

William Kristol has written that "Strauss, by way of his students, is in large part responsible for making the thought and principles of America's founders a source of political knowledge and appeal, and for making political excellence more broadly a subject of appreciation and study. America's founders thought it self-evident that all men are created equal, and yet increasing inequality has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration, as it was of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Donald Rumsfeld's primary task under Ronald Reagan was to rid the country of the Great Society programs of the early 1960s. Irving Kristol, an early Straussian, advised Reagan and Rumsfeld and their staffs of the need to stop coddling hungry children, educating the poor, and helping the aged, the infirm, victims of prejudice. The current Bush Administration works more boldly toward inequality. It has adopted a tax system suggested by Grover Norquist, another Straussian, a man who publicy compared the inheritance tax to the Holocaust.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the Great Books Program, said, "The best education for the best is the best education for all." In 1959, Strauss wrote that "Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society." In one sentence he had stated his elitism and his distaste for what he called the vulgarity of democratic society. Three years later he made the ruling elite permanent: "We must not expcet that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and privilege of a minority." Arrogance follows elitism. It leads to cruelty, the capability, even the desire, to use people, to make them into things. No follower of Strauss can agree with Kant's description of human dignity: man is not a means but an end in himself. The Straussians assign dignity to the few, and those who are deprived of dignity cannot pursue happiness. The study of Strauss's work does lead to thinking about the Founders: not how they would agree with Straussians but how they would oppose them.

[astorian]

On this issue, I don't have to ask the Master. I've been reading the leading conservative magazines since I was in high school, so I've long been familiar with the name Leo Strauss and with the concept of neoconservatism.

Which is more than the liberals babbling about the threat posed by "neocons" and "Straussians" can say.

First of all, there are practically no neoconservatives in the Bush administration ,and there were never more than a few (like the much maligned Paul Wolfowitz) in the first place. Almost all the leading neoconservatives, from William Kristol on down, were John McCain supporters (why? Because neoconservatives tend to be concerned with foreign policy, first and foremost, and candidate Bush showed almost no interest in foreign policy) and as such, they were almost all shut out of the Bush administration.

Second, Leo Strauss had little or nothing to say about American foreign policy.

Third, Strauss's most devoted followers were never the neoconservatives of the Commentary/Weekly Standard set.

So, was Strauss a weird guy who taught some odd concepts? In my opinion, definitely. But do his theories and his followers carry any real weight or wield any real power in the current White House? Nope. And neither do many genuine neoconservatives.

My feeling is, most of the people using "neocon" as a perjorative have no clue what "neoconservative" means. And people usually just look silly when they use big words without knowing what they mean.

[rjung]

My feeling is, most of the people using "neocon" as a perjorative have no clue what "neoconservative" means.
Demonizing a political term? Never saw that before! (http://www.perspectives.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=75715&forum_id=6) ;)

[astorian]

Demonizing a political term? Never saw that before! (http://www.perspectives.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=75715&forum_id=6) ;)


All I know is, any definition of "neocon" that includes Dick Cheney is a pretty stupid definition.

And then you've got people like Mick Jagger singing about neocons, and suggesting they're bad Christians (when a London School of Economics alumnus should know practically all the leading neoconservatives are Jews, and secular ones).

For isnoramuses (ignorami?) on the Left, "Neocon" apparently means nothing more or less than "conservatives I REALLY don't like."

[BrainGlutton]

All I know is, any definition of "neocon" that includes Dick Cheney is a pretty stupid definition.

Why? Cheney might not have any credentials in neocon-oriented think-tanks, but if, in his official duties he acts exactly as PNAC would like him to act, shouldn't he be considered an honorary neocon?

[BrainGlutton]

First of all, there are practically no neoconservatives in the Bush administration ,and there were never more than a few (like the much maligned Paul Wolfowitz) in the first place. Almost all the leading neoconservatives, from William Kristol on down, were John McCain supporters (why? Because neoconservatives tend to be concerned with foreign policy, first and foremost, and candidate Bush showed almost no interest in foreign policy) and as such, they were almost all shut out of the Bush administration.

Yeah, right.

From "A Tragedy of Errors" by Michael Lind, The Nation, 2/23/05 -- :

Paradoxically, Perle and Frum happened to publish their manifesto of neoconservative grand strategy [An End to Evil] at the very moment many of their colleagues were insisting in print that neoconservatism does not exist, and that the neocons have no influence on US foreign policy. Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong. As of this writing, more US soldiers have died in the unnecessary second war in Iraq than have been killed in any other US military venture since Vietnam, and several thousand Iraqis have died, with many more maimed (the Bush Pentagon does not bother to count Iraqi casualties). As the enormity of the debacle became apparent, neoconservatives abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this.

David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in the same way that the Committee on the Present Danger used to broadcast the views of Paul Nitze and Gene Rostow, who as government officials were guarded in their own public comments.

Brooks continued: "In truth, the people labeled neocons... travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." In truth--to use Brooks's phrase--among those who have signed PNAC letters are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Robert Kagan. PNAC is run by William Kristol, who edits The Weekly Standard, for which Brooks writes, and is the son of Irving Kristol, founder of The Public Interest and former publisher of The National Interest, who wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and is married to the neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, William's mother. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist who has worked for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times and the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns The Weekly Standard and Fox Television. Norman is the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former Iran/contra figure and former head of the neocon Ethics and Public Policy Center and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Elliott's mother-in-law and Norman's wife, Midge Decter, like many older neocons a veteran of the old Committee on the Present Danger, was recently given a National Humanities Medal after publishing a fawning biography of Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith, veterans of the Committee on the Present Danger and Team B, the intelligence advisory group that grossly exaggerated Soviet military power in the 1970s and '80s. Perle, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (and its former head), is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and sits on the board of Hollinger International, a right-wing media conglomerate (including the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph) controlled by Conrad Black, the chairman of the editorial board of The National Interest, which Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Perle and Feith--both PNAC allies--helped write a 1996 paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," on behalf of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith and the other US and Israeli authors called on Israel to abandon the Oslo process and to restore martial law in the Palestinian territories long before the second intifada began. Co-authorship is common among the neocons: Brooks and Kristol, Kristol and Kagan, Frum and Perle.

These are people who, according to David Brooks, "don't actually have much contact with one another."

(Mods: Above is a long quote from a very, very long article; it's fair use; please do not delete.)