Shadia Drury: "Leo Strauss and the American Right." ,"Saving America"

[G_j]

http://www.uregina.ca/arts/CRC/book_americanright.html

Prof. Shadia Drury:
"Leo Strauss and the
American Right."

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States for his first term and the conservative revolution that had been slowly developing in the United States finally emerged in full-throated roar. Who provoked this revolution? Shadia Drury provides a fascinating answer to this question as she looks at the work of Leo Strauss, a seemingly reclusive German-Jewish émigré and scholar, who was one of the most influential individuals in the neoconservative movement, a man widely seen as the godfather of the Republican party’s “Contract with America.” Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, was one of Strauss’s students; the works of Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and William Kristol, as well as Chief Justice Clarence Thomas and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, also show Strauss’s influence. Drury delves deeply into Strauss’s work at the University of Chicago, where he taught his students that, if they truly loved America, they must save her from her fateful enchantment with liberalism. Leo Strauss and the American Right is a fascinating piece of work that anyone interested in understanding our current political situation will want to read.

==

You can find more about Shadia Drury at her website:
http://www.uregina.ca/arts/CRC /

Her essay, "Saving America," can be found on the MAIN homepage at
http://www.main.nc.us .

or directly at, http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/254.html

[whistle]

1. This is not the Strauss who wrote all of those wonderful waltzes..

...is it? :blush:

I just love it when the conservative right wing crap gets exposed to the sunshine and melts away like the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz.

<snip>

Saving America
Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives
By Shadia B. Drury

Shadia Drury gets to the bottom of neoconservatism.

There is a growing awareness that a reclusive German émigré philosopher is the inspiration behind the reigning neoconservative ideology of the Republican Party. Leo Strauss has long been a cult figure within the North American academy. And even though he had a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy, his disciples have gone to great lengths to conceal the fact. And for the most part they have succeeded -- as the article by James Atlas in The New York Times and the article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker indicate. This picture of Strauss as the great American patriot, who was a lover of freedom and democracy is pure fabrication. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The trouble with the Straussians is that they are compulsive liars. But it is not altogether their fault. Strauss was very pre-occupied with secrecy because he was convinced that the truth is too harsh for any society to bear; and that the truth-bearers are likely to be persecuted by society - specially a liberal society - because liberal democracy is about as far as one can get from the truth as Strauss understood it.

Strauss's disciples have inherited a superiority complex as well as a persecution complex. They are convinced that they are the superior few who know the truth and are entitled to rule. But they are afraid to speak the truth openly, lest they are persecuted by the vulgar many who do not wish to be ruled by them. This explains why they are eager to misrepresent the nature of Strauss's thought. They are afraid to reveal that Strauss was a critic of liberalism and democracy, lest he be regarded as an enemy of America. So, they wrap him in the American flag and pretend that he is a champion of liberal democracy for political reasons - their own quest for power. The result is that they run roughshod over truth as well as democracy.

<more>
<link> http://evatt.org.au/publications/papers/112.html

[Colorado Blue]

2. Oh, brother. I scanned through her article and it worries me

deeply.

The references to "the superior few" strike me as edging toward the kind of conspiracy theories, that You Know Who are trying to dominate the world -

Can some other DU'ers please kick in here? Surely I am not alone in suspecting this article of lacking a certain scholarly rigor?

I think, this woman's POV is fruit of some kind of poison tree, which has its roots in bigotry and not in fact.

I do not espouse the neocon philosophy, Pax Americana, so forth - obviously. I'm just a rank and file Democrat who's been flyin' the peace flag for longer than I care to mention.

By the same token, the espousal of forward-leaning American strength and dominance is NOT a new idea. It has been practiced in FACT for decades now - look at Southeast Asia ('Nam) and Latin America. The demise of the Soviet Union has caused people who espouse such an aggressive stance to act more recklessly and more openly, as we have seen in Iraq.

The consequences of THAT particular debacle should cool the jets a bit, I think; "pax", after all, means "peace" and I think it should be obvious to all they they F***** UP, and that peace is going to be better served by making - uh - PEACE, rather than creating wars.

On the other hand, we fought in 'Nam for years, ditto in Latin America, so what do I know.

Certainly, the interests of the global multinational corporations are served by our armies and our soldiers: the acquisition of favorable trading terms has not always come through deal making on the telephone. We have long used wars, large and small, to help advance the commercial interests that help fuel our economy. This should hardly come as a shock to adults, or to people who are aware of the rationales behind the creation of multinational corporations OR of powerful nations with global economic and geopolitical interests.

I am extremely concerned about this article and its implications. This is NOT scholarship. She is implying something altogether different, impugning the very well documented social liberalism of Strauss and his followers and bringing up the ancient specter of "world domination" theories.

Read Seymour Hersch. HE is a great writer. And the University of Chicago is a GREAT academic institution, hardly a hotbed of sneaky conspiracies.

[Stephanie]

3. Read up on Strauss and PNAC here >

Shadia Drury is a well-respected scholar.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=110&topic_id=80&mesg_id=80

[G_j]

4. did you think so?

it sounds like you are linking this to a long discredited 'document' and the people who believe in it. Strauss was a real person whose ideas inspired some of the neo-cons. I don't think that is a "conspiracy theory".

[KlatooBNikto]

5. Shadia Drury is a well respected scholar.Her research into Strauss'

thinking and writing have been meticulously researched and subjected to many peer reviews.

If anything, I think she understates the poisonous nature of Strauss' influence. This is a man who escaped the clutches of Nazism and came to Chicago only to discover that what he detested about the Master Race concept was that the Nazis did not include Jews like him in that framework. He reformulated the same idea as the Elite and the Masses with the Elite born to rule because of their superior knowledge and the Masses to obey the Elite becsue they were given to frivolity.He may even have come to detest America because after 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans were given Equal Rights with the Whites.Strauss believed that was a big mistake because "these Masses were just not ready for power".
He was a vicious creature and the spawn like Kristol, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft that he produced attest to his pernicious influence.

Shadia Drury makes a compelling case against this man who may very well have given rise to an American Fascism as evil as Nazism.

[Eloriel]

7. Very well said, and I think we owe Shadia Drury a great deal

To my knowledge, she alone has been studying these people (tho others may have joined the party since then). It's also true that Strauss's writing aren't easy to read and decipher, esp. given that there was an instinct for purposeful lack of forthcomingness (aka: dishonesty and trachery).

[Stephanie]

10. Jeet Heer of the Boston Globe also

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg106270.html

The Philosopher
The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?

By Jeet Heer, 5/11/2003

ODD AS THIS MAY SOUND, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush's Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss's work and trace his disciples' affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.

Yet while the extent of Strauss's influence is wide, his writings are frequently obscure, and his legacy is hotly disputed by admirers and critics alike. Certainly, Strauss was no ordinary Republican idea-maker: Steeped in ancient philosophy, he had dark forebodings about democracy, religion, technology, and nearly everything else that can claim the allegiance of the contemporary conservative (or liberal, for that matter).

At first glance, a University of Chicago professor who spent most of his life pondering old books would seem an unlikely master-thinker for the policy wonks, career bureaucrats, and pundits who make up Washington's unelected elite. Strauss held that politics was a central human activity, but he also believed that ''all practical or political life is inferior to contemplative life.'' He participated in the battle of ideas not by issuing political manifestoes or angling for bureaucratic power, but by writing recondite and difficult books.

A typical Strauss volume is a densely packed commentary on a classic text like Plato's ''The Laws'' or Machiavelli's ''The Prince,'' festooned with footnotes drawing on an array of hard-won languages from ancient Greek and Latin to medieval Arabic. It's often difficult to discern where Strauss's paraphrases of dead writers leave off and his own views begin-and this has only deepened the mystery that attaches to his work. <more>

[Eloriel]

6. And NOW you get to step up to the plate --

impugning the very well documented social liberalism of Strauss and his followers

and put your research where your mouth is. I would absolutely LOVE to see documentation of this "well-documented social liberalsm" of Strauss and the others, along with a thoroughly cceptably definition of same. And while you're at it, please tell us why "social liberalism" is of any relevence in this discussion anyway -- these Straussians/neo-cons/PNACers are all about foreign affaris, NOT domestic affairs. They're perfectly happy to let the Christian Right keep the masses occupied (another part of Strauss's philosophy) while they're busy conducting geopolitical madness.

Meanwhile, here are a few of MY favorite links on Strauss and the Neo-Cons:

One more time: LEO STRAUSS AND THE NEO-CONS
http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=7200&forum=DCForumID70&archive=yes
WAKE UP! - Strauss / Neocons and Terror PLUS dire warnings
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1780890#1781801

Leo Strauss and the Noble Lie: The Neo-Cons at War
http://www.logosjournal.com/mason.htm

Straussian.net -- Leo Strauss and the History of Political Thought
(with Discussion Forums! Book Reviews and a News Blog)
http://www2.bc.edu/~wilsonop/strauss.html

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2003.
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935
linked to from this thread: Has Straussian ideology permeated the GOP?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2121269#2122935

Eurolegal Services - Neoconservatives
http://www.eurolegal.org/useur/usneocon.htm

Wikepedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
U.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_%28United_States%29

History Will Absolve Me (Hegelian philosophical roots)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1591968#1592078

[KlatooBNikto]

8. As I have posted above, the social liberalism of Strauss is a myth

designed to provide him a cover from the well documented attacks by scholars like Drury.He was nothing of the sort.He was the brains behind the movement of jews away from Liberalism especially the breakup of the coalition with the blacks.He turned the University of Chicago, never a liberal institution into a viper's nest of poisonous intellectuals from Milton Friedman ( Economics),Bellow ( Literature) and certainly the worst, Strauss himself.Even a cursory reading of his writings shows how great an admirer he was of the Nazi concept of Master Race, which he artfully concealed by concocting different phrases for the same concept.

[Colorado Blue]

13. Many people who have read Nietzsche may appear to be

interested in the "master race". That's an error in interpretation, I think, one famously said to have been made by Hitler himself. It is also said that he took Wagner's ravings seriously, so what can I tell you.

Nietzsche's philosophy is not nearly so blatant, nor is it meant to be taken literally. It is PHILOSOPHY, ideas, meant to provoke thought and discussion.

Also, there is no law that says Jewish people have to be liberals. Nor is the fact that some Jewish people have chosen a more conservative political outlook, a sinister thing. Nor is the fact that a few Jews have sought political power, in whatever party.

Why SHOULDN'T they? Everybody else in America has sought political power; is there something worrisome about Jews wanting to serve their government?

People are free, as far as I know, to choose their political party and affiliation in the US of A.

I am concerned that Jewishness is an issue, among critics of the neocon philosophy. That, among other things, is what makes me uneasy about the article.

That the author has academic creds, I will grant you. Obviously, she is well known.

However, I've also read her reviews of Bellow and they make me nervous.

Friedman and Bellow are highly regarded intellectuals, gifted people. Strauss has something to offer as well.

In America, we are free to read their work and discuss their ideas. We do not have to espouse them, nor should we fear them.

We DO need to fear the confluence of corporate and religious and political power, such as we are now seeing in the Republican Party. That is why we need to be very creative, to present the liberal idea. We are in danger of being locked out of the discourse because we lack the thinktanks, the media outlets, and frankly the ideas.

Strauss actually has some nuts and bolts ideas about how to do that, how to get things done. This is "vizier craft", if you will. It is not evil, it is simply a fact. Powerful people have worked behind crowns since there WERE crowns.

Think of Merlin.

[KlatooBNikto]

15. What I have said in my post is that I found it incongruous and repulsive

that a man who sought refuge in America from Nazi barbarism, found that the Untermenschen of our country ( blacks, hispanics, native Americans and Asians) did not meet his Nietzschean concept of superman.In fact, I would go so far as to say when you read Strauss the obvious parallel that comes to mind is Mein Kampf, not the Prince.

[Colorado Blue]

16. Yes, that sucks. nt

[Colorado Blue]

17. Wait a second - I thought of something. The Greeks, Plato

and Aristotle, also had reservations about direct democracy.

In fact Greece was a slave-state and women couldn't vote, but beyond that Plato firmly believed the best system wasn't democracy but the rule of a philosopher-king, who would embody the virtue of "arete" (excellence).

They said , democracy breeds mediocrity.

Are you sure this isn't the true link, thought-wise?

[KlatooBNikto]

18. Your need to make apologies for a man who found our idea of democracy

"distasteful" by invoking his affinity for the Greek philosophers is,to state it mildly, quite revealing.We need not perform mental gymnastics in behalf of Strauss. He was a vicious creature who found blacks,Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians unworthy of sitting at a table with his own exalted self.He wanted to identify himself with the likes of his one time scourge Adolf himself. All his posturings and the evil spawn he has produced at the evil institution, the University of Chicago, attest to his detructive bent.

[Colorado Blue]

9. OK, since y'all chimed in, I will reply all at once.

Nothing I have read about what is bothering people about Strauss' philosophy, so far, strikes me as being either new or particularly scary.

The Prince particularly comes to mind, Machiavelli's blueprint for the acquisition and manipulation of power.

This is new?

What people probably THINK is new, is that people like Bush, people born into wealth and power, study this stuff with their Wheaties. So do others, NOT born into wealth and power, but who would like to influence the political shape of their time.

That is not a crime. In fact, if people of the lower classes did not learn how to acquire and manipulate power, the rich, the kings, would NEVER be deposed.

In a sense, this is a progressive philosophy, not a reactionary one. It is teaching the following:

a) political power exists
b) it can be desirable if you are into that sort of thing
c) if you are not born into the powerful classes, here's how you can get some

and implied, is

d) in some cases, it is necessary to acquire political power, otherwise needed reforms can't occur.

The so-called PNAC/Neocon philosophy is based on this, I think, along with a cold-eyed view of how to project American power into the world - which we've been doing anyway.

Nor would America be the first nation to seek imperial power. As I said above, we have been doing it for decades.

The PNAC docs, so forth, do not represent the introduction of these ideas into American politics, it simply puts it out there where people can read about them. This is the role of the university, after all. And we should be glad they're public, we can debate these ideas openly.

I studied both Machiavelli and Nietzsche in school. Their ideas have not turned me into a prince or an ubermensch.

However, I did attend school with people born into the upper classes, who most definitely are aware that they will be Princes of the Universe all their lives. They learn how to manipulate others, how to use wealth, power, in their cradles. More, they learn a sense of entitlement to the above.

Strauss, it seems to me, is teaching people the IDEAS, which have been around forever, of power and its acquisition, in an open university.

People NOT born into the ruling classes have need of their tools, do they not, if they are to effectively break down the barriers of privilege and class?

Fire back!

And thanks for the conversations, and the links, I appreciate them:)

[KlatooBNikto]

11. You left out the most salient tidbits of the Straussian Philosophy.

That the Elite are not just entitled to acquire power by any means necessary but can dissemble and evade the truth to the masses.That is a new one on the American Scene. That is what has led to the stonewalling of the 9/11 event,the election fraud,the WMD deception and the like.

[Stephanie]

12. it's a very convenient philosophy, isn't it?

[Colorado Blue]

14. OK, now THAT is dangerous. It isn't new either, but in

America, it's troubling.

Control of the media of course is more like a totalitarian idea. For the news outlets to all be owned by corporate sources, that is bad.

However, I understand that Gore has bought a network, television, and moreover WE can write, we have the 'net, and we can think and create. Other wealthy liberals are investing in infrastructure, Soros for example.

I think we're fine. We see all this, we see the shape of what we have to fight.

What worries me MORE, are these two factors:

Americans being passive, hynotized. We're drugged, we aren't acting vigorously or creatively these days. That's not just government propaganda, it's something deeper. Maybe it's advertising:)

It's as though our culture is tired, people are dragging their asses from bed to SUV to work and back. Where is the vigor? This isn't the America I remember! And, there's a sense either of stupid complacency, or a sense of hopelessness - take your pick.

Secondly, a lot of the air, the creativity, seems to have gone out of our culture. This, I blame on capitalism, unchecked. Creativity frequently doesn't pay well - I should know, I'm a painter. Our economic system punishes creativity that is really "out there", that exists for its own sake. Yet without it, the culture will die.

We need to vigorously support art, science, mathematics, philosophy - and that includes people we don't like, like Strauss! They keep us alive, on our toes.

See, already we've had a good argument and it's still early.

Thanks to all:)