THE NEO-CONS: HOW WE GOT INTO THE DITCH ( part 1/4 )            >>>  PART 2 
( from the March 2006 issue of HALVASON NEWS )

In the early 1960's I lived in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, which surrounded the Gothic-spired University of Chicago. Daily I rode a commuter train to my magazine job in the Loop District, but I frequently seized the opportunity to hear the University's visiting speakers. When walking past the football field I always slowed in reflection that underneath the bleachers was a laboratory where Enrico Fermi secretly built the first nuclear reactor, which created the atom bomb that ended World War II. 

But when passing a massive gray stone building I was unaware that in an upstairs lecture hall was incubating a political movement that soon would begin infiltrating the government and laying groundwork for another foreign war. That lecturer was Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish middle-aged professor of political philosophy who had immigrated to this country in 1937. He first taught briefly at the New School for Social Research in lower Manhattan, before finding a niche at the University of Chicago, where he remained until his death in 1973. 

Strauss was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Kirchhain, Germany in 1889 and was an obscure biblical scholar before leaving Germany in 1934 to pursue graduate study. He was never a Nazi, but he was an early admirer of Hitler for the firm way he took control of Germany after the demise of the ineffective Weimar Republic, which he despised. He was also dazzled by that famous trio of German intellectuals, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who were the philosophical shapers of the Nazi party. Strauss would continue to revere these men, even after turning against Hitler upon learning of the concentration camps. It was Schmitt, the designer of the silent coup that installed Hitler, who arranged for Strauss to obtain a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study in France and later in England, which led to his coming here. 

Strauss' graduate classes in political philosophy were exceedingly popular because of the novelty of his ideas. They posited a totally different society, a radical reversal of the American political tradition. His pleasant, mild manner contrasted with the urgency of his message. It was that our country was dangerously on the wrong track and was headed for catastrophe if it didn't change course. His perspective, based on his unique experience, was that our society was seriously flawed. His lectures were a kind of peering under the government's hood to point out its defective parts. 

Foremost, he insisted, was liberalism. Our liberal democracy courted danger by giving people too much freedom like the Weimar did. In his view the liberal Weimar had invited Hitler. For hadn't Hitler been democratically elected? Yes, liberalism invited dictatorship. Further, liberal education cultivated open-mindedness, which bred tolerance for a plurality of values - bad in his opinion. Best for society when citizens could agree on their values instead of differing. What's more liberal leaders were too weak. Society needed a firm hand at the tiller. Also citizens needed to be more united, more nationalist, and to be that required them to be united against something, some external threat. A stable order required it. 

Strauss saw the human animal as being antagonist by nature and he believed that trait can be directed to benefit the State if the antagonism is directed toward an enemy. People need a common enemy, he said. It creates a readiness to defend. In his opinion, a government should operate in a permanent mode of wariness and suspicion. If no external threat exists, "then one should be manufactured." One of his critics Shadia Drury, a professor of politics at the University of Calgary, said Strauss' ideas transferred into an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy." 

Strauss was much taken with Nietzsche's vision of the 20th century as an age of war leading up to a unified planet ruled by philosophical supermen. He foresaw his male students participating in it, but didn't see women taking a place among the philosophical rulers. Women lacked a passion for wisdom, he thought. 

A female student who was not enamored with Strauss remembered his student followers as "tiny little men with rounded shoulders who would lean back in their chairs and declare that nature had made men superior to women." She recalled Strauss' faculty followers as "larger softer men with soft white hands that had never held a gun or changed a tire but who delivered disquisitions on manliness." Another under-whelmed observer accused Strauss of cultivating a following that self-righteously saw themselves as natural aristocracy who deserved privilege and were without obligation to have-nots. Strauss scorned the burgeoning welfare programs. 

He also criticized the United States for inviting a diversity of people into the country. Mixing so many different races together robbed people of their distinctiveness. He strongly urged American Jews to cherish and preserve their traditions and religion and not to assimilate. Be loyal Jewish nationalists, he counseled. In one respect persecution was positive, in his view; it discouraged Jews from assimilating. 

Another serious flaw in our society was our government was too open. Government should operate largely in secret, Strauss believed. Different factions of society have different interests and in order to control them the strong leader must practice deception. He agreed with Machiavelli that deception and deviousness were not wrong if done in the national interest. Truth was not always good for society. It can be dangerous and destructive, so should be reserved for a small elite equipped to handle it. He also accepted the Machiavellian doctrine that moral considerations have no place in political power. Strauss' published writings in books and journals were largely esoteric and concealed. He claimed all serious writers likewise obscured their message from the masses. 

The American belief in equality was another weakness. He didn't hold with the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. To emphasize equality, in his opinion was a recipe for mediocrity. Moreover, what the Founding Fathers saw as inalienable rights were not inalienable at all. Rights were what a strong leader decided were practical and workable. He further didn't believe that government by popular consent is the only legitimate form of government. And like Machiavelli, he believed society should be hierarchal, divided between the educated elites and the masses who should follow trustingly. 

Nor did Strauss believe in separation of church and state. Indeed, he thought they should be tightly entwined. The state needed religion to hold society together and maintain order. People have a natural tendency toward evil, in his view, and won't behave unless they believe in a god who punishes wickedness and rewards righteousness. Yes, people need gods of "shuddering awe" to keep them in line. Religion and morals should bolster and serve politics. A strong state needs an authority to define right and wrong, and the most powerful instrument for doing that is religion. Strauss thought it regrettable that this country had a multiplicity of creeds and thus lacked a single unifying belief. 

Yet, he was at a loss for a solution. The country would be better off with one faith, but which one? He himself couldn't endorse Christianity, feeling as he did that Christianity was partly responsible for the holocaust. Still he knew Judaism wouldn't fill the bill either. Besides that dilemma, Strauss wrestled with a personal conflict. It was that, while he endorsed religion for the good of the state, he did not believe that any religion held truth. To his advanced students and in some scholarly journals, he revealed his conviction that "the sordid truth is there is no god and no moral order." Religion was a "pious fraud - a noble lie." But all care must be taken to shield that truth from the masses. They must be encouraged to keep an unwavering faith in god, for their own good and the good of the country. Strauss agreed with Karl Marx that religion is the opium of the people, but people need their opium. 

The foregoing are the primary criticisms of the United States that Strauss, throughout the 1940's and until his death in 1973, urgently communicated to his University students and faculty associates and in the Committee for Social Thought that he founded there. The quiet, reclusive bachelor was grateful to have his political ideas - his cherished brain-children - appreciated in his beloved groves of academe. Obsessed with how easily and quickly Europeans had succumbed to the seduction of fascism, he was sorely afraid his country of refuge, vulnerable as it was with liberalism and tolerance, would be too weak to withstand totalitarianism's stealthy approach. Remembering how he too had been taken in by Hitler, he never rested in warning that it could happen here. 

Strauss' fears were almost certainly stoked by the student revolts of the 1960's that spread to the University of Chicago from Harvard and the University of California. My brother was a pre-law student there then and he and I participated together in the vociferous peace demonstrations and marches organized by an energetic faculty wife from the University Divinity School. 

During his more than three decades of teaching at the University, Strauss trained more than a hundred doctoral candidates. He was confident he was planting his ideas in fertile ground and that his followers in time would enter government and seek to introduce the changes he deemed imperative to rescue our failing state from impending catastrophe. 

Still, in his most sanguine musings, Strauss could scarcely have imagined just how swiftly and spectacularly that would happen. Had he been looking down from that heaven he disclaimed, he would have blinked in disbelief when in 1996, 23 years after his death, Time Magazine named him "one of the most influential and powerful figures in Washington, D. C." 

And then five years later the New York Times, under the headline "WHO RUNS THINGS? stated, "It would not be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss with whom the Bush Administration is rife." Shortly thereafter the Boston Globe ran a 3,000- word article claiming that, "we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss."