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The Trouble with Straussians
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Polly Mann, W A M M
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In a February 2004 speech given to the American Enterprise Institute, George W. Bush declared, “You are some of the best brains in the country, and my government employs about twenty of you.” He was speaking to a cohort of journalists, political philosophers, and policy makers known as Straussians—disciples of Leo Strauss.
And just who are these Straussians, also known as neoconservatives or neocons? They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Elliott Abrams, Director of Middle East Affairs for the National Security Council (convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal); Richard Perle, member of the Defense Policy Board and a managing partner in Trieme Partners, a venture capitalist company invested in manufacturers of technology for homeland security and defense; and William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard.
Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, is a leading authority on Strauss. According to Drury, “the Straussians are the most powerful, the most organised, and the best-funded scholars in Canada and the United States. They are the unequalled masters of right-wing think tanks, foundations and corporate funding. And now they have the ear of the powerful in the White House.”
Neoconservatism (Straussism) arose during the l970s when a small group of politicians and intellectuals disagreed with the policy of détente, preferring to challenge the Soviet Union with U.S. power. They reflect this view today by advocating aggressive policies and actions against foreign dictatorships and unfriendly regimes.
A Jewish, German-born philosopher, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a charismatic teacher and eminent author who taught for twenty years at the University of Chicago, where he produced a small army of devoted followers.
Strauss witnessed Russian pogroms as a child and barely escaped the Holocaust. “When we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers in our past—our political scientists failed to recognize it,” Strauss wrote in his classic On Tyranny. He believed, as he once wrote, that “to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself, as well as the society of nations.”
Strauss was a great admirer of Plato and believed that within societies some are fit to lead and others to be led, that justice is merely the interest of the stronger, and that power makes the rules in its own interests and calls it justice. But unlike Plato, Strauss thought that those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right: the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.
Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” he once wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united—and they can only be united against other people.” Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control and to inspire citizens to fight and die in its defense. The rulers need not be bound by it since the truths proclaimed by religion were a “pious fraud.”
Professor Drury theorizes that the use of deception and manipulation in current U.S. policy flow from the doctrines of Strauss, who believed in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. She writes, “The trouble with the Straussians is that they are compulsive liars. But it is not altogether their fault. Strauss was very preoccupied 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...”
Could Straussian theory have laid the groundwork for the disastrous lies disseminated about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
A feature article in the New York Times Magazine on May 5, 2004, exposes the fact that the Straussians support the idea of new wars in the name of “counterproliferation.” In short, instead of using diplomacy and economic pressure to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, these neocons want to use preemptive strikes against “evil” regimes—even those that do not have nuclear weapons—in order to prevent their development.
Professor Drury would probably agree. “I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.” |
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© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete July/August 2004 Index - click here
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