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By Tom Smith

Unless I misunderstand what my computer is trying to tell me, I have been sent a virus by a neo-con. Well, I guess all is fair in love and war. I admit, I was not very nice in my post below, implying, inter alia, that neo-cons had trouble getting girlfriends, or to be more politically correct about it, friends of persons of romantic interest. Some disclosure might be in order. When I was at Cornell in the late 1970's, it was a hotbed of Straussianism. I lived at Telluride House, where Alan Bloom had lived for a while. Paul Wolfowitz and Frances Fukuyama were also Telluride Scholars in their day, and dropped by the House a few times while I was there. Werner Danhauser, a student of Leo Strauss's, was in the Government department, and I took ancient history and got memorably drunk with Paul Rahe, who was in the history department at that time. One simply could not avoid getting a big dose of Straussianism in such an environment.

I thought and still think Paul Rahe was a great teacher and a brilliant mind, and I'm not sure he really counts as a Straussian, though perhaps he was. But over time I came to the view that whatever else one might say, anyone who loved liberty would be crazy to trust with power anyone who really believed the Staussian tenants. Here is an unsympathetic, but as far as I can tell, largely accurate summary of those views, with a response here. I don't want to enter the perhaps stale by now cyber-debate on whether Paul Wolfowitz was engaged in Straussian noble lying when he claimed there were WMD's in Iraq. We're never likely to know without a spy inside the club (too bad Kojeve isn't available for the job). There are many other, good reasons for believing Iraq had WMD's besides taking Wolfowitz's word for it, which in any event would be unwise, in my view.

Ironically, those neo-cons who are Straussians (and it's far from all, I suppose) are not neo-conservatives at all. They seemingly reject modernity in toto, with all of its baggage of free individuals, rationality, tolerance, free markets, the whole classical liberal kit and kaboodle. To me, it's all very ferrin'. More Plato, Machiavelli, Neitzche and Heidegger than Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Smith, Locke and Reagan (hee-hee!)

Here's an imperfect metaphor. For many years liberal democrats played coalition politics with the far left in this country, many of whom, it turns out, really were Stalinist stooges. I think the Straussians are rather like the communists of the right. It is a creepy, conspiratorial ideology that may be temporarily useful for the cause of liberty, but it is a dangerous game to be playing. Give me a bible-thumping, foot-washing, snake-handling redneck cracker hymn singing fundamentalist any day. Remember! The friends of liberty have always been few!
posted by thomas at 12/02/2003 02:51:00 PM