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As Jeet Heer put it in the Boston Globe,
"Odd as this may sound, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973.
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."
"Odd as this may sound, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973.
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."
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This sudden interest was due to the unusual number of Straussians who had found their way into close proximity to the centers of power in Washington an extraordinary number of Strauss's students (or students of his leading followers) were employed in and around the Bush administration, particularly at key points in the national security bureaucracy
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Iraq war is surely a textbook example of the Straussian method in action: an enlightened elite deceives the public into an action that must be taken, after all, for their own good.
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The prominent Straussian Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, states in "The Case for the Strong Executive" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, "Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. The first is that law is always imperfect by being universal, thus an average solution even in the best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot, who can judge particular circumstances.
The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton's term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.
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The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton's term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.
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Continuing Mansfield:
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In our time
an opinion has sprung up in liberal circles particularly that civil liberties must always be kept intact regardless of circumstances. This opinion assumes that civil liberties have the status of natural liberties, and are inalienable.
John T. Flynn, opposing FDR's New Deal wrote:
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""First let us state our definition of fascism," he writes:
"It is, put briefly, a system of social organization in which the political state is a dictatorship supported by a political elite and in which the economic society is an autarchic capitalism, enclosed and planned, in which the government assumes responsibility for creating adequate purchasing power through the instrumentality of national debt and in which militarism is adopted as a great economic project for creating work as well as a great romantic project in the service of the imperialist state."
"It is, put briefly, a system of social organization in which the political state is a dictatorship supported by a political elite and in which the economic society is an autarchic capitalism, enclosed and planned, in which the government assumes responsibility for creating adequate purchasing power through the instrumentality of national debt and in which militarism is adopted as a great economic project for creating work as well as a great romantic project in the service of the imperialist state."
To sum up:
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Today we have an ostensible "conservative," Thomas Sowell, pining for a military coup in the pages of National Review, and, in the same magazine, Col. "Buzz" Patterson, author of War Crimes: The Left's Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror, opining that the Democratic party, and especially its congressional branch, is legally guilty of "treason," and ought to be punished for this crime forthwith.
