> What I find fascinating is how the greatly articulated nonsense that
passes as the politics of the neoconservative elite that has been
turned into the material of policy, can be so easily stripped of its
finery and decoded as pure racist horse shit---if you have the nose for
it.
It's also not constructive to reduce all politics we hate to racism. Straussianism is not racist at the core, taht it, it does not turn on the notion of race. It is elitist and antidemocratic -- isn't that bad enough?
> All of this reflection leads to a terrible sort of conclusion. That if
the official academy is allowed to re-write history along the lines of
the neoconservative twist---which is already at least two decades
along anyway---then very likely any semblance to the history and
culture I learned will most likely vanish. What I learned will simply
not be the accepted view, but some kind of radical, suspect, and
ideologically skewed interpretation.
So who's gonna stop them? They've done it with the fench Revolution already.
> I do dimly remember Jim Farmelant (thanks for the urls), Justin and
others going on about Strauss and others, but I didn't understand the
significance at the time. I am not sure I really want to add that sort
of crap to an already impossible reading list, which I slog along
with. There is something nausating about having to read these people
just to figure out how they arrived at such despicable ideas.
Strauss, unlike most Straussians, is worth reading; he's actually a valuable interpreter of Hobbes et al. There's book by a Canadian scholar, Shadia Drury, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, that will save you a lot of agony reading people are who aren't worth toilet paper (Jaffa, Bloom, etc.).
jks
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