The point is that Strauss formed his ideas in a very interesting and particular milieu, Weimar, Germany in the 20s, in an elite academic setting that was in the process of attempting to forge philosophical, social, and political ideas that were supposed to constitute a national identity and provide for its analysis and justification.
Mann's book of essays, Reflections, written during WWI and published just after gives a literary reflection of the questioning of that foundational milieu.
For me, the reason to understand Strauss, is to understand what Neoconservatives in the US in the wake of the 60s-70s found in Strauss; what they think they are doing now that they are in political power in the US government---and apparently have the controlling voice of the formal and informal apparatus of policy making for the state, as well as most of the policy media.
What I think is the Neocons as an archetype, in their twenties (60s-70s) confronted a contentious sea of classes, races, ideas, and histories that threw them out of their protected, insular, elite, white all American identity and its world view. They underwent an identity crisis, and reacted against this confrontation of a democracy of ideas and worlds.
There was some historical-cultural affinity between that period in the US, and the Weimar of Strauss's youth. So his own intellectual responses found a concordance among reactionary minded students. This concordance was intimately related to those on the Left who followed Marcuse and Adorno. My choice was Arendt and Cassirer. All of these sources were contempories in Weimar.
During the 60s-70s in US academia learning to live, act, and think within a relativity of values coupled with a relativity of identities and cultural worlds was the order of the day. And the way Neocons met that order was to fabricate a rigid traditionalist view that insisted on its own elite supremacy. They essentially stuck a pole in the mud and grabbed on to it.
That circus of worlds, people, views, cultures has not gone away, but been amplified over the decades by the globalization of the US political economy. Now days, the Neocons are in power and face a domestic and geo-political world even more threatening, contentious, and rudderless than the one they came of age in, in their youth. On this round, they have found their stick in the mud, obscurantist, elitist, reactionary views even more challenged, inadequate, and pathetically wanting than ever before. And needless to say they are reacting badly and running amok.
Their reaction has been to become even more reactionary, rigid, authoritarian and elitist, all under the bogus patriotic banner of a traditional America. What is truly pathetic is that this reactionary world view has found acknowledgement among the US voting blocks that both political parties seem so determined to represent, i.e. white middle class men with more or less the same identity problems as their political representatives.
So it is this reaction and its retreat into an authoritarian elitism that reminds me so strongly of what happened with the intellectual elites during Weimar as the political, social and economic chaos intensified.
I think it is particularly funny that the anti-war, anti-globalization movements with their chaotic, centerless, conflicting and inconsistent rhetoric with its circus of groups must represent all that is most wrong in the world of the neocon prigs. And that is just in the domestic foreground. Just beyond that foreground, and receding to the horizon are even more chaotic waves of European, Asian, Latin American, African, Arab and Muslim worlds, with their oceans of banners, signs, protests, and clambering rabble.
Chuck Grimes