[lbo-talk] Neocons

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Thu Apr 24 08:50:43 PDT 2003


Words fail me. jks

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Well, I am sitting here on page 57 of Leo Strauss and the American Right. I have to say we don't need a nazis movement, since we've got Strauss.

That isn't entirely a sick joke or a careless smear. The sorts of ideas that Strauss advocates were part of the popularization of reactionary ideas put out in the 1920s as the German bourgeoisie considered the democratization of Germany under defeat at the hands of the English and French in WWI. I'll just note it again. The best of the tracts on this sick brew of popular political garbage was Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

What these ideas amount to is a political popularization of some of Nietzsche and they go a long way toward explaining how N got to be associated with the National Socialists. Unfortunately, Mann helped this process to a considerable degree with the publication of Reflections which took the basic spirit of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky (romanticized nihilism) and combined them with several of the then current threads on whether or not, or just even how a German state should become a popular based democracy, and drop its military state under Bismarck run by an elite class.

Virtually every conservative thread of the early 20s Germany is echoed in Strauss and it constitutes an extreme reaction to Cassirer and other's radical cultural relativists and their embrace of the high Enlightenment ideas of a secular, liberal, and classless society. Enacting this ideal into a state (Weimar) was seen to lead to the destruction of German identity, and destruction of a whole germanic civilization---an alternative to the latin based, secular, and liberal English and French state ideals.

In other words, people like Heidegger and Strauss were pre-curser to the National Socialists. What the nazis added was anti-Semiticism, and a kind of working class nationalism and militaristic dumping down of their high blown rhetoric---which was used as some of the first forms of nazis propaganda in order to enlist the more cultured high bourgeois.

While Strauss argues that it is democracy's liberalism and religious tolerance that leads to fascism, in fact it is his own and Heidegger's insistence on the uniqueness and high value of national identity electrified by Populism that leads to fascism.

While the US hasn't become a fascist state, certain basic elements are undoubtly there in the ideals that these US reactionary jerks espouse, particularly their endless attacks on what are traditional liberal ideals and institutions from US history.

Chuck Grimes



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