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I am afraid I have almost the same aversion as you. Remember too, I've only started reading Bloom and Strauss. There is a whole system of ideas and people in a spectrum that I don't really understand.
For example, Michael Pollak just wrote: ``Today's neocons (unlike their forebears) don't seem to care about domestic policy at all. And to the extent they do, they don't seem to have any distinctive ideas about it....''
I think the above is probably accurate. Foreign policy seems to dominate. On the other hand since Strauss claims to write political philosophy, his ideas and bizarre views on the history of ideas are not tied to any one area of the political economy. So the influence is dispersed and has blended into a whole spectrum of other conservative agendas in law, economics and social policy. In the case of Strauss and Bloom, however, their focus on Rousseau in particular, reveals a broad interest in education policy. After all they were both professors.
Weakness? Judging only from Strauss and Bloom I think their greatest weak spot (beyond their terrible scholarship) is their destain for science and history. For all their self-proclaimed prowess in the arts of political analysis and influence they are ultimately fools because they seem to think that facts and empirical realities are, if not irrelevant then negotiable and relative. Strauss has an essay on Facts verses Values, which I haven't read yet. But, in advance, that is a strange dialectic I never would have considered.
One of the corollaries to this aberrant idealism is their elitist view that ordinary people are fools. While most people might seem foolish in their optimism toward the world, you really don't want to presume that good naturedness makes for stupidity. That is a sure way to alienate the very people you intend to swindle and dominate. On the other hand, the current necon hack operators have turned that elitist view around with a phony celebration of the common man, mouthed at the same time they shit on everything public. Just weird.
Getting back to their dismissal of science and history. Facts and empirical realities, or the concrete has a way of making its itself known, despite whatever ideological spin is used to obscure it. Iraq is an example. No matter what the necons, paleocons, fundies and the rest of the managery claim is going on, the war in Iraq is not over. And very likely it will get worse as time goes on. Here is the latest spin:
``Is the Bush administration losing control of the situation on the ground, or is the media transforming a military victory into a defeat in the public mind?'' (American Enterprise Institute, web)
That's the ticket. We're winning the war and losing the press. Ignore those burning Humvees, dead soldiers, and cheering crowds in the background of every news shot. Apparently the problem is not a matter of assessing concrete circumstances, but the way those circumstances are negotiated and portrayed. Shades of Vietnam. We were always winning the war but the press kept turning victory into defeat.
In any event I also think they have numerous psychoanalytic weaknesses, a whole cavern full of them. Part of the tip off is betrayed by their over weening obsequity toward authority. They seem to have a father figure complex of some sort. And, there is something deeply flawed in their construction of masculinity. This flaw shows up in all sorts of pathological ways---ambivalences toward homosexuality and women for example. The whole sensual complex of human experience seems to be an enigmatic anathema to them. And along with this empty well in their souls they also seem to be completely devoid of spontaneity, irony, or humor.
Chuck Grimes