========== DISCLAIMER: This is not a defense of Straussianism, much less any attempt to render it consistent. It's just an attempt at a reconstruction. Also, I don't claim this ideology is a driving force behind our policies. I do however believe that thinking like this has some currency in our gov't. Finally, I like to think I'm a good vulgar Marxist about this when all is said and done: Straussianism has currency in parts of our gov't because it reflects and serves the interests of sectors of our capitalist power elites. ==========
I don't know if Chuck will agree, but I think the Straussians' claim to moral realism, i.e., there are such things as good and evil, is part of their exoteric (public consumption) doctrine. I used to think that the Straussian esoteric program was a covert aristocracy in liberal society, but now I think that's only a transitional stage in the program: the covert aristocracy is the means to form some sort of cohesive, uniform society. For them, it's the liberal state that's the problem; it's weak because it's endangered from within (different factions unleased by liberal freedoms) and from without.
If Strauss is a moral nihilist--no good or evil--then the Nazi genocide is not a real problem for him. No doubt _qua_ Jew he did not approve of it, but _qua_ social architect he may have thought something like it would be inevitable in the course of building a cohesive state.
Curtiss
> The problem I guess I'm having with this understanding of
> Strauss and the followers we're now dealing with: Wolfowitz,
> Perle, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Robertson, etc., is that
> Nazism, the consequence of the liberal democracy of the Weimar
> Republic according to the neocons, was also an autocracy based
> on ideological homogeneity with a constant state of war
> mentality. In other words, the autocratic, centralized,
> homogenous structure/system the neocons feel is needed to
> keep evil forces/indivduals in check, is the exact structure
> needed by evil forces to effectively and absolutely wreak
> havoc -- the Nazi Holocaust.
>
> I mean, why did Leo Strauss or Irving Kristol and why do their
> neocon followers NOT see the homogeneous and centralized autocratic
> structure/system itself as the problem?