>> and its boosters make the claim that be opposed to their program is
to
>> be with the terrorists.
> Doug
> Sure, but wasn't Nazi rhetoric full of stuff about the sickness of
> democracy, and the beauty of the unified Volk und Reich?
>
I don't think anything like "the sickness of democracy" would ever fly--although I can well imagine democracy being subsumed under a unified Americanism, i.e., out democracy is great because it is American. Besides, for a cabinet official to draw a straight-line between dissent and treason is already pretty damn bad (although it likely isn't the first time it's happened...)
> And as much as I hate Bush & Co, I wouldn't want us to forget Lincoln
> suspending habeas corpus, Haymarket, the Palmer raids, McCarthyism,
> etc.
I don't think we should forget those things either--in fact, wouldn't the argument be that in Straussianism we have another movement that *could* result in repression and violence as ugly if not uglier than what you mention?
Please understand that I'm not trying to make a conspiracy of Straussianism: I do not think it is the driving force behind foreign policy, let alone policy in general; I do not think it would have been anything but an academic curiousity or cult were it not that other factors helped it along; and if full-flegded repression were to break out in the US, I doubt very much the Straussians will be the puppet-masters they hope to be. I'm just revolted and unnerved that this kind of thought has the currency it does in our halls of power.
Regarding calling the Straussians fascists (or proto-fascists): what *can* we call an ideology whose exponents support a push to limit our formal freedoms, an emphasis on some kind of shared and essential national identity, and an expansionist and militarist foreign policy? Of course it is not Nazism or Fascism yet: we do still have our freedoms, and there is no positive American type to which we're all to aspire (or else.) It may never get that far--but so what? How else can one characterize such a position?
Curtiss