By Nicholas Xenos
... Liberalism is itself fearful, in most instances, of popular power, of—for want of a better term—the power of the people. The big event in Allan Bloom’s life, aside from meeting Strauss and writing a best seller and becoming rich, happened at Cornell University, while he was teaching there, when armed black students took over the student center. In many respects, Straussian cultural criticism is a reaction against the counter-cultural and political movements in the 1960s, including the student movement. But there has been a liberal reaction to that, too. And a liberal discourse that talks about the need for civic education, that talks about the need for a patriotic discourse—Wesley Clark’s campaign talk about the need for a “new American patriotism” is an example—is really moving in the same area as the Straussian discourse. And there are some crossover types, as well. Mark Lilla, a professor in the Straussian redoubt of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and an associate director of the Olin Center there, published an article in the “liberal” New York Review of Books on the importance of the concept of tyranny. What is troubling in a lot of ways, more than anything else, is that the Straussians have begun to dominate the terms of public discourse. A fearful liberalism and a political and punditry elite have been fertile ground for Straussian seeding. It was shocking in some ways when the New York Times hired David Brooks as a regular columnist, but it was not a shock when he very soon afterward wrote a column on the persecution of conservatives in American universities and interviewed Straussian professors to drive the point home. There is no conspiracy at work here, but rather a conflation of a Straussian and a liberal discourse that is really, really troubling. And both of them are fundamentally anti-democratic.
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Carl
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