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``...they were just the most recent and vociferous of generations of allegedly rationalist enthusiasts for blood and soil...'' Sure. But the important question is why is Blood and Soil so popular and apparently compelling to millions? Below is what I think explains a lot of the appeal. It can also be applied to most of the center Democrats and war liberals as they try to play catch up to the Right.
Snag on another thread suggested I spend more time reading various background material on African American history, and less time on Strauss et al. I spend a few days and did and got to thinking about middle class black america, some of the women's movements all of which inculcated a certain social conservatism. I thought wow. Now, I see it. A black middle class identity politics.
But I am more interested in studying and applying insights into understanding my enemies. The concept of using race, class and gender to deconstruct neoconservatism, the rightwing propaganda machine, and its great success in convincing white male voters to vote the way they usually do, opens up the whole dense package of the US right and the mainstream Democrats as they play tog a war over gaining the vote. The way to see what's going on is to use just what Angela Davis called the intersection of race, class and gender as categories of understanding.
What's going on is the politics of a threatened white male identity that is losing or thinks it's losing its dominant role in society. So, its self-appointed intellectual class, the neoconseratives, the more general right, and rightwing Christians developed policies that empower or re-empower that identity and restore the postion of power to a traditional white man with traditional values. All of which is pure political and philosophical nonsense. There are no substantive arguments to be made in favor of such policies in a democratic society, most especially in a society that is increasly becoming more diverse exactly in terms of race, language and culture. So the only thing that makes sense is the psychological understanding of why and how this white male identity politics works.
Leo Strauss is an important clinical model to use and therefore understand. What's important about him is his life and times, the intersection of race, class and gender and how those drove his thinking and writing. The whole package is about constructing a dominant white male identity through the use of the history of ideas, and this in turn is used to creat a corresponding political philosophy of state. In terms of religion, what I found was the use of the Old Testiment as the founding authority of state. The rule of society explained by Moses was to be conducted by a selected patriachy, the male heads of the tribes. Each was assigned a social duty with its responsibilities and powers. It was Spinoza (among many others) who developed and adapted this idea to apply to a modern republic. Spinoza intended to apply the idea of a ruling patriarchy to a completely secular and non-religious society, whose laws and customs should be developed by rational thought. Instead of religion the development of the rational science would take its place. While Strauss argued the role of divine revelation over reason in his essay on Spinoza, he certainly supported the idea of rational elite patriarchy and continued on back to Plato and Aristotle. Strauss tended to concentrate on Aristotle because he more systematic. In the large view, Aristotle constructed the world in a rational hierarchy of knowledge with the ultimate social good, the idea of the good itself on top, and more concretely somewhere below happiness. Equality was niether sought nor possible, because it is rationally obviously people are not equal. In fact, people are arranged in a ordered tier system by a tiered order of social functions and their place in a related scheme of ethics and moral virtue. The rationally determined highest virtue was on top, and the lowest rationally determined virtue on the bottom. So, the best thing to do, is minimize strife and seek the tiered order of good available to each social function through its concept of happines.
(Enough rough sketch intellectual background. Please feel free to correct the detail on the OT, Spinoza and Aristotle. I got very bored reading this stuff. It was a labor of loathing and it was several years ago).
Now the clinical model. Strauss's identity and person were deeply threatened in his youth in Weimar. First of course as a German Jew. Anti-Semiticism is the usual understanding and explanation. In Strauss's case there was the added dimension of the loss of a traditional Jewish life. He was from an Orthodox family and at that time and place men brought home the money, made all the big decisions and women ran the children's lives and household affairs. Strauss saw this loss as a loss of Jewish culture and Judaism itself. In other words, he was caught up in what we call today, searching for his roots. He thought his proper inheridence as a Jew and as a Jewish man was being stolen by the political and ideological programs of the Enlightenment, via Weimar policies of social assimiluation and social tolerance.
Second, he was threatened as a man, that is his masculinity was evidently always on the table. He was short, fat, and a bookish whimp. The scholar type. For example he married late. He once asked a young Hannah Arendt out for a date and she turned him down. Another example, perhaps worse. The militant Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky asked Strauss how was rifle practice coming along in Blau-Weiss? This was a insult on about fifteen different levels of masculinity. Bleu-Weiss was essentially an over age boy scout organization Strauss had belong to since high school. They were in to nature hikes, studying Hebrew, reading the Torah and German poetry (My guess German Romantic nature poets.) The organization was aligned with the cultural movements within Zionism. So, there was a whole homophobic undercurrent to the joke. Then too, Jabotinsky knew Strauss had been in the German Army about six months when the cease fire was declared. Strauss had never gone to the front and worked as a translator in Beligum before de-mobilization.
Other indications of Straus's concept of his own masculinity can be seen in his obcession for a few years with Nietzsche, the promise of building a new man, more than human German man and with its promotion of the warrior cult. Strauss would stay attached to this concept of a warrior cult.
Strauss was also threatened as a scholar and budding intellectual. After all, he wasn't very good at either and he was surrounded by giants like Cassirer and Heidegger two of his professors. There was also intense competition in his generation of students on the left like Adorno, Horkhiemer, Marcuse, just to name a few associated with the Frankfurt school. As his first book on Spinoza shows, he wasn't much of philosopher of Judaism and certainly not of the caliber of Herman Cohen or of Julius Guttmann who got him a small stipend to write. On the other hand he must have been pretty good at socializing with other writers and intellectuals, because he met and knew a lot of the important to know crowd in more conservative circles.
And then last but not least Strauss's economic background was from the small town petite bourgeoisie. His father sold farm equipment, had little money, and Straus got little support from his family.
So, these are the profiles of race, class, gender, and general mind set that characterize Leo Strauss as a young man. They are also the profiles that fit much of the German public who supported the rise of a social conservative reaction in general. That support would soon turn into the National Socialist nightmare under the great social chaos of Weimar and its collasping political economy at the end of 1920s
With very little alteration it is pretty easy to see the same general intersections and profiles at work in the US. It seems clear to me these profiles have lead to a forty year long reaction to the tormoil and chaos of the 1960s.
We can start with the strange idea that white men are threaten with the loss of their identity and are therefore victims. How can this be? As a race and class they apparently hold all the top positions of power in society. No, it's the position of the white men in middle to lower middle class, or petite bourgeoise who consider themselves victims. The class and economic problem is that white men cannot support the all american family man's dream: a good job to support a wife, house, two kids, and a two car garage. As women joined the workforce in increasing numbers after the 1960s both to promote their own independence and make up for losses in the standard of living under falling wages, men had to give up some the economic power to make all the big decisions at home. The loss of that privilage of economic power carries quite a bit of threat and tension inside households and families. Quite a few men consider reproductive rights gained by women as a lost of their own rights, that is to maintain their power as fathers and husbands.
Next, in the larger society at school and at work, more and people are not white or male. In heavily diversified urban areas the once dominant, language and generalize sense of middle and working class culture has lost much of its ground. For example the neighborhood beer and steak house is more often now being replace with god knows what kind of food, say a Indian or Vietnamese place, i.e. not real food. Note the warrior cult hero is always a big draw across races, with the white, black and asian male role models competing for best of show.
These features of society mean that white men have to rethink who they are in relation to their fellow workers and their role in the society and broader culture at large. There is a kind of grinding equalizer in the so-called merit system of rewards and punishments and its race to the bottom. A lot of white male workers have to share what little power they had with others.
The combined forces of race, class, gender in the US for the last forty years have driven white men to believe in or at least have greatly sympathic views of a fabricated social conservativism and reactionary vision on every major social and economic issue. The social conservative intellectual class has done an good job in converting these pressures and threats to the dominant personal and cultural identity into a series of reactionary policies, via the culture wars and a whole cottage industry of think tanks. These policies promote and propagate the ideals that should if adopted, secure white men their proper place on top of the all american patriarchy handed down from its Judeo-Christian roots as the cosmological order of the universe as explained in the Old Testment. Or if you've gone to college, there is the academic canon of dead white men to read and find the same ideals. Unfortunately there's plenty of competition for these ideals in ethic studies, postmodern writers, but most white male students don't take those classes unless they are forced to.
``Under the banner of the Culture War, Christian Right leaders increasingly focused anxiety over changing sex roles and the unfinished equalization of power between men and women on the convenient scapegoats of the feminist and abortion rights movements. They steered public fears over AIDS toward s vast conspiracy theory of homosexual intrique. They redirected the legitimate concerns of parents over the quality of education, materials tolerant to gays, and AIDS awareness programs. They shifted the desperation of unemployment and underemployment to the scapegoat of the well stereotyped poor bleeding society through welfare. And they shifted the problem of a unfair economic structure and an overloaded criminal justice system on the scapegoat of liberal secular humanism and lack of God-centered morality...
Meanwhile, a growing infrastructure of think tanks, policy groups, and experts bombarded the media with studies that had the veneer of academic research but lacked substance and did not have to face the scrutiny of true peer review. The result was a political debate sidetracked by dubious statistics, demonization of the poor and weak, and scapegoating of people of color, women, immigrants, and gays and lesbians, among others.'' (Right-wing Populism in American, Berlet, Lyons, 246p)
About the only point I am trying to add here, is an attempt to understand psychologically why all this political and policy rhetoric works. It works because in the process of promoting all this nonsense, the promise is continually made that the average joe, the average white male american will soon be back on top running his job, his home, and the society in general. In other words all those Liberal positions on the issues of race, class, and gender are keeping you, Mister Joe Smith from your proper place at the head of the table.
I hope that puts some flesh on why the constant drone of blood and soil has been going on and why it is supported mostly by white male voters, but increasely less and less by others. It appeals to masculinity, power, and race, in particular the wounded white male ego. In its less nuanced version it is right in line with a long tradition in American politics, which has often been been turned into some form of rightwing populist movement of a much more destructive sort as Chip Berlet outlines in the above quoted work.
Strauss's role in all this was minor in that it was restricted to the internal academic culture wars. His goal was to train a young elite male class how to run things so as to promote their own interests. His main academic contribution was to co-author a textbook with Joseph Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy. The most interesting feature of this book, which I have scanned but not read, is, it's composed entirely of essays in which Strauss, Cropsey and others tell their students what Plato, Aristotle and others thought. There are no extended excepts and discussions, and no break down into the various categories of ideas and their arguments. It stands in quite a constrast to my first philosophy textbook by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, which by the way contained no overt political philosophy at all. As I said I haven't bother to go through it detail. But here is what I suspect is going on. The essays are reconstructing the history of ideas in order to promote a highly conservative view that the most sensible, stable and orderly societies are those that are run along hierarchical and patriarchial lines. This is what the return to classics is all about. The travasity to ancient history is stunning, since the ancient world was as polygot a world as our own and had perhaps an even more diverse array of peoples, languages, cultures, religions, and systems of customs and ideas. Strauss had no interest in studying that kind of history and most certain not in promoting the implicid relativistic view of the nature of history, cultures and espoused value systems.
Strauss shared Heidegger's view that most modern social science were just technocratic nonsense. So Strauss attempted to promote the idea that philosophy and political philosophy in particular would restore a traditional hiearchy of knowledge in which philosophy was on top, and very much down the steps of human thought we arrive at the empirical world of the social science. Modern society should be run along lines of such a hierarchy of knowledge and treat modern social science as a mere instrumentalism. So then follows the idea that ideologically minded policy experts, the best and brightest should determine what is the ultimate social good, which is of course ruling the economy, and privilaging its own hierarchy of capitalist values, where the financial sector is the top dog. As C.Wright Mills said, the financial system is the glue that binds the power elite together. The same power elite class also knows best how to run government and let the social scientists and technocratic class manage the details. This arrangement of course completely excludes any notion of mass participatory democracy as anything but a rubber stamp. It also excludes the idea that any very diverse mass of people should have anything to say in how society is run.
The extraordinary destructiveness of these concepts of social and political order and it's so-called wisdom can be seen in the concrete by merely pointing to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the terrible consequences of these still ongoing wars. Obviously theoretical experts who didn't bother with the fact based world made some very big and nasty mistakes in their warrior cult apprasals has to how things should work.
What is striking to me is that the religious wars over Islamic fundamentalism is the burning mirror to the US with its less overtly destructive reationary ideologies and culture wars. And of course everybody is scream all this bullshit is about freedom and the social good, and `our' identity as a people.
We are certainly watching how well the power elite expert class, almost exclusively made up of rich white men, has done their traditional job in running the economy.
The US whitewing is in disarray at the moment and seems dazed and confused by its own train wrecks. As the cultural icon of white male identity politics himself said, ``I'll be back.''
CG