http://coreyrobin.com/2012/01/02/my-appearance-on-up-with-chris-hayes/
It accords well with what I found in the Strauss project. In the latter the extreme was in his drive to erase the entire Enlightenment project from about Spinoza forward. The source or at least part of it was the extreme idealism that simply ignores `reality' as understood by empiricism and substitutes an idealism of rational hierarchies, i.e. like those of Aristotle.
We can see this process near complete in the neocons where their own idealism and rationalism has nearly erased their understanding of empirical realities. The wars, the grand mess of the economy are all immunized with an idealistic vaccination of some sort. They don't need facts anymore...
CG