I don't know about the writing, but the dismissal of Strauss's political importance in the U.S. is right on. He had nothing to do with the Bush policies -- the villains were Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, & their military and foreign-policy advisors. The last 10 years would have been exactly the same had Strauss never been born.
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I don't disagree Bush would have been Bush. But the issue is the nature of the propaganda used to justify these atrocities. They have no US liberal justification, which was LBJ's problem. And the liberal intelligencia had to drop away from LBJ and try to reconcile Vietnam with the War on Poverty and they couldn't.
What Strauss provided was that bridge, just as Hayek provided the bridge between neoclassical economics and individual liberty, the putative goal of democratic goverment.
The last ten years would have been the same...perhaps. What Strauss provided was the link to European history which gives the last ten years of atrocity, its pseudo-intellectual cache in the history of ideas. In that context, we have something of a new phenomena, the recognition that the US has an intellectual class beyond its well known anti-intellectualism and populism.
FDR invited the progressive intellectual class into government and we got the welfare state, along with WWII mass civilian bombing raids. With LBJ, we got the war on poverty and the mass extermination of Vietnamese. McNamira was supposed to be one of the best and brightest.
Carrol, you just don't seem to understand that ideas matter. They shape the conception of the worldview of the elite who propogate it down into the masses.
CG