[MD] Neoconservatism

[david buchanan]

Alice and all:

Alice said to dmb:
First impression is that the piece is quite slanted and because of that, it 
makes me sceptical. She makes a lot of assertions and doesn't back them up, 
like this one... "The policies are by now very clear: no gay rights, no 
liberated women, no uppity blacks, lots of prayer in the schools, a strong 
commitment to the death penalty, and the re-criminalisation of abortion. The 
latter is particularly important. Of course it will keep the women at home 
and out of the way so that world can be ruled by men in the proper manly 
fashion; but that's not all. More importantly, it will keep women busy 
having babies - lots of babies"

dmb says:
This makes you skeptical? Really? I think she says that these "policies are 
by now very clear" because the only thing one needs to back it up is read 
just about any newspaper. These are the policies that the Republican party 
has been using to motivate their voters for years.

Alice said:
Maybe she never heard of the pill or thinks her readers haven't.

dmb says:
As it says at the end of the quoted article, "Shadia Drury is among the 
world's foremost scholars on the history, philosophy and politics of 
neoconservatism. She is the author of the acclaimed books Leo Strauss and 
the American Right (1998) and The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988)." So 
I think the suggestion that she and her readers "never heard of the pill" is 
just plain silly. I imagine she knows that ALL of the major "pro-life" 
organizations in the United States is not just opposed to abortion, they are 
also opposed to contraception. As you MUST know by now, contraception is the 
best means of preventing unwanted pegnancies and I think its safe to say 
that unwanted pregnancy is the number one cause of abortions. Doesn't that 
strike you as rather unfriendly to women?

Alice said:
Also, I have read Bloom's book "The Closing of the American Mind" While it 
does mention with disdain, some of the events which occured in the sixties, 
I think it had more to do with the decline of academic rigor and the 
abandonment of the classics by the university.

dmb says:
Books like Bloom's lend intellectual respectability to the cause. Clearly, 
neither he nor Strauss are idiots. And, personally, I have a great deal of 
sympathy for the idea that the classics are classics for a reason and they 
should be preserved. But I think that if we look at the Republican party's 
attitude toward the 60's in light of Pirsig's diagnosis, Bloom is just the 
least offensive example of America's present neo-Victorian moral decline. 
Pirsig's diagnosis says that the hippy movement of the '60s was a moral 
movement that failed. This is actually what I've been getting at with all 
the quotes from George Nash's book. Again, this is a book by a conservative, 
for conservatives and about conservatives. It has an entire chapter on the 
Struassians. The polcies and attitudes described by Shadia Drury may seem 
slanted to you, but Nash said the very same things about his own ideology 
over 25 years ago.

Alice said:
One thing I heartily agree with is that neo-conservatism has nothing to do 
with conservatism. The latter is much more concerned with tradition and slow 
change, while the neo-cons seem to be all about making change for others, 
something conservatives for years have complained that liberals do.

dmb says:
Well, neoconservatism is different than Burkean conservatism. Libertarians 
are different than the religious right too. But I don't think these 
distinctions are very important. There are factions within the Republican 
party and they don't agreee on every point, but it sure seems clear to me 
that the general thrust of the overall coalition is an anti-liberal and 
anti-modern. It sure seems clear to me that virtually everyone in this 
coalition buys into the neocon myth of good and evil.

In the interest of fairness, I've quoted an article from THE WEEKLY 
STANDARD, which is the voice of neoconservatism. (Owned by the same guy who 
ownes FOX NEWS) As Wikipedia says... "The Weekly Standard is an American 
neoconservative political magazine published 48 times per year. It made its 
debut on September 17, 1995 and is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News 
Corporation. It is viewed as a leading outlet of the influential 
neoconservative movement. Its current editors are founder William Kristol, 
chairman of the Project for the New American Century, and Fred Barnes." 
Actually, having just read George Nash's book again, I can tell you that the 
following article is full of omissions, distortions and statements that 
simply aren't true. I can't say if the author is just ignorant or if this 
nonsense is intentionally inaccurate, but it seems to support Drury's 
assertion that neocons are "compulsive liars". I mean, I'm actually stunned 
at how inaccuately Berkowitz paints the picture here. You'd think that a 
neocon writing about a neocons for a neocon audience should be able to get 
it right. But this article flies in the face of what both Nash and Drury 
have written about this movement. Personally, I think the following "Weakly 
Standard" article is mostly bullshit. What do you think?

dmb

What Hath Strauss Wrought? From the June 2, 2003 issue: Misreading a 
political philosopher. by Peter Berkowitz

THE NEW YORK TIMES, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have 
sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy 
team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are 
themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo 
Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in 
the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.

On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President 
Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense 
Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all 
accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative 
intellectuals--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of 
everybody's list--have craftily ascended to positions of power in the 
federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And 
it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work 
consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and 
sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: 
Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is 
able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and 
loyalty--and indeed, to compel the actions--of highly successful and 
well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the 
academy.

Despite its wild implausibility, the scenario is in one important respect 
true. And that has to do with the influence of Leo Strauss on a generation 
of neoconservative thinkers, some of whom are active in our politics (and 
some of whom can even be found writing in these pages).

Judging from the recent hubbub, which restates an accusation that has gained 
much currency in the academy, that influence is nefarious. Strauss is said 
to be an elitist who scorned democracy. He is attacked as an atheist who 
encouraged his students to see through the falseness of religion, while 
manipulating it to discipline and mollify the masses. And the realization of 
his ideas, we are warned, requires his followers to establish by force of 
arms a foreign empire for America.

These accusations, similar versions of which are often leveled at 
neoconservatives, are nonsense, and in parts vicious nonsense. Yet the ideas 
that the accusations pervert are those of Strauss, and when those ideas are 
restored to their true shape they can be seen as articulating core 
neoconservative convictions.

Strauss was not an elitist--but he was a lover of excellence. He believed in 
the cultivation of the mind, and sought to restore respect for its 
manifestation in the ambition for honor and nobility in the soul, which he 
understood to be not only compatible with but essential to democracy. On the 
occasion of Winston Churchill's death, he told his class that "We have no 
higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our 
students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human 
excellence." Strauss also shared Churchill's famous praise of democracy as 
the worst regime except for all the others that have been tried from time to 
time. Although he regarded modern democracy as flawed, it is, Strauss 
suggested, the form of government best suited to the protection and 
enjoyment of human liberty, and therefore should be defended wholeheartedly.

Strauss may have been a religious doubter, but he showed time and again that 
the question of the truth of religion seemed to have been left unsettled by 
the greatest figures in the history of political philosophy, and that 
therefore religious teachings, which concern man's highest and deepest 
longings, must be studied with care and an open mind. He loved the Hebrew 
Bible and sought to show that it was rich in wisdom about the human 
condition. He saw that religion could be either salutary or destructive, 
depending on the circumstances and the religious teaching in question. And 
he certainly believed that in our day religion could play a positive role in 
counteracting the tendency of liberal democracy to indiscriminately break 
down custom and convention.

Finally, Strauss was not a proponent of American empire--but he did teach 
the importance of American strength in defense of liberty. Writing in the 
midst of the Cold War, as a refugee from Nazi Germany and as a student of 
tyranny, Strauss insisted that totalitarians of the left and the right posed 
a profound threat to liberal democracy--a threat that liberal democrats 
tended to underestimate because of their habit of supposing that all 
individuals and nations are as open to reason and persuasion as liberal 
democrats consider themselves to be. Strauss encouraged liberal democracies 
to be strong in defending themselves and forceful in conducting a foreign 
policy in accord with their principles.

Strauss was no ordinary liberal democrat, but he was a staunch friend of 
liberal democracy. The urgency of defending liberal democracy by encouraging 
its virtues, combating its vices, and never losing sight of its enemies is 
the great political lesson that those of his students who became 
neoconservatives embraced. To be sure, Strauss seemed to prefer the 
classical Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to modern political 
philosophy. He was a proud Jew and took the claims of religion with utmost 
seriousness while keeping his distance from organized religion. He dwelled 
at length on liberal democracy's undemocratic and illiberal tendencies, in 
part because he loved the truth and in part because he was devoted to 
America's well-being. He was the kind of friend who makes one better by 
constantly exhibiting, through example and argument, the look of excellence. 
Not always an easy sort of friend, but the sort of friend, you would think, 
whom true liberals in every time and place would appreciate.

Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is a 
research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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