[MD] Neoconservatism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

I've noticed all the talk about Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss.  Richard Rorty 
went to school with Bloom and both were students of Strauss.  Rorty gave an 
interview in The Believer in 2003 which gives a slightly different take on 
the neocons and Bloom/Strauss.  The gist is that, no matter how theoretical 
some others may want to make them look, they're really just thugs.

Matt

---------------

BLVR: You’ve written that one of the reasons philosophy has become marginal 
to culture is that people are tired of the philosophical pendulum that 
swings between Plato and the Romantics, and between Socrates and the 
Pragmatists, that we don’t have the patience to listen to disagreements 
between those who seek sweeping, synoptic universalistic grandeur and those 
who seek ineffable and inexhaustible depth. It seems to me that those 
arguments are still going on. There was an article in the Times in early 
April about the roles of philosophers, political scientists and historians 
in the current administration, and the writer traced the intellectual 
genealogy of this group—people like Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill 
Bennett, Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Bill Kristol—back to the 
philosopher Leo Strauss [1899–1973], and his student Allan Bloom. Strauss 
was the epitome of the modern Platonist. He had severe doubts about 
democracy, because he thought that the lazy, stupid masses could never get 
in touch with Truth, capital T, the way that the philosophers could. As a 
Platonist, he thought that the Good was prior to the Right, that 
philosophers should strive to answer the question “What is the good life for 
man?” and set-up a political system accordingly, rather than allow for a 
multiplicity of good lives. On the other hand, Todd Gitlin has written in 
his recent book—Letters to a Young Activist—that the problem with the Green 
Party is that they’re too hung up on authenticity and questions of spiritual 
purity to make prudent compromises and thus get stuff done—the Romantic side 
of the dialectic you’ve been describing. So how can you square these debates 
with what you’ve said about our commonsensical impatience with the swings of 
the philosophical pendulum?

RR: I guess I don’t think there are any deep intellectual roots to either 
the Bush Administration or the Greens. That is, I think of the Greens as 
just expressing distaste for the two big parties. I mean, there may be a lot 
of stuff about deep authenticity somewhere, but I think of most of the three 
million votes that Nader got as just protest. Disastrous protest, as it 
turns out. There are some Straussians in the Bush administration, but I 
don’t think they have any particular importance, and a lot of the people who 
get identified as Straussian intellectuals have nothing to do with Strauss. 
Bennett doesn’t, for instance. I doubt he ever heard of Strauss before he 
met young Kristol. So I think that it’s one thing to have doubts about 
democracy—Posner has doubts about democracy, Schumpeter has doubts about 
democracy, everybody has doubts about democracy. There are all kinds of 
things wrong with it: it’s always in danger of populist fascism, 
representative assemblies are always corruptible by bribes. Everybody knows 
that. You don’t have to have a view about Plato and Truth to have doubts 
about democracy. But, more importantly, I’m not at all sure Strauss would 
have been interested in voting for Bush over Gore, because he thought that 
American liberalism, including the welfare state, was a perfectly reasonable 
arrangement. Because they’re both from the University of Chicago, people 
connect Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, but there isn’t any particular 
connection. Strauss had nothing, so far as I know, against the welfare 
state. Coming from Germany in the Twenties, he took the welfare state for 
granted—they’d always had one.

BLVR: But what about the rhetoric of this group of politically involved 
Straussians? They put everything in terms of a moral crusade in the service 
of Truth and Morality, and they take Plato’s ideas about the necessity of a 
well-ordered, militarized, censoring polis as a call for a National Security 
State. Those things seem like they’re in line with a Straussian/Platonic 
political philosophy.

RR: I don’t see that. Every government, left or right, always engages in 
moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make 
war; any war has to be a moral crusade. There’s nothing in Plato or 
Aristotle that suggests the virtues of a National Security State. Strauss 
would have loathed the idea of the military-industrial complex.

BLVR: In other words, the neoconservatives around the White House—Cheney and 
Wolfowitz and the neocon Project for a New American Century—may trace 
themselves back to a Straussian political philosophy and a Platonic love of 
Truth, but that’s just a pretentious philosophical gloss on an 
unphilosophical set of policies?

RR: Yeah, exactly.

BLVR: But even if it’s just rhetoric, it seems to me to be fairly powerful 
rhetoric, and calling it rhetoric doesn’t explain away the problem of their 
policies. In a response to the review you wrote of Allan Bloom’s The Closing 
of the American Mind [in a 1991 issue of The New Republic], the Straussian 
Harvey Mansfield wrote that “Nietzsche said that man would rather will 
nothingness than will nothing. Strauss often quoted this farseeing remark… 
[and suggested that] communism, in its desire to put an end to class 
conflict, is essentially for wimps.” Democratic socialism gets construed as 
a cowardly alternative to the bold, meritocratic fray. In Letters to a Young 
Activist, Gitlin makes exactly this point: the neoconservative movement has 
been so successful exactly because of its Platonic rhetoric about toughness, 
and the disciplined moral pursuit of the Truth at all costs. You’ve written 
that “the appeal to something overarching and invulnerable, and the appeal 
to something ineffable and deep, are both just advertising slogans—ways of 
gaining our attention.” That may be true, but it seems unhelpful to dismiss 
the rhetoric as mere sloganeering when it seems to be working.

RR: Who is it supposed to be working on? How do you convince the public that 
wanting social justice, the welfare state, trade unions, maybe not a 
communist revolution, but a social democratic state, is wimpish? I don’t see 
that anything in Greek philosophy or Strauss would help convince you of 
that. You get convinced that the welfare state is philosophically wimpish if 
you’re a selfish greedhead to begin with. Philosophy isn’t going to turn you 
into one if you weren’t already. I think that people like William Bennett 
are just pandering to evangelical Christians. If there’s an intellectual 
influence on the Bush Administration, it comes out of the Southern Baptist 
Convention, and those are the people who buy Bennett’s books. They wouldn’t 
know Plato from a hole in the ground. Strauss would have found it 
unbelievable to be linked with the Southern Baptist Convention, standing for 
morality.

BLVR: Let me try putting this another way. You claim that these 
philosophical debates between Plato and Nietzsche, between the universalists 
and Romantics, are really just a matter of discussion in philosophy 
departments. But it seems like those debates might have a more central 
political importance when it comes to arguing against these neoconservatives 
we’ve been discussing, even if it’s just fluff, since they’ve decided to 
frame the discussion in those terms. If someone like you, someone with a 
pragmatic bent, came down hard against the Straussian Platonism they 
brandish, don’t you think it would undermine their influence?

RR: I can’t see it that way. Michael Lind had a piece [in the New Statesman] 
about the gang around Richard Perle and Wolfowitz, saying that this is a 
very small, very special group of weirdos. They’re not the tip of any 
iceberg. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time. 
Cheney happened to get them all into the government at once, because he was 
in charge of the transition, and that’s why we have this stuff going on in 
the Middle East. But stranger things have happened in the history of 
countries. Cabals do assume power in governments, and they carry all before 
them. If Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t had the influence he did, we probably 
wouldn’t have Puerto Rico, or occupied the Philippines. It wasn’t that there 
was a vast swell of opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt.

BLVR: So you have no interest in meeting any of those people on 
philosophical terms, on the philosophical level upon which they want to be 
taken seriously.

RR: I just don’t believe that they do. I’d be very surprised if anybody 
except the people who actually took the courses from Bloom, like Kristol or 
maybe Wolfowitz, could even talk about this stuff, or would want to. Well, 
actually, I wouldn’t mind having a discussion with them, because I’d like to 
see them make the connection between Strauss and the present administration. 
I don’t think they could do it for a minute.

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