This entry is not exactly on Leo Strauss (1899-1973), but perhaps more accurately on the peculiar history of neoconservatism in America. (For much more on Strauss, my entry The Posthumous Wild Adventures Of A Nice Jewish Thinker in the Tikkun Olam section will be posted later.)
Having talked already about the political esoterism of Leo Strauss and its far-reaching consequences for the new American century (I think that even the bravest political opportunists in Washington DC wouldn’t dare to talk about a new American millennium in this context), the time has come to probe into the shallow acid waters of the so-called neoconservative movement in America, which, I am afraid, has not quite given up ghost since the retirement of the body, which that wretched ghost used to officially possess last in the George W. Bush Administration.
I have studied the history, faith, and practice of the American neoconservative movement for a while, and it strikes me with its most curious parallel to the story of Marxism in Russia a century ago. The Russians, with Lenin’s inspired blessing, radicalized the relatively benign elder thinker Marx (not to be confused with the young radical thinker Marx of the Communist Manifesto period), blatantly ascribing to him an array of outrageously un-Marxian ideas, originating from Lenin himself, and rather successfully managed to pass them off as belonging to Karl Marx. By the same token, the neoconservatives may have ascribed some pretty outrageous ideas to the authorship of the relatively benign philosopher Leo Strauss, and proceeded to call Strauss the father of the neoconservative movement, whereas its real father may not have been Strauss at all, but the much more down to earth political activist and practical political thinker Irving Kristol, who is ironically being called “godfather” of the neoconservative movement, officiating the Strauss-Kristol nexus along exactly the same structural lines as the nexus Marx-Lenin had been made not so long before them. We will be talking about the Strauss-Kristol nexus a little later, but for now we are resuming the regular course of our discussion.
Let us now retrace the history of neoconservatism in America, both as a movement and as a term. The term itself was coined by the eminent American socialist, social critic, radio commentator, professor of political science at Queens College Michael Harrington, in reference to the critics of the American welfare reform. (His 1973 article in the Dissent Magazine had the title The Welfare State and its Neoconservative Critics.) Harrington used the new term pejoratively, describing the ideas of the liberal intellectuals who had rejected the dominant political direction taken by the Democratic Party at the time in favor of a new improved form of conservatism.
Ironically, although the term was first used pejoratively, it would be picked up and used, this time as an adequate description of the new movement, by its spiritual leader and explicit founder. Its distilled meaning, this time positively self-descriptive and unabashedly self-congratulatory, was proposed by none other than Irving Kristol, who was calling himself a true self-confessed neoconservative. Needless to say, Leo Strauss, never used this term and never described the fundamentals of the neoconservative ideology, as described by Irving Kristol and later ascribed to Strauss.
(Mea culpa, I am describing neoconservatism as an ideology, because to me it is clearly one, but, technically, Kristol insisted that it was not an ideology, but a persuasion, a way of thinking about politics, rather than a compendium of principles and axioms. It was classical, rather than romantic in temperament, and practical and anti-utopian in policy. In my view, this effort to "de-ideologize" neoconservatism is clearly disingenuous, and even an effort to brainwash the public, for which reason I now withdraw my mea culpa plea.)
Mind you, I do not deny that neoconservatism can be called a persuasion or a way of thinking about politics or whatever, none of which denies the fact that at the same time neoconservatism is an ideology.
The fact that Kristol was disingenuous in denying that neoconservatism is an ideology is revealed in his own admission, which is this: “What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” (Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1975.) This observation, or rather philosophical credo, makes Kristol’s disingenuous definition of neoconservatism as a “persuasion” indistinguishable from the normal understanding of what is called “ideology.”
Apart from Irving Kristol, (whose son Bill Kristol has become one of the top leaders of the neoconservative revolution in America), another, this time totally odious political figure has been openly recognized as its major inspirer. Max Shachtman (1904-1972) was an American leftwing Communist intellectual who was expelled from the Party in 1928 and became one of the closest associates of Trotsky and the chief intellectual force behind the CLA, the Trotskyist Communist League of America (1928-1938) and its successor organizations SWP (Socialist Workers Party), ISL (Independent Socialist League), a reconstituted SP (Socialist Party), and eventually on Shachtman’s death, SDUSA (Social Democrats USA). Irving Kristol had acknowledged some indebtedness to Shachtman, and the Reaganite luminary UN Ambassador and senior Academic Jeane Kirkpatrick used to be a devoted Shachtmanite in her earlier years, and never, even in her later life, had repudiated this association.
There is actually a very good reason why none of the elder neoconservatives (who had all been influenced by Max Shachtman in some way) either deny or repudiate this association. Although Trotsky was an “anti-Stalinist,” he was not “anti-Soviet,” whereas Shachtman surely was, and he differed with Trotsky on the question of taking sides in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939, opting, unlike Trotsky, against the USSR. His Trotskyism graciously forgiven, it was this extreme anti-Sovietism of Shachtman, which had endeared him to the neoconservative crowd, who were all, strictly speaking, anti-Soviet cold war hawks, rather than anti-Communist hawks. This core distinction (anti-Sovietism, rather than anti-Communism!), I repeat, has defined the nature of American neoconservatism, and has made Shachtman’s otherwise radical Trotskyite transgressions palatable to the tastes of the future pillars of American neoconservatism.
…So far so good, but where does Leo Strauss fit into this. Apparently he does not. The neoconservative flirt with Trotskyism never was to his taste, at least insofar as his history of personal associations, written legacy, and public statements are concerned. On the other hand, of all neoconservative heroes, he is by far the most intellectual, the most academic, and the most philosophical in the classic sense of the word. Max Shachtman and Irving Kristol, in contrast, were both mostly political activists and ideologues. Thus, Leo Strauss, unlike the others, gives the neoconservatives a much higher level of intellectual legitimacy (as the only one, for instance, who ever talks about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, whereas the others talk about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and contemporary politics). This, as it happens, is the main reason why the neoconservatives like to identify themselves with Strauss first and foremost, while their more immediate connections to Trotsky, Shachtman, and the mother of them all Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, have been most deliberately downplayed… But before we get to Lenin, though, let us examine the basic tenets of neoconservatism.
In terms of its ideas, neoconservatism has most visibility in foreign policy. Using the codeword "freedom," its stated purpose has been to defeat all opposition to American power in the world (which required the defeat of America’s main adversary of the cold war, the USSR, and its successor state Russia, with which task the Russians conveniently obliged in the 1990’s) and to establish America’s global hegemony (this second task turning into a debacle). It is quite obvious that, thus securing world power, the neoconservatives reasonably saw their control of the essential political institutions of the United States as an absolute must, and it is here that Lenin will shortly come into the picture.
In their domestic orientation, the neoconservatives enthusiastically identified themselves with neoliberalism, that is, the ideology of aggressive capitalism, founded on the concept of the free market. Attributing positive ethical value to capitalism (which certainly turns all Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism and such upside down), they saw free-enterprising capitalism as the embodiment of that freedom which they were anxious to impose on the rest of the world via the doctrine and practice of Globalism. This linkage makes perfect sense. Being the predominant economic power in the world and by far the richest one, global economic “freedom” means nothing less than America’s total hegemony. (By the very same token, “freedom” in any society divided into the rich and the poor, institutionally empowers the rich and disenfranchises the poor.)
Now, here we encounter an immediate contradiction. Economic freedom implies freedom from government restraints. But the neoconservative foreign policy emphasis requires exactly a very strong and very intrusive central government, that is bound to intrude into, and dominate, all American domestic institutions, including the nation’s economic activity. This contradiction appears irresolvable until we come to realize that political and economic power are virtually merged in the neoconservative winning scenario. The same people will be essentially holding power in the United States over both sectors with the obvious division of responsibilities between neoconservatism in foreign policy and neoliberalism in domestic and economic policies.
In order to have its way not just in Washington, but in the country at large, this neoconservative-neoliberal monolith must effectively take power over the country as a whole, subordinating all domestic policies to its joint agenda. This can be achieved by talking about politics on a massive scale, and by “persuasion” of the public, which results in a propaganda offensive and both extensive and intensive brainwashing of the public and by a virtual takeover of power over all three branches of the US Government: executive, legislative and judiciary. Certain signs of such a successful takeover are distinctly visible today: despite all the catastrophic debacles suffered by neoconservatism during the George W. Bush Administration, from 2001 to 2009, the neoconservative-neoliberal alliance is alive and quite active behind the Obama Administration (just as President George W. Bush himself had predicted, prophesying the dramatic change in Candidate Obama as soon as he would become President Obama), its rhetorical vocabulary slightly muted down, but its practices largely unabated, while its control over the US media has recently become even greater than before.
Coming to the question of method, where Lenin finally gets into the picture, let us look at the curious array of neoconservative historical associations. I do not intend to join the ranks of those critics who implicitly identify neoconservatism with Trotskyism, by overstating their historical connection. Let me be clear, even the extreme anti-Sovietism of the neoconservatives, which highlights the influence of Max Shachtman, has no connection to Trotsky, who was an anti-Stalinist, but angrily quarreled with his American disciple over the latter’s excessive anti-Sovietism. The distinguishing features of neoconservatism are its underlying ideas, which have nothing to do with Trotskyism, but also its methods of achieving them which have everything to do… not so much with Trotsky as with his intellectually far superior comrade Lenin.
It was Lenin who developed and successfully introduced into practice the famous party principle, according to which it is possible to take power in a great country against overwhelming odds, as long as you have the instrument for such a takeover: a small, but absolutely committed body of disciples and comrades, bound by the tightest conspiratorial discipline, following a clear-cut set of rules, and, most importantly, armed with an effective ideology. This practice of creating a secret society within the United States, exactly along Lenin’s lines, and activating it for an effective power takeover has been explicitly attributed to the neoconservatives by their critics, which must always be taken with a grain of salt, but even on the face of it, judging from the words and actions of the neoconservatives themselves, it looks like this must exactly have been the case. In this light, the political theories of esoterism, conspiratorialism, and principled mendacity for a good cause, as forwarded by Leo Strauss, and allegedly gleaned by him from the Ancient Greeks and some later classics of political philosophy, become important pieces of a sinister jigsaw puzzle, which now fall into place, and reveal a very disturbing picture. In this case it is no longer important whether Strauss was the mastermind of the emerging neoconservative movement, or was merely used by the neoconservatives, exactly like Lenin had used Marx. After all, Leo Strauss died back in 1972, when America, despite all her faults and missteps, still was a very different country from what she has become in the last twenty to thirty years.
Having talked already about the political esoterism of Leo Strauss and its far-reaching consequences for the new American century (I think that even the bravest political opportunists in Washington DC wouldn’t dare to talk about a new American millennium in this context), the time has come to probe into the shallow acid waters of the so-called neoconservative movement in America, which, I am afraid, has not quite given up ghost since the retirement of the body, which that wretched ghost used to officially possess last in the George W. Bush Administration.
I have studied the history, faith, and practice of the American neoconservative movement for a while, and it strikes me with its most curious parallel to the story of Marxism in Russia a century ago. The Russians, with Lenin’s inspired blessing, radicalized the relatively benign elder thinker Marx (not to be confused with the young radical thinker Marx of the Communist Manifesto period), blatantly ascribing to him an array of outrageously un-Marxian ideas, originating from Lenin himself, and rather successfully managed to pass them off as belonging to Karl Marx. By the same token, the neoconservatives may have ascribed some pretty outrageous ideas to the authorship of the relatively benign philosopher Leo Strauss, and proceeded to call Strauss the father of the neoconservative movement, whereas its real father may not have been Strauss at all, but the much more down to earth political activist and practical political thinker Irving Kristol, who is ironically being called “godfather” of the neoconservative movement, officiating the Strauss-Kristol nexus along exactly the same structural lines as the nexus Marx-Lenin had been made not so long before them. We will be talking about the Strauss-Kristol nexus a little later, but for now we are resuming the regular course of our discussion.
Let us now retrace the history of neoconservatism in America, both as a movement and as a term. The term itself was coined by the eminent American socialist, social critic, radio commentator, professor of political science at Queens College Michael Harrington, in reference to the critics of the American welfare reform. (His 1973 article in the Dissent Magazine had the title The Welfare State and its Neoconservative Critics.) Harrington used the new term pejoratively, describing the ideas of the liberal intellectuals who had rejected the dominant political direction taken by the Democratic Party at the time in favor of a new improved form of conservatism.
Ironically, although the term was first used pejoratively, it would be picked up and used, this time as an adequate description of the new movement, by its spiritual leader and explicit founder. Its distilled meaning, this time positively self-descriptive and unabashedly self-congratulatory, was proposed by none other than Irving Kristol, who was calling himself a true self-confessed neoconservative. Needless to say, Leo Strauss, never used this term and never described the fundamentals of the neoconservative ideology, as described by Irving Kristol and later ascribed to Strauss.
(Mea culpa, I am describing neoconservatism as an ideology, because to me it is clearly one, but, technically, Kristol insisted that it was not an ideology, but a persuasion, a way of thinking about politics, rather than a compendium of principles and axioms. It was classical, rather than romantic in temperament, and practical and anti-utopian in policy. In my view, this effort to "de-ideologize" neoconservatism is clearly disingenuous, and even an effort to brainwash the public, for which reason I now withdraw my mea culpa plea.)
Mind you, I do not deny that neoconservatism can be called a persuasion or a way of thinking about politics or whatever, none of which denies the fact that at the same time neoconservatism is an ideology.
The fact that Kristol was disingenuous in denying that neoconservatism is an ideology is revealed in his own admission, which is this: “What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” (Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1975.) This observation, or rather philosophical credo, makes Kristol’s disingenuous definition of neoconservatism as a “persuasion” indistinguishable from the normal understanding of what is called “ideology.”
Apart from Irving Kristol, (whose son Bill Kristol has become one of the top leaders of the neoconservative revolution in America), another, this time totally odious political figure has been openly recognized as its major inspirer. Max Shachtman (1904-1972) was an American leftwing Communist intellectual who was expelled from the Party in 1928 and became one of the closest associates of Trotsky and the chief intellectual force behind the CLA, the Trotskyist Communist League of America (1928-1938) and its successor organizations SWP (Socialist Workers Party), ISL (Independent Socialist League), a reconstituted SP (Socialist Party), and eventually on Shachtman’s death, SDUSA (Social Democrats USA). Irving Kristol had acknowledged some indebtedness to Shachtman, and the Reaganite luminary UN Ambassador and senior Academic Jeane Kirkpatrick used to be a devoted Shachtmanite in her earlier years, and never, even in her later life, had repudiated this association.
There is actually a very good reason why none of the elder neoconservatives (who had all been influenced by Max Shachtman in some way) either deny or repudiate this association. Although Trotsky was an “anti-Stalinist,” he was not “anti-Soviet,” whereas Shachtman surely was, and he differed with Trotsky on the question of taking sides in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939, opting, unlike Trotsky, against the USSR. His Trotskyism graciously forgiven, it was this extreme anti-Sovietism of Shachtman, which had endeared him to the neoconservative crowd, who were all, strictly speaking, anti-Soviet cold war hawks, rather than anti-Communist hawks. This core distinction (anti-Sovietism, rather than anti-Communism!), I repeat, has defined the nature of American neoconservatism, and has made Shachtman’s otherwise radical Trotskyite transgressions palatable to the tastes of the future pillars of American neoconservatism.
…So far so good, but where does Leo Strauss fit into this. Apparently he does not. The neoconservative flirt with Trotskyism never was to his taste, at least insofar as his history of personal associations, written legacy, and public statements are concerned. On the other hand, of all neoconservative heroes, he is by far the most intellectual, the most academic, and the most philosophical in the classic sense of the word. Max Shachtman and Irving Kristol, in contrast, were both mostly political activists and ideologues. Thus, Leo Strauss, unlike the others, gives the neoconservatives a much higher level of intellectual legitimacy (as the only one, for instance, who ever talks about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, whereas the others talk about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and contemporary politics). This, as it happens, is the main reason why the neoconservatives like to identify themselves with Strauss first and foremost, while their more immediate connections to Trotsky, Shachtman, and the mother of them all Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, have been most deliberately downplayed… But before we get to Lenin, though, let us examine the basic tenets of neoconservatism.
In terms of its ideas, neoconservatism has most visibility in foreign policy. Using the codeword "freedom," its stated purpose has been to defeat all opposition to American power in the world (which required the defeat of America’s main adversary of the cold war, the USSR, and its successor state Russia, with which task the Russians conveniently obliged in the 1990’s) and to establish America’s global hegemony (this second task turning into a debacle). It is quite obvious that, thus securing world power, the neoconservatives reasonably saw their control of the essential political institutions of the United States as an absolute must, and it is here that Lenin will shortly come into the picture.
In their domestic orientation, the neoconservatives enthusiastically identified themselves with neoliberalism, that is, the ideology of aggressive capitalism, founded on the concept of the free market. Attributing positive ethical value to capitalism (which certainly turns all Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism and such upside down), they saw free-enterprising capitalism as the embodiment of that freedom which they were anxious to impose on the rest of the world via the doctrine and practice of Globalism. This linkage makes perfect sense. Being the predominant economic power in the world and by far the richest one, global economic “freedom” means nothing less than America’s total hegemony. (By the very same token, “freedom” in any society divided into the rich and the poor, institutionally empowers the rich and disenfranchises the poor.)
Now, here we encounter an immediate contradiction. Economic freedom implies freedom from government restraints. But the neoconservative foreign policy emphasis requires exactly a very strong and very intrusive central government, that is bound to intrude into, and dominate, all American domestic institutions, including the nation’s economic activity. This contradiction appears irresolvable until we come to realize that political and economic power are virtually merged in the neoconservative winning scenario. The same people will be essentially holding power in the United States over both sectors with the obvious division of responsibilities between neoconservatism in foreign policy and neoliberalism in domestic and economic policies.
In order to have its way not just in Washington, but in the country at large, this neoconservative-neoliberal monolith must effectively take power over the country as a whole, subordinating all domestic policies to its joint agenda. This can be achieved by talking about politics on a massive scale, and by “persuasion” of the public, which results in a propaganda offensive and both extensive and intensive brainwashing of the public and by a virtual takeover of power over all three branches of the US Government: executive, legislative and judiciary. Certain signs of such a successful takeover are distinctly visible today: despite all the catastrophic debacles suffered by neoconservatism during the George W. Bush Administration, from 2001 to 2009, the neoconservative-neoliberal alliance is alive and quite active behind the Obama Administration (just as President George W. Bush himself had predicted, prophesying the dramatic change in Candidate Obama as soon as he would become President Obama), its rhetorical vocabulary slightly muted down, but its practices largely unabated, while its control over the US media has recently become even greater than before.
Coming to the question of method, where Lenin finally gets into the picture, let us look at the curious array of neoconservative historical associations. I do not intend to join the ranks of those critics who implicitly identify neoconservatism with Trotskyism, by overstating their historical connection. Let me be clear, even the extreme anti-Sovietism of the neoconservatives, which highlights the influence of Max Shachtman, has no connection to Trotsky, who was an anti-Stalinist, but angrily quarreled with his American disciple over the latter’s excessive anti-Sovietism. The distinguishing features of neoconservatism are its underlying ideas, which have nothing to do with Trotskyism, but also its methods of achieving them which have everything to do… not so much with Trotsky as with his intellectually far superior comrade Lenin.
It was Lenin who developed and successfully introduced into practice the famous party principle, according to which it is possible to take power in a great country against overwhelming odds, as long as you have the instrument for such a takeover: a small, but absolutely committed body of disciples and comrades, bound by the tightest conspiratorial discipline, following a clear-cut set of rules, and, most importantly, armed with an effective ideology. This practice of creating a secret society within the United States, exactly along Lenin’s lines, and activating it for an effective power takeover has been explicitly attributed to the neoconservatives by their critics, which must always be taken with a grain of salt, but even on the face of it, judging from the words and actions of the neoconservatives themselves, it looks like this must exactly have been the case. In this light, the political theories of esoterism, conspiratorialism, and principled mendacity for a good cause, as forwarded by Leo Strauss, and allegedly gleaned by him from the Ancient Greeks and some later classics of political philosophy, become important pieces of a sinister jigsaw puzzle, which now fall into place, and reveal a very disturbing picture. In this case it is no longer important whether Strauss was the mastermind of the emerging neoconservative movement, or was merely used by the neoconservatives, exactly like Lenin had used Marx. After all, Leo Strauss died back in 1972, when America, despite all her faults and missteps, still was a very different country from what she has become in the last twenty to thirty years.
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