Reply #3: Strauss's influence [View All]

[Emit]

Strauss's influence is surprising because his voluminous, often esoteric writings say virtually nothing specific about issues of policy, foreign or domestic. ...he wrote mainly about the importance of understanding the classics, especially Plato and Aristotle, along with European philosophers from Locke and Rousseau to Nietzsche and Heidegger. One core idea in Strauss's work was a denunciation of the spirit of moral tolerance that, he argued, had come to dominate intellectual life in Europe and the United States. He described what he called "the crisis of liberalism ----...a crisis due to the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic." The problem with relativism and with liberalism, Strauss argued, was that they can degenerate into "the easygoing belief that all points of view are equal (hence, none really worth passionate argument, deep analysis or stalwart defense) and then into the strident belief that anyone who argues for the superiority of a distinctive moral insight, way of life, or human type is somehow elitist or antidemocratic -- and hence immoral." Strauss spoke of the need for an elite group of advisers, as in Plato's Republic, who could impress upon a political leader and upon the masses the need for virtue and for strong moral judgments about good and evil.

For America's relations with the world, Strauss's ideas carried a number of implications. First, his ideas stressed the importance of a leader who was especially strong in his actions, firm in his beliefs and willing to go against the grain to combat "tyranny" (Strauss frequently used the older word tyranny, rather than te more modern word dictatorship)...

Second, during the cold war, Strauss's thought provided some of the intellectual underpinnings for strong, unqualified anticommunism. The Straussians were not constrained, as many liberals often were, by the need to suspend moral judgments and to take into account differing cultural values and sensitivities. If a third world country was trying to choose its form of government, liberals might argue that communism was inefficient, that it didn't work; the Straussians, by contrast, would argue that communism was tyranny and inherently evil...

~snip~

Finally, other Straussians, including Wolfowitz's close associate Abram Shulsky, carried the implications of Strauss's theories into the field of intelligence gathering. The Straussians argued that the analytic style of the CIA, developed under the Yale history professor Sherman kent, had been intrinsically linked to the academic tradition of liberalism. Intelligence officials tended to assume that all leaders followed the same underlying processes and patterns of behavior (for example, trying to stay in power, furthering national interests, maintaining access to economic resources). Thus the best way for the CIA to predict how another government would behave in the future was to study objective criteria, such as economic outputs; planting spies and stealing secrets didn't matter so much. But in the Straussians' contrary view of intelligence gathering, what counted above all was the nature of the regime; tyrannies behaved in fundamentally different ways from democracies. As a result, the Straussians argued, American intelligence should pay more attention to the phenomenon of deception. A totalitarian regime had the ability to deceive the world about what was happening inside its borders; to discover the reality that a dictator covered up, spies were important. pp. 26-28

Rise of the Vulcans, The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James Mann

"Moral claims involve a quest for absolutes, a denial of nuance, a rejection of history," Kissinger argued...By contrast, for Wolfowitz, moral principles were more important than stability or national interests...

In his memoir of the Ford years, Kissinger disparaged those Americans who, in the fashion of Woodrow Wilson, see American foreign policy "as a struggle between good and evil, in each phase of which it is America's mission to help defeat the evil foes challenging a peaceful order....Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus." Those words were an apt description of Wolfowitz's views, beginning in the Ford administration and continuing through the second Bush administration. More than any other single figure in the Republican foreign policy hierarchy, Wolfowitz viewed himself as Kissinger's opposite, his adversary in the realm of ideas.

The evisceration of Henry Kissinger and detente represented a turning point for America's relations with the world. Inside the United States the issues and the very focus of debate over American foreign policy were undergoing rapid and fundamental transformation. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz all played key roles in these changes... pp. 76-77

Rise of the Vulcans, The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James Mann