From: pierce@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Brad Pierce)
Subject: Leo Strauss, "elites", and occlusion
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Distribution: alt
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 19:03:03 GMT

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From: andrey@cs.arizona.edu (Andrey K. Yeatts)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.dan-quayle
Subject: Paleocon Think
Keywords: Strauss, Kristol, Quayle & other intellectuals
Date: 29 Oct 92 17:37:48 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona, CS Dept, Tucson

For those that might be interested in the driving intellectual forces
behind Dan Quayle and the (now old) New Right, here's Christopher Hitchen's
Minority Report in this week's _Nation_. Perhaps it will drive Dan Ashlock
to put some PUBLIC back in the Republican party!

----------

"The Obituary of Allan Bloom in the October 8 _New York Times_ contained a
marvelous intellectual confusion. Speaking of his book, _The Closing of the
American Mind_, the elegy reported, 'Mr. Bloom seemed to revel in goading
the intellectual elite.'  A scant few paragraphs later the same report mentioned
Bllom's subsequent book _Giants and Dwarfs_, and noted without comment that
one of the essays collected therein begins with the words 'Fellow elitists.'

"This only appears to be a contradiction. Bloom was guided all his life by the
writings of Leo Strauss, the savant of the classical conservatives, whose own
obituary he wrote in _Political Theory_ in 1974, employing terms of adoration
that are familiar to anyone who knows the Bloom style:

      Those of us who knew him saw in him such a power of mind,
      such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of
      the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of
      the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him
      is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never
      experience a man of this quality.

"The votaries of Leo Strauss form a sort of cult movement that is crucially
ambiguous about the idea of elitism. The core belief of Strauss himself, and
the mantra of his many rather odd followers, most of them located in the academy
and in the "think tank" culture, was:

      Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy
      within mass society.

"The key word here is probably `within'; Strauss made a special study of the
esoteric and the cabalistic, and believed that since ancient times authentic
philosophers had occluded their true meaning so as to make it clear only to a
class of adepts. As Bloom wrote in discussing Strauss' theory of the Greeks
(a theory Strauss projected onto Machiavelli and Hobbes and other students
of tyranny):

      Gradually Strauss became aware that these thinkers practiced an art
      of writing forgotten by us, an art of writing by which they hid their
      intentions from all but a select few.

"The need for concealment arose from the fact that the untutored masses needed
a ruler. It was thought better that they not know what, or how, the ruler was
thinking. In his book _What is Political Philosophy?_, Strauss was as candid as
could be, writing: `Philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small
minority... Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relation of
philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of
writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the
few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions
on which society rests.' [!]

"A Straussian, then, is one who hears it said that the study of Aristotle is a
study to be pursued only by a favored few, and who privately agrees. (This is
a double insult to the lucidity and universality of the Greeks, but the study
of classical philosphy is defamed in more that one way these days.) The
Straussian ethic involves the cynical `briefing,' by `gentlemen' well chosen
by one another, of potential princes. To it we owe the current conservative
fascination with `natural law' and `natural right' (evidenced by the school of
Bork and Thomas) and the less intellectual idea of secret and selective
government. The Straussian professor Harry Jaffa was the man who gave Barry
Goldwater the line about extremism in the defense of liberty being no vice,
and under the still-existing Reagan/Bush "regime" (a favorite Strauss word
for an ideal form of government) other acolytes have been busy in the worlds
of national security and public morals. It may seem absurd, but a number of
them have been involved in the molding of Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. [!!]

"Carnes Lord, once a close adviser to Quayle on the national security side,
wrote two books on that are more congruent than they seem. The first, _Education
and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle_, and the second, _The
Presidency and the Management of National Security, show how shallow is the
`deep connection' between ancient and modern ideas of oligarchy. In the first
Lord follows the precepts of Strauss by writing that Aristotle's _Politics_
addressed itself `to a class of aristocrats or "gentlemen" possessed of the
leisure necessary for education and for politcal activity. In the highest
case, they are addressed to men of this sort who are potential or actual
statesmen or legislators.' From this and other questionable readings, Lord
concluded that Aristotle was speaking to `educated and leisured gentlemen
even and precisely in regimes where they do not constitute a ruling class in
the political sense.' [well, Dan is certainly leisured, anyway!] The second,
more policy-oriented book argues that democracy is a strategic disadvantage.
`The openness or penchant for self-criticism of American society strikes many
foreigners as manifestations of weakness rather than strength." Lord called
for government control of the media in time of war to prevent any sickly
subversion of the sentimental democratic sort.

"Quayle's chief of staff, William Kristol, is another self-admitted Straussian,
and the man who suggested that the Vice President campaign against the
`cultural elite.' How apt it is that such demagogy comes form those who conceive
it as their task to incubate a secret nobility that holds the key to minority
rule."

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