Leo Strauss and the American Right. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1997 by Michael Lind

In the past half century, one of the most striking phenomena in American intellectual life has been the influence of European emigre intellectuals who fled Hitler (or in some cases Stalin) in the 1930s and 1940s. The American New Left of the 1960s would hardly be conceivable without the influence of Herbert Marcuse and other German Marxist emigres. Postwar-American conservatism also counts among its patron saints intellectual exiles from Europe such as Ludwig von Mises and Eric Voegelin. In Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia B. Drury, a professor of politics at the University of Calgary in Canada, examines the influence on the American right of one of the most celebrated emigre intellectuals, Leo Strauss (1899-1973).

Strauss, a German Jewish professor of philosophy, taught political science at the University of Chicago after fleeing Nazi Germany. The list of Strauss' students and admirers includes a number of luminaries of the conservative intellectual movement between the 1950s and the 1990s: Willmoore Kendall, Irving Kristol and his son William, Robert Bork, Harvey Mansfield, Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, and William Bennett, among others. The late Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, and Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History, have made the larger public and not just the intellectual community aware of Straussian themes.

Straussian thought is hard to wrap your mind around, in part because Strauss and his disciples write in a highly abstract style that keeps trespassers out. Their enemies have accused Straussians of forming a cult, a charge that is risible when it comes from disciples of Marx, Freud, or Derrida. It is true that Strauss believed that many if not most philosophers, for fear of persecution, wrote in ways that concealed their views as much as they revealed them. A secular Jew, Strauss believed that the harsh truths of philosophy should not be publicized, for fear of undermining the public orthodoxy on which any stable community must rest. Strauss and his followers tend to blame both communist and fascist totalitarianism for the undermining of traditional belief systems by intellectuals. "Strauss understood both Weimar and America in terms of Plato's analysis of how democracy gives way to tyranny," Drury writes. "The licentious quality of the American love of freedom and its resemblance to the freedom of Weimar was therefore a reason for disquiet"

From Willmoore Kendall in the 1950s to Irving Kristol today, American conservative thinkers have invoked Strauss' name in arguing for an American public orthodoxy, which (mirabile dictu) just happens to coincide with the orthodoxy of the conservative movement and right-wing churches. Of Kristol, Drury writes: "He is so convinced of the political utility of religion that he is blind to the immoderate nature of groups such as the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell or the Christian Coalition of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed " The alliance between neoconservative intellectuals and anti-intellectual fundamentalists took a surprising turn recently when Kristol, Bork, and other right-wing intellectuals bravely declared their opposition in public to--Darwinism! (Coming soon: Noah's Ark and the Shroud of Turin!) It is impossible to picture Leo Strauss, a reclusive thinker who shunned political involvement, declaring his belief in creationism at a press conference as part of a strategy for securing the allegiance of the trailer-park South to the GOP.

Drury's account of the relationship between Strauss and other anti-liberal and anti-democratic 19th- and 20th-century German thinkers like Friedrich Nietzche, Carl Schmidt, and Martin Heidegger is generally persuasive. She neglects to point out the extent to which Strauss and his disciples have been philhellenes who emphasized the ancient Greek heritage, which was less important to the American founders than the heritage of Republican and Imperial Rome. This widely shared bias in favor of the Greeks and against the Romans (and Italians) is a legacy of 19th-century German and British Romanticism.

Unfortunately Drury's account of Strauss' thought is far better informed than her discussion of American politics. Drury finds plausible the claim of The New York Times that Leo Strauss was the godfather of the 1994 Republican Contract with America. In fact the Contract owed less to the Herr Doktor than to the Spin Doctor. Most Republican leaders probably think that Leo Strauss is a brand of jeans.

Drury treats "neoconservative" and "conservative" as synonyms, even though the most impressive neoconservative intellectuals--Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Theodore Draper--refused to follow Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz into an alliance with Pat Robertson and the Business Roundtable. By the early 1990s, the neoconservatives who had joined the Republican party had ceased to differ in any significant respect from old-fashioned Republican conservatives. Drury writes: "The 1996 presidential campaign of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp is a model of the neoconservative philosophy ... " On the contrary, the contemporary GOP, based on an alliance of big business with Protestant churches, is hardly distinguishable from the Republican Party that existed in the 1920s, when Leo Strauss was still teaching Plato in GermanY The sad fact is that the two postwar conservative intellectual movements in the United States--the largely Catholic movement centered on William F. Buckley Jr., and the more recent, largely Jewish movement of which Irving Kristol was the informal leader--have left little or no trace on the substance of American conservative politics. The conservative intellectuals did not take over the Republican party, but were taken over by it. For example, Catholic and Jewish intellectual conservatives in America have found it expedient to sacrifice the pro-labor strains of European Catholic conservatism and of Cold War liberalism in order to flourish as the house intellectuals for Republican business elites and foundations endowed by dead tycoons. Whatever one thinks of Strauss as a philosopher, he cannot be blamed for the opportunism of his followers.