TIC Heads-Up: Gottfried on Strauss

by Stephen Masty

Far from Amazon and bookshops here in Kabul, I can only suggest a good article by Paul Gottfried on his newest book and hope that someone reviews it here.

Leo Strauss

Dr. Gottfried, a prolific conservative author who teaches at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has written Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement: A Critical Appraisal, recently published by Cambridge University Press, and he gives us a tasty amuse bouche on LewRockwell.com to be read here.

Dr. Gottfried shows respect for Strauss as “a person of vast humanistic learning, and more thoughtful and less pompous than some of his famous students,” as some TIC contributors do, while he remains “hardly friendly to the Wilsonian Weltpolitik of the Straussians.” But without using the word “ideology” (in the article at least) he describes Strauss, Straussians and their so-called NeoConservative fellow travellers as ideologues in a way that resonates with anyone who possesses a Kirkian cast of mind.

Near to the heart of it, he accuses the Straussians of imposing their own (often modern and liberal) values onto history, seeing their own narrative justified everywhere, and going to indefensible lengths to defend their positions.

Ludwig von Mises

He recounts a disagreement between Strauss and Ludwig von Mises over whether facts exist apart from one’s values:  “As the debate wore on and Strauss began to moralize, Mises lost his equanimity. He indicated to (economist Murray) Rothbard that he was being asked to debate not a true scholar but a ‘gymnasium instructor.’’

Ideology is not merely a kind of party-game that ends in genocide; the participants blind themselves incrementally until what Dr. Kirk scornfully calls ‘defecated reason’ triumphs and make-believe trumps reality and prudence. Dr. Gottfried asks, amusingly:

“...in their attempt to find "secret writing" in texts, Straussians would almost compulsively read their own values into the past. Presumably all smart people who wrote "political philosophy," no matter when they lived, were religious skeptics, yearning for something like "liberal democracy." This speculation could be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed and contributed zip to scholarly discussion. (We)...also wondered why none of the great minds whom the Straussians wrote about was ever shown to be a Christian heretic or something other than a forerunner of those who are now revealing their concealed meanings...Why do all "secret writings" seem to have originated with a Jewish agnostic residing in an American metropolitan area?”

At the end, if what Dr. Gottfried describes is not a diagnosis of ideology, one wonders what is. It fits Sir Karl Popper’s principle of empirical falsification (if it cannot be disproven it is not a valid proposition) as well as the Procrustean definitions of ideology familiar to students of Burke and Kirk.

He also critiques Strauss and his followers for failing to see the similarities of state socialism in its many noxious forms and, instead, blaming everything on ethnicity, specifically Germans. Hence for many modern NeoCons, it is always 1938, everyone on their side is always Churchill and every opponent is Hitler.

On the basis of one insightful article, the book sounds worthwhile.

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

How the GOP swallowed the Conservative Movement

by Paul Gottfried

The state of “American conservatism” can be fully appreciated by turning on FOX News and then listening to Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, or Bill Kristol present their customary civics lesson. One supposedly becomes a conservative by embracing such exponents of the faith and then by denouncing Obama and the Democrats for their deficit spending and for not standing tall for human rights. If there is another definition of “conservatism” that is widely accepted in this country, I have yet to hear of it. It is also possible to manifest ones conservatism by voting Republican in elections and by talking up GOP pols and railing against their Democratic opponents. Although there are other examples that are held up for honor, three paradigmatic conservatives who enjoy incessant praise from the official Right are George W. Bush, Martin Luther King, Jr., and (Human Events’ Man of the Year) Dick Cheney. I’m not sure what makes such people “conservative,” but then who am I to question what tens of millions of Americans hear every night about true conservatives?

One might think that I’m being sarcastic but I’m only trying to illustrate my contention that the term conservatism has become so free-floating that it means whatever journalists and politicians want it to mean. “Conservative,” as it is now being used to describe Republican ward-heelers and neo-Wilsonian social democrats, is an arbitrary designation. Equally ridiculous is the attempt to describe as conservative someone who opposes the institutionalization of sodomy or who recoils at the idea of having someone marry his Great Dane.

Political personalities receive rightwing accreditation by being associated with a party that is thought to be further to the right than the Democrats. Although that linkage may please media types, it has only a very limited historic basis. The persistence of this association allows Republicans to sound and act like Democrats without losing their assigned right-of-center location. For example, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry favors giving the children of illegal residents the advantage of instatetuition to attend Texas state universities. Despite his embrace of this now established leftist position, Perry is certainly not being scolded by FOX for taking it. His position becomes toxic for the Murdoch-media Empire, and commendable for the rival media complex, only when a Democrat takes the same stand. Moreover, it was not Obama but Bush who in July 2003 went to West Africa and apologized before some local tyrant for the practice of slavery in this country. Yet it is not he but Obama and the Democrats who get attacked or defended for speaking deferentially to the leaders of non-Western countries.

I recently heard from a neighbor that, unlike Obama, Bush was “tough” on illegal immigrants. When I asked my obviously Republican neighbor why she believes this to be the case, she explained that it was natural that Bush should be “tough” on illegal immigration. After all, he’s a Republican and Republican means conservative. Apparently by registering with the Republican Party, one acquires a certain perhaps irreversible conservative grace. One can then exhibit one’s grace by putting Republican bumper stickers on to one’s Republican car and by listening to authorized GOP loudmouths. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with traditional hierarchies, an agrarian culture or whatever in the past people like me, who are European social historians, understood to be conservatism. But I suppose this stuff fills someone’s leisure time or golden years and supplies respectable labels to those who might otherwise be considered shock-jocks or placeholders.

In the past I’ve hammered the neoconservatives for denaturing the American conservative movement by pushing it leftward. After reflecting on the ease with which this was done, it is hard to pretend that too many innocents were led down the primrose path. I’ve now come to realize that there were exceedingly few “conservatives” who held out against the takeover, and even if the neoconservatives never imposed their will, the movement would have drifted in any case in the direction in which it went, toward becoming a GOP accessory. Contrary to what I hear from the liberal press, it was not the Republican Party that swallowed the Right but exactly the opposite that occurred. The conservative movement went into the business of working for the GOP and decorating its politics with slogans.