William Pfaff is the latest nitwit journalist to take up the thought of Leo Strauss -- and to get it terribly wrong. This column is even worse than that Jeet Heer piece we deconstructed a couple of days ago, so bad that I'm not going to do the same thing.
However, Pfaff goes even further than Heer in smearing the GOP as a collection of idiots, a collective particularly susceptible to -- everyone together boys and girls -- the radical neoconservatives (conveniently influenced by... that's right, Strauss!). Excerpt:
The trouble with American conservatism during most of the 20th century was that it was not particularly intelligent. The Republican Party was and is a business party, anti-intellectual and to a considerable degree xenophobic.The ties of Perle, Abrams, Kagan, and Kristol to Strauss are tenuous, at best. Wolfowitz did NOT do a dissertation under Strauss, who taught political theory, but under Albert Wohlstetter, on nuclear proliferation. And in any case, a sinister, far-reaching conspiracy to control something as BIG as American foreign policy should include more than two people who have had any significant training under Strauss or Straussians (Wolfowitz and Shulsky) and who are not even cabinet secretaries, shouldn't it?.
The radical neoconservatives, who appeared in the 1960s, are the first seriously intelligent movement on the American right since the 19th century. They want to remake the international order under effective U.S. hegemony, destroy America's enemies and cripple or eliminate the United Nations and other institutions making a claim to international jurisdiction.
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They have a political philosophy, and the arrogance and intolerance of their actions reflect their conviction that they possess a realism and truth others lack.
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They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan and William Kristol.
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The main intellectual influence on the neoconservatives has been the philosopher Leo Strauss, who left Germany in 1938 and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Several of the neoconservatives studied under him. Wolfowitz and Shulsky took doctorates under him.
More evidence that nitwit journalists should stick to matters they are equipped intellectually and methodologically to handle. Pfaff can't even get his FACTS write (that's simple journalism), and wants us to take his thoughts on political theory seriously? Please.
Daniel W. Drezner has some pertinent thoughts on Strauss and neocon "conspiracies" here. Quite a few people should stop watching their DVDs of X-Files episodes, take a deep breath, and read it.
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