Origins of Neo-Conservatism:  Is Leo Strauss a ‘false god’?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane


  Before we can discuss whether the alleged founder of Neo-Conservatism was a false god, we must answer three questions in order to dispel three myths.  First, is Neo-Conservatism merely a tool and a cover for Zionism, or is even the question merely a product of conspiratorial paranoia.  As a life-long student of the Neo-Con ideology, I have concluded that the ideology of Neo-Conservatism has nothing to do with either Zionism or Zionist Israel.  Israel is not a threat to anyone except its neighbors in the Middle East, which is part of a vicious circle of threat and counter-threat.  Israel will disappear within the next half century or so, perhaps through an Abraham Federation.  Inevitably, in my opinion, perhaps through a long process of hudna, the Jews will be welcomed as an integral part of the Holy Land, even though this seems impossible today. 

  On the other hand, with only perhaps a tinge of paranoia, one can argue that the NeoCons present a generic threat to the entire world, because everything they say and do is designed to save the world from universal global chaos.  Americans like to think big, but the NeoCons think perhaps even bigger.  Based on the primacy given to justice in the establishment of the Great American Experiment, we speak of the power of justice, whereas the NeoCons speak of the justice of power.  Normative politico-economists aim to empower others through the economic justice of broadened capital ownership, whereas the NeoCons seek to empower themselves as the saviors of civilization through its opposite, namely, monopoly capitalism (euphemistically called democratic capitalism).  We speak of good and evil by reference to the world religions; they deny any distinction between the two except as it reflects their existential fears.  The NeoCons represent one form of the Armageddon mentality, but they orchestrate the brilliance of their co-opted intellectuals in the think-tank community to hide the clear implications of all their basic premises.  Israel has nothing to do with such forces of history except as a local mirror of self-destruction.

  The second myth that must be exposed is the popular concept that the NeoCon movement is and always has been monolithic.  In fact, there are at least two basic variations in this ideological movement, the original form represented in the 1950s by Robert Strauss Hupe, and the malignant form of Neo-Conservatism represented by the modern-day ideologues who have hi-jacked the movement just as they are trying to hijack everything else for their own agenda.  The question is whether they are hi-jacking Leo Strauss as the alleged founder of Neo-Conservatism or merely representing him. 

  A very minor third myth is that Leo Strauss founded the Neo-Conservative movement because he was a Zionist.  He indeed was a very early Zionist.  In his autobiography published in 1965 he traced his Zionism back to the early 1920s when he was a university student.  He stated his Zionist commitment in the introductory paragraph of his presentation in December, 1957, entitled “What is Political Philosophy?”  His voluminous correspondence, now being published by Heinrich Meier in the multi-volume Gesammelte Shrifte of Leo Strauss, however, should indicate that his philosophy of politics reinforced his view that Jews could be secure only if they controlled their own sovereign state.  He did not produce his philosophy of politics in order to justify Zionism.  Like Henry Kissinger, who advises President Bush today, Strauss thought and operated at a much higher level than the parochial movement of self-determination known as Zionism. 

  Fortunately, the trials and tribulations of both the political Zionists and the Neo-Conservatives have opened up freedom for discussion in America after several years of intellectual lock-down.  Freedom for discussion has always been the salvation of the Great American Experiment, so we should take advantage of it during the current period of what the Chinese once called “let a thousand flowers bloom.”

  The subject of this essay on the origins of Neo-Conservatism is the alleged guru of the movement.  The most popular riddle in early 21st century thought is “Who is Leo Strauss?”  Was the real Strauss a modern Machiavelli, or a principled philosopher of civilizations, or was he merely a misunderstood proponent of the school of “national interest politics” associated with Hans Morgenthau’s seminal book, Politics Among Nations?  In short form, the answer to all three questions is “no.”  Strauss and Morgenthau proceeded from different premises and at different levels of thought.

  In 1965, in opposition to what I regarded as the demonic value-free power-paradigm of Henry Kissinger and the Illuminati (on which he wrote both his M.A. and PhD theses at Harvard), I received a grant to spend a year getting a degree from Oxford (funded as a research associate at Strauss-Hupe’s Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia) while writing a book on basic premises of mid-century thought. A student boycott at the University of Pennsylvania against the FPRI, which received funding from the Department of Defense, deep-sixed this grant, but I have been writing this book ever since, now more than forty years, partially in answer to today’s most popular riddle.

  Robert Strauss-Hupe, the founder of the FPRI, who told me that he wanted me to succeed him as its director, arguably can be considered to be the real god-father of the Neo-Conservative movement.  While there in 1965-66, I studied the writings of his generation of fugitives from Nazi Germany, including Leo Strauss.  Strausz-Hupe believed in the power of moral superiority, whereas Strauss believed in the moral superiority of power.  Strausz-Hupe’s ideas get too little credit, and Strauss’s get too much, as seminal origins of twenty-first century American foreign policy.

  Nowhere, as far as I know, did Leo Strauss ever state that the highest morality was the pursuit of power.  But, like probably all of the Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany, he warned that democracy and justice are fragile plants in a hostile climate and can easily be destroyed unless they are rooted in power (both hard and soft).  I benefited from conversations in my father’s house in the early Post-World-War-II years with the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Heinrich Bruening, who tried to defend his reputation against those who claimed that he personally destroyed the Weimar Republic through his weakness and paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler.

  Bruening instituted draconian austerity budgets as Chancellor during the first two years of the Great Depression and underestimated the power of the National Socialists in reaction to his policies.  His detractors blame him for failing to use the power of the state in suppressing both the Nazis and Communists, and for his alleged naivete in hoping that the Nazis would destroy the Communists and then disappear.

  The lesson that all the exiles learned from this debacle is that democracy, freedom, and justice are possible only when backed by an overwhelming monopoly of force, which, of coursed, is the very definition of a modern state, a Jewish one or any other.  From this premise, the followers of Strauss concluded that only such force can save the world from the enemies of democracy and justice.

  The hallmark of modern Neo-Conservatism is the firm belief that justice must be postponed until order can be imposed, which is one reason why justice is not in the modern NeoCon vocabulary and why President Bush has never even uttered the word except as a synonym for revenge.

  In my various writings on the Neo-Conservative movement I have quoted the most influential religious leader in Washington, Bishop John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who states that he would support economic justice if it were possible, but the world is not ready for it.  Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has stated further that institutional changes to widen access to private property ownership of productive capital is the ultimate solution to the chaos in the world, but he vociferously insists that the U.S. government must restore order in the world first before any changes to promote justice are possible or can even be contemplated.

  In some of my other writings, I have noted that for NeoCon strategists the name of the game seems to be “creative destruction.”  This term was used originally in reference to aggressive monopoly capitalism, but it can apply to everything from the Medieval crusades to the current “war against evil,” both of which serve to consolidate political power.  The other NeoCon founding father, Irving Kristol, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of August 2, 1996, “With the end of the Cold war, what we really need is an obvious ideology and threatening enemy, one worthy of our mettle, one that can unite us in opposition.”  Equally obvious is the fact that to engage such an enemy properly one must eliminate international law, the law of nations, and the moral guidelines of every religion.  In the run-up to the Year 2000 presidential election, John Bolton, who very soon will be up for renewal as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, asserted, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so - because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are [sic] those who want to constrict the United States.” 

  This reliance on brute force as the elixir of freedom and justice provides the context for my conclusion that the NeoCons rely on the moral superiority of power rather than on the power of moral superiority. This merely raises the question, however, which of these Leo Strauss himself chose and under what circumstances.

  Neo-Conservatism has always had two wings.  We have yet to see which wing of Neo-Conservatism will win out, the wing that exhibits the insanity of doing more of the same without any productive result, or the wing that revives the premises of principled conservatism, also known as “paleo-conservatism” and even “classical liberalism,” from which the self-styled NeoCons pretend to derive their raison d’etre.

  This opens the question whether later-generation NeoCons have hijacked the movement on behalf of their attempt to rule Washington and the world and whether they have hi-jacked Leo Strauss.

  The fascination of modern political scientists with Straussianism derives in part from Strauss’s oft stated belief that the great ideas of philosophers, unlike the pedantry of scholars, often can best be communicated by esoteric and indirect communication.  Strauss followed Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Maimonides in emphasizing the importance of distinguishing literal from figurative speech in Scripture.  He was aware that prophets in all the world’s sacred scriptures, as well as the world’s greatest thinkers, used analogies and often deliberately contradicted themselves in order to force independent thought.  This method of communication is valid at times in the search for truth.  It was used by prophets in the transmission of wahy and is used by those inspired by ilham.  Unfortunately it is also used by false prophets to mislead the naive and unsuspecting as a weapon of what one can call mimetic warfare designed subliminally to seduce and control human thought and emotion.

  This fascination of the human mind with what eludes its grasp is one reason why students are attracted to cultic forms of Islamic Sufism and of every other form of mysticism.  I started a course at Harvard as a 17-year old Sophomore on Kantian philosophy and concluded that Emmanuel Kant warranted a separate course because no-one could possibly understand what he was saying, nor, it is my contention, could he himself. 

  Those who are straight forward can easily be dismissed, but one cannot dismiss a person whose ideas deliberately remain illusory and therefore can be marshaled to empower even the opposite of their original meanings.  Do the second and third-generation Straussians use his thoughts to promote esoterically the false gods of modern relativistic ideology while exoterically (superficially) condemning positivistic relativism?  Quite pragmatically, have the modern-day Neo-Cons used Strauss to reject the power of justice in favor of the justice of power as the lode-star of America’s purpose in the world?

  Are the NeoCons merely a case study of the modern ideological poles of utopianism and catastrophism, and specifically of a unique combination of both, which is the framework that I have used for many decades in my typology of twentieth-century premises of thought.  Do the NeoCons represent extreme forms of the good and bad on both sides of what Strausz-Hupe called the “protracted conflict” between slavery and freedom?  Do they therefore represent “two sides of the same coin.”  Are the end-time paradigms of both utopia and catastrophe merely part of the incoherence of civilizational disintegration or are such ideological paradigms very coherent and powerful as false gods?

  Has Leo Strauss been turned into a false god by those who would be God?  In answer, as a too clever means to avoid an answer while urging others to seek their own, permit me to quote one of Leo Strauss’s wisest sayings from his book Thoughts on Machiavelli, University of Chicago Press, 1958, page 30:  “The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.”