I felt a certain guilty pleasure reading Anne Norton's "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire." The book is just too much fun - especially the juicy little tidbits of gossip about some of the crazier Straussians.
And, yet, the book has several serious, important points to make.
I myself entitled a review of Strauss's "The City and Man" (posted here on amazon six months before Norton's book was published) as "Strauss vs. the 'Straussians'." My point was that Strauss's own published writings directly and dramatically contradicted the positions and policies espoused by his supposed followers, the "neoconservative" Straussians, who now control the foreign policy of the United States of America.
This is one of the central themes of Norton's book. She distinguishes between Struass's "students" and his "disciples." The "students" were interested in learning what Strauss and his colleagues had to teach and then moving on in their own direction. The "disciples" were part of a bizarre cult.
As a student herself at the University of Chicago, in effect the headquarters of the Straussian movement, Norton had a chance to get to know both "students" and "disciples."
One telling anecdote about the Straussian Allan Bloom, famed author of "The Closing of the American Mind," reveals the internal dynamics of a cult:
"Bloom himself liked to play little games with his puppies [his students]. 'He was tossing pennies down the hall, and his students were scurrying to pick them up off the floor,' my friend Peter Agree told me. `He was laughing.'"
Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" became an instant manifesto for conservative, traditional values when it was published in 1987. And, yet, Norton explains:
"The defender of youthful innocence, family values, and traditional morality was a homosexual - and not just any homosexual, either. If Bloom's students were to be trusted, Bloom's antics gave new meaning to the term 'transgression.' The rumors of houseboys in sexual servitude, the evident flirtations with students, Bloom's flamboyantly queenly manner made 'The Closing of the American Mind' read as high hypocrisy..." Norton adds that all this was "readily acknowledged" (though not in print) by Bloom's "colleagues, friends, and students."
When I read Bloom's book back in 1988, although I agreed with much of Bloom's cultural criticism, I sensed something was wrong: there was too much enthusiasm for "eros" and too little for the norm of calm, disinterested truth. Indeed, if I understood the book correctly, the only real reason for human society was to produce more people just like... Allan Bloom.
Clearly, I didn't know the half of it.
But the psychological dynamics of cults provides only one piece of the explanation for the neoconservative Straussians who now control American foreign policy.
Perhaps a greater factor is revealed in an anecdote Norton tells of Zalmay Khalilzad, the new Bush Administration ambassador to Iraq:
"When I knew him, he was an Afghani graduate student and a radical. He boasted of the demonstrations he had organized in Beirut, of the fedayin he knew and had worked with, and of his friends who regularly visited Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi. He went to pro-Palestinian meetings. His room had a poster of Nasser..."
But, one happy day, Khalilzad and Norton were invited to a lavish party at the luxury apartment of a professor, Albert Wohlstetter, who had done very nicely for himself monetarily by working for the US defense establishment. The experience, Norton claims, altered Khalilzad's life: Khalilzad was "enthralled by Wohlstetter's party. In the elevator, in the apartment, he kept saying how much it all cost, how expensive it was, how much money Wohlstetter must have." In due course, Wohlstetter helped Khalilzad turn his back on his Third-World radicalism and find a cushy spot in the American establishment.
Anyone who has followed the financial success of the leading neocon Straussians knows that this story is hardly an isolated case: one conservative critic has renamed the famed neoconservative Richard Perle as "Richer Perle," in honor of the lucrative financial shenanigans that forced Perle to surrender his position as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Perhaps the most important argument Norton offers is that the neocon "Straussians" (although not Strauss himself) are anti-Semitic bigots. This may seem an odd accusation since many of the Straussians are Jewish. However, Norton points out, not only Jews are Semites: Arabs also are Semites. As she declares:
"From the time I first came to Chicago to the present day, I have seen Arabs and Muslims made the targets of unrestrained persecution, especially among the Straussians. At school, Straussian students told me that Arabs were dirty, they were animals, they were vermin."
She adds that David Frum's and Richard Perle's recent book, "An End to Evil," "has a strange familiarity about it. Scholars familiar with the language of anti-Semitism will find it reminiscent of older, long-dishonored texts. The careful fabrication, the language of blood-libel, the calls for violence in the name of defense, all are present here."
Finally, Norton emphasizes that the evils of Straussian neoconsertvatism are not characteristics of true conservatism. Although she is not herself a conservative, in a chapter entitled "Conservatism Abandoned," she brilliantly and sympathetically explains that, while conservatives have differed among themselves on a host of issues, on one key point they stood together: "Conservatives united in the desire for smaller government and on the belief that taxes should - if they existed at all - be very low."
But, thanks to the neocons' exploitation of the 9/11 catastrophe, Norton adds, "All this changed as the twentieth century ended. American conservatism embraced big government with a vengeance." She cites chapter and verse: everything from the petty harassment to which Americans are now subject by the flunkies in the "Transportation Safety Administration" to the violation of basic civil liberties (such as habeas corpus), the huge federal deficit, and the ongoing campaign to conquer the world. The Straussian neocons, Norton concludes, "are not preservers; they are (as they will tell you) revolutionaries."
Yes, indeed.
