Post by POA on Apr 10, 2004 4:19:45 GMT -5
(This is an old article, but I think it's still relevant. An issue that should be paid attention to is where the neo-cons might end up going if Bush loses, since they have a tendency to stick around and continually make trouble).
The Leo-conservatives
For the past few weeks, US President George W. Bush has been surrounded by a secretive circle of advisors and public relations experts, giving rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories and debates. It's been said that the group's idol is German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.
The German philosopher who has suddenly become surprisingly popular in the United States was never a leftist, but rather a conservative to the core. We are not talking about Theodor W. Adorno, who would be celebrating his 100th birthday this year, or Herbert Marcuse, whose remains were recently transferred from New Haven, Connecticut to Berlin, but a contemporary of these two founders of the Frankfurt School who has received relatively little attention from German intellectuals: Leo Strauss. Like his contemporaries, Strauss was also a German Jew. He also emigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his life there. This fall will mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Leo Strauss was a remarkable exception among those who were forced to leave Hitler's Germany. Unlike his fellow expatriates, this soft-spoken, diminutive deep thinker quickly obtained a professorship at the major and highly regarded University of Chicago. He was also the only German emigrant to establish a philosophy movement that became widespread in the United States, a movement whose influence extends to within today's inner circles of power in Washington.
What is the story with his students, the "Straussians," who have so often been invoked and described since the end of the Iraq war that they have almost become an intellectual legend? They are viewed as a group of neo-conservative conspirators, as a small, elite order guiding the Bush administration - and when its path becomes crooked, providing it with a good conscience. They can be found among the justices of the Supreme Court, and they work at both the White House and the Pentagon.
Although most of them have learned their particular way of thinking from Strauss, they are more power-conscious than the master was. They want to change and not just interpret America.
The Washington branch of the "Straussians" recently met at a barbecue in a Washington park in July, as it does every year, to play baseball and chat about the past and present. More than 60 members of the inner and outer circles of the administration attended the event. Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's hawkish idea man, was there, as was Abram Shulsky, a Pentagon intelligence expert who co-authored a book with Francis Fukuyama.
William Kristol, publisher of the "Weekly Standard," a paper with a circulation of only 60,000 but with considerable influence in Washington, was there, and so was Leon Kass, whom the President has commissioned to develop guidelines for stem cell research. They too are students of Leo Strauss.
rest at link
