Leo Strauss was a German Jewish émigré who made his career at the University of Chicago. He was famous for his criticisms of American political science on the ground that it “fiddles while Rome burns.” This was a scurrilous charge, especially since it was directed at Harold Lasswell, who believed that political science must actively promote public policies that would prevent the horrors of European totalitarianism from being repeated in America. Strauss shared the same concern, but he objected to Lasswell's efforts to tame the “power elite.” For Strauss, the solution was rule by hard-nosed and steely-eyed leaders who would not flinch from the necessity of exterminating the enemy.
It is well known that the neoconservatives who masterminded the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration were self-proclaimed devotees of Strauss—Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Abram Shulsky, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby emerged as paradigms of Straussian politics. But their lies, their wars, and their failures became a source of embarrassment to Strauss's disciples in the academy. So, the latter came to the defense of their master by denying that these “political Straussians” are representative of Strauss's legacy; they insisted that Strauss was a “friend of liberal democracy” and “one of the greatest friends that liberal democracy ever had” (see Steven Smith's exchange with me in Political Theory, February 2007).
Most of Strauss's defenders refused to be candid; this has had the effect of undermining the possibility of serious debate about issues of real consequence. In this debased intellectual climate, Nicholas Xenos sets out to reveal that Leo Strauss was no friend of liberal democracy, that he had a “penchant” for authoritarian thought, and that he was a deeply fascistic thinker.
In support of his thesis, Xenos relies heavily on a letter that Strauss wrote to his friend Karl Löwith in 1933, when Hitler came to power and passed the dreadful anti-Jewish laws. Strauss tells his friend that the best way to oppose Hitler is not from the left, but from “the principles of the Right, from the fascist, authoritarian, imperialist, principles” (p. xv). Xenos believes that when he came to America, Strauss adopted a purposefully misleading and mendacious style of writing in order to conceal his anti-democratic sentiments (p. xvi). So, nothing that Strauss says clearly or repeatedly can be trusted. Nevertheless, Xenos is determined to unveil the fascistic secret of Leo Strauss from his scholarly corpus. He believes that the devotees of Strauss among the neoconservatives in the Bush administration were fascists who were doing Strauss's bidding. But the neoconservatives are mentioned only in the last nine pages, and their connection to Strauss is unclear. At the same time, one gets the distinct impression that they are enemies of American democracy who are using American rhetoric to conceal their sinister objective, which is to transform America into an imperial power that is less free, less democratic, and more authoritarian, as demanded by Strauss.
One assumes that the book would articulate the nature of this Straussian authoritarianism and subject it to a deserved criticism. But the book offers little of the sort. Instead, Xenos provides a series of chapters of painstaking textual analysis, in a style that is dense, circuitous, obscure, and filled with suggestive innuendos, mysterious clues, and subtle allusions—unwittingly, Xenos reproduces all the trappings of Straussian scholarship, as he sadly acknowledges (p. xvii). Using extensive quotations, Xenos tries to show that Strauss had absolutely no quarrel with totalitarianism and that the real object of his ire was American liberal modernity. The arbitrariness of Xenos's approach to the texts allows him to ignore Strauss's claim that modernity is the harbinger of the totalitarianism of Hitler (which, for Strauss, is indeed the reason why America needs to be rescued).
It is not enough to show that Strauss is a fascist and that the real aim of the neoconservative social policy is “regime change” in America. It is necessary to explain the source of Strauss's objections to liberal democracy, and his anxiety over excessive wealth and the pursuit of pleasure. It is also important to point to the irony involved in launching a foreign policy based on democratic messianism, when Strauss was so hostile to American democracy. But in my view, Strauss was not fussy about what human beings fight and die for. It is the jihad that makes them human; that's what he thought politics was for—to make people human; otherwise, they are likely to surrender to pleasure and descend into animality. But why, I ask, should politics concern itself with war and death, instead of life and happiness? The reason is that Strauss shares Machiavelli's view that politics must provide human beings with an enemy that threatens their existence, and if no enemy can be found, then one must be invented. If not, people would either succumb to hedonism, become soft, and get wiped out by an external enemy, or they would tear their fellow citizens to pieces. In my opinion, Strauss set his sights too low, since human beings are capable of being united by a shared love of freedom, tradition, or way of life, and not just by mutual enmity. Moreover, even if endless war was the solution to what Daniel Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” Strauss could not possibly endorse the global dominance to which the neoconservatives aspired, because, as Francis Fukuyama realized in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), it would mean the end of war, the effeminization of culture, and the emergence of the dreadful specter of Nietzsche's “last man”—well fed, well medicated, and inconsequential. In other words, the relation between Strauss and the neoconservatives is more complex and ironic than Xenos imagines.
I agree with Xenos that Strauss is profoundly hostile to both liberalism and democracy, and that he is a deeply fascistic thinker. I also think that in turning America into an empire, the neoconservatives are consciously or unconsciously making her less democratic and more authoritarian. I am not as certain as Xenos that this is the real motivation behind their foreign policy. As I have argued elsewhere, I do not believe that the neoconservatives are a homogeneous group, or that the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration share the same motivations, even when they agree on the same policies (see “Straussians in Power: Secrecy, Lies, and Endless War,” in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, 2005).
In response to Xenos, it is important to point out, first, that criticizing America and wanting to change her does not make one un-American. By insisting on the un-American nature of neoconservatism, Xenos unconsciously adopts the same rhetorical McCarthyism often deployed by the neoconservatives against critics on the left. Second, being anti-democratic does not make one a fascist. Indeed, suspicion of the “tyranny of the majority” has always been a component of American liberalism. Third, fascism is not as easily defeated as Xenos believes; he can summarily dismiss it because he associates it with Nazism. But for Strauss, Nazism was a corruption of what Heidegger called the “truth and greatness” of fascism. Heidegger was referring to the Nazis, but Strauss thought that the Nazis did not represent fascism, properly understood. In my view, Strauss embraces fascism properly understood as a wholesale rejection of liberal values—especially individuality and critical thinking, which are replaced with community, family values, and a selfless, unquestioning, and unwavering devotion to the nation and its God. I believe that fascism, properly understood, is not a uniquely European phenomenon. On the contrary, it beckons every democracy, as the rallies of Sarah Palin have recently illustrated. This explains why Strauss had such a receptive audience in America.
Unlike Xenos, I side with Strauss in thinking that liberal democracy is seriously flawed. But I also believe that Strauss's “cure” is worse than the disease. It is the fascistic nature of that cure that requires critical examination. What is wrong with fascism is not that it is un-American or undemocratic, as Xenos maintains. What is wrong with it is that it is a rabid form of nationalism that deifies the state; promotes the surrender of one's intellect to the authorities; endows democratic majorities with a fatal certainty in their own self-righteousness; encourages simple folk to believe that there is no good other than their own and their nation's; and glorifies war and struggle in the interest of the nation, no matter how partial, iniquitous, or unjust.
In many ways, Xenos is a victim of the secrecy that has lowered the level of intellectual discourse between the defenders and critics of Strauss. But he is also a victim of his valorization of democracy, which leads him to assume that fascism is by definition antithetical to democracy.
