Posted on 05/23/2003 1:15:02 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
Ever since the New York Times published a long article explaining that most of the architects of the Bush foreign policy are "Straussians," more and more journalists have been asking the question, "What the heck is a Straussian?" A number of common principles have emerged after these writers have examined the writings of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neoconservativism.
Straussian Principle #1 is the perversion of the idea of natural rights, as understood by John Locke and the American founding fathers. The natural law tradition holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state is always and everywhere the greatest threat to these God-given rights. To the founders, this meant that government should be "bound by the chains" of the Constitution, to paraphrase Jefferson. If men were angels, there would be no need for government, Madison wrote in defense of the Constitution. But men are not angels, Madison continued, which is why government power must always be limited.
Strauss (and his followers) rejected this view of natural rights in favor of Plato’s philosopher-king model of government: Eliminating restrictions on state power is fine as long as that power can be wielded by an elite few who can pursue their own vision of "the public good." As David Gordon has written, "Straus, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the 17th and 18th Century conceptions of Locke and the rationalists, particularly to their . . . championing of the rights of the individual: liberty, property, etc." Far from advocating limited government, Strauss was a proponent of unlimited state power in pursuit of "nationalism" (as are his American neocon followers).
Straussian neocons tend to repeat the words "prudence and moderation" ad nauseum, to the point of absurdity. In all their critiques of my writings on Lincoln some of the most apoplectic criticisms have been over my "failure" to acknowledge Lincoln’s alleged prudence and moderation (as though waging an unnecessary war that killed 620,000 Americans was either). (Eric Root of the John Lock Foundation even went so far as to condemn me for failing to pontificate upon these Magic Straussian Words while admitting that he had not even read my book!)
These buzz words are merely deceptive euphemisms for "unlimited and unconstitutional executive branch power." Strauss himself was fond of praising British imperialism and Caesarism for their supposed "prudence and moderation," just as his contemporary followers are now using these same words to praise the Bush administration’s foreign policy (of which they are the main architects!).
This is obviously why the Straussians have labored so furiously to make Abraham Lincoln even more of a cult figure. He essentially declared himself dictator, suspended habeas corpus, mass arrested thousands of political dissenters, shut down hundreds of newspapers, ordered the murder of New York City draft protesters by federal troops, deported an outspoken Democratic Party opponent, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, censored all telegraph communication, nationalized the railroads, confiscated private property, rigged Northern elections, and waged war on civilians as well as combatants. The reason he gave for these shocking acts of tyranny was to destroy the secession movement and abolish the voluntary union of the founding fathers. Or, as he deceivingly put it, "to save the Union."
Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to replace the American republic with an empire that would rival Great Britain’s. To accomplish this they invaded the Southern states, killing one out of every four white males of military age, and pillaged, plundered, and burned their way through the South, destroying its economy.
There could be no better role model for aggressive, dictatorial, militaristic nationalism, which in fact is Straussian Principle #2. Strauss believed that human aggression could only be restrained by a powerful, nationalistic state (See Jim Lobe, "Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception," Alternet.org, May 19, 2003). He believed that such an omnipotent state can only be maintained if there is an external threat, "even if one has to be manufactured." This is why Straussians believe in perpetual war, and is another reason why they have formed a cult around "the church of Lincoln," whom they hold up as "the greatest statesman in history." Lincoln manufactured many "threats," including the truly bizarre notion that representative government would perish from the earth if the Southern states were permitted to secede peacefully. In reality, peaceful secession would have been a victory for self-government, keeping in mind that neither Lincoln nor Congress ever said that they were launching an invasion for any reason having to do with liberating the slaves.
Straussian Principle #3 is aggressive lying. In "Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception" Jim Lobe noted that Strauss believed in the necessity of "perpetual deception" of the ruled by their rulers if nationalistic objectives are to be achieved. Straussians routinely claim to possess unique understanding of the "hidden meaning" of history and historical documents, which is often directly at odds with the plain historical truth. This is all a part of their perpetual campaign to confuse the public and keep it ignorant of their political designs.
A good example of this phenomenon is the "special meaning" of the Declaration of Independence that Straussians claim to have discovered. The Declaration declared to the world that the colonists were seceding from the British Empire, but Straussians incredibly insist that it is an anti-secessionist document because Lincoln quoted the "all men are created equal" phrase in the Gettysburg Address. They repeat Lincoln’s tall tale that the Declaration made the Union "perpetual" even though the states describe themselves in the document as "free and independent."
The Declaration announces that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever governments become destructive of the peoples’ natural rights it is the duty of the people to abolish the government and replace it with a new one. That is exactly what Jefferson Davis announced he intended to do in his First Inaugural Address, yet the Straussians claim that it was Lincoln, not Davis, who was upholding this principle.
Even though the free and independent states ratified the Constitution to create the federal government as their agent, Lincoln held that there was never any such thing as state sovereignty because "the Union is older than the states." This of course is impossible, since the union of two things cannot be older than either thing that it is a union of.
Straussians tell us that Lincoln had to destroy the Constitution in order to save it, that he was a great humanitarian who nevertheless waged war on civilians, he favored equality even though he loudly denounced racial equality throughout his lifetime, and a thousand other deceptions.
Straussian Principle #4: Fake religiosity. Several of the journalists who have recently written about Strauss have noted that he was a proponent of a greater role for religion in affairs of state, a position that has endeared some Christians to the neocon movement. But Strauss’ position was that the political rulers and the intellectual elite (philosopher kings?) need not be bound by religion themselves; religion was primarily a propaganda tool to be used to get the masses to acquiesce in state intervention on behalf of aggressive nationalism. As Ron Bailey of Reason magazine has pointed out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."
Once again, Lincoln is the perfect Straussian role model. Lincoln never joined a church and was opposed by almost all the ministers of Springfield, Illinois, when he ran for president. He was infamous for his dirty jokes and even his criticisms of Scripture. There is no explicit evidence that he ever became a Christian, and some of his contemporaries even believed that he was probably an atheist. As James Ostrowski has written ("DiLorenzo vs. His Critics on the Lincoln Myth," LRC Archives), the "church of Lincoln" is "the church of a man who had no Church."
Lincoln was nevertheless brilliant in his use of religious language and images to mesmerize Northern audiences, especially the hyper-puritanical New England Yankees and their upper Midwest brethren. After launching a war that he apparently thought would last only a few months, Lincoln distanced himself more and more from responsibility for his own decisions by invoking religion. By the time of his Second Inaugural, when over a half million young American men had been killed in the war, he was to the point of absolving himself entirely from any responsibility for all the war’s death and destruction. He declared that "the war came," as though he had nothing to do with it, and said that it was all out of his hands and a matter of God’s will. He theorized that God was punishing America for the sin of slavery. This argument was nonsensical on its face, however, since it ignored the fact that some 95 percent of all the slaves that were brought to the western hemisphere ended up outside the U.S., where no such "punishment" was being executed by the Lord. Why would God punish Americans for the sin of slavery but no one else?
In his Second Inaugural Lincoln quoted at length Mathew 18:7 and Luke 17:1 in order to make the argument that both North and South were being punished for the sin of slavery. This in itself is, well, Straussian, since Lincoln claimed to know the "inner meaning" of God’s Word.
As Charles Adams writes in When in the Course of Human Events (p. 205), "Lincoln’s Jehovah complex gave the war a psychopathic Calvinistic fatalism, with God directing the whole affair and punishing both North and South for tolerating slavery." The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young men, the killing of civilians, the massive theft of private property, and the burning of entire towns by federal soldiers would continue until God decided otherwise. "Not even the maddest of religious fanatics," Adams writes, "ever uttered words to equal Lincoln’s second inaugural address."
Lincoln’s cynical political manipulation of religion was the perfect Straussian subterfuge. It was the perfect propaganda tool for sugarcoating a bloody and imperialistic war of conquest. Little wonder that contemporary Straussian neocons think of Lincoln as "the greatest statesman in world history": He was an extreme nationalist; an enemy of constitutionally limited government and genuine natural rights; a skilled political conniver, manipulator and deceiver; and a phony religionist. Perfect.
But they weren't changing in the south. Belief in the institution of slavery was never stronger and never waivered among the confederate leadership. Jefferson Davis went to his grave believing that blacks were suited for servitude and nothing else, and he wasn't alone.
When AT&T was broken up the shareholders did not see the value of their investment immediately shrink to zero. They received shares in the new companies equal to their original investment. If slavery was legislated out of existence, on the other hand, someone like Jefferson Davis would see the value of his investment in 113 slaves, worth in excess of $100,000, be reduced to zero. That wealth would be gone, removed from the economy forever. He would be ruined financially, left with a plantation that he had to now pay people to work.
As to the question of secession the Constitution is silent on the matter so, in theory, there is nothing to prevent a state from leaving the Union and I have no problem with that. It is the manner that the south chose to secede. Secession without the consent of all the parties involved is not acceptable, it should have required a majority vote in Congress. That is the same method that all but the orgiginal 13 states had to go through to join the Union, it stands to reason that a similar requirement should be needed to leave.
Secondly, "anti-capitalist" would have meant something different in 1860 than it does today -- if the word would even have been used. A native-born socialist was likely to be someone who'd supported Fourierist communes or other voluntary utopian communities when they were the fashion -- a fool probably, but not a state socialist. A German radical would be more political, but he might have been a republican, democrat or nationalist in the old country, or an idle theorist more often than a coercive revolutionary, Marxist or committed state socialist.
Third, anti-capitalism was at least as common in the South. Fitzhugh and other feudalist defenders of slavery were harshly anticapitalist. Regardless of how great their influence on others was, they did reflect an atmosphere in which the "greasy mechanics" and "mudsills" of the North who lived by selling their labor and what they produced were scorned and despised. Arguments in favor of slavery had some striking similarities to later socialist and welfare state views. There's the same feeling that some are weak and dependent and need to be looked after, though the control and coercion take different forms.
Fourth, Southerners who did attack the radicalism of Northerners, also attacked abolitionists, racial egalitarians, feminists and women's suffragists, prohibitionists, divorce reformers, supporters of free love and other reformers and radicals. Some of these movements were foolish or harmful and others beneficial, but it's not as if revolution, statism, or the welfare state was the main concern of the radicals, or the fear of socialism was the main motivation of their Southern critics.
One of the interesting things about American history is how many libertarian defenders of capitalism spurn those politicians and businessmen who actually helped build American capitalism and hit on obscure thinkers who were undoubtably anti-statist, but also anti-capitalist -- someone like John Taylor of Caroline who disapproved of banks, mortgages, and paper money. If they'd had their way, a modern industrial economy would never have developed.
How big a part did they play? I have no clue. Obviously, this writer back then thought they played some part. I have no real way of knowing how right or wrong he was.
Yeah, these Rockwellites are a scary bunch. They give me the chills.
Peter Berkowitz weighs in on the recent spurt of Strauss articles here. He reinforces several of the points so ably made in your post.
Thanks Cornelis. Kind of you to say so.
I think I sort of over-simplified both Heidegger and Strauss's critique fo Heidegger in a later poast, but what the hey --- nobody's perfect.
I generally agree, but I'd demur on his basic motive. Certainly he was a mercantilist, as you and others have shown repeatedly despite the catcalling and downplaying of any mercantile motive for the war by the Marxians.
I think we should distinguish Lincoln's primary motive from that of the Eastern Republicans. I think the latter were the mercantilists, and that Lincoln and the Western Whigs, Free Soilers, and Republicans were motivated instead by the specter of slavery's proven ability to preoccupy new lands.
In Texas, as Texas historians have shown, slaveholders were able to claim many labores of land staked by their slaves as their own, so that slave ownership became a "force multiplier", in modern terms, in the race for the best arable lands. In coastal Texas, old 19th-century soil maps showing the principal soil types have been validated by modern pedology, and the preferred "peach bottom" lands in the modern river valleys were quickly occupied by planters who, using their slaves to claim land, staked out broad sugar-cane plantations many of which exist today as state correctional facilities, reflecting their gradual change from slave to convict labor, and then from economic entities to resources of the State of Texas, which uses them to feed its prison population.
The spread of slavery into the Territories (and an open senate seat) was what moved Lincoln to attack Stephen Douglas for having just promulgated "popular sovereignty" as a doctrine, in 1854.
So the anti-Southern coalition was double-headed and had both an industrial component and an agricultural and populist component.
Having read some of Lincoln's 1854 and 1855 letters that reflected on slavery, I'm satisfied that it was the slavery issue that preoccupied him and the Westerners, though they were doubtless sensible of the benefits to them of national development schemes. I'm less sure they understood what tariffs meant to them, which IMHO were one of the great disgraces of the last century, insasmuch as they caused a ruinous drain of needed capital from rural America and the American people to the Mugwumps and their obscenely rich principals in the seaboard cities.
I think it would have been slavery, too, that impelled Lincoln to carry on with the war after the true cost began to be borne in on him; only the mantle of a liberator, not a reputation as a "national development" waterboy for the rich, would save him from the judgment of history under those circumstances.
Lincoln had to champion slavery, once the war was on, whether he'd planned it that way or not. The idea that he had started a massive civil war over money would have been fatal -- he'd have been shot by his own voters.
None of which seems to have encumbered the self-enriching parties in the background, who went on from abolitionism to carpetbagging's zestful plunder to the spoils of a continent and the Billion-Dollar Congress, the Great White Fleet, and beyond.
I agree with you, but warn you that this issue has been debated at length unsatisfactorily. 4ConservativeJustices and I achieved elenchus against WhiskeyPapa, Non-Sequitur, and their supporters on another thread last year over this issue. N-S and WhiskeyPapa simply refuse further attempts at refutation of the constitutional and sovereignty arguments beyond pointing repeatedly at quotes from the Prize Cases, Texas vs. White, McCullough vs. Maryland (in which John Marshall was caught nakedly contradicting the views on sovereignty he'd expressed years before, when participating in a constitutional ratifying convention), and other Supreme Court cases that were simply exercises in juridical overreaching when they attempted, ultra vires, to reach the issues of what the Sovereign, the People, could or could not do. They accompany these quotes with thumpingly unsupported assertions of their own Declarationist positions, or perhaps quotes from red-diaper "liberation" historians, and the self-satisfied statement that the Southerners are wrong, have always been wrong, and will always be wrong.
Your comment on the self-referential, circular, and I might add insular nature of your opponents' reasoning is well taken. I can testify to it, and, in part, I just have.
To the best of my knowledge I have never quoted from either the Prize Cases or McCullough vs Maryland.
...and other Supreme Court cases that were simply exercises in juridical overreaching...
I must have missed the part where it said that Supreme Court decisions are not valid because you say they aren't.
I said that firing on Sumter was part of the souther rebellion. I've never, to my knowledge, used the word treason. Get it right, please.
If a state secedes, it has to enforce a border. At some point that will mean the use of force.
And if the confederacy chose force as their policy, then why should they be surprised when the Union responded in kind?
Had he wanted to, JP Benjamin could have probably devised an even better legal defense of secession.
You're history is wrong. More than half of the Confederate states were carved out of federal territories, from the Louisiana Purchase or other tracts. They were never "sovereign" states that existed before the union, but nationally owned land that the national government transformed from territories into states. They didn't "come into" the union from outside, but existed on terriroty that was owned, from the beginning, by the national government. So for them to try to leave the union amounted to attempted theft of property that was the common heritage of the entire nation.
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