Neocons
Billmon reviews Shadia Drury?s book, Leo Strauss and the American Right:
One of the Straussians? most important innovations has been to reconcile their brand of elite conservatism with Southern fried demagogic populism ala Huey Long and George Wallace. That?s a pretty radical concession for a movement with its mind (or at least its heart) planted firmly in the fifth century BC. But it’s solved the traditional dilemma of old-style conservatives in America: How to win power in a society that has no landed gentry, no nobility, no established church ? none of Europe?s archaic feudal institutions and loyalties.
The rationale ? or rationalization ? for the populist ploy is that the common folk are a hell of a lot less liberal (again, using the Enlightenment definition of the word) than what the Straussians like to call America?s ?parchment regime? ? that is, the ideas and principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The masses want their opium, in other words, and with the right guidance, will happily sweep away the liberal elites who have been denying it to them.
This, in turn, will set the stage for a golden (or at least silver) age of religious orthodoxy, patriarchal values and a hierarchical corporate capitalism stripped of its original libertarian feistiness ? all of it supervised by a moral nanny state freed from the confines of all that ?parchment.?
National Greatness, indeed.