Finds strange philosophical comrades among Bush supporters
Ross, Benjamin
THE POLITICS OF George W. Bush, unlike earlier American conservatisms, is animated by ideas and not merely by interests. That is, at least, what Bush's friends assert, and what his foes usually...
...Both left legacies of oral teaching and discipleship that far outweigh their writings...
...Combining two such groups should have been doubly difficult, but instead all obstacles vanished...
...Strauss's students dropped NOTEBOOK their teacher's avoidance of worldly involvement early on, and the Shachtmanites could not help but change their minds along the way from revolutionary Marxism to Reaganism...
...The two groups did share a rejection of "relativism," but the fixed principles for which they rejected it were very different...
...Max Shachtman (1904- 1972) led a grouplet that evolved from Trotskyism to right-wing social democracy...
...But is it so...
...How some of these habits prepare for political combat is obvious enough...
...It was not very different, I suppose, from the training yeshiva students or Jesuit novices have been given over the centuries...
...The question is answerable only in the mean—any assemblage of humankind will include some knaves, some sincere fools, and various mixtures of wisdom with knavery and foolishness—but it is still worth asking...
...But philosophy is not the place to look...
...Norton writes of the Straussians as a student of philosophy, who enjoyed a close personal acquaintance without being part of the inner circle...
...Leo Strauss (1899- 1973) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago...
...BENJAMIN Ross is a community activist who writes frequently for Dissent...
...Common ambition and instinctive affinity made rethinking superfluous...
...Shachtmanites loyal to labor lingered on the scene, everyday political opponents who retained a vestigial usefulness when hawkish foreign policy initiatives needed a bipartisan veneer...
...Each began as an intellectual brotherhood of sorts...
...I say brotherhood intentionally—the atmosphere was distinctly male...
...Against opponents sharing Marxist premises, we could argue well, but against those who did not we were sometimes bewildered...
...To be sure, both Straussians and Shachtmanites had long advocated an activist American foreign policy...
...Straussians prefer the creative elite to the dull masses...
...Why is this said...
...That is, at least, what Bush's friends assert, and what his foes usually concede...
...Each group has identified its own fixed principle with the military strength of the United States, ignoring whatever aspects of its doctrine get in the way...
...I don't mean to set Shachtman's leftist activism against Strauss's philosophical conservativism...
...And Howe: In the course of these fights, all energies were mobilized...
...People have been burned for less, but we could not burn, nor did many of us want to...
...Straussians seek to preserve hierarchies...
...Each possessed an esoteric doctrine of political philosophy...
...The power and influence of the networks came more to be ends in themselves and less means for the propagation of beliefs...
...The movement came to resemble a medieval convocation of theologians locked into months of debate on a proper interpretation of doctrine...
...We had a keen sense of intellectual honor, but only a feeble appetite for intellectual risk...
...Here is Norton: Strauss read and taught as political theorists have done from time immemorial...
...They learned the pleasures of a common endeavor and the pleasures of contest...
...Who searches for the intellectual roots of George W Bush searches in vain...
...And finally, Norton: Ambitious students were unleashed...
...Those who would not follow this evolution were hived off...
...My own relation to the Shachtmanites as an activist undergraduate in the late sixties was analogous, and I found behavioral and cultural similarities almost leaping out of Norton's pages...
...Anne Norton's recently published Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire offers some guidance...
...Howe: Clever enough in responding to familiar cues, we had little capacity for turning back on our own premises...
...Shachtmanites such as the National Endowment for Democracy's Carl Gershman and the American Enterprise Institute's scholar in residence Joshua Muravchick specialize, as bureaucrats or writers, in intellectual forms of combat...
...98 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 NOTEBOOK The claim that the behavior of the Bush administration derives from neocon principles does not stand up, because principles are not what gathered the neocons themselves together...
...Or were the ideas fabricated to justify the policies...
...Shachtmanites help sturdy masses conquer an effete elite...
...Today's neoconservatism rises above these concerns...
...The interests at stake at home— the enrichment of the wealthy and the protection of the privileged—are easy to identify...
...They would be fought as rivals, they would be resented...
...The Shachtmanites, who early in their evolution abandoned Marx's historical relativism, proclaimed democracy as the universal value...
...Are the policies consequences of the ideas...
...They learned that when they succeeded most fully they would not be praised...
...My method will be to look at historical origins...
...Norton's depictions of academic Straussians echo Irving Howe's description of Shachtman's Trotskyist followers in the 1930s...
...As time went by, doctrine faded in importance...
...Compare the above to Howe, writing in his memoir, A Margin of Hope: The training we received in the movement was narrow—a training in the explication rather than examination of texts, in games of debate rather than play of mind...
...IF IDEAS DID NOT bring Straussians and Shachtmanites together, what did...
...Both had stressed obligations and institutions that mediate between the individual and the state...
...What they lack in common is an animating ideal...
...In the shul and the madrasa, in seminaries and Bible study groups, sacred texts are still studied in this way...
...Other correspondences point, perhaps, to psychological cornmonalities more complex than I can fathom...
...The school is called neoconservative, its ideas match current policies, and its adherents often implement those policies...
...Although neoconservatism has had an immense influence on the tone of contemporary conservatism, its substantive effect on the actions of government has been much smaller...
...Many things unite today's neoconservatives...
...What of the question that began this inquiry...
...They learned to like the taste of their professors' blood...
...Along with this common organizational pattern comes a similarity of intellectual style...
...others (such as Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics) retain a focus on philosophical issues...
...Even so, sharp contrasts remain...
...Even at the groups' origins, in very different environments, with altogether incompatible intellectual outlooks, the resemblance is strong...
...The resemblance is, first of all, organizational...
...For Straussians, history is made by heroes...
...This was accomplished through informal networks, with little organizational structure...
...Today, what remains of the once wide divide between these two schools of thought is little more than a division of labor...
...The Straussians have never had any more formal structure than a Web site...
...The Shachtmanites retained for a while the leftist habit of forming "front groups" decorated with illustrious names, but there was no rear behind the front...
...for Shachtmanites, by social forces...
...The arrival of two philosophical brotherhoods, the Straussians and Shachtmanites, at the same end point owes much to their resemblance as brotherhoods and very little to their widely disparate philosophies...
...Their views were far from identical—Straussians emphasized the obligation of noblesse oblige while the Shachtmanites' paradigmatic institution, even after the abandonment of Marxism, was the trade union—but they joined in rejecting the libertarian view of human beings as individuals whose social relationships consist of contracts freely entered into...
...The two schools began with very different doctrines...
...Agonizing reappraisals were rare, confessions of error infrequent, earnest efforts at theoretical reconstruction few...
...I will compare two groups that came to96 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 gether in the neoconservative movement of the late 1990s: the Straussians and the Shachtmanites...
...The intellectual maneuvers that this convergence effected were executed with a remarkable lack of effort...
...Both groups started far from the mainstream, engaging in activism that was tightly linked with their intellectual activity...
...This was a precondition to the confluence of the two schools, but it does not suffice to explain their fusion...
...I will rather examine, as a whole, a school of thought and two groups of thinkers who adhere to it...
...The wellsprings of what is done abroad are harder to sort out, a topic for another day and another author...
...These common patterns go far to explain the ease with which the disciples of Strauss and Shachtman came together and their joint success in approaching the corridors of power...
...Shachtmanites to level them...
...After winning control of the former Socialist Party in 1973, they allowed the renamed Social Democrats USA to wither into little DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 97 NOTEBOOK more than an excuse for occasional reunions of old comrades...
...They share a facility with argument, a taste for debate, an appetite for influence, a talent for networking, a desire for gainful employment, and perhaps some hard-to-pin-down psychological predispositions as well...
...Indeed, the two schools jettisoned attitudes they shared as easily as they did those that separated them...
...The student who believes all knowledge rests in the canon is exempted from reading anything else, and loudly presents his laziness as the inevitable entitlement of cultural superiority...
...Consider these: • Straussian politics focuses on ideas...
...Left Straussians disappeared early on...
...The thinkers they followed were obscure during their common lifetime, but the importance of both has grown in retrospect...
...they do not inspire policy...
...The ideas in question are well known, so much so that I need not enumerate them here...
...Norton again: The student armed with the sacred text believes himself armed to take on all comers...
...One must compare the elements of Shachtman's thought that survived the migration to the right with the Straussianism of Strauss's followers...
...Shachtmanite politics expresses interests...
...Their purposes are not to be found in philosophies, but in politics...
...They learned, quickly enough, to be something more than students...
...The ideas of George W. Bush's Republicanism accommodate prevailing interests and justify the accumulation of power...
...The question at hand is this: What is the direction of causation...
...He would read a passage in a text and ask: "What does it mean...
...In introducing its doctrine to the world of political power, each evolved into a tightly bound patronage network, offering the skills of young believers to patrons in exchange for jobs, influence, and advancement...
...Straussians embraced natural law...
...All criticism of laissez-faire economics has, of course, been dropped from the new neoconservative synthesis, which greets attacks on trade unionism and efforts to shred the social safety net with deafening silence—when it does not actively join in...
...Ideological differences seemed irrelevant...
...Each grouping, in its earlier incarnation, had been found indigestible by political near-neighbors—too self-centered, overly focused on esoteric doctrines...
...so we hurled documents, speeches, polemics against one another...
...What does this history tell us about current events...
...Some Straussians (Paul Wolfowitz comes to mind) direct armies...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
