When the Moralists Embrace Deception, Their Morals Become Deception

Dear Leader takes his Bamboozlepalooza tour on the air tonight to promote the Arthur Andersen plan for Social inSecurity.

Instead of developing alternative energy sources Dear Leader advocates an energy policy involving drilling in the Artic and the Gulf and the United States of Canada whether they want it or not and whether or not it will effect the price of oil.

Dear Leader, having obtained 95% of the Federal judiciary he's appointed, wants to round out the bar with judges from the American Taliban.

As Dear Leader makes his case for a candidate for the United Nations who has advocated American Empire and personally disrupted the vote tallies in Miami in 2000, we should pause to consider where we are at and how we got here.

Let me point you to the historic background of the Neo TheoCon philosophy, so well described today by Billmon.

... the Straussians – and by extension, the neocons – ... pushed the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy of American politics back about 150 years, and moved it roughly 4,000 miles to the east, to the far side of the Rhine River. Their grand existential struggle isn’t with the likes of Teddy Kennedy or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s with the liberalism of Voltaire, John Locke and John Stuart Mill – not to mention the author of the Declaration of the Independence.

Strauss, in other words, wasn’t a neo anything. He was a conservative in the original European sense – fond of hierarchy, tradition and religious orthodoxy; deeply suspicious of newfangled ideas like egalitarianism, rationalism and a political theory based on enlightened self interest and the social contract. Nor was he impressed by Mill’s utilitarian adding machine – constantly calculating the greatest good for the greatest number.

To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.

That logical leap from Jefferson to Hitler might seem like the intellectual equivalent of Evel Knieval’s outlandish attempt to jump the Snake River canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But...

What gives Straussian thought its special flavor – a bitter blend of hypocrisy and cynicism – is the fact that Strauss himself didn’t believe in the eternal “truths” he championed. He was a nihilist, in other words – but one who believed only the philosophical elite could be trusted to indulge in such a dangerous vice. In exchange for this privilege, the elite has a special obligation to uphold the “noble lies” the ignorant masses must live by if society is to survive...

All this would be just another academic exercise – so to speak – if some of the Straussians hadn’t turned his philosophical fixations into a political crusade to “save” America from the horrors of modernity...

A most informative post, for those unfamiliar with Leo Strauss, and the chain of Wrepublican "intellectualism" and cynicism that leads from Strauss to the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century.

And over at Corrente, Riggsveda points towards the new issue of Harpers which looks to do a breakdown of the TheoCon movement as it attempts to strong arm its way into absolute autocratic control of all three branches of government.

She says a few things from a post of her own blog worth repeating.

The first thing we must do is to join with religious progressives across the country, many of whom are the so-called mainstream churches of our childhoods, to stand up against this attempted coup, protect our nation, and protect our nation's churches. It is foolish and self-destructive to take the tack, as so many bloggers and commenters have, that if it says "religion", it's the enemy. If the protective barrier between church and state dissolves, we will all suffer, religious and non-religious alike. People of faith everywhere have been watching open-mouthed as these fascist maniacs have grabbed the mantle from them and declared themselves the only true "christians", and the Christians I know, both friends and family, are appalled.

These fascist maniacs have been stoked by politicians trained by the Straussian school.

Back to Billmon:

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.”...

There are so many problems with this political vision (insane, potentially catastrophic problems) that it’s hard to know where to begin. I can start, I suppose, by attacking the notion that liberalism or secularism – or even nihilism, for that matter – is the royal road to totalitarianism.

Leaving aside the fact that most totalitarian movements are simply imitation religions that feed off the same irrational emotions as the established name brands, there’s the rather obvious empirical example of modern Europe – about as secular and cosmopolitan a society as ever has existed. Europe has its social problems just as America has hers, but it’s not obvious they’re any worse – in fact, on many indicators (teen pregnancy, drug abuse, violent crime, election turnout, public civility) they’re clearly better. Likewise, back at the ranch, the Godless blue states rank, on average, ahead of the Bible-thumping red states on such hot-button morality indicators as divorce, unwed mothers and domestic violence.

So perhaps the masses don't need to be spoon fed their religious opium in order to have a reasonably decent society. The death of God may have left the neocon elites trembling with existential dread, but it’s possible that everyman and everywoman can go right on loving their children, obeying the laws and finding meaning in life even without the old bugger upstairs.

The nihilist threat, in other words, may be the Straussian version of an “inside the beltway” issue – one which paralyzes the philosophical elite but which the rest of the Western world is increasingly inclined to ignore as it tries to get on with daily life. The horrors of the 20th century were unquestionably real, and even more terrible ones may well await us in the 21st. But the horrors of the Thirty Years War, the Holy Inquisition and the Russian pogroms were also real – and it’s pretty hard to blame them on the death of God.

If there is a crisis of modernity, it appears to be more a function of the faithful – some whom are getting awfully violent for a bunch of opium addicts. When the 9/11 terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, I can guarantee you they weren’t reciting passages from Mill’s On Liberty. The real crisis may be the lack of modernity, not a surplus of the stuff – an argument the neocons themselves are now making, at least about the religious fanatics in the Middle East.

The ones in Midwest, on the other hand, are another story. To the Straussians, it apparently doesn’t matter what kind of religious orthodoxy America has – as long as it has one. And so the highly educated followers of a Jewish refugee from demented old Europe have allied themselves with some of the most ignorant, racist and xenophobic people in modern crazy America.

Men of the Straussian school of thought like the Bu$hes, the Wolfowitzes, the Boltons, the Cheneys, men who view their status in the world as the Dominionists do, that they are the elite by virtue of breeding and belief, such men may find that the force they've unleashed is one that may just as easily feed on them as on the democratic modernists they so despise.

This is because the feudal social structure depends first and foremost on Forte Main. And breeding and family, and money and greed, may ingrain the avarice for power and riches, but this a very different thing from holding power and riches. As Al Gore says, gut the system of its laws, and those laws will no longer protect you.