Part 19 (1/2)

31. Midway through the 2004 Democratic presidential primary elections the New York Times suggested that all of the candidates except the two front-runners should abandon the race. This would have meant that the viewpoints represented by the left wing of the party would lack a public forum, and that the electorate would be denied the opportunity to hear views other than those of the party establishment. It was only after the center-right candidate of the Times, Senator Lieberman, withdrew for lack of support that the paper issued its call for the Left to commit hari-kari.

32. For an illuminating discussion of the various political roles played by ordinary people, slaves, and Indians in the years leading up to and including the revolution of 1776, see Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005).

33. The Federalist, No. 55, p. 374.

34. See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989).

35. The Discourses of Niccol Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), vol. 2, II.2.10 (pp. 35960).

36. ”For when on the decision to be taken wholly depends the safety of one's country, no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that alternative should be wholeheartedly adopted which will save the life and preserve the freedom of one's country.” Machiavelli, Discourses, III.41.2 (pp. 57273).

37. Jonathan Israel has pointed to a significant divergence in the republican traditions as they developed in seventeenth-century England and the Dutch republic. While republican theorists in both countries drew upon Machiavelli, the English writers tended to contrast republicanism and democracy, while their Dutch counterparts looked more favorably upon democracy and tried to incorporate elements into their theories. See Jonathan Israel, ”The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism, 16601720,” European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 1 (2004): 736.

38. On the republican tradition, see Poc.o.c.k, The Machiavellian Moment. There are several excellent essays in the collection Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). There is an extended, forceful criticism of Poc.o.c.k in Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination.

39. It is usually forgotten that the weakening of popular majorities was built into the structure of Congress. The different terms (two and six years, respectively) for representatives and senators were intended to establish the Senate as a smaller, aristocratic body that would attract more reliable, respectable men, who would serve to place a brake on the popular pa.s.sions that the House was expected to reflect. Further, while the House's members would face a turnover every two years, which would reduce the effectiveness of the body itself, the terms of senators would be staggered so that that body would enjoy greater stability and continuity.

40. It has been remarked that ”[a] proposed amendment can be added to the Const.i.tution by 38 states containing considerably less than half of the population of the country, or can be defeated by 13 states containing less than one-twentieth of the population of the country.” Edward S. Corwin's ”The Const.i.tution and What It Means Today”, 271.

41. See Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 1023, 227 ff.

CHAPTER NINE.

INTELLECTUAL ELITES AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

1. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 7677.

2. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, an important text among Straussians, simply ignores the power of capitalists.

3. Perhaps the most recent critical discussion was that of C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). As a sign of the times consider the changing character of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society that, until recently, recognized distinguished contributors to the traditional academic disciplines and the arts. Now it includes a section for ”Business, Corporate and Philanthropic Leaders.h.i.+p (Private Sector).”

4. ”As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges . . . ,” New York Times, April 22, 2004, A-1.

5. In California tuition at the state universities has been raised in an effort to reduce enrollments at the major inst.i.tutions; students are then shunted to the community colleges and told that at the end of two years they may apply to the four-year universities. Most university teachers are of the opinion that community college graduates enter the four-year inst.i.tutions at a distinct disadvantage. It is worth noting that during the 2004 elections both major candidates made a point of campaigning at community colleges and stressing their role in job training.

6. ”Kissinger Reflects on Vietnam War and Foreign Policy,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin, March 1, 2004, 3.

7. See the discussion of ”enrollment management,” which is now practiced at many inst.i.tutions, both public and private. It attempts to systematize the recruitment and retention of students. According to one experienced student of the subject, ”the emergence of enrollment management is simply one small indicator of the ascendancy of capitalism and the extent to which the market metaphor has taken hold throughout the United States and the rest of the world.” Donald R. Hossler, ”How Enrollment Management Has Transformed-or Ruined-Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 30, 2004, B-35.

8. ”Enrollment management” extends to watching out for the progress of a student during his or her studies, through graduation and beyond. It has also influenced curricula and faculty recruitment. See Hossler, ”How Enrollment Management Has Transformed-or Ruined-Higher Education,” B-35.

9. Burton Pines, director of research at the Heritage Foundation. Cited by Greg Easterbrook, ”Ideas Move Nations,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1986.

10. Foundations are dependent on their tax-exempt status, which encourages a certain wariness because of past incidents in which the Internal Revenue Service used its powers of withholding exemptions when foundations crossed the political administration in power. It might be noted that there is little doubt of the major role that private foundations played in funding and engineering the impeachment of President Clinton.

11. See Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), for a hagiographic depiction, and, for a more critical appraisal, David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 20th ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

12. Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol (The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission), cited by Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 219.

13. Cited in George C. Herring, ”America and Vietnam: The Unending War,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1991/92.

14. The Third Wave, cited (but no page given) in Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 18.

15. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 5. By ”liberal” education Strauss did not mean the liberalism a.s.sociated, say, with philosophers such as Dewey, Rawls, or Dworkin. Instead, ”liberal” is identified with ”virtuous” and is closer to conservatism as Strauss defines it. See viiviii.

16. The Third Wave, cited in Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 1819.

17. Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 10.

18. Ibid., 12.

19. See G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 220 ff.

20. For Strauss and Schmitt, see Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7787 (first published in Germany in 1988); for a critique of Meier, see Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 2025. On Strauss and Mussolini, see Nicholas Xenos, ”Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror,” Logos 3, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 4. For a thoughtful defense of Strauss as a moderate, see Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Smith attempts to dissociate Strauss from the Bush adventure in Iraq by presenting Strauss as a moderate. See 199 ff. For a sophisticated appraisal, see Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

21. Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), 7. This is a very useful a.n.a.lysis and account of its subject.

22. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 324.

23. On Nietzsche see my Politics and Vision, chap. 13.

24. Cited in Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, 11.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. ”Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about 'all things' by knowledge of 'all things'; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes, and thus it endangers society.” Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 221.

27. These att.i.tudes are displayed, if rather vulgarly, in Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. For some critical remarks on that work, see my essay, ”Elitism and the Rage against Postmodernity,” in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 4765.

28. ”Executive power . . . has a natural basis in monarchy.” Taming the Prince, 295. One of Mansfield's earlier books was a highly suggestive study of Viscount Bolingbroke, who was the author of The Idea of a Patriot King (1738).

29. Taming the Prince, 297. See my review, ”Executive Liberation,” and Mansfield's spirited rejoinder, ”Executive Power and the Pa.s.sion for Virtue,” in Studies in American Political Development 6 (Spring 1992): 21116.

30. Taming the Prince, 271.

31. Ibid., 294.

32. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1951), VI.1518, 48, 53, 61, 74, 8992; VIII.6, 12, 17; VIII.45, 4654, 56, 8182, 8689. In Strauss's view, Alcibiades was first ”compelled” by the Athenian demos to be a traitor, and was then a tyrant who promoted the Sicilian expedition from self-interest. See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 19293, 19699. See the fine study by Josiah Ober, Ma.s.s and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

33. The book comes with the highest recommendations not only from Huntington but also from Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. See the book jacket.

34. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 22021.