There is little question where Leo Strauss stood on the major issues of the Cold War. Strauss understood Soviet Communism, as well as Nazism, as a recrudescence of barbarism in the contemporary era, reflecting the political and intellectual crisis of liberal democracy. Strauss’ early concern with the question of tyranny, and the failure of Western social science to address it adequately, was probably his most important contribution to the debate over American policy toward the Soviet Union in the decades following World War II, and it was central in shaping the orientation of those students of his who were interested in security questions. More generally, Strauss’ development of the theoretical issue of the “regime,” and his emphasis on the fundamental differences among regimes, flew in the face of fashionable social scientific thinking during the 1960s and 1970s. It provided a vital intellectual anchor for those inclined to resist the notion that the West and the Soviet bloc were on a course of convergence as a result of economic and technological processes of modernization, and to understand Soviet actions during the Cold War as a function of deep imperatives of the Soviet system rather than as mere reactions to Western policy. At the same time, Strauss clearly viewed Western liberal democracy as the only viable alternative to the totalitarian temptation, and the closest approximation to the “best regime” of the philosophers that is possible under modern circumstances.
As the visible and accelerating erosion of liberal principles in the United States in the late 1960s and beyond made the ultimate outcome of the Cold War seem doubtful in spite of the manifest strengths of the postwar West, Strauss was increasingly sensitive to the need to mount an intellectual defense of the liberal polity, especially in its unique yet paradigmatic American version. At the same time, he was never sparing in his analysis of the vulnerability of the original liberalism embedded in the American experiment to the logic or the dialectic of modernity as such. World War II had been a great victory for liberalism, but Strauss worried that the victors, like other conquerors before them, would eventually succumb to the ideas of their defeated enemies.
The German ideas of greatest concern to Strauss—perhaps surprisingly, and in contrast to most American conservatives—were those originating not on the left but on the right, in what Strauss referred to as the “third wave” of modernity inaugurated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Historicism and positivism, now powerfully entrenched in American higher education and modulated to suit the egalitarian impulse of American political culture, threatened liberalism in ways more fundamental than Marxism, in spite of its continuing presence in intellectual life in the West. On the ideological battlefields of the 1960s, liberalism could more than hold its own against the Old Left; but it stumbled when confronted with the New Left, with its potent mix of liberationist, nihilist, and communitarian themes and a ready-made cause in the calamitous Vietnam War. With these developments, which profoundly demoralized the American political establishment and sent American education into a downward spiral from which it has yet to recover, Strauss’ “crisis of the West” entered a new and acute phase.
For those arriving in Washington in the 1970s with direct or indirect exposure to the teachings of Strauss, the prospects for the republic could hardly have seemed bleaker. On the domestic front, the Watergate scandal had brought down an administration, and in the process wreaked incalculable havoc on the presidency as an institution. Internationally the nation was reeling under the impact of the oil embargo and the final collapse of its position in Southeast Asia, while the Soviet Union was in the midst of an unprecedented military buildup. In the meantime, Congress and an increasingly countercultural press were vying with one another to discredit and dismantle elements of America’s Cold War national security establishment, while successive administrations engaged in a series of rear-guard actions at home and abroad. The collapse of the American position in southwest Asia after the Iranian revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, coupled with the national humiliation of the hostage crisis and the military failure at Desert One, the fraying of traditional alliance relationships, stagflation and “malaise” at home—all seemed to point to an America in retreat and decline.
How Strauss himself would have reacted to the political and cultural turmoil of the 1970s, the conservative revolution of the 1980s, the end of the Cold War, or the centrist presidencies of the 1990s, is impossible to say with any confidence. Strauss would certainly have welcomed the conservative resurgence that was already underway—thanks in no small part to his own efforts—by the time of his death in 1973. Yet there is little reason to suppose he would have felt comfortable with the fundamental outlook of the dominant elements in the conservative coalition that emerged in the 1980s. It seems highly likely that Strauss would have shared the cultural pessimism of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, rather than the optimism of Ronald Reagan himself or the liberal-democratic triumphalism of more recent years that has come to be associated with Reagan’s legacy. Strauss always entertained a healthy respect for the American people, but he was never a populist. Loosening the shackles of government, desirable as it might be as public policy in particular cases, would not in his view automatically liberate the good sense and productive energies of ordinary Americans, since the moral character and the capacity for self-government of a given people is a fragile acquisition, not something that can be taken for granted.
Strauss has often been accused of being an elitist. Strauss believed, not of course that elites as such deserve to rule, or that elites of the philosophic or the right-minded deserve to rule without reference to the wishes of the people, or even (or perhaps one should say particularly) that intellectuals should have a leading role in politics, but rather that elites set the tone for the larger society, exemplifying a way of life and nurturing ideas and values—the deeper meaning of the notion of “regime” that Strauss found in Plato and Aristotle—that pervasively affect the character of the nation as a whole. Strauss never denied (as did the sociological tradition of elite theory stemming from Mosca and ultimately Machiavelli) the reality of democratic governance. But it is crucial to see that Strauss understood the crisis of liberal democracy as a crisis not of democracy as such, but of liberalism understood as the guiding philosophy and way of life of contemporary democratic elites.
There can be little question but that the ills we currently confront in virtually every area of national policy have a great deal to do with fundamental changes in the outlook of the American political class over the last thirty years or so. The liberalism of the early Cold War was pragmatic, tough-minded, sure of itself, and firmly rooted in the American political tradition. It was comfortable with the exercise of power and recognized the importance of political leadership and judgment in a democratic polity. At the same time, it was civic-minded. It looked on public service as an honor and a duty, while at the same time promoting civic education and greater popular participation in political activity. The liberalism prevailing in contemporary America is different in virtually every one of these respects. As Christopher Lasch has argued with only some exaggeration in his recent polemic Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), today’s socioeconomic and professional elites increasingly see themselves as a free-floating global meritocracy of intelligence and achievement, with ties to local communities, fellow citizens, or the nation as a whole that are tenuous at best. To the extent that these elites carry intellectual baggage, it is largely of liberal provenance—but a decayed liberalism deeply influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s (also well analyzed by Lasch in his earlier The Culture of Narcissism) and its contemporary offshoots. The capture of the universities by the children of the counterculture, and the increasingly important role played by the academy in the public policy arena, are the key institutional developments in this story. The key intellectual development of more recent years is the marriage of the multicultural agenda of post-sixties radicalism with the philosophy of deconstruction.The infiltration of German and French nihilist doctrine into American intellectual life beginning in the 1970s has profoundly transformed academic study in literature and the social sciences in this country, in ways that are no doubt not yet fully appreciated in terms of their impact on our society generally. In particular, the notion, axiomatic in this body of writing, that social arrangements and forms of thought are no more than expressions of power relationships has unquestionably had a demoralizing and corrupting effect on the political behavior of elites; and it has spread increasingly into the popular culture thanks to the hold it has established on Hollywood and the national media. An unprecedented cynicism concerning the character and motives of politicians is today the conventional wisdom. Such attitudes undermine not only the incentives for civic responsibility but the very possibility of vigorous political leadership, with consequences that are only too visible in our current politics.
Let us return to the issue of national security policy. Remote as it may appear to be from these intellectual eddies and currents, national security is in fact as much exposed to their impact as any other policy arena, and in some ways perhaps more so. In spite of the public’s appreciation of American military performance in the GulfWar, the legacies ofVietnam and Watergate continue to weigh heavily: generally speaking, government activities in the national security field are more scrutinized and contentious, their fundamental legitimacy more readily contested. In one sense, this is as it should be, given the expense and hazards of the instrumentalities of national security as well as the more benign international environment we now enjoy. Nonetheless, there is reason for concern. The declining legitimacy and the moral decay of our political and professional classes are not without their effect on the behavior of government officials; and recent developments (consider particularly the Ames espionage case) show that the nation’s military and intelligence services in particular are by no means immune to it. The disappearance of their Cold War mission as well as the downward spiral of spending on these services have certainly contributed to the demoralization and drift that is so evident in them, as has the relentless efforts of the current political establishment to use the armed forces to validate and advance the multicultural agenda. At a more fundamental level, however, one senses as well a steady erosion of the ethos of honor and national service that is at the core of military and intelligence professionalism. A number of factors seem to be at work here: the long-standing assault on traditional values in the popular culture, a civilian leadership that lacks credibility and authority, and a growing estrangement between the armed forces and the civilian world generally. Few would argue that civil-military relations in the United States are in a state of active crisis. But the trends are worrisome, and not only from the perspective of maintaining effective military forces. They have ominous implications for the long-term health of the republic.
Some have called recently for the reconstitution of an American conservatism that embraces the idea of a strong national government and promotes an ethos of national greatness and mission, arguing for (among other things) dramatic increases in defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy designed to sustain democratic governance abroad. To try to address the merits of this project would take us beyond the scope of this discussion, but the simple point needs to be made that it is altogether doubtful that the moral or political preconditions for such an undertaking are currently in place. No political leader is in sight who could credibly articulate and sustain it; but perhaps more to the immediate point, there is no stomach for it among our political and cultural elites. What seems to be required at the present time is something different and more modest—not indeed isolationist retrenchment, but a refocusing of effort and attention on the home front in the broadest sense, with a view to (among other things) arresting the decline of American education, reviving a sense of citizenship and civic responsibility, and repairing vital national institutions such as the armed forces.
Like Shakespeare’s Glendower, a future president may well find occasion to summon the nation’s spirits from their present slumber; but will they come when he calls them?