#neoconservatives

[shinyasahalo]

Greater Israel Explained: The Israeli Plan to Conquer the Arab World.

The video also debunks the idea that the Middle East is naturally sectarian, or “tribalistic,” which is given as an explanation by liberal academic authors like Mark S. Weiner about why democracy can’t thrive outside of Israel.  

That explanation would also allow neoconservatives and liberals to say that any communism in the Middle East is from Russia, because people in the Middle East can’t think for themselves.  

[free-land-free-labor]

I found a document listing factions in the Syrian Civil War with a couple sentences each. It had to reach nearly 300 pages to include every group fighting. Most of which, frankly, are evil. The regime murders children, much of the opposition at this point are terrorists…just sad all around and I pray for Syria’s civilians. Assyrian & Yazidi brigades are typically the most morally upright though, and my prayers and condolences are with both groups for the violence they’ve faced at the hands of Daesh and others.

[coolmaycroft]

A follow up to my previous post

[mckitterick]

sure he was a corporate puppet, but an evil puppet

the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

war on drugs: reagan's aggressive escalation of the war on drugs was a catastrophic policy, primarily targeting minority communities and fueling mass incarceration. the crusade against drugs was more about controlling the Black, Latino and Native communities than addressing the actual problems of drug abuse, leading to a legacy of broken families and systemic racism within the criminal justice system.

deregulation and economic policies: reaganomics was an absolute disaster for the working class. reagan's policies of aggressive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and slashing social programs were nothing less than class warfare, deepening income inequality and entrenching corporate greed. these types of policies were a clear message that reagan's america was only for the wealthy elite and a loud "fuck you" to working americans.

environmental policies: despite his reputation being whitewashed thanks to the recovery of the ozone layer, reagan's environmental record was an unmitigated disaster. his administration gutted critical environmental protections and institutions like the EPA, turning a blind eye to pollution and corporate exploitation of natural resources. this blatant disregard for the planet was a clear sign of prioritizing short-term corporate profits over the future of the environment.

AIDS crisis: reagan's gross neglect of the aids crisis was nothing short of criminal and this doesn't even begin to touch on his wife's involvement. his administration's indifference to the plight of the lgbtq+ community during this devastating epidemic revealed a deep-seated bigotry and a complete failure of moral leadership.

mental health: reagan's dismantling of mental health institutions under the guise of 'reform' led directly to a surge in homelessness and a lack of support for those with mental health issues. his policies were cruel and inhumane and showed a personality-defining callous disregard for the most vulnerable in society.

labor and unions: reagan's attack on labor unions, exemplified by his handling of the patco strike, was a blatant assault on workers' rights. his actions emboldened corporations to suppress union activities, leading to a significant erosion of workers' power and rights in the workplace. he was colloquially known as "Ronnie the Union Buster Reagan"

foreign policy and military interventions: reagan's foreign policy, particularly in latin america, was imperialist and ruthless. his administration's support for dictatorships and right-wing death squads under the guise of fighting "communism" showed a complete disregard for human rights and self-determination of other nations.

public health: yes, reagan's agricultural policies actually facilitated the rise of high fructose corn syrup, once again prioritizing corporate profits over public health. this shift in the food industry has had lasting negative impacts on health, contributing to the obesity epidemic and other health issues.

privatization: reagan's push for privatization was a systematic dismantling of public services, transferring wealth and power to private corporations and further eroding the public's access to essential services.

education policies: his approach to education was more of an attack on public education than anything else, gutting funding and promoting policies that undermined equal access to quality education. this was, again, part of a broader agenda to maintain a status quo where the privileged remain in power.

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

[asensefeed]

francis fukuyama. Stands victorious on the ruins of kiev. It is the year 2049. The forever conflict in Ukraine has finally ended. He holds the decapitated head of Tsar Putin of Muscovy. The Pog Sussy Common Sense Trumpets of Liberal Democracy blair in the background. We have won. All is good

[sprites4ever]

Liberals aren't snowflakes, as neoconservatives say, it's just that they, like everyone else, get offended when they're told extremely hurtful things. This was shown by recent events, as liberals have by now figured out how to offend neoconservatives just as strongly.

The neoconservatives are hypocrites! What a surprise! This is my surprised face: 😐

[readingsquotes]

"I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the group’s hottest topics: ...

• The shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists. “The West is at best a beautiful cemetery,” lamented Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic German family fled the country after World War II to Chile, where their son was raised before returning to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.

• Israel-Palestine, a problem that Michael Yudelson, Prince’s business partner at Unplugged, which markets an allegedly supersecure smartphone, said should be handled by napalming Hamas’s tunnel network. “I would burn all those bastards, and have everything above ground, everything left of Gaza, collapse into this fiery hell pit and burn!” he wrote. .

....

Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. ...

The roster of invitees includes: ...

• Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

...Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad.

...

Even more farcical was the manner in which group chat members portrayed themselves as rightful guardians of democracy, even as they proposed employing military force against their unarmed domestic political opponents and rounding up members of the “global cabal” for trial at a Nuremberg-style tribunal. It’s blazingly evident that many in the group can’t even define democracy, and those who can don’t like it. ...

Off Leash’s participants want a “democracy” where the “plebs” vote the way they want in every election and the government only approves their preferred policies, which would give them the absolute certainty they want that their outsize wealth, privileges, and influence will be protected. That’s not the way democracy works, it’s the way dictatorships do, which no doubt feels comfortable to group chat members who have thrived doing business with corrupt, repressive regimes and leaders, which is the way many met each other and Prince, and how they came to be part of Off Leash in the first place

[xtruss]

Outrage at Chuck Schumer’s Speech: The Pro-Israel Right Wants to Eat Its Cake Too

Neoconservatives Only Hate “Interference” in Israel When It Means Anything Other Than Blank-Check Support For Apartheid and Slaughtering Palestinians.

— Murtaza Hussain | March 15, 2024

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, departs the Senate Chamber at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Schumer called for Israel to hold new elections, a sharp break with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the highest-ranking Jewish US elected official. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., gave a speech that provoked anger from right-wing supporters of Israel, many who described it as a regime-change effort targeting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The roughly 40-minute speech, delivered by Schumer on the floor of the Senate, attacked Hamas as well as critics of Israel, while vowing that the U.S. would defend and support Israel through any crises it faced. But Schumer also took direct aim at Netanyahu, describing his government as “an obstacle to peace” and saying that his coalition government “no longer fits the needs of Israel.”

Schumer went further in his remarks, calling for elections in Israel to bring a new government to power and saying that Netanyahu had “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Despite its otherwise pro-Israel tone, Schumer’s speech predictably triggered outrage among staunch pro-Israel Republicans, including many neoconservatives. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, of Iran–Contra fame, hysterically accused Schumer of attempting to turn Israel into an “American colony” by intervening in its politics. “It’s a shameful and unprecedented way to treat an ally,” he wrote, “and an “unconscionable interference in the internal politics of another democracy.” His views were echoed by Israeli officials like former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who took to social media to denounce his comments as “external political intervention” in Israeli affairs.

These arguments could perhaps be respected were it not for the massive, regular, and institutionalized intervention in U.S. political life carried about by the Israeli government and its supporters, which has successfully turned the affairs of a small country on the eastern Mediterranean into one of the most important domestic political issues in America. Netanyahu himself has shown no embarrassment about his own intervention in American politics, delivering rapturous speeches lobbying the U.S. Congress to legislate in favor of Israel and essentially endorsing his favored political candidates for office during U.S. elections.

American foreign policy is today effectively handcuffed by the lobbying efforts of powerful special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. These organizations are hellbent on ensuring that the U.S. provide Israel unstinting military, economic, and diplomatic support, even as its government rebuffs repeated U.S. requests to allow the creation of a Palestinian state in accordance with international law.

The complaints of people like Abrams and Bennett that the U.S. is intervening in Israeli affairs seem utterly myopic at best, given that extensive U.S. intervention is not just welcomed but also demanded by Israel and its supporters so long as it is in accordance with the security and political needs of the Israeli government.

Now More Than Ever

Schumer’s speech comes at a moment in which Israel has perhaps never been more isolated, or more dependent on U.S. support. The U.S. today has pivoted back to the Middle East against its own wishes, fighting the Houthis on behalf of Israel, providing arms for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and deterring Hezbollah in Lebanon by parking its aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. When three American military service members were killed in Jordan earlier this year, the assailants were clear that their motive was retaliating against U.S. support of Israel.

The U.S. has used its veto powers at the United Nations to shield Israel from an onslaught of global outrage over the scenes of mass killing and starvation in Gaza. As Israel has faced diplomatic assaults from Brazil, South Africa, China, and across the Muslim world, the U.S. has remained steadfast as its most important and often only defender in international fora.

All this support has come with very little reciprocation from Israel. In the wake of President Joe Biden’s comments expressing rhetorical support for an eventual two-state solution, Netanyahu publicly humiliated his most important patron by publicly vowing that no Palestinian state would ever be created. The right-wing prime minister even bragged about his own historic role in preventing one from coming into existence.

Netanyahu’s steadfast commitment to defying international law and overwhelming global opinion to pursue a project of continued colonization of the West Bank is only made possible thanks to his and his supporters’ tremendously successful campaign at bending U.S. politics in Israel’s favor. No country has been a greater beneficiary of U.S. support, nor has any country given less back for the tremendous blank checks that the U.S. has written it for decades, up until the present day.

Schumer’s comments on the Senate floor, despite their opposition to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition government, were resoundingly supportive of Israel and hostile to its enemies. But in calling for a two-state solution to the conflict, he contradicted not just Netanyahu but also a majority of the Israeli public who today oppose such an outcome and prefer the status quo, which requires systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians that human rights groups have classified as apartheid.

In this light, the Senate majority leader’s comments should not be taken as an effort to engineer a color revolution on the streets of Tel Aviv, but rather a last attempt to prevent Israel from descending to a level of ostracism from which even the U.S. would strain to rescue it. “Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world,” Schumer said.

Israel’s supporters who were incensed by his words would be better off taking them as wise counsel.

[hasan-news-updates]

https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/piers-morgan/cenk-uygur-joins-piers-morgan-to-slam-neoconservatives-for-their-insanity-on-un/video/134424e54c7395769070869f6edb9690

[thenewdemocratus]

Eagle Forum:Phyllis Schlafly: A Choice Not An Echo Revisited

Source:The New Democrat  If you want to know why Tea Party Republicans, the non-Conservative Libertarians in that movement, have a tendency to sound like Ron Paul Libertarians on economic and fiscal policy and even to a certain extent of foreign policy as well, but sound like Rick Santorum and other leaders on the Religious-Right on social issues, Phyllis Schlafly and her book A Choice Not An…

[free-land-free-labor]

Still fundamentally a Georgist & a skeptic of uninhibited markets, etc., but have definitely had the Norman Podhoretz, Bayard Rustin, etc. shift (back) right overall. Neoconservatives have my heart!

[sandinmybed]

found a good kissing ref on pinterest and naturally had to make it about byler. let them KISS in st5

[crownedpatriot11]

Claudia Sheinbaum’s election (and horrible presidency) will result in a massive antisemitic and right-wing backlash in Mexico guaranteed

[doesyourshipmakeyouabadperson]

500 posts!

And i'll make 500 more! Watch me ❤😈

[nicklloydnow]

“In 1941, whether liberal societies could endure despite their weaknesses was a more than theoretical question. Strauss’s lecture addressed the long-standing question of how liberal ­societies might protect the virtues they need but often struggle to cultivate, and sometimes actively undermine. And his answer, offered in defense of what he called the “open society” (a term Karl ­P­opper would put to different use four years ­later), was provocative. He argued that many virtues essential to liberalism are best understood in the moral traditions that are most opposed to liberalism. He also suggested that the vices most threatening to liberal societies are often nurtured by liberal ideals themselves. As was his style, Strauss suggested, rather than explicated, his thesis: An open society requires strengthening by moral and political imaginations that have been formed in closed societies.

Strauss’s lecture bore the solemn title “German Nihilism”—slightly misleading, since its focus was broader than Germany and deeper than nihilism. Strauss was horrified by National Socialism, and he closed his lecture by expressing his admiration for Churchill and his gratitude toward British combatants. But what most engaged his attention was not contemporary statesmen and soldiers, but a previous generation of teachers and students. Strauss worried that the mistakes made by progressive educators in the decades prior to the rise of National Socialism could be made again, endangering the stability of Western democracies.

Strauss opened with a claim that may be ­unsettling, even when considered in context. He expressed his regret that National Socialism had been identified with nihilism, a philosophical doctrine whose political goals were said to be purely destructive. His concern was not that Hitler’s regime had been denied a fair hearing among intellectuals. For Nazi ideology Strauss expressed only the severest contempt, and with the interesting exception of Ernst Jünger’s early work, he dignified no contemporary German writer with a citation. Nor did Strauss suggest that the regime’s goals were less barbaric in theory than they were proving to be in practice.

Strauss’s concern was that the brutality of the regime evoked strenuous moral responses that impaired philosophical thinking and historical judgment. The regime posed an obvious threat to its victims and to those resisting its advance on two continents by force of arms. But Strauss argued that it posed a less obvious and potentially more enduring threat to those opposing it by intellectual means. Authoritarianism clouded the thinking of some of its most trenchant opponents, making it difficult for them to understand critiques of modernity as anything other than the “ravings” of the vulgar, the provincial, and the stupid. Strauss lamented that a political movement whose lasting defeat required the deepest philosophical wisdom had, in too many cases, elicited something else. It had given defenders of democracy, among whom Strauss included himself, the opportunity to demonize liberalism’s critics as “gangsters,” “mentally diseased,” or “morbid.”

Strauss was not alone in wishing for a deeper understanding of the intellectual roots of European illiberalism. In the same semester, a young John Rawls published his first essay, a sympathetic reading of Oswald Spengler’s predictions of democratic decline. But Strauss’s worry was distinctive of him and his pedagogy, which would play an increasingly important role in American conservatism after his move to the University of Chicago in 1949. Strauss worried that Western thinkers were no longer capable of contemplating perspectives beyond liberalism, even against liberalism, from which to judge the present. Far from constituting a threat to clear thinking, such a perspective is essential to it—for only outside the open society can we identify its virtues and its ­vices, and gain the strength to endure its discontents. But if we are to reach this horizon, Strauss argued, a popular prejudice often directed against critics of liberalism must be rejected. For what is mislabeled “nihilism” is not a destructive doctrine at all. It is a protest on behalf of something of the highest human importance—something liberalism dismisses at its peril.

(…)

Strauss’s portrait of his classmates was unsparing, but not disdainful. Strauss described young men full of vehement certainty about what they rejected, but inarticulate and unreflective about what they affirmed. “The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled,” he observed, “was positively horrifying to [them].” Strauss lamented that their passions found no outlet other than the crudest propaganda. Unable to understand or express themselves in any other way—Strauss noted that they had largely rejected Christian belief—they gave voice to savage forms of group identity. The mark of barbarism, Strauss explained, was the belief that truth and justice should be defined in terms of ethnic or racial membership.

But Strauss acknowledged that these students, shaped by defeat, conflict, and social disintegration, were inspired by an ideal—an ideal whose dangers they did not understand but whose allure they keenly felt. Here we approach the heart of Strauss’s lecture, which sought to place these interwar students and their ideal in a broader intellectual history. Strauss cautioned that he sought not to pardon what deserved condemnation, but to make intelligible what required understanding. He therefore challenged his class to see in the youthful German protest what many had failed to perceive two decades ­earlier: its moral basis. This protest against liberalism was not fundamentally inspired by a love of war or a love of nation, Strauss insisted. Nor could it be explained by material or class interests. It was inspired, as he put it in a bracing passage, by “a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.”

Strauss named this outlook the morality of the “closed society.” No sensitive reader of the lecture can avoid being struck by the intensity of the passages in which Strauss describes the gravity of the challenge this “endangered morality” poses to the “open ­society.” What is the closed society? Strauss didn’t identify it with any one people, tradition, or form of government. By the “closed society” he didn’t mean non-Western cultures, pre-Enlightenment thought, or even ­undemocratic polities. The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul and whose demands must be confronted by every human community. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral, or at least amoral, because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life.

Strauss assumed his American students might have difficulty seeing the possible strengths, to say nothing of the seductive appeal, of a way of life associated with ignorance and bigotry. He therefore tried to show them how liberal and democratic ideals might appear from a perspective that denies their moral legitimacy—not out of resentment or bad faith, but out of loyalty to a higher order of values. The rights of man, the relief of the human estate, the happiness of the greatest possible number—for advocates of the open society, these are ideals that have inspired social progress. They are part of a shift in modern consciousness, through which we have recognized our power to change the present, rather than simply accept the authority of the past. But to defenders of the closed society, Strauss argued, the moral prestige of these slogans evinces a different kind of shift. It is a sign that humanity has been debased rather than ennobled.

To draw his listeners into anti-liberal ways of thinking, Strauss sketched the development of modern political thought from the perspective of the closed society. This interpretation casts the arc of modernity in a disturbing light, depicting as decline what Enlightenment thinkers hailed as advance. It sees modernity as the story of how and why Western societies chose to lower their moral ideals, exchanging the demanding codes of antiquity and biblical religion for the comfortable norms of commercial society, legal proceduralism, and bourgeois life. Heroic ideals, attainable only by the exceptional few, were defined down for the ordinary many; ideals that promoted spiritual or intellectual excellence were balanced by those promoting health and prosperity; ideals that imposed self-denial were replaced by those that indulged self-expression.

As Strauss’s reading of modernity suggests, the closed society is defined by what it affirms no less than by what it rejects. He emphasized that its conflict with the open society is ultimately over the most fundamental question: Which way of life is best for man? For defenders of the closed society, human life should be ordered to a political end whose achievement requires the highest and rarest human qualities. So demanding is its vision of moral excellence, so uncommon are the virtues it requires, and yet so necessary is it to the sustaining of human life, that its fulfillment involves the greatest personal risk. As Strauss described it:

Moral life . . . means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness . . . are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment. . . . Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human.

Duty, sacrifice, danger, struggle—here we enter the charged atmosphere of a moral world that Strauss feared his students, and not only his students, failed to understand. It saw the best human life as one that dares to risk all for the sake of heroic possibilities. It saw the desire to pledge oneself to a great cause and to prostrate oneself before great authorities as essential to human virtue. In later writings, Strauss would examine a tension between the life of philosophy and the life of faith, a tension that he believed was foundational to Western civilization. But the conflict between the open and closed societies is not a conflict between reason and revelation. It is a conflict over the necessity of life-and-death struggles for human excellence. If the open society is constituted by free argument and equal recognition, the closed society is formed by loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and honor. It celebrates the virtues that it believes make political order possible: the willingness to forgo material comforts, to close ranks against outsiders and oppose enemies, and, above all, to fight to the death with no thought for profit or pleasure. Though these virtues animate other spheres of life, they are, in their deepest origin and highest expression, martial virtues.

(…)

But in defending the martial virtues of courage, heroism, and loyalty, Strauss was not simply giving guarded expression to past political views. He was giving voice to a moral ideal that defenders of democracy were jeopardizing, at significant human cost. That ideal insisted that these are the virtues through which, and only through which, a man can prove himself to be a man in full. It ­contended that what makes us human is not the way we pursue and enjoy the goods of bodily life, however refined our habits might be. Rather, we prove our humanity only by exercising our radical ability to contradict those goods, only by risking our lives for a value greater than mere survival. To live as a human being is to fight to the death for something higher than life. Within this moral world—a world so fundamentally hostile to liberal ­modernity—man is not made for comfort and security. He is tempted by them. The man who wishes truly to live must flirt with death.

Strauss was aware of the destructive power of this impulse and its pursuit of meaning through confrontation with annihilation. But before it could be corrected, he believed, its moral critique of liberal modernity had to be confronted. Proponents of the closed society regard the open society as degrading not simply because it places bodily safety and well-being at its political center. They regard it as degrading because it diminishes the soul’s need for moral risk, demotes the virtues needed for pursuing and protecting the highest things, and devalues the men who strive to live by its severe code. For those, such as Ernst Jünger, who found the most sublime virtues in the trenches of a world war, the open society was hypocritical. It lived by achievements it did not properly honor, or merely pretended to honor, and in doing so lied about the basic facts of human experience. Its dream of a world of freedom and equality, a world in which everyone was happy and satisfied and at peace—such a world was no dream, but a posthuman nightmare, “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe.”

Strauss’s portrait of the closed ­society made no claim to originality. As he acknowledged, his account brought together critiques of liberal modernity made by Rousseau, ­Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and others, who had likewise questioned whether something vital to human life was lost when older moral codes were exchanged for greater freedom and equality. But if Strauss’s reading of history was not original, the lessons he drew from it for the American university were. As he brought his seminar to a close, he reflected again on the generation of students who had entered adulthood during the decades before the Second World War, and whose moral passions had been so poorly understood and so poorly formed. He said that what those students had needed most was “old-fashioned teachers.” It is a startling remark.

(…)

Strauss didn’t wish to turn his students into sophisticated enemies of liberalism. His goal was to turn them into virtuous defenders of democracy. But to become true patrons of the open society, they needed qualities of character that could be developed only through a proper appreciation of traditional society. The open society was right to order its common life through the exercise of reason and the arts of civility. But the closed society was also right about some important things. It acknowledged our need to be loyal to a particular people, to inherit a cultural tradition, to admire inequalities of achievement, to reverence the authority of the past, and to experience self-transcendence through self-­sacrifice. It acknowledged as well the importance of a leadership class whose decisions expose them to special risk rather than shielding them from it. As Strauss observed, these are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-­minded. A society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a ­society that cannot question them.

Strauss gave his lecture only months after the institution of a military draft in the United States. But his primary aim wasn’t to steel his students for the nation’s entry into war. As Western democracies sent young men into combat, they needed to think more soberly about the kind of society they wished to defend after the fighting ended. Strauss warned them against the illusion of building a culture around values of “openness” that scorned the human need for solidarity, sacrifice, and even suffering. As a philosopher, Strauss was a critic of modern thinkers whose ideas encouraged, as he later wrote, the “corrosion and destruction of the heritage of Western civilization.” Strauss was therefore both a defender of liberal democracy, as well as a critic of liberal theories of human nature that sought to domesticate the highest longings of the soul. He correctly saw that some of the most serious threats to liberal ways of life do not come from authoritarian regimes. They come from homegrown ideals of equality and freedom, which can exercise their own kind of tyranny over the social customs and habits that make open societies possible.

For Strauss, more was at stake than the West’s readiness to shed “blood, sweat, and tears” on the shores of Europe and the islands of the South Pacific. There was also the tradition of education on which the peoples of the West depend for their civilizational identity. Strauss saw liberal education not as a catechesis in liberal pieties, but as a courageous engagement with moral traditions that may be profoundly at odds with democratic life. In this way, a genuinely liberal education served as a “counterforce” to the leveling pressures of mass culture. It provided reminders, as he later put it, of human greatness, of human possibilities beyond a life of consumption and production.

Strauss wrote frequently about education, and the survival of great books education in our country owes a great deal to his work. But his boldest insight is found in this early lecture, delivered at a time when the future of Western civilization was in doubt. Strauss implied a moral connection ­between the martial virtues of the closed ­society and the liberal virtues of the open society—­between the life of the warrior and the life of the philosopher. He suggested that only in the search for wisdom could a human being truly achieve the qualities sought by the warrior and the soldier. Strauss did not therefore condemn the man who fights valiantly to the death; he sought to perfect the martial ideal, transposing it to the mind’s struggle against its enemies, falsehood and flattery. To pursue the highest truths and the highest goods, he claimed, requires the rarest human excellences. It requires the courage to risk cherished beliefs and self-images in encounters with great authors of the past. Strauss ended his lecture with a remark that is as arresting today as it was eighty years ago. He observed that there is a place in Western culture where the old morality and its noble ideals are still defended rather than subverted. Within its ancient universities, the greatest human battle is carried on bloodlessly and perpetually—as rational debate over the nature of truth and goodness.

(…)

Strauss wished to recover classical philosophy and revive the careful study of the great books. He believed that this kind of education could open the aristocratic horizon that citizens of an open society most desperately need, if they wish to save liberalism from itself: not freedom from the past, but freedom from the present. Perhaps education cannot bear the moral weight that Strauss placed on it. And as religious men and women, we should entertain even more serious doubts whether the philosophical life can fulfill our deepest aspirations for wisdom and holiness. But as our politics burns through the ideological firewalls of the postwar era, we should heed Strauss’s prescient ­warning: An education that denies our need to risk our lives for something beyond life will fail students to the extent that it succeeds. It will leave them in a condition like that of Strauss’s doomed classmates: angry, lost, and prey to the savagery that will destroy our civilization.”