The American Conservative

I’ve been saying it for quite a while now, but in just the last few days events have been happening faster than they can be reported across the Arab world.  The first sign came that Tunisia would not be an isolated case over the weekend with large protests taking place in Algeria, where twenty years of emergency rule after the Muslim Brotherhood was freely elected might surely set off a powder keg.  Solidarity protests have been taking place from Yemen to Palestine, and in the latter the Abbas regime has clamped down.

Such a brazen act could not come at a worst time, as they coincide with the release of documents detailing the degree of Fatah collusion with Israel and the peace process charade.  (Mondoweiss, per usual, has the best coverage of all angles to this rapidly developing story).  There is also the depressing spectacle of the neocons trying to spin this, just as they have ludicrously tried to spin the events in Tunisia as the vindication of the Bush global democratic revolution.  And Hezbollah is on the march.

As I said in an earlier blog, the reason that the coming revolution is more akin to 1989 than to 1919 or the 1790s is that as in 1989, the various countries are united in throwing off the yoke of the empire that oppressed them all for decades, whereas if anything the two earlier cases could be interpreted as a Russian or French conquest of the countries in upheaval.  This does not mean that the American-Israeli hegemony will disappear tomorrow or even next year, but it does mean that the process of disintegration has unambiguously begun.

UPDATE: It begins in Egypt.

The official line now appears to be that “engagement” has failed, for probably the third or fourth time at that.  Over at Lobelog they see the glass half full, and they may be right.  If we analogize to Nixon and China, it is worth remembering that the first two years of Nixon’s presidency were no less disappointing on this front:  As with Obama on Iran, Nixon initially went hat in hand to China begging for all the obvious ways they could help extricate him from the foreign policy disaster of his predecessor, but China, like Iran, saw no reason to give away the store immediately, and so, as with Obama and Iran, both sides, each for reasons of their own, have played a long game of chicken.

Optimistic reading or not, this seems as good a time as any to reiterate some blunt truths that get lost in all the nonsense about Iran:

1. Iran is Israel’s problem and no one else’s, period end of sentence.
2. The Israeli obsession with Iran is simply not rational and cannot be understood in rational terms.  Iran is nothing but a scapegoat for all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians as well as with the rest of the world.
3. Lest anyone still raise a concern about Iran having a nuclear weapon, Peter Beinart nailed it: “The dilemma you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto.”
4. There is no reason whatsoever that Iran should not be entitled to peaceful nuclear energy, to suggest otherwise is a betrayal of extraordinary bad faith.
5. Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel is not.
6. The line that the Arab states see Iran in terms as ominous if not more so than the U.S. or Israel is a bad joke.  They certainly aren’t pleased to see Iran become a more dominant power in the region, but few today can remember the analogous farce when the Israelis insisted that the real worry of the Arab states was the Soviet Union.
7. Lest anyone invoke any kind of principles of justice regarding the last point, Iran is the most democratic and bourgeois society which presently exists in Southwest Asia.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still fall far short of the ideal, but, to take just one example, Iranian restrictions on the rights of minor political parties can often pale in comparison to those that prevail in the United States.

In conclusion, I’ve long felt that the figure in history to whom George W. Bush was most comparable is Napoleon III, the short version being that Afghanistan was Mexico, Iraq was Italy, and, by the grace of God, we have been spared Iran as Prussia.  But perhaps the most spot-on part of the analogy is that the most logical course for Napoleon III to take would have been to ally with Austria in order to contain if not thwart the rise of a unified Germany, but to his ultimate downfall he refused, blinded by republican ideology.

So it has been with the United States and Iran since 9/11.  That we have installed the best allies of Iran in both Iraq and Afghanistan is but natural when we recall that Napoleon III had to frequently side with the Vatican in Italy and installed a Habsburg prince on the Mexican throne.  But now American ideological blindness may lead to some disastrous consequences, such as standing in the way of what could be a powerful Iran-India alliance that could once and for all contain the lingering menaces of Afghanistan and Pakistan and provide a bright Metternichian future for the region.  Yet as the inevitable ultimately brought on the downfall of the Second Empire, so shall it too the neocon regency.

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!” Goldwater famously proclaimed. In a roundabout way, Jason Sorens writes the same on Pileus, in a critique of an earlier post of mine that merits a full reply.  Primarily he wants to counter any notion that libertarians are politically inept and demonstrate that many of the projects which they are undertaking are as politically sensible as they are ideologically consistent.  He cites the Free State Project as an example:

The example of the Free State Project helps make the point. The FSP was never intended to be a “mass movement” across the country as a whole. Rather, it was (is) aimed at highly self-conscious, activist libertarians who wanted to make a bigger political difference in their lifetimes. The FSP recruits these people to the state that the FSP membership has chosen, New Hampshire. The FSP actually doesn’t undertake any political activities in New Hampshire as an organization, but individual migrants do. And in fact we do see an emerging libertarian/classical liberal “mass movement” in New Hampshire.

This might be the case, but a visit to the Free State Project’s website also reveals that one reason why the activists chose to base their efforts in New Hampshire was because New Hampshire’s political culture aligns more than any other state with libertarian political philosophy—as the website states, New Hampshire has no sales tax, no income tax, no eminent domain and liberal gun-carrying laws.  This might make New Hampshire more receptive of libertarian policy prescriptions, but it also means that while there may be a libertarian “mass” in New Hampshire, there is less of a “movement.”  While I am skeptical that current political alignments will change anytime soon, I don’t believe it is inevitable that one be socially liberal and economically restrictive and one generally economically liberal and socially restrictive; if Vermont had remained an independent country, then the political geography of that region would likely include a robust libertarian political establishment.

But to look at libertarian initiatives from a purely political vantage point is to gauge the issue too narrowly.  I wrote in the earlier post that libertarians often overemphasize the significance of government; obviously something can only be overemphasized in a context, and, in this case, the context is not only government but all aspects of civic life. Initiatives like the Free State Project or the seasteading movement requires people who are more committed to going lengths which even the most conservative Tea Partier and liberal MoveOn.org blogger is unwilling to go; it may provide activists with unlimited political liberties, but it does so at the expense of the numerous non-political liberties that we don’t think of as such because we take them for granted: I might not have an income tax in New Hampshire, but can I drive safely without winter tires in the snow like I could in California? I might be able to choose a government which fits my individual needs on a sea colony, but can I make it to my brother’s wedding easily?

None of this means that the Free State Project or the seasteading movement are pointless; while I am ambivalent about libertarianism (I could join many libertarians in calling for a limited Federal Reserve but not for permissive abortion laws), I would like to see both projects succeed; the Free State Project might further solidify the already-libertarian orientation of New Hampshire and seasteading could be ingenious if it addressed itself to areas in which the government is becoming more tutelary—perhaps providing unregulated medical treatment to patients on international waters (similar to offshore banking).  But it is hard to imagine that initiatives like these could change our present civic experience significantly; most citizens are satisfied enough with their non-political liberties to put up with political grievances when they occur.

The problem isn’t that libertarian ideas are wrong.  It’s that when individuals begin from the platonic level of ideas and try to apply them to reality, the imposed framework always ends up distorted in one way or another.  Libertarians would do better to begin from the mainstream and try to pull political opinion in their direction—in other words, libertarianism would have more impact if its adherents thought of it more as their disposition than as their ideology.

I am very late in coming to any comment on the TAC symposium on the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, and as tends to most often be the case, my heart is with Bill Kauffman and my head is with Michael Desch.

I come to the subject now because of a swipe made at the symposium at NRO.  It is true, as the article states, that Eisenhower’s concerns about the military-industrial complex were mostly a matter of green-eyeshade Republicanism, but it is also true that just as only Nixon could go to China, only the Supreme Allied Commander could make major defense cuts and make even the most limited effort to try to make America a normal country in spite of the Cold War.  And who can doubt that fifty years on, American democracy became “the insolvent phantom of tomorrow”?

Still, we do well to consider, alongside Desch’s reminder of what American militarism owes liberalism, some of the really pernicious conceits that the military-industrial complex legend serves.  So much of the left’s conspiracy theories about history, from the macabre tales of Wall Street men who bankrolled the Nazis and even on the Kennedy Assassination, owes to the need to acknowledge the existence of the military-industrial complex while denying how much its existence owes to FDR and Camelot.

One peculiarity of the Eisenhower legacy I’m surprised has not been touched on at all though is his Middle East policies.  The very strong tilt toward the Arabs that at least prevailed in the first half of his administration stands in sharp contrast to the isolationist legacy, Robert Taft having been a staunch pro-Zionist, as were most of his cohort in the House Republican Caucus.  To be sure, there was a dark side to Eisenhower-Dulles Arabism: Kermit Roosevelt, architect of the 1953 coup in Iran, was one of the most outspoken anti-Zionists in the foreign policy establishment, as was his collaborator Loy Henderson.  All this is dealt with in my forthcoming book, but this whole era cries out for more scholarship.  I strongly urge any Middle East studies majors who might be reading this to look into writing a dissertation on the old CIA front American Friends of the Middle East.

But as for the genuine article, I’ll just note the death today of Sargent Shriver, the America First Committee leader who went on to be George McGovern’s running mate.  Well done thou good and faithful servant!

The initial resignations from the Lebanese Cabinet were read out by Jibran Bassil of the Maronite-based Free Patriotic Movement at the Rabiyeh residence of none other than Michel Aoun. The other signatories did indeed include Mohamad Fneish and Hussein Hajj Hasan of Hezbollah, as well as Mohamad Jawad Khalife, Ali Shami and Ali Abduallah of the Amal Movement, although it is worth pointing out that Amal was partly founded by the then Melkite Archbishop of Beirut. But the rest were Charbel Nahhas and Fadi Abboud of Free Patriotic Movement, Abraham Dadayan of the solidly Armenian Tashnaq, and Youssef Saade of Marada, which is no less Maronite than its name suggests. The Government’s fate was sealed by the resignation of State Minister Adnan Sayyed Hussein, obviously a Muslim himself, but who had been named by President Michel Suleiman, the occupant of whose office has to be a Maronite.

By contrast, the other side is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, whence came the 9/11 attacks and which Jews are forbidden to enter, in stark contrast with their reserved parliamentary representation in certain other countries. (As an uprising at least spearheaded or directed by totally unreconstructed Communists overthrows a characteristically unpleasant Western client in the Arab world, to where does he flee? Why, to Saudi Arabia. Of course.) Guess which side is busily restoring Beirut’s historic Maghen Avraham synagogue, a project which would be preposterously profligate if there really were as few Jews left there as certain interests would have one believe. Likewise, look at that mainstay of the Axis of Evil, Syria:

Israel’s Channel 10 reported on Monday night that Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad has agreed to the restoration of his country’s synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, especially those in Damascus and Aleppo.

The report mentioned that Assad had made this pledge during a meeting last week with Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The meeting had been set up by a Jewish-American businessman with Syrian roots.

The report added that Assad recently opened up the country for visits by Syrian Jews.

Assad’s initiative, Channel 10 said, is an attempt on his part to improve ties with the US.

Hoenlein came to the meeting with a message for Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu concerning the two countries resuming negotiations.

Assad told Hoenlein that the resumption of talks was conditional on Israel agreeing on a complete withdraw from the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu implied that there mediation between Syria and Israel was under way when he noted in a meeting of the Israeli government that Assad refused to concede this condition.

It is true that Egypt restored the Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo last year; would that she treated her Christians anything like so well. But it is in Iran that the Jews have reserved parliamentary representation. Why is any of these countries doing such things? To curry favor with Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu? Hardly! Netanyahu and Lieberman look and sound like no Jew that they have ever met. Except, perhaps, Malcolm Hoenlein. He has no reason to wish to restore a synagogue in an Arab country except so that the local Jews may congregate there. And there is no reason for any such country’s government to spend money on any such restoration except to that same end. No Jews left there, or at most too few to form the necessary quorum, with those remnants desperate to move to Israel? Who told you that? Tell them to tell it to Assad, to Ahmadinejad, to Hezbollah and friends, and, it must be conceded, to Mubarak. For that matter, tell them to tell it Malcolm Hoenlein.

Today, of course, is Martin Luther King Day.  Even as a kid I can remember finding something very disturbing about the fact that in America we observed something called “King’s Birthday” (that I first heard it referred to as such by a teacher with a very thick southern accent surely didn’t help).  Chris Rock undoubtedly had the best attitude in reassuring us white folks way back when he was still on Saturday Night Live: “It’s just one more Monday off.  What do you do on Columbus Day, put three ships in the yard?”

I mentioned in one of my more recent blogs the discovery that Straussianism explains perfectly how the American right has come to believe such bizarre things about Martin Luther King.  No sooner do we have so perfect an illustration of this as a meditation by Straussian mainstay Peter Wehner on how King was inspired by the classics.

But now comes the spectacle of MLK becoming a symbol of American militarism, via Nathan.  In recent days I had seen a number of references to antiwar protesters confronting the heavily military MLK Day Parade in LA, but this really misses the point.  So too does the righteous rant by Cornel West I saw the other day on C-SPAN that “the election of Obama is not by itself the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.”  Much more on point was a black friend in college, who when I asked what they thought of Condoleezza Rice’s infamous statement to a black journalists’ convention that they of all people should oppose the notion that Iraqis were incapable of democracy replied “that she learned to bullshit from the master.”

The problem is not that “the dream” is being betrayed by those who would employ it for the cause of national greatness, it is that the myth of Martin Luther King only exists for the purpose of including African-Americans in the march of progress toward the millennium that can either be called Whig history, court history, Straussian mythmaking, or the NBC school or national greatness liberalism.  In years past I have seen shocking reverence displayed toward King at my lefty shul, but I can live with that since, whatever his failings, King was genuine agent of social protest, making his exaltation a far cry from the era when the often-righteous rabbis portrayed in my forthcoming book would typically so exalt the emperors Lincoln and Roosevelt.

There is an interview, which has only ever been published in this rather rare book, with King’s colleague Bayard Rustin in which he is quite frank about King and in my estimation perfectly accounts for all the various conservative bugaboos about him.  In short, that King was shallow and not exceptionally bright, that he developed a messiah complex, and this, rather than ideology, was responsible for King’s move into the north and to the left generally.  Rustin, to be sure, had his own pathologies, but we’ll leave that for another day.

King’s famous antiwar speech is certainly an admirable one, but it can just as easily be spun into mythmaking as anything claimed by the Straussians or, to take another example, the Jewish establishment.  It is simply impossible to know whether King would have become, had he lived, a Nation lefty or a Eustonite, a Democratic Party hack like Jesse Jackson or a Christian conservative notwithstanding his economic agenda.  Probably the best way to honor his legacy is to make some undoubtedly vain attempt to take him down from the pedestal.

MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — “… we will live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.”

Controversial figure? Certainly. Unsavory and unseemly ties and skeletons in the closet? Definitely. Worthy of a national holiday? Maybe not (although I have no complaints about spending the day on the farm, rather than in the office).

But globalist apparatchik of the hawkish persuasion? Only in the twisted minds of the sorts of cretinous individuals whom the Hope-and-Change Cabal would install at the Widow and Orphan making office is Martin Luther King, jr., the great moralizing voice of the Empire.

Via Russell Arben Fox, a fine quotation from MLK: “I always look at Marx with a yes and a no. There were some things that Karl Marx [wrote] that were very good….[But] Karl Marx got messed up, because he didn’t stick with Jesus.…Now this is where I leave Brother Marx and move on toward the Kingdom [of Brotherhood]….God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate superfluous wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.”

Never intended to live in abject, deadening poverty — unless, of course, you happen to get in the way of an American military conquest.

Update: Let’s slide a little further down the rabbit-hole:

Members of the armed forces historically have played a role in the fight for civil rights, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said today at the Pentagon’s 26th annual observance of honoring civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

[…]

Calling it “our own singular moment of overcoming the practice of segregation,” Lynn recounted that President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order in 1948 that eliminated segregation in the military, but he acknowledged that the process of integration in the military that followed was not flawless.

Still, Lynn said, the military took a significant step toward fulfilling King’s dream 15 years before the historic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial here to an audience of 250,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963.

[My emphasis — NPO]

And finally (again with my emphasis): Today, Lynn told the audience, African-Americans constitute a greater proportion of the military than in the nation’s population.

South Park (And not The Simpsons?!) said it best:

General: Now each battalion has a specific code-name and mission. Battalion 5, raise your hands!
[All of the African-Americans raise their hands]
General: You will be the all important first defense wave, which we will call “Operation Human Shield”.
Chef: Hey, wait a minute!
General: Now keep in mind, Operation Human Shield will suffer heavy losses. But don’t lose your spirit, men! Stay until the bitter end. Battalion 14?
[The rest of the group, all Caucasian, raise their hands.]
General: Right, you are “Operation Get Behind The Darkies”. You will follow Battalion 5 here, and try not to get killed for God’s sake! Are there any questions, men?
[Chef raises his hand.]
General: Yes, soldier?
Chef: Haven’t you heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?
General: I don’t listen to hip-hop.

Steve Walt has a typically intelligent blog about why he’s skeptical that Tunisia is the beginning of a revolutionary wave in the Arab world, primarily in response to a blog by Juan Cole.  Walt correctly notes that 1989 was the exception, that in 1919 and, even earlier, the 1790s, the Russian and French Revolutions respectively died quick deaths.  But what he fails to acknowledge is that the reason the wave was sustainable in 1989, unlike 1919 or the Napoleonic era, was that all of the rebellious nations were united in revolt against the same overweening hegemon, which is exactly the condition that obtains the Arab world – especially Egypt, Palestine, and the Gulf – today.

Egypt is Exhibit A, with the Pharaoh already on his deathbed and the Muslim Brotherhood having already made major advances through the openings it has been able to seize.  The point being that inasmuch as Walt is right to point out that Tunisia is a warning sign to Egypt, it is too little too late, telling the regime nothing it doesn’t already know.  The conditions obtaining in Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and for that matter in Iran, hardly need be repeated here.

To complete the analogy to 1989, many readers will no doubt be incredulous to the idea that Obama will be even so noble as Gorbachev and simply not intervene militarily to stop the march of history.   Yet even if he wanted to use the military to keep the Houses of Saud and Mubarak in power, or repeat the Reagan misadventure in Lebanon, with exactly what troops and money could he do so?

Some Palestinian writers have quite convincingly compared Tunisia to Gdansk, allowing for the useful caveat that a region-wide upheaval may well still be some time off, always reassuring to us Burkeans.  On the other hand the neocons stubbornly persist in the delusion that the spread of democracy means that the Arab world will be ruled by Ahmed Chalabi and Zalmay Khalilzad, who will proceed to give Israel back the Sinai, the east bank of the Jordan, and the south bank of the Litani.

Whether the neocons are really so deluded as to believe that their vaunted “Arab democrats” are Lech Walesa rather than Gus Hall, or if their just that craven in seeking to preserve the American empire, is hard to say.  Either way the former comrades of Tom Kahn should be ashamed of themselves.

Though it may well be too soon to assume any real significance to the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the Lebanese government, it is nevertheless suggestive of what I have argued for a while – that we are on the brink of an uprising across the Arab world to cast off the yoke of the American empire akin to the wave of uprisings that finally freed Eastern Europe from the Soviets.  Helena Cobban writes:

My sense from afar is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his friends and backers in Tehran are sending a fairly blunt message to the west (whose leaders often like to describe themselves as the “international community”) that regime change is indeed a game that more than one side can play.

Where is Saudi King Abdullah? He has had several serious medical procedures recently. Who has PM Saad Hariri been listening to as he has made his decisions of recent weeks?

If Nasrallah and his friends in Tehran (especially Supreme Leader Khamenei) indeed think the time has come to give the western house of cards in the Middle East a little nudge in Beirut to see what happens, the fallout from this could well end up extending far beyond Lebanon’s tiny confines.

Cobban believes that Saudi Arabia is indeed as ripe for revolution as Egypt, with King Abdullah as near death as Mubarak.  There is apparently even some shit going down in Tunisia, of all places.  The neocons, in their moral outrage at the comparison to 1989 (or is it 1919?) will now doubt insist that this would only be the conquest of the Middle East by Iran.  But it is certainly no more so than the fall of Communism meant that Eastern Europe was absorbed by the American empire.  Indeed, who can imagine the Iranians constructing an apparatus to compare to NATO?

Speaking of Iran, in a possibly related matter we have seen the dramatic shift in the party line about the Iranian nuclear program, in what can only be interpreted as the desperation of the war party to buy time, for reasons as yet unclear.  The official consensus mouthpiece itself, the Washington Post, is typical:

The challenge for the Obama administration, Israel and other allies will be to make use of that window to force a definitive end to the Iranian bomb program. The administration still hopes negotiations, set to resume Jan. 20, will achieve that end, but most likely it will require a fundamental change in Iran’s hard-line regime. From that point of view, five years is certainly not much time.

Perhaps Barack Milhous Obama really is about to actually reach out to Iran and end the madness.  But it may also be that the neocons and Israel lobby have decided all they can do now is go for broke and do all the moral chest-beating they can muster, and perhaps try to put across the big lie that America is legally bound to use its military to prevent “crimes against the Jewish people”.  The apparent strategic retreat may also be a sign that America has already lost the war – like Russia before the revolution, like France before the Americans came in, and like Germany thereafter.

But the liberation of Lebanon, and perhaps also Tunisia, if they spread to Egypt and Saudi Arabia could create a revolutionary wave that not even the most U.S. garrisoned Gulf sheikhdoms could withstand.  Let the Arab Spring commence!!!!

Paul Gottfried has paid me the high compliment of writing an extended response to a message board comment I made of his essay on the critics of Leo Strauss.  Though I’m amused that Gottfried seems to be taken in by the argument of some Straussians, of which I was vaguely aware, that Strauss was really a Cold War liberal, I think in the end it misses the point to debate whether Strauss was a man of the right.

Gottfried is correct that Strauss’ Zionism was not a right-wing predilection in the European context.  The analogy to black nationalism is instructive with its very great likeness to Zionism.  Before World War II, to be a Zionist was a right-wing choice in the Jewish context, not only with socialism still a force to be reckoned with but with German Zionism still very much influenced by classical liberals like Hannah Arendt.  Indeed, Jabotinsky was probably responding to the likes of Arendt and Magnes far more than to Labor Zionism.

As for whether Straussianism belongs on the right today, I go back to the template that I actually picked up from a very bad leftist professor, that the right, as opposed to conservatism, is simply the enemy of the left which hates the left more than it believes in any positive program – which goes far, of course, in explaining how so much of the right through history, from fascism to neoconservatism, came out of the left.  (This professor, by the way, who was in great measure responsible for the failure of my graduate school career and I was told on good authority was only even there as a condition for hiring his wife, was furious when I invoked his template in embracing Edmund Burke).

There may well be a strong argument that in the 20th century context Strauss and his immediate disciples were closer to Cold War liberalism than even the new right, but in placing Straussianism on the right today one need only examine the fundamental Straussian influence behind Glenn Beck and the Tea Party doctrines generally.  I remember well back during the 2008 Republican primary, when I asked my friend Joe Stromberg, a Mormon apostate, what he thought of Mitt Romney’s speech on religion in America.  Blessedly cut off from the media circus, Joe wasn’t even aware of it, so we ended up having a very general conversation about Mormonism.  In explaining his quite compelling thesis that Mormonism is the ultimate religion of American predestination, at one point I was led to ask in shock “are there Mormon Straussians?”, to which Joe bemusedly replied “one or two, yes.”

Mormon Straussianism, in short, is the secret of the Glenn Beck phenomenon.  Its core doctrines about the divinely inspired Constitution (something the two groups separately believe anyway) were expounded Beck’s acknowledged forebear Cleon Skousen.  The above link by Michael Lind explains how it was the Claremontistas who first began pushing the notion that Woodrow Wilson was our worst President – not because his crusade to make the world safe for democracy directly led to all the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century by allowing the Allies a decisive victory, not because he set up the worst police state in American history (yes, Southern partisans, worse than Lincoln, we can have that out another day), but because he introduced theories of government that contradicted the Straussian belief in natural law.

It was in watching Glenn Beck’s coming out party as the white Farrakhan last August that I was finally determined to figure out how the American right came to believe such bizarre things about Martin Luther King.  I soon enough realized that it was but a classic Straussian exercise, to banish any historical and cultural context and divine the secret meaning of a great man’s words in the abstract.  In his bizarre “Rally to Restore Honor” religious revival speech that was one part Elmer Gantry and two parts Edward Bellamy, Beck made brief allusions to Mormon theology about the predestination of early America at creation.

He deftly went over this in an instant, but that he got away with it at all before his evangelical audience is shocking.  What it proves is that the American right is far more steadfast to the neocon “fourth great western religion” of Americanism than to Christianity.  What this owes to Leo Strauss hardly need be repeated here.

So if – and I realize many, not least Gottfried, will want to debate this point – the Tea Party represents the right in America today as opposed to principled conservatism, than the progeny of Strauss most assuredly belongs there.  But I should think that categories of left and right are superfluous in diagnosing the militant world-redemptive idolatry of Americanism.  And to be clear, I am the last person who would deny its debt to liberalism.