Lured by the open­ing ref­er­ence to Leo Strauss, I unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally man­aged to make it through William Kristol’s extra­or­di­nary Times column this morn­ing. Here’s how it begins:

Half a cen­tury ago the philoso­pher Leo Strauss remarked that the pas­sage in which the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence pro­claims its self-​evident truths “has fre­quently been quoted, but, by its weight and its ele­va­tion, it is made immune to the degrad­ing effects of the exces­sive famil­iar­ity which breeds con­tempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”

What’s extra­or­di­nary about the column is that Kris­tol doesn’t misuse Strauss. Most people who cite that quo­ta­tion from Nat­ural Right and His­tory cite it as evi­dence of Strauss’s good­will toward Amer­i­can democ­racy. But of course it’s noth­ing of the kind; in fact it’s the open­ing salvo in a long, dense, and often decep­tive attack on the philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of democ­racy itself.

Which is why I found it fairly amaz­ing to see Kris­tol follow the Strauss­ian line through to its nasty anti-​democratic end, right there in the Op-​Ed pages of the New York Times:

So the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion made the bold and doubt­ful choice for inde­pen­dence. Their fellow cit­i­zens rat­i­fied the choice. But they might have been slow to act if the wor­thies had not moved first.

For, as the dec­la­ra­tion itself notes, “all expe­ri­ence hath shown, that mankind are more dis­posed to suffer, while evils are suf­fer­able, than to right them­selves by abol­ish­ing the forms to which they are accus­tomed.” The people are con­ser­v­a­tive. Lib­erty some­times requires the bold lead­er­ship of a few individuals.

Per­haps that’s why the rep­re­sen­ta­tives, who have signed on behalf of “the good people” of the colonies, “mutu­ally pledge to each other” their lives, their for­tunes and their sacred honor in sup­port of the dec­la­ra­tion. Their pledge isn’t to the people. The pledge is an indi­vid­ual one by the sign­ers to one another.

And the pledge has to be sup­ported by a sense of honor — even of sacred honor. The declaration’s asser­tion of equal rights, one may say, is sup­ported by what is nec­es­sar­ily unequal, the sense of honor of those acting on the people’s behalf.

Words like “worthies” and “bold lead­er­ship of a few individuals” will tell some people all they need to know, but it’s that last para­graph in which Kris­tol shows just how much of a a true anti-​democrat (and heart­felt Strauss­ian) he really is.

He man­ages to coax a mean­ing out of the Dec­la­ra­tion’s most pro­found claim–”We hold these truths to be self-​evident, that all men are cre­ated equal”–that dizzies even a woolly-​headed post­mod­ernist like me.

You see, Kris­tol says, by “self-evident,” Thomas Jef­fer­son and the sig­na­to­ries of the Dec­la­ra­tion didn’t actu­ally mean “self-evident.” What they meant was that the equal­ity of all people is actu­ally founded on aris­to­cratic honor. Let the “sacred honor” of the “worthies” perish, and the puta­tive equal­ity of all people per­ishes with it.

Say what you will about the aris­to­cratic ten­den­cies of the Found­ing Fathers; this last thesis is still a shock­ing for­mu­la­tion. And at the start of this Fourth of July week it’s a pretty jolt­ing reminder what the phrase “enemy of democracy” really means.