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.