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:

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