Anti-Democracy in Action
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:
