NeoCon philosophy by Billmon

Billmon describes the philosophy that Strauss, the founder of the NeoCons, used. Billmon is excerpting from Shadia Drury’s book: Leo Strauss and the American Right.

Here are some excerpts that especially struck me: "To the Straussians, rationality does not provide an adequate basis for a stable social order. To the contrary, the Age of Enlightenment has ushered in the crisis of modernity, in which nihilism – the moral vacuum left behind by the death of God – inevitably leads to decadence, decline and, ultimately, genocide.

[...]"When Newt Gingrich equated feminism with the destruction of Western civ, he was echoing (in his dumbed-down way) Strauss’s lurking fear that the liberal American state would steer the same course as the Weimar Republic – a political Titanic on a collision course with a totalitarian iceberg. Deprived of the moral certainty provided by religion and tradition, the masses are vulnerable to crazed political adventurers who would fill the nihilistic void with their own crackpot ideas – like, say, the international conspiracy of Communists and Freemasons."

So the Strussians believe that there are two classes. The elite (conservatives) who can handle the nihilism and the absence of absolute truths in modernism, and those masses who must have religion to support them in the nihilist modern world.

"One of the Straussians’ most important innovations has been to reconcile their brand of elite conservatism with Southern fried demagogic populism ala Huey Long and George Wallace. That’s a pretty radical concession [...] But it's solved the traditional dilemma of old-style conservatives in America: How to win power in a society that has no landed gentry, no nobility, no established church – none of Europe’s archaic feudal institutions and loyalties.

"The rationale – or rationalization – for the populist ploy is that the common folk are a hell of a lot less liberal (again, using the Enlightenment definition of the word) than what the Straussians like to call America’s “parchment regime” – that is, the ideas and principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The masses want their opium, in other words, and with the right guidance, will happily sweep away the liberal elites who have been denying it to them.

"This, in turn, will set the stage for a golden (or at least silver) age of religious orthodoxy, patriarchal values and a hierarchical corporate capitalism stripped of its original libertarian feistiness – all of it supervised by a moral nanny state freed from the confines of all that “parchment.”

Billmon goes on to point out that the Straussian ideas have been thoroughly spread throughout Republican conservatives.

This is the connection between the NeoCons and the fundamentalist Xtians I have been looking for. The conservatives and the NeoCons need the votes and the energy provided by the fundamentalist Xtians. The fundamentalist Xtians need the conservatives for the Republican Party that gives them access to government power.