Regarding Richard Wall’s blog, below, on the Asia Times archives of the anonymous “Spengler,” and his comment on how the followers of Leo
Strauss have “faith” in the ability of “statecraft” to “improve the human condition” I have several questions.

First, how is this different from communism? Wasn’t that always the communist ideal — to use statism to supposedly improve the human condition?

Doesn’t this kind of thinking completely ignore political reality, the law of unintended consequences, and centuries of study of political economy, including the kind of understanding that founders like Madison and Jefferson had of political economy? And why do we call it “statesmanship” and not statism, which is what it really is?

Isn’t it extraordinarily contradictory for the Clarmontista Straussians to claim that their work is in the tradition of the founders, when the founders themselves viewed “statesmanship” with such suspicion and fear? Jefferson, for example, believed politicians needed to be “bound by the chains of the Constitution.” But to the Straussians, politicians need to be unbound, with the dictator Lincoln as their preeminent role model, so that they, too, can behave like dictators, with the Straussians as their advisers.

Can anything be more UN-American than these ideas, which are always promoted as somehow being in the American tradition?

Finally, isn’t turning a politician into a “statesman” about as likely as making a dog meow or a cat bark? That is, isn’t it against any politician’s (or any human’s) nature to ignore his own personal interest and act only in the interest of “the public”?

Isn’t this an awfully childish and naive belief system? And isn’t it identical to the Marxist belief that a new kind of man –socialist man in Marx’s case — can be created by mere humans? Do the Straussians really think that they can turn a politician into “Neocon Man” who, with a string of Lincoln quotes in his pocket, can bring peace and prosperity to the planet — with the help of the U.S. millitary arsenal? Only naive and ignorant children, or the insane, could believe such nonsense.

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