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Read other letters about this article
I like this, from L.W.M.: "Chesterton on gummint: The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all. (G. K. Chesterton) Perhaps that makes some poorer RW anarchists useful idiots."
My remark about Leo Strauss' "pseudo-classicism" and him being a "bad Jew" was doubtless very tired-sounding ; that was just before I signed off last night. I would have to - let me make that, I WILL have to - develop this in Arendtian terms, and I shall do so as sincerely as I can, my not being Jewish notwithstanding. I can't do it overnight. But the argument will be something like this : Arendt admits, in a wry sort of way, that one of the perennial Jewish functions has been to act as ideological decorators for other peoples' empires. She refuses to condemn this, as a dogmatic marxist would, as witness her quite affectionate treatment of Disraeli, which I mentioned (and I have to stress that I am working through "Origins of Totalitarianism" very, very slowly).
However, Arendt was a secular progressive with a strong moral sense of Jewish responsibility. Her entire oeuvre was an attempt to explain what 'Jewish responsibility' meant. She would have agreed that from time to time Jews betray their own people's better qualities, and the human species as a whole, by engaging in forms of empire-flattery so vile that they effectively legitimate wholesale genocide, and if she was still around, she might add, incipient planetary-scale destruction.
This seems to me to be what Strauss did. In essence his work is ideological flattery of the worst tendencies of the US ruling class. It provides an intellectual gloss for Hollywood's pseudo-classical "New Rome", "New Centurions", type imagery, a sort of egg-head star wars fantasy. Then it introduces the epigones of classicism, notably Machiavelli.
Another image that comes to mind is Strauss as Iago to America's Othello. That certainly brings out the tragic aspect.
