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... that is, that the neo-conservatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, are a product of the school of thought originating in Leo Strauss' teaching at the University of Chicago.
Strauss believed that liberalism would cause the masses to lose focus on the most important aspect in society--national identity--and to promote that nationalism which he believed would be a unifying force, it was important for government to create what he termed "necessary lies" which would rally the public around the aims of the country's leaders to project force around the world. Strauss believed this was legitimate because the country was founded on freedom and democracy, noble aims, so it was perfectly okay to use any means to spread those ideals around the world.
Implicit in this is that Strauss and his followers believed that this was a moral goal, even if the means were not moral or ethical. And, I think this is where the alliance with the religious right wing fits into the mix. The religious right wing sees its role in this grand task of bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to the world as maintaining an aura of morality around quite immoral activities.
In exchange for delivering the votes necessary to bring the neo-conservatives to power, the religious right has been promised a greater role in government by making them the arbiters of morality in society. Therefore, they are necessary to the neo-cons to maintain in society a particular moral view of that society itself--that it is both moral and of noble aims, even while it is engaging in ignoble ventures--torture, indefinite confinements, illegitimate wars of opportunity, graft, corruption of the elite, etc.
Strauss himself believed that the world could be neatly divided into good and evil, white hats and black hats (some of his colleagues said he never missed an episode of "Gunsmoke"), and that whatever one did to promote good and attack evil was acceptable.
The fundamentally undemocratic part in all this played by both the neo-cons and the religious right is that Strauss believed that it was up to a few "wise men" to determine what was good and what was evil, and for those wise men to advise the aristocrats in society (people like the President) on how to explain that Manichean division between good (our society) and evil (the rest of the world) to the masses. Certainly the religious right, being the arbiters of morality, would want to be part of that small group of wise men controlling the aristocrats of society, guiding them to the moral goals they perceived as necessary for society.
But, the neo-cons stll run the ship of state--the religious right, then, to my mind, are essential to the neo-cons in promoting a series of "necessary" lies--that we are a good country, a moral country and a god-fearing country and our aims are pure, despite how we actually behave. This fiction, promoted by the religious right, allows the masses to approve of its government doing things it wouldn't otherwise. This is why there are so many attacks on what the right calls "moral relativism," which is nothing more than the non-religious ethical belief that means do not justify ends. The neo-cons seek to discredit that so-called moral relativism because their means are fundamentally immoral, unethical and undemocratic, and their true end is the arbitrary imposition of their values on the rest of the world by use of military and economic force.
It's a conjoining of aims. The religious right believes that their Biblical mandate to spread the Gospel impels them to spread Christianity world-wide. The neo-cons believe that they are spreading "freedom" and "democracy" around the world by their actions. They've joined forces to mutually obtain their own ends.
The only problem with it all is that Strauss had no respect for democracy or Constitutional rule of law, and didn't feel that the masses were capable of understanding the truth if it were offered to them (hence the need for "necessary lies" that they could understand, and for a cadre of "wise men" to direct that society and create the necessary lies while secretly proceeding along another course).
What Strauss advocated in his philosophy is fundamentally elitist in construction, and is a prescription for totalitarianism. The religious right is along for a ride because Strauss' conception of society agrees with their own shadings of the same.
Cheers.
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