I posted this in
lyson's diary about Strauss, but I think it deserves a separate diary of it's own.
There's an awful New Yorker movie review in last week's issue about "The Power of Nightmares", an amazing documentary about the rise of extremist Islam paralleling with the rise of neo-conservatism. It's an amazing movie and all should see it.
But the blurb trashes the movie for disparaging Leo Strauss. Saying that Strauss was "troubled by Hitler's rise to power", like that's reason enough to like Strauss. But Strauss believed in fascism! He believed what they believed. See here:
In Strauss's case, he admired the sense of spiritual unity that was promulgated in these German youth groups and it was that sort of nationalist or spiritual element that was appealing to him. He wrote a book on Spinoza published in 1930 and left Germany in 1932 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant for research on Thomas Hobbes in Paris and London. He was thus in Paris when the Nazis took power. However, Strauss should not be confused with the anti-Nazi refugees who soon arrived in the French capital, because at this time he was a committed anti-liberal, in the German sense of anti-liberal, which is to say, among other things, an anti-parliamentarian.
He even admired fascism after being kicked out of Europe for being Jewish:
"Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us," meaning Jews, "it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right--fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]--is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to `the inalienable rights of man' to protest against the mean nonentity,"
Essentially Strauss thought Hitler was the result of too much democracy. That it was the communal will of the people that gave rise to Hitler.
He believed that the logical fallacy of Reducto ad Hitlerium:
In following this movement towards its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler. Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler."
although certainly a logical fallacy, you wonder to what ends he was using this logic. He also believes in the "noble lie" and historical revisionism. Essentially, he was a self-hating fascist.