crisis magazine

CRC?

neocons?

===

https://crisismagazine.com/author/swalter

RECENT ARTICLES

Crises, Tidings, and Revelations: Undemocratic Vistas at the New York Times

In Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched himself into the spotlight with a warning to the nation that the Department of State employed 205 Communists. He declined to offer those names to the public. On November 28, 1994, Brent Staples revealed on the New York Times editorial page that our … Read more

:{in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched himself into the spotlight with a warning to the nation that the Department of State employed 205 Communists. He declined to offer those names to the public.

On November 28, 1994, Brent Staples revealed on the New York Times editorial page that our nation’s democracy is gravely imperiled by the “sinister vogue” of the latepolitical philosopher Leo Strauss. Mr. Staples declined to offer the public one quoted word from, or reference to, Strauss’s vast oeuvre. He later told the Jewish Forward that he never studied with Strauss or his students: “He said the main sources for his column were attacks on Strauss in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.” Among numerous other charges, Staples alleged (a) that Strauss was an enemy of the Enlightenment’s “democratic” attachment to equality and reason, from which Strauss thought “Hitler had sprung full blown”; and (b) that Strauss “viewed the status quo as an expression of divine will.”}:

For Mr. Staples, the evil Strauss did lives after him. Entitling his attack “Undemocratic Vistas,” Staples argues that Strauss’s “undemocratic” — or perhaps one should say, “unAmerican” — views were “elitist” and thus engendered a callous disregard for the poor in Strauss, his students, and all those influenced by them. That last group, according to Staples, includes Thomas Sowell, Robert Bork, Allan Bloom, William A. Henry, “the conservative elite,” “college professors,” “political ideologues,” “conservative think tanks,” and “writers, economists, and jurists who were schooled at [the University of] Chicago.” The sinister group also includes, if I read Staples’ insinuations correctly, Charles Murray, Newt Gingrich, and anyone who voted Republican in the last election. Staples concludes that the “antidote” to the disease being spread is “fresh and frequent reading of the Declaration of Independence.”

The only difficulty with Mr. Staples’ argument is “the extraordinary medley, in every sentence, of outright ignorance, malicious calumny, and near-paranoiac fantasy,” as someone who both knew and even read Strauss puts it. Indeed, while Staples claims Jefferson’s Declaration for his own, had he so much as glanced at the cover of Strauss’s best-known work, Natural Right and History, in its standard paperback edition, he would have seen that it is entirely covered by the Declaration. Had Staples risked the book’s first paragraph, he would have discovered why the publisher chose such a design: Strauss begins the work by quoting the Declaration’s most famous passage and asks with some concern whether this nation still holds “those ‘truths to be self-evident’?”

Similarly, Staples asserts that Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind “parrots Strauss’s view that higher education ought to be the province of the golden few.” Had Staples made it to page 82 of Bloom’s book, he would have found Bloom lamenting the class distinctions that still exist “poisonously” in English universities. Staples adds that he, “black and poor,” fits “Strauss’s notion of rabble that didn’t know its place,” yet Terence Marshall, an admitted Straussian (and contributor to Crisis), recalls how Strauss encouraged his students “to study and write on black political thought over 30 years ago, well before it became an academic fad.” In fact, before the nation’s first black studies department was founded, Herbert J. Storing, a student and then colleague of Strauss at Chicago, devoted himself to the careful and respectful study of the political thought of black Americans. Marshall also remarks that Strauss often spoke to, and many of his students taught in, “the adult education program at Chicago for persons who, because of poverty, had not been able to obtain earlier the education in classical learning that their abilities allowed.”

If Staples cared to learn Strauss’s and Bloom’s views on liberal democracy, he might also have turned to the first two pages of a collection of Strauss’s essays entitled, Liberalism Ancient and Modern. In the book’s Foreword Bloom writes, “Leo Strauss is sometimes reviled as an enemy of liberal democracy by defensive and dogmatic liberals who cannot tolerate friendly criticism and who cannot be bothered to read what he wrote. Strauss, however, cautions us in this book that ‘we are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.’ . . . He would recall us to the original understanding of such founders of modern democracy as Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Jefferson that democracy with its orientation toward universal freedom is nonetheless meant to be a regime of virtue and even ‘an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.’ Strauss is therefore indeed a friend of liberal democracy when he summons true liberals to counteract [what he calls] the perverted liberalism that forgets quality, excellence, or virtue.”

Again, a mere perusal of the opening chapter of Bloom’s 1990 Giants and Dwarfs would have found Bloom insisting, “I have always been a supporter and a beneficiary of the movements toward practical equality.” The chapter closes with Bloom sadly surveying the undemocratic vista he sees in “the dominant schools in American universities,” which tell students “that rationalism has failed, that they should study non-Western cultures, and that bourgeois liberalism is the most despicable of regimes.”

As a student of several of Strauss’s students, I learned that both they and he teach the value of reason, the nobility of the Declaration, and the desirability of our liberal democracy. If one seeks fomenters of anti-democratic sentiment — persons who hanker after, in Staples’ words, “rule by a privileged elite” — one place one might consider is the New York Times itself, which published Walter Duranty’s deceitful apologies for Stalin’s rule and Herbert Matthews’ deceitful apologies for Castro’s rule. More recently, there is the editorial page’s already-infamous December 11 paean to the “counterculture” of the 1960s, whose relation to Jefferson’s Declaration may be summarized in one word, Amerika. And certainly there is a whiff of Orwell’s Thought Police in Staples’ reckless disregard for the truth. Nor, balefully, is his fanatical obscurantism unpopular: he assured the Forward that his colleagues’ reaction to his attack was “overwhelmingly favorable,” and those same colleagues did not permit any of Strauss’s distinguished students to challenge Staples’ lies. Staples also showed the Forward a letter he had received from Alfred Kazin praising his editorial and regretting that Staples had been, in Kazin’s words, “tactful about the influence of Strauss on Jewish neo-cons.”

But perhaps the best place to seek undemocratic vistas would be in the works of that great critic of the Enlightenment Martin Heidegger and his fashionable epigones, whose antipathy to reason and Western democracy is reflected in prestigious universities as well as prestigious newspapers. In this connection, we should question Staples’ assertion that Strauss called the Enlightenment the cause of the Holocaust. Challenged by the Forward as to where Strauss made this claim, Staples said it was in his “study of Spinoza.” Since Strauss wrote Spinoza’s Critique of Religion years before Hitler came to power, Staples presumably refers to the Preface he appended to the work’s 1962 English translation. In the intervening years Strauss, as a Jew, had had to leave Germany. And so, looking back, he does not fail to notice that in the 1930s the citizens of the liberal Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler. But in the Preface he notes that “the weakness of liberal democracy in Germany explains why the situation of the indigenous Jews was more precarious in Germany than in any other Western country.” Strauss was grateful to America for providing religious liberty and refuge, and in Natural Right and History he is concerned that Americans are abandoning the Declaration’s principles for “German thought.”

As Strauss notes in the Spinoza Preface, German thought continued to be hostile to liberal democracy even after the war: “in 1953, Heidegger could speak of ‘the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.'” Similarly, in the opening chapter to Giants and Dwarfs, Bloom recalls Heidegger’s “Nazism” and goes on to remind readers of the influential “Paul de Man, who introduced deconstructionism into the United States,” and who wrote, “as a young man, pro-Nazi articles.”

One could safely wager with Mr. Staples that present-day admirers of Heidegger and Paul de Man are more likely to read the New York Times editorial page than the works of Leo Strauss. There is no doubt, however, what Strauss thought of the Times. He once wrote a friend that his latest article had been written for his students: “I wanted to show them with an exemplary case what sort of rubbish is praised by idiots in The New York Times.”

Scott Walter is executive vice president of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. He also heads Campion Consulting, which provides philanthropic consulting for donors in the fields of education, civic literacy, and aid to the underprivileged; and customized writing for nonprofits and businesses. A graduate of Georgetown University, Scott lives with his wife, Erica, and their four children in Maryland.

Talking with Mr. Percy

Walker Percy was certainly a gentleman, but not necessarily the last one. He probably thought it a gentleman’s duty to try to ensure he’s not the last, and so he was magnanimous enough to leave a legacy to his fellow travelers in the cosmos: six novels, three books of non-fiction, and now, thanks to editors … Read more

The Wodehouse World: Low Comedy and the Incarnation

(with apologies to P.G. Wodehouse) “I say, Jeeves, these Wodehouse books are ripping. He’s got the stuff, what?” “Indubitably, sir.” “These dashed critics, complaining he writes the same thing over and over. Well, what I want to know is, what sort of a beef is that?” “Man is an ungrateful animal, sir.” “I mean, with … Read more

Out of the Ruins: The Poor Old Pope? Seduced Nuns? Nazis and the New York Times? Walker Percy Explains

Conversions have figured prominently in Walker Percy’s life. He trained as a physician, but contracted tuberculosis during his internship and found himself confined him to bed for three years. While convalescing, he read widely and, as his friend and admirer Flannery O’Connor put it, “he and St. Thomas became friends.” His reading converted him first … Read more

Facing the Facts: Is Phillip Berryman Losing Faith in Liberation Theology?

Partisans of liberation theology have accepted Phillip Berryman’s Liberation Theology (Pantheon, 1987) as a strong statement of their own beliefs. Yet in that book Berryman makes a crucial admission. He writes of liberation theologians: “If their social theory is fundamentally wrong, their whole enterprise is in jeopardy.” The liberation theologians did not develop this social … Read more

How Not to Debate Liberation Theology: Avoid the Real Argument

I have worked with Michael Novak on five books and countless articles, speeches, and columns. Like my predecessors, I occasionally wonder whether reviewers are reading different versions of Novak’s books than mine. Criticizing his, or anyone else’s views is usually helpful; such debate is the essence of civilization. But little is served by ignoring or … Read more

Nicaragua’s Cheerleaders

[The U.S. under Carter] tried very hard to build that new relationship [with the Sandinistas]. But the effort failed, principally, I believe, because the Sandinistas could not live with a positive image of the U.S. government. They did not try at all. And many in the United States cheered them on. (Lawrence E. Harrison, “We … Read more

===

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege

Charles J. Eusey July/August 2007

The theme of this book is the rise of public religiosity that has been orchestrated by a small group of "theoconservative" intellectuals. It is Mr. Linker's contention that Roman Catholicism has provided Republicans with a nondenominational language and morality with universal appeal. He foresees the end of separation of church and state and of secular polities.

The founder of the theocon movement is Richard John Neuhaus, for whom Linker worked when he served as editor of First Things. Neuhaus, a Lutheran convert to Roman Catholicism, is joined by two other Roman Catholics, Michael Novak and George Wiegel, as the three most important theocons.

Neuhaus claims that this nation is facing a national "crisis of meaning" (i.e., a crisis of religion); and the cause of the crisis is that the governance of our nation is influenced by decadent liberals who advocate a form of "secularized liberalism cut off from its religious roots and robbed of its power to provide meaning." The future of democracy in America depends upon public religiosity. He wishes, says Linker, "to bring politics into conformity with divine authority."

Novakmaintains that Christianity, modern democracy, and modern capitalism share "the same logic, the same moral principles, the same set of cultural values, institutions, and presuppositions."

Neuhaus has long believed that Roman Catholicism is in a unique position "to propose the American proposition anew." George Wiegel agrees by recalling the words of Archbishop John Ireland who believed that God wants Catholics in the United States "to make America Catholic." Neuhaus and Wiegel do not advocate that the American state religion should become Roman Catholicism. They want our political institutions and principles to be spiritualized—catholicized. Evangelicals and fundamentalists rely on quoting biblical texts, which has no appeal to those who do not believe in the Bible. So Wiegel argues the superiority of Catholic natural law that serves as "a philosophical foundation on which virtually all men and women of good will could participate in the ongoing argument about the American experiment and its foundational consensus."

Novak has contributed to the theocon philosophy by making the case for the compatibility of free markets and Christian ethics in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Neuhaus maintains that Pope John Paul II accepted Novak's spiritualized view of "democratic capitalism." Democratic capitalism is an outgrowth of the Catholic doctrine of "creative subjectivity of the human person." Linker says, "a Capitalist economy dominated by a generally Catholic outlook would be one in which its members spontaneously acted to maximize their own benefits as well as the common good—the only effective means of alleviating the suffering and degradation of poverty."

The theocon ideology emphasizes economics to a degree, but places far more emphasis on its opposition to legalized abortion. Neuhaus does this by referencing innate human dignity based on man's creation in the image of God. He believes that legalized abortion could lead to infanticide and even genocide. Failure to outlaw abortion is evidence of "an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake."

In 1985 Charles W. Colson initiated discussions between Neuhaus and several prominent evangelicals. The religious alliance advocated by the theocons was to become a formal reality. From the fall of 1992 to the spring of 1994 they worked on "Evangelicals and Catholics together: The Christian Mission for the Third Millennium."

This document aims at a revitalized American democracy on the recognition that "religious freedom is itself grounded in and is a product of religious faith." Separation of church and state does not mean "separation of religion from public life." Religion is the "foundation of our legal order." Roman Catholics and evangelicals had come together in the face of "a cultural crisis of historic magnitude." Doctrinal differences would be set aside to better fight a culture war.

The next step for the theocons was to become more involved in a political agenda. Neuhaus proposed a special issue of First Things on "judicial tyranny." It was titled "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics." Neuhaus introduced the readers to the topic by stating the question was "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." He went on to say, "Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality." What should be our attitude to "laws which violate the moral law?" They must, Neuhaus said, "in conscience be disobeyed."

Colson contributed to this edition of First Things by suggesting the possible need of "direct, extra political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime." Robert P. George agreed. He claimed, "The courts . . . have imposed upon the nation immoral policies that pro-life Americans cannot, in conscience, accept."

In response to the critics of the special issue, Neuhaus claimed, "The American experiment began with the declaration of self-evident truths, and it may well be ending with the exclusion of those truths from the public square under the iron rule of 'the separation of church and state.'"

The theocons achieved their political objective in the election of a president who had courted Neuhaus beginning in May of 1998. The theocons had access to the White House. One of their own, Michael Gerson, was director of the Speechwriting Office. A full-time liaison to conservative Christians, Timothy Goeglein was formulating policies to advance the theoconservative agenda. The establishment of a religious America was slowed by the attack of September 11, 2001. The war on culture would become less important than a military war. But the theocons joined in the military war. They declared it to be a just war between Christian civilization and its enemies. Neuhaus characterized the most likely opponents of the war as "our morally debilitated professoriate," the "inveterate complexifiers, offering detailed analyses of the seven sides of four-sided questions while declaring their achingly superior sensitivities that make them too sensitive for decent company."

Wiegel supported the war in Iraq in a lecture at the Catholic University School of Law entitled "Moral Clarity in a Time of War." The lecture, later republished in First Things, provided moral and theological justification for the president's Iraq policy.

Wiegel maintained that America has a duty to enforce international justice, to further the good of all decent human beings. He went on to say that statesmen are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, a charism of political discernment, in deciding whether to go to war. This gift, he said, is not shared by religious authorities or agencies.

Neuhaus sees a fundamental problem with American religion—its troubled relationship with authority. He says a Christian must "think with the church.. . . in the larger picture of history, the witness of the Catholic Church is immeasurably more important than anything I might think or say. In short, I obey."

Linker looks at the early history of America and says that religious passions do not belong in public life. The precondition of religious freedom is "privatization of piety." Americans may worship as they wish without state interference, but they are given this freedom on the condition that they give up their desire for "political rule in the name of their faith."

Reviewed by Attorney Charles J. Eusey, Leominster, Massachusetts.

The book under review presents a good explanation of just how the culture war is being carried by the theocons. While Liberty shares their concerns, we see their chosen methods as destructive to the true pluralism of the United States, dismissive of the Constitution, and clearly a growing threat to religious liberty for all. —Editor.

Article Author: Charles J. Eusey

ggl 6 23 opus

pus Dei

:{

}:

Crisis Magazine

https://www.crisismagazine.com › tags › opus-dei

:{

}:

Perhaps no other organization within the Catholic Church has generated more controversy over the years than Opus Dei. We'll look at the foundations and ...

The Controversial Opus Dei

:{

}:

Crisis Magazine

https://www.crisismagazine.com › podcast › the-contr...

:{

}:

Perhaps no other organization within the Catholic Church has generated more controversy over the years than Opus Dei. We'll look at the foundations and ...

Did Opus Dei Just Receive a Slap on the Wrist from ...

:{

}:

Crisis Magazine

https://www.crisismagazine.com › Editor’s Desk

:{

}:

Jul 23, 2022 — Eric Sammons is the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine.

An Intimate Portrait of the Founder of Opus Dei

:{

}:

Crisis Magazine

https://www.crisismagazine.com › Opinion

:{

}:

Dec 11, 2015 — The book illustrates vividly what it was like to live close to the man that members of Opus Dei affectionately call “Our Father.” Orthodox.