I just read a very interesting article about Straussians (it’s a fairly old article, but new to me). I recommend the whole thing; I learned a lot from it, I think I now understand why neoconservatives have become interested in neuroscience (it’s a way of attacking Enlightenment ideas of the blank slate), for example. It ends with a provocative question:
How has a thinker as radical as Strauss–a thinker so blatantly hostile to democracy and modernity, so deeply suspicious of political liberty and equality, so profoundly skeptical of moral and religious belief–managed to become the intellectual idol of contemporary American conservatism, with its clamorous moralism, its pious parochialism, its shameless populism, and its instinctual suspicion of doubt? Only when we have devised a satisfactory answer to that troubling question will we be capable of rendering a responsible judgment of Leo Strauss’s ideas and their enigmatic legacy to the times in which we live.
A similar question is how has Ayn Rand become an idol to many (less intellectual) conservatives?
The answer is the same: both Strauss and Rand put forward the ideas of deserving elites — for Strauss, it’s philosophers, for Rand, it’s Galtian geniuses. Maybe people have always wanted to believe that they were part of some special awesome elite — and that everyone else is a lazy rube — but I don’t remember this idea getting so much intellectual and pseudo-intellectual play 20 years ago. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.