Leo Strauss, Godfather of the Neocons

Strauss in the Public View
Strauss is a controversial figure,[12] not only for his political views, but because some of his students and their followers are themselves controversial public figures. Allan Bloom, best known for his critique of higher education The Closing of the American Mind, was very close to Strauss (their relationship is lampooned in Saul Bellow's quasi-biographical novel Ravelstein, where the minor character Davarr represents Strauss and the central character Ravelstein represents Bloom). Harry V. Jaffa, another student of Strauss, served as a speechwriter for 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and is a proponent of Declarationism constitutional theory. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense during the United States invasion of Iraq and later President of the World Bank, was briefly a student of Strauss; Wolfowitz attended two courses which Strauss taught on Plato and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. James Mann claims that Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago because Strauss taught there and believed him to be "a unique figure, an irreplaceable asset," recommended to him by teacher Allan Bloom who taught at Cornell when Wolfowitz was an undergraduate there. Wolfowitz himself has claimed to be more of a student of Albert Wohlstetter. The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which worked under Wolfowitz to gather intelligence for the Iraq War, was headed by Abram Shulsky, another of Strauss's students.[8] Harvey C. Mansfield, though never a student of Strauss, is a noted Straussian (as followers of Strauss frequently identify themselves) and prominent neoconservative whose notable students include Andrew Sullivan, Elliott Abrams, Alan Keyes, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, and Irving Kristol.
Critics of Strauss also accuse him of elitism and anti-democratic sentiment. Shadia Drury, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, argues that Strauss taught different things to different students, and inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders that is linked to imperialist militarism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury accuses Strauss of teaching that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them." Drury adds, "The Weimar Republic was his model of liberal democracy... liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews." However, Strauss was hardly alone in arguing that liberalism had produced authoritarianism. Many German émigré, most notably among them Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, made similar claims.
On the other hand, Strauss is also criticized by some on the right, especially by paleoconservatives. For example, Paul Gottfried often writes about his views on why Strauss' ideology is allegedly not really conservative or right-wing at all.[13] He writes, "The Democrats are less inclined than the Republicans to push the war policies favored by the Straussians. Although this reluctance may be due to their preoccupation with social questions at home, the Democrats are less open than the Bushites to Straussian imperial projects at the present time, if not necessarily for the future. Moreover, the establishment Right and its Republican organizational structure have become scavengers, living off yesterday’s leftist rhetoric. What Ryn calls the 'new Jacobinism' of the neoconservative- and Straussian-controlled pseudo-Right is no longer 'new.' It is the warmed-over rhetoric of Saint-Juste and Trotsky that the philosophically impoverished American Right has taken over with mindless alacrity. Republican operators and think tanks apparently believe they can carry the electorate by appealing to yesterday’s leftist clichés."[14] The late Samuel Francis agreed, charging Straussian ideology with influencing a powerful neoconservative cabal that "provides for the left—to serve as a political formula for preserving the New Deal-Great Society regime, even as the real conservatism began to rip it apart intellectually and to win political battles against it with Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan."[15]
In 2004 Adam Curtis produced a three-part documentary for the BBC on the threat from organised terrorism called the Power of Nightmares. This television documentary claimed that Strauss' teachings, among others, influenced neo-conservative and thus, United States foreign policy, especially following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Two students of Strauss, Wolfowitz and William Kristol, are cited, and Kristol discusses Strauss's influence in the film. Since they were students of Strauss, the documentary claims that their later political views and actions are a result of Strauss' philosophy and teaching. The central theme of the documentary is that the neoconservatives created myths to make the Soviet Union and terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda (Arabic: القاعدة‎) appear to be better organized and coordinated, as well as more threatening than they actually were, and that such "nightmares" enabled the neoconservatives to gain disproportionate power in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
Others, such as Steven Smith,[16] question the link between Strauss and neoconservative thought, arguing that Strauss was never personally active in politics, never endorsed imperialism, and questioned the utility of political philosophy for the practice of politics.[17] Those who do make such a link, Smith argues, misread Strauss's published writings.
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