No Machiavellian Left Behind
Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown: Options for a Post-Carbon World contains the following in a sidebar entitled “Who are the Neocons?”
According to Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right, (Griffin, 1999), Strauss advocated an essentially Machiavellian approach to governance. He believed that:
- A leader must perpetually deceive those being ruled.
- Those who lead are accountable to no overarching system of morals, only to the right of the superior to rule the inferior.
- Religion is the force that binds society together, and is therefore the tool by which the ruler can manipulate the masses (any religion will do).
- Secularism in society is to be supressed, because it leads to critical thinking and dissent.
- A political system can be stable only if it is united against an external threat, and that if no real threat exists, one should be manufactured.
…
Among Strauss’s students was Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading hawks in the US Defense Department, who urged the invasion of Iraq; second-generation students include Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Irving Kristol, William Bennet, John Ashcroft, and Michael Ledeen.
Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (1999), is a policy advisor (via Karl Rove) to the Bush administration.
posted @ 12:40 PM EDT