Here's a new tack: instead of whispering about secret cabals, insider code, and conspiracy theories about Straussians, Kenneth McIntyre simply reviews the man's work (by way of a new treatment by Paul Gottfried), and comes away underwhelmed:

Strauss was at best a mediocre scholar whose thought expressed a confused bipolarity between a very German and ahistorical Grecophilia on the one hand and a scattered, dogmatic, and unsophisticated apology for an American version of liberal universalism on the other. Amongst prominent European philosophers, Strauss was taken seriously only by Hans-Georg Gadamer, until Gadamer concluded that Strauss was a crank, and by Alexandre Kojève, whose work reads today as if it were a parody of trendy French Marxism. In Britain, neither Strauss nor the Straussians have ever been taken seriously.

Gottfried is a real scholar and this book is not, by all accounts, a hatchet job. I might add that it was strange arriving at Harvard to discover that the only non-left-liberals in the faculty were Straussians. The concept of a conservatism that was not dogmatic, that did not rest on eternal truths to be found in Plato and Aristotle but on the prudential management of contingent liberal societies … well, I realized I had left it all behind in Britain. I just had my Oakeshott in the Widener library for succor.

Nonetheless, I'd argue that Strauss's often idiosyncratic takes on the great philosophers are often stimulating, and full of insight. Straussians were much more fun to study with because they believed they were dealing with live issues, not the dry residue of dead historicism. Yes, there's also a lot of nonsense (numerology and the like).

But the real trouble, I'd argue, is with Strauss's 1930s-driven lack of faith in modernity, his insistence that unimpeachable truths (not insights, eternal truths) about human nature could be gleaned by close reading of ancient texts by a few in the elite, and his followers' need to disguise their disdain for democracy and religion (making them insufferable cynics). It was hard to find a Straussian scholar who wasn't obsessed with domestic politics and who wasn't a neoconservative, itching for a new war for freedom somewhere.

America, alas, didn't have a Burke or an Oakeshott to craft its conservative philosophy. It ended up with the work of a German Jewish exile, whose political didacticism was as pronounced as his philosophical inscrutability. The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture. Or as McIntyre tersely puts it:

[T]he primary effect that both neoconservatives and Straussians have had on the American conservative movement is to suck all the air out of it and ensure that there is no one to the right of them, while their primary effect on American politics generally has been to reinforce the ideologically charged notion that America is some sort of propositional nation constituted like a vast pseudo-religion by a set of tenets needing constant promulgation. It is a story of America as armed doctrine, and Gottfried is assuredly right in arguing that there is nothing conservative about it.

So why did the "cult of Straussianism" succeed?

"It took hold here for the same reasons that cults generally succeed in the U.S.: ignorance, inexperience, and a desire to have a simple answer to complex problems."

The CIA chief who destroyed the evidence of his own torture sessions is still peddling untruths in defense of the indefensible. From a New Yorker interview with Ali Soufan:

There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the E.I.T.s claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August, 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claims.

The reality is that both of those pieces of intelligence were gained by my partner and me, with C.I.A. colleagues, in early April, 2002—months before the August, 2002, start of the E.I.T. program. But in the memos they were able to promote false facts, even altering dates, to make their claims work. In the so-called C.I.A. Effectiveness Memo, for example, it states that Mr. Padilla was arrested in May, 2003. In reality, he was arrested in May, 2002. But saying 2003 fits with the waterboarding narrative. When the Department of Justice asked Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the author of the 2005 O.L.C. memo to reinstate E.I.T.s, why he didn’t check the facts, he replied, “It’s not my role, really, to do a factual investigation of that.”

The claim about waterboarding leading to unmasking of K.S.M. as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks is similarly false. We got that information in April, 2002, before the contractors hired by the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center even arrived at the site. One by one, the successes claimed by E.I.T. proponents have been shown to be false.

Once you have committed crimes of this gravity, there is a massive psychological need to justify them, and to buttress your legal defense against war crimes. If you have to lie to justify being a war criminal, you have to lie thoroughly. And you have to destroy or amend any evidence to the contrary. That's what Rodriguez has been doing, by destroying the tapes and changing the factual record. It's called obstruction of justice. It's also a crime.

But we live in a republic where the CIA is not considered governed by the rule of law – an alarming situation which has been legitimized by president Obama. In that sense, the CIA is a state unto itself. It is another country.

(Photo: Anti-Iraq war protesters act out water boarding torture on March 19, 2008 in front of the White House in Washington, DC, during a demonstration.  By Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.)

Good headline, huh? But I’m not talking about Eliot or David, but Robert and Paul. They both have had a major impact on the discussion of homosexuality. Spitzer is an extraordinarily accomplished psychiatrist with an ornery streak. He published a study lending some legitimacy to reparative “cure” therapy for homosexuals, depending on their own self-descriptions. He’s now apologizing for the study’s sloppiness. Here it is:

Basic Research Question. From the beginning it was: “can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual?” Realizing that the study design made it impossible to answer this question, I suggested that the study could be viewed as answering the question, “how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation?” – a not very interesting question.

The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.

I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.

Meanwhile, one of the most pernicious nutball propagandists in the anti-gay underworld, Paul Cameron, has now told us that he started out life as gay:

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Cameron acknowledges having been raped as a child and “overcoming” sexual feelings about men as he approached his adolescent years. “I reacted to my environment,” he said. “As you’re probably aware, I was seduced, or raped, as a child … I was raped homosexually. Had that continued, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up.”

The longer I am in this debate, the more something emerges. Most people don’t really care much about gays. The subject doesn’t come up; and most adjusted straight men do not feel passionately on the subject one way or the other. And so you notice patterns. You find that most of the really impassioned anti-gay activists are just as motivated by personal passion – whether as an early victim of sex abuse (Paul Cameron), or as the father of a gay son (Charles Socarides), or as a single mother abandoned by her boyfriend (Maggie Gallagher), or someone fighting to restrain their own gay feelings (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) – as pro-gay activists are. This is a perfectly legitimate motivation for all sorts of political movements, but on the gay question, one should always be alert to the personal psychological undercurrents. (That goes for us gays as well as out opponents, and I am grateful for the odd psychological diagnoses I receive via email.)

Is it any surprise, for example, that Cameron believes that large numbers of gays are sex abusers, or that we all die young, and other canards he has spread over the years? Is it not relevant that he says he was raped as a child by a man? Any major surprise that one of the very few psychiatrists to advocate reparative therapy, Charles Socarides, blamed it on fathers, while having a gay son, Richard, who went on to become the Clinton administration’s point person on gay issues? You can go all the way up to the current Pope’s absurd obsession with the subject.

What we’re trying to do is change consciousness so that this kind of psychological panic and reaction is less potent today than it was, because that will fuck up fewer people, straight, gay and just frightened. And fewer fucked up people helps for a less fucked up debate.

Well: we’re getting there, aren’t we?

I was struck by the juxtaposition of two stories on the NYT front page today. The lead story is the shift in America's racial make-up toward a minority-majority country:

Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.

The second is a Republican Super-PAC aiming to target "Barack Hussein Obama" as a radical, anti-American racist:

G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama

This is the great unspoken drama of American politics right now – and has been for a while. In a world of economic distress, where a globalized economy gradually eclipses any single country's ability to control its own economic destiny, and when multiracial immigration tears at the cultural identity of nation states, it is utterly predictable that more atavistic strains of nationalism will emerge. Across Europe, the hard and far right is gaining, as the center buckles. In America, the fervor behind shutting down Mexican immigration is occurring just as that immigration has slowed to a trickle or begun to reverse itself.

And the Tea Party, utterly indifferent to massive spending in good times by a Republican, had a conniption at a black Democrat's modest measures to limit the worst downturn since the 1930s. Conniption isn't really he right word: this was a cultural and political panic in the face of a president who was advocating what were only recently Republican policies: tax cuts, Romneycare on a national level, cap-and-trade, a W-style immigration reform, and a relentless war on Jihadism. They reached back to a time, when there were only three kinds of Americans – native, white and slaves. They even wore powdered wigs.

To ignore this cultural turmoil is to miss the forest for the trees in this election. No one represents the new and future America more clearly than Obama: a mixed-race, pro-immigrant, pro-gay pragmatist. And Romney's great strength in this election is that he looks and speaks and acts like a generic American president from the 1950s.

His Mormon faith adds heft to his American brand (Mormonism is more purely American than any other branch of Christianity and until recently, was rooted in white, racial superiority.) His style is comforting, even as his policies (so far as we can glean them at all) are more radical than any Republican in decades. (He is, for example, far to Reagan's right on entitlements, taxes and spending, as well as on immigration.) His slogan is: "Believe in America." Not too subtle, is it?

Expect the subtext to become text in this election. Look at the currents that push more powerfully than the surface's waves and ripples. Are we afraid of this future? Or eager for it? I'd say it's about 50-50 right now, but the passion this time lies with the resistance and the fear. Which is why I have come to think that, unless the future America turns out this year in the vast numbers they represented in 2008, Romney is the favorite to win this election.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama signs his receipt for David Mazza and Casey Patten, Co-Owners of Taylor Gourmet, while visiting Taylor Gourmet, a sandwich restaurant May 16, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

In some ways, Romney is the reductio ad absurdum of what has been wrong with conservatism in America (but not Britain) this past decade:

In Romney’s telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obama’s position — that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending — he rejects it out of hand.

The AP notes that Chait's analysis is reality-based, and Romney's narrative is essentially a lie. But it's the "out of hand" dismissal of increasing revenues that is so telling. How many households take no account of their income when deciding what to spend? How feasible is it politically – as Jim Manzi notes here – that we will seriously lower the debt entirely on one party's terms, rather than by some bipartisan deal? Romney's position is, it seems to me a declaration that partisanship trumps debt-cutting in his mind. Given his own rhetoric about the danger of the debt, that's quite something. And it sure isn't conservative. It's radical to be playing ideological brinksmanship at this point.

And I think this is actually Romney's biggest liability in this race. On the key question of how to lower the long-term debt, Romney takes the view that only spending on entitlements matters. Everything else can and should actually add to the debt. More Pentagon spending and more tax cuts for everyone, including the 1 percent (even below the Bush era rates), are fine. That kind of debt is somehow not debt for Romney because he assumes that if you slash taxes, revenues will increase. This was an interesting theory in 1981. It is a failed experiment today. (Why we need to drastically increase defense spending in a period of necessary austerity is beyond me.)

More to the point, I just cannot see how that argument wins against the logic that this sacrifice needs to be shared, that we all need to do our part, that, at this stage in the debt-binge begun in earnest under Reagan, we should double down on supply side economics in the face of massive evidence that it doesn't fucking work. You need some kind of intravenous injection of Jude Wanniski to get this argument off the ground and in the air.

Let me be clear: I have long favored serious retrenchment of entitlement spending. It is the most important thing we can do to curtail future debt. But I do not only oppose the perverse unfairness of balancing the budget entirely on the backs of the needy; I don't think Romney's positions will help reduce the debt. Call me crazy, but I think a permanent and sustained reduction in revenues will increase the debt. Call me crazier, but I tend to think a balance between spending cuts and revenue increases is obviously a fairer, more effective, and more feasible path forward.

I'd be fine with 3-1 on the spending cuts-revenue increase question. I'd prefer the revenue increases were achieved through tax reform, rather than increasing tax rates. But Romney is stuck with the position that he would even turn down a 10-1 ratio, and that the cuts should be entirely on the backs of the poor, while increasing defense spending, and lowering still further the taxes paid by his own class.

How on earth do you win a general election when you are so far out on the fringe?

Scott Shackford takes issue with my cover-essay's thesis:

[Andrew Sullivan] concludes that Obama "learned" to be black the same way that gays "learn" to be gay, thus explaining the attention-grabbing headline. But even the idea of "learning to be gay" is getting old-fashioned, and it’s a little odd for Sullivan to be invoking it given his blog's periodic chafing at the gay establishment. In his need to make Obama "one of us," he has nearly gone collectivist. The gay community, to the extent one exists, has fractured and diversified significantly since the days of Harvey Milk, and we’re all the better for it.

Yes, mercifully, learning "how to be gay" is increasingly old-fashioned, and many of us worked hard to expand the range of experiences and opinions and lifestyles than can be included within a gay community, including being connected to our straight families and friends, serving in the military or voting Republican. But Obama is almost exactly my own age, and in my own generation, and I felt and feel a resonance with his description of his own grappling with identity in his youth in the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot speak for all gay people; but I can speak to my own experience and suggest common themes. And if my own experience were completely an outlier, marriage equality would have remained a quixotic intellectual game for a few gay conservatives.

But there is, of course, an aspect to this that is timeless, and that is the fact the vast majority of gay kids grow up in straight families.

And they understand marriage long before they understand sex. And that breach between their identity and their parental models of authority is deeply wounding. The possibility of civil marriage – of being equal with your own parents and siblings – targets this wound, and does more than anything else to salve it. This experience is not limited to conservative Catholic kids, although they should not be dismissed either. It has been close to universal. It is becoming less so, with incalculable social consequences, because of the change in consciousness marriage equality has brought.

God knows I am not a collectivist. I'm a loner who has been at odds with vast tracts of my own gay community for decades. But I cannot indulge the fiction that gay people don't need one another still, that our communities and subcultures don't nourish us. I hope that issues such as marriage and the military, which signal to closeted conservative gays that they too can have dignity and pride if they come out, make such monolithic communities and subcultures less necessary. That's happened already, and yes, we are all the better for it. But reducing us entirely to individuals or to collectives misses the dynamic between the two. We exist in both gay and straight culture, the way Obama exists in white and black culture. You can dismiss this tension – or you can try to understand it better.

I will leave it to you, dear readers, to decide if what I said above was "creepy", as Glenn Greenwald has it. It seems to me I was completely candid about the emotions that flooded my frontal cortex in the wake of Obama's ABC News interview. I did not say they undermined my core point that technically the president doesn't matter on this matter. It is possible both to assess the limited practical impact of an interview and express emotion at the same time.

Still, Glenn and I have different temperaments. He's perfectly entitled to label me a pathetic, sappy human being for being moved by the great cause of my life finally finding a home in the Oval Office. But it's deeply unfair to accuse me, especially on the issue of gay rights, of being a sycophant to this president. On this very blog, I often lacerated Obama and the administration when I thought they were dragging their feet – on the HIV ban, on the DOJ's original defense of DOMA, and especially on gays in the military, when I went on CNN to accuse the president of "betrayal". I wasn't a terribly reliable hagiographer then, was I? And you can read my cover-essay and see if it is pure hagiography, as opposed to a genuine judgment of a political and moral evolution.

As to my reference to Obama as a father figure on the Chris Matthews Show, after constantly saying that we shouldn't be looking for a father figure, well: consider me busted.

The power of a president's words did surprise me. The president is the head of state. When he speaks, history is being made. When a president uses that authority to express solidarity with gay citizens and their families, and to assert his belief in their core equality, for the first time ever, I'm not going to apologize for being moved, just as I was moved by the sight of an African-American being sworn into the presidency in the first place. And forgive me, but if someone had told me two decades ago that by 2012, a black president would be endorsing gay marriage, I would have asked where he got that stuff he was smoking.

Glenn is a fantastic blogger and a friend. I'm sure my occasional sentiment irritates him as much as his detached purism sometimes baffles me. But I am not a toady to power; in this village, I am more of a feral creature. I have excoriated presidents and hailed them at times. I just believe this president matters; and, for me, he now matters more. If that is a position a blogger should not take for fear of being seen as a suck-up, so be it. It's from my heart.

Update: Glenn emails to say that his point was that I should apologize to those who insisted that it would matter a lot if the president said the words. I don't recall a specific individual I criticized on those grounds, but, yes, those who believed his words mattered were right and I was wrong.

E.J. Graff is patient: 

Here's the truth: If we had national marriage laws, I would not be married right now. The U.S. has only recently been able to break through and try out same-sex marriage, which is leading people to realize, albeit slowly, that it's no threat to anyone. But that's only been possible because our federalist marriage system allows each state to make its own decision. And because we have a federalist system, LGBT advocacy groups are able to challenge the one national marriage law that the U.S. has passed: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). … And what all the DOMA lawsuits are saying to the federal courts is this: let the states decide. 

Exactly. There are currently two core positions on marriage equality. The first says this is a matter for the states, as it was for inter-racial marriage for centuries. The second says that this has to be decided federally for the entire country as a whole. I have always taken the first position – because I take seriously the argument that you do not change such a fundamental institution without some experience of what its effects might be. Federalism is able to test things out: "laboratory of the states" blah blah blah. And that's why federalism is, or should be, a conservative position (in the Manzi sense).

Instead the GOP first pushed for the Defense Of Marriage Act, the first time marriage was federalized as an issue in American history; and its current nominee wants to amend the federal constitution to prevent Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, et al from deciding their own marriage laws. So much for states' rights. If they conflict with divine mandates, buh-bye states' rights.

My view is that we can and should be patient, because I believe the experience of marriage equality is one of the reasons public opinion has shifted. We can now see this as a reality, rather than as an abstraction. And it has led to very little social change, except for more marriages, and more family integration. You think my taking turns with my husband to walk the dogs is a subversive and destabilizing act? Please.

What's left right now is the federal government's simple legal recognition of all civil marriages in the states where marriage equality exists. The feds recognized inter-racial marriage in non-Southern states long before the bans on miscegenation were ruled unconstitutional. If DOMA falls, we can get back to the debate – and allow Burke's "great law of change" take its course.

(Image by Mike Rosulek)

Gallup reveals the new normal. The cross-over point comes with Obama's election. One critical reason for the long-term trend:

One fact the Catholic hierarchy needs to understand: Catholics are the most pro-gay of all Christian denominations. 66 percent believe gay relationships are moral (compared with 41 percent of Protestants); and 51 percent favor marriage equality. The cardinals are, once again, directly opposed to the moral sense of a big majority of American Catholics. You can also overstate racial difference: the Gallup poll finds no difference between white and non-white support for marriage equality: 49 and 50 percent respectively.

The CBS poll shows something else: that there is a residual core of around 30 percent, even among the younger generation, who oppose all legal recognition of gay couples (which is the GOP position). Equally, a resilient 62 percent are in favor of either civil unions or civil marriages. The generational split at this point is between full marriage equality and civil unions. Among the under 45s, marriage crushes civil unions; among the over 45s, civil unions are a place where more people feel comfortable. Which means to say that the GOP is stranded with their base on a smaller and smaller island of total opposition to rights for gay couples. That base has intensity – sometimes of a furious kind. But the intensity is beginning to have a hint of desperation about it.

My cover-essay on Obama's historic embrace of full gay equality is now online. It isn't just about one interview:

[It's easy to] be skeptical of Obama’s motives, of how long it took, of whether this is pure and late opportunism. But when you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work. He did this the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game.

And Obama's own life-story resonates with the same conflicts of identity that many gay people grow up with:

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times.

This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation.