I've never read much about Strauss, but, apparently, he thinks philosophy is dangerous and that he discovered the real Plato.
If you click on Strauss in the article you get this very interesting piece from the International Herald Tribune:
This is from the third thru fifth pages.
http://www.iht.com/articles/96307.html"The ostensibly hidden truth is that expediency works; there is no certain God to punish wrongdoing; and virtue is unattainable by most people. Machiavelli was right. There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order.
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This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the neoconservatives' own declared policy ambitions to make the Muslim world democratic and establish a new U.S.-led international order, which are blatantly utopian.
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Strauss, who died in 1973, was no friend of hegemony, American or otherwise. He said that "no human being and no group of human beings can rule the whole of the human race justly." His concern during the Cold War was that Soviet universalism invited an alternative American claim to world rule.
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His real appeal to the neoconservatives, in my view, is that his elitism presents a principled rationalization for policy expediency, and for "necessary lies" told to those whom the truth would demoralize."