If the Mouse Were King . . .

A "brief encounter" with an ex-pat American living comfortably in Sweden has led the Mouse to wonder if the ideals envisioned by the founders of the American nation were not pipe dreams. Perhaps the notion was merely cockeyed that people could wisely govern themselves. We are, after all, a people "endowed by our creator" with certain "inalienable" proclivities, among them the desire to believe whatever strikes our fancy, the desire to deny any truth we find uncomfortable, the desire to love and to hate with equanimity, the desire to -- shall we say it -- to destroy any disagreeable parts of the "alien" world. We are, in the aggregate, a fairly stupid bunch.

But then, so were they, those whose tyrannies the immigrants to this fair land sought to escape. And so are they, the foreigners who threaten us with their own versions of stupidity. We know enough, and knew enough, to resist oppression and to defend ourselves against the threats and actions of madmen. But it is, as the Buddha knew, one thing to resist force and quite another to accomodate it and react to it with the strength of calmness. It is, as Socrates knew, one thing to avoid the wrong and quite another to seek the right. We know evil when we see it but are denied knowledge of the just.

That much The Founders knew. They did not prescribe rules for human behavior. They created a governmental framework which they believed would be the best of any they may have conceived by which people could be governed. They trusted that, left to their own designs, the people would elect representatives fully capable of constructing laws optimally beneficial to themselves and their posterity.

But even in that beneficent vision, The Founders did not imagine that the people themselves were capable of direct self government. They believed that, as a minimum, the people were able to elect the best among themselves to represent them in governing, and that, even if the people occasionally elected poor governers, on balance a government of and by and for the people would be better than any other. The people would have no one to blame but themselves if those they empowered to act on their behalf governed unwisely. The Founders believed that people could at least be trusted to know the difference between the noble and the base, even if they did not know the means by which they knew that difference.

The Founders may have been vaguely aware of the psychological motivations of human behavior, but they could not possibly have understood the extent to which those drives could be manipulated by clever men. They could not have understood that some men would sell their votes for unconscious reasons. They could not have appreciated that some men, cleverer by half than the masses, would find ways to play with the minds of men as puppeteers play with their marionettes. The Founders assumed men could see the difference between their prejudices and their reasoned ideas. To that extent, The Founders themselves were ignorant.

Those cleverer men did and do, however, understand the malleability of human minds. They understand, as Plato did, that men could be more easily led by rhetorical persuasions than by reason, that even lies play well if they feel good and the truth does not. Esoteric knowledge of the electorate was at first used by political parties to sway elections, but in time, as the techniques of subtle persuasion became more sophisticated, the candidates themselves became symbols more valued for the feelings they created by their mere appearance than for their ability to actually govern. The need thus arose, in the minds of the cleverer men, for meta-puppeteers to handle the strings of the electable puppeteers.

The father of this innovative view was a university professor by the name of Leo Strauss. Himself a gentle man, Strauss brought his students around to his views by the same sorts of techniques he was teaching them to employ in their future roles as governors of the governers. He spoke in great detail of Machiavelli's devious techniques, sounding on the one hand like a critic and on another as a disciple. That every message delivered could have both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning was "caught onto" by those who were to become Straussians. The others were to be left behind, no more or less than mere voters, the grist to be ground in the mills of cleverer minds.

There's much on the internet that can be read about Leo Strauss and his "graduates." I will briefly mention one, and then leave it alone.

Francis Fukuyama, in 1992, wrote a best selling book of its kind called, The End of History and the Last Man. Hailed as the final statement of Hegelian history, the book immediately "caught on" with a certain class of political warrior. It could be read as a justification for the export of the American dream, an idea that fit neatly into the needs of a struggling American manufactory for a politically expedient way to peddle its goods to the electorate. A mere eight years later, the idea that the world, and not just America, was ready for a "Bill of Rights" found its niche in the American mind. Unfortunately -- and Fukuyama was one of the first to see this -- the gentle persuaions of the Straussian dream were soon to be replaced by the forceful hardware of the military-industrial juggernaut, the idea being that democracy (or "freedom") is such a good idea any means needed for its export are justifiable.

And here we are.

Fukuyama quickly denounced the uses to which his theme had been placed. His apologies have achieved nowhere near the notoriety of his foundational book. He is now a footnote.