How to Talk About Israel says:
What Henry Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush have in common is that they enabled bookish men to feel tough, beautifully, enviably tough. Too much can be made of the connection between the Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss and officials in the current Pentagon, but one aspect of Strauss appears to have rubbed off on them. Born in Germany, Strauss was a liberal rationalist in his youth. He had hoped, he said, that anti-Semitism would end with Jewish assimilation in a liberal democracy. The Nazis taught him otherwise. By the 1920’s he began to regard liberals as weaklings, powerless to stop the violent mob. If one thing ties neoconservatives, Likudniks, and post-cold-war hawks together, it is the conviction that liberalism is strictly for sissies.
While I’m not quite in the liberals are sissies camp, I do feel that liberalism must be defended from its enemies. Anyone who doesn’t believe that fundamentalist totalitarianism is the enemy of Western liberalism has their head in the sand.
I just want to win the war without in the process giving up all of the cherished rights like habeas corpus that give liberalism meaning.
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