Yet another religious cult raided

[kandrathe]

... Your opener about the Lie to the Mob, which easily dovetails into the Lie of the Revolution that was perpetuated for about two centuries, on the masses, after the French Revolution.
Let's try this response again: use an applicable analogy.

Goodbye Thomas Jefferson, hello Leo Strauss.

Not quite.

Goodbye Thomas Jefferson, hello Woodrow Wilson.

Compare apples to apples.

Occhi

I'd agree. We gave up the principles of TJ with the advent of the Great Society. The quaint notion that we would be a nation of free people who would have the opportunity to succeed or fail based on our application of brain power or horse power was set aside sometime during the World Wars, and Great Depression time period. The Civil War, was a turning point when the Federal government took the opportunity to severely curtail States rights in the name of opposing slavery. Then, consequently, with the rise in power of the Federal system, so too have the citizens of the US been systematically over the years deprived of more and more liberty. This trend continues, and will continue until enough people reclaim their rights and limit those of the government. It is no accident that 90% of politicians are lawyers, and that Title 26 of the United States Code (the US tax code) is now at 16,845 pages. Every additional law on the books is another shackle on freedom. I'm not advocating the Anarchy of zero laws, but against the Anarchy of too many laws. We've become a nation of criminals, and not due to moral decline.

I do think Leo Strauss is a modern genius of political philosophy and worthy of study, but I'm also not his fan boy. I'd say the same of Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Kant, Popper, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Hayek, Nozick and some others.