curtis, strauss, momus and me.

If you get the chance, watch "the power of nightmares" and any other adam curtis documentaries you can get your hands on. I watch a lot of documentaries lately, and Adam Curtis persuades and informs like no one else. His subject matter also seems the most prescient stuff going. His last two were about the birth of advertising and consumerism and the "power of nightmares", that is to say the way that modern politics became more about creating negative visions than positive ones.
Concerning the latter, he sees Leo Strauss as the wellspring of the current shit creek we find ourselves in. I can't really effectively encapsulate Strauss' thought, but he thinks that society would fall apart if it were left to the devices of secular liberal democracy. He doesn't think it's bad per se, just that society needs a broader raison d'etre to keep the people moving in the right direction. A jaded, undisciplined society falls victim to the barbarians. Thus we use "benign" fictions to keep people in line and preserve the great western civilization. So despite the fact that the educated can see that the institutions of patriotism, organized religion and market capitalism are utterly bankrupt, meaningless and wrong, the elite really ought to push a message to keep the herd in line.
I have a zillion problems with this stuff, though admittedly this is an aggressively bad reading, strauss himself did have a brighter and better take. Since what I'm really discussing here is the current political application of his ideas, I think the above is a suitable boiling down.
According to adam curtis, the young straussians cut their teeth on the cold war, wherein they got the chance to test out the "power of ideas" (a straussian buzzword) in shaping public opinion toward the evil commies. Boy did that ever work. Now they're taking it to streets through the republican party leadership. And boy is it ever working. Instead of "commies are evil", now "terrorists are evil" "as are those who disagree".
An image of a perfect christian america is presented, but damned if those in power are going to live that way. Strauss only really asks that they shape the people, not respond to moral ideals themselves. That's why we have this iokiyar society where dan rather is forced to retire over putting his trust in forged documents containing true information, whereas rove gets to clearly commit federal crimes without critique from the party.
How are we supposed to counter this shit? Well my knee jerk reaction is that the "truth" will somehow triumph in the end. More and more, that sounds like it just isn't working. The kids on the streets don't believe in objective truth anymore. Counter cultural leaders like momus are eager to call huge government, media industry collusions benign occurences in a post-modern economic world (see his every post at neomarxisme); payola is no longer offensive; art is no longer seperate from commerce; objective critique is an impossibility.Too many of the thoughtful folks have given up on truth and objectivity. Giving up on those means giving up on an informed populace able to self-determine... means giving up on liberal democracy.
I feel like the cop in wicker man begging a crowd that doesn't even understand what I'm all hung up on. "christ, oh christ think of what you're doing!"