My book The Secretocracy takes place in 2006 and 2007. It relates the downfall
of a civil servant — intelligence budgeteer-during the Bush
Administration. To write it realistically, I had to research the dozens of Bush
era scandals, most of them involving Vice-President Cheney, to get factual
material to include in the story. For example, my protagonist's son has an
affair with a woman on Wolfowitz's personal staff at the World Bank.
My research made it clear that the belief system shared by the key figures in
the Bush Administration was one I had encountered repeatedly through all my
years in government's unapologetic in its certainty that the elite alone have
the intelligence, understanding, and will power to shape policy. Then I came
across a review of a lecture about the philosopher Leo Strauss, a follower of
Nietzsche and Machiavelli. A web search on Strauss nailed it down for me. I had
found the philosophical underpinnings of neoconservatism that characterized the
Bush regime archetype. Here are some quotes I found by and about Strauss:
“[T]here is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over
the inferior.”
“The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite
few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss
thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute
truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury,
author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right.'
TOM'S TALES