On Ultra Nationalists: When You Slow-Dance with the Devil, You Can't See His Face

The Heritage Groups Council played a major role in electing US Presidents and, through the Heritage Foundation, also helped shape policy. For their part, the UNA (Ukrainian National Association) and ABN played a large role in the Republican Heritage Council. By 1976, UNA members were assistants to Senators Bob Taft, James Buckley, and Special Assistant to President Gerald Ford.

In 1977 the UNA gained enough political potency to establish Human Rights Day in the nation's capital, an event hosted by Senator Bob Dole and attended by 51 members of Congress.

The Reagan years brought the Neo-cons into power, and they have been a fixture in US domestic and foreign policy ever since. The role played by the Neo-Cons deserves a write-up of its own. What can be said briefly here is that the Chicago School of political thought, led by Leo Strauss, turned American politics to the hard right. Needless to say, the Ultra Nationalists who were chief advisers to the Heritage Foundation's founder guided the implementation of this ideology.

Leo Strauss, the Chicago School, and Neo-Cons

Because of his political theory, friends, acquaintances and connections, many have tried to paint Leo Strauss over the decades as a Nazi. That effort has, however, been unsuccessful. The idea that a Jew can be a Nazi is simply too repugnant to common sense. Yet, the colors of Ultra Nationalism have changed in the public eye since the rightward-leaning Euro Maidan began.

Ukrainian Nazism is not politically anti-Semitic, because many of its current leaders are Jewish. At the same time, however, it is brutally anti-Semitic in substance. It is not guided as much by doctrine as it is by the direction the wind is blowing on a particular day. This is a politics Leo Strauss would have loved. It puts all of his theory into play.

"My head spins with a hundred plans, none of which is likely to be realized: England, US, Palestine, France are out of the question--in part because of the circumstance that they consider me a "Nazi' here." Leo Strauss to Gerhard Kruger, December 3, 1933.

In Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography , Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World, we find this: "Strauss was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views that Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him."

The Chicago School Neo-Cons, including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and, today, even Victoria Nuland, subscribe to Strauss' brand of ultra-nationalism. That is what the "American Exceptionalism" they all want to promote is in reality.