KRISTOL IN HIS OWN WORDS

(from his collection of essays "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea")

ON LEO STRAUSS ("An Autobiographical Memoir", pp. 6 & 8):

The two thinkers who had the greatest subsequent impact on thinking were Lionel Trilling in the 1940s and Leo Strauss in the 1950s.

[snip]

What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that "the truth will make me free." He was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and the political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease turmoil, and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion—with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative consequences.

ON THE COMMON MAN:
(From "An Autobiographical Memoir", p 13)

My wartime expe­rience in Germany, however, did have the effect of dispelling any rem­nants of antiauthority sentiments (always weak, I now think) that were cluttering up my mind. My fellow soldiers were too easily inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war. Only army vigilance kept them in check.

(From "My Cold War", p. 483)
In any case, my tepid loyalty to "democratic socialism" did not survive my experiences as an infantryman in the army. I entered military service with a prefabricated set of attitudes: The army was an authoritarian, hierarchical, mean-spirited, mindless machine—as later described by Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead—while the common soldiers, for all their human imperfections, represented the potential for a better Future. Well, it turned out that, as a provincial from New York, I knew nothing about the American common man and even less about the army as an institution. Again and again, and to my surprise, I found reasons to think better of the army and less well of my fellow enlisted men. It is true that, since I was inducted in Chicago, my regiment was heavily pop­ulated by thugs or near-thugs from places like Cicero (Al Capone's old base), so my impressions may have been extreme. Nevertheless, my army experience permitted me to make an important political discovery: The idea of building socialism with the common man who actually existed—is distinct from his idealized version—was sheer fantasy, and therefore he prospects for "democratic socialism" were nil.