Johnson’s book is dogged in its efforts to turn Socrates into a twenty-first-century compassionate conservative, and to this end it frequently courts breezy anachronism. On women, we are told that Socrates “liked to think of them leading responsible and fulfilled lives, but he had no objection to their confining themselves to looking after their husbands and children, if that is what they wished.” On slavery, Johnson speculates that “perhaps there is a missing dialogue” in which Socrates condemns it. And on war? Socrates “fought heroically for Athens in his day, but he thought war was usually unwise and the struggle to the death with Sparta suicidal for Greece… ” Johnson then contradicts himself, claiming that Socrates “neither supported nor condemned the Peloponnesian war.” Johnson’s knowledge of his subject wobbles here. (Socrates is light on scholarship: Johnson cites only Gregory Vlastos and Karl Popper, though he recommends a few other books, such as Nickolas Pappas’s excellent introduction to the Republic.) In the Menexenus, Socrates blames Athens’s struggle with Sparta for the decline of Greece, but he never criticizes wars against barbarians. His feelings are probably due to his pro-Sparta sympathies, rather than a sense that war as such is a bad idea. (Socrates’s habit of going barefoot and lightly clad even in winter was an emulation of Spartan custom.)
If you're reading Plato and not, on some level, unsettled, then something has gone wrong.
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But is the typical CCOA even reading Plato, or providing evidence of having done so? My sense of the genre is, "Plato" sounds to them like a name you'd see on a leather-bound tome, a pipe not far away, and it fits with some aesthetic conception of conservatism-for-elites (everyone else, of course, being channeled into vocational work). So on the one hand, it doesn't make sense that conservatives, who want education to produce job-creators, good, honest, working men, yet advocate the Great Books. On the other, it makes perfect sense if we read between the lines - they want Plato for some, the military and/or air-conditioner-repair school (or housewifedom?) for most. Meanwhile, it is kind of unclear why the CCOA wants elites squandering their formative years reading Great Books and not, say, starting businesses.
Well, for starters, anyone who talks about "Plato" is revealing themselves to be uninformed about the state of Plato scholarship, or very intentionally pretending ignorance: even as an undergrad way back in the mists of 2003, I learned that the dialogues mostly concern a character called "Socrates," who may or may not be consistent across the dialogues; Plato's intentions in writing the dialogues were left very much up in the air.
On the more general question: there's a line of conservative thought that suggests that all great moral teachers are giving variations on the same basic teaching (the most popular version of this argument is C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, but you can see it reappear in various strains of natural law thinking). If one takes that to be true, and believes that the Greatness of the Great Books comes from their having been tested by other great minds and found worthy, then it stands to reason that these books will generally confirm the same moral outlook. Since that outlook is (on this account) mildly aristocratic with some democratic undertones, is heavily concerned with negative rights and virtue, and not with tougher questions of positive rights or distributive justice, it flatters the sentiments of the CCOA audience. And since it flatters the illusion that in the good old days fine, upstanding young men used to learn Greek and Latin and the classics before becoming titans of industry, it becomes possible to believe that the Great Books teach and reinforce valuable lessons which reach their pinnacle in Anglo-American right-of-center capitalism.
So, Plato for all, not for some, but only because Plato gives you some pretty thoughts and an air of sophistication that will not otherwise challenge your view of the world, whether you become an entrepreneur or a housewife.
I think where we disagree here is, I'm not sure how relevant it is to this discussion what the content is of the most-named classic texts, any more than what the content is of a Gender Studies class, given that the typical CCOA is delving into neither. It's assumed that certain authors are acceptable, because the names sound familiar (sure, Shakespeare may have famously written sympathetically about young teens having sex, but Important White European Male Author trumps all), and that certain topics "lack rigor" or whatever because sympathetic CCOA audiences already know that if "gender" or "studies" enters into it, it's fluff, and probably involves a tenured professor explaining postmodern theories of the vibrator.
And that's my beef, at least, with the CCOA. If it really was that they'd read these Great Books, come to the conclusion that certain works are most important, figured out how to convey why these authors are most important, if I really believed any of them had the slightest clue what actually does take place in the classroom, what academic research actually consists of, then maybe I'd disagree with the critiques as someone to their left, but that's all. As it stands, it's all about preaching to the converted. The goal isn't to reform academia, but to laugh at it.
I'm not sure we actually disagree on this, except perhaps in emphases and my ability to properly explain what I'm trying to say. At the very least, I agree with the points you're making, especially re: assuming that the word 'studies' or the mention of gender can only mean pointless postmodernity (I wrote a post on Foucault some months ago in which I expressed surprise to find out that he's mostly just a garden-variety intellectual historian and not the bringer of all evil things he's made out to be by CCOAs).
I saw myself to be attempting to deepen your point by explaining how it is that CCOAs can feel like they don't need to delve into the Great Books, etc: there are academics and quasi-academics who argue that the Great Books are more or less a ratification of the common sense of 21st century American religious conservatives. There's no need to read those books because they will only confirm what CCOAs already know.
That's the angle that's of greatest interest to me, since I am at least some of the time in the category of American religious conservative (though in theological terms, I'm a liberal), and my day job involves forcing students to read a number of the Great Books. The irony that they do not, in fact, teach the common sense of CCOAs is always prominent.
I take your word for it that there's conservative theorization of which long-ago authors seem to be in line with contemporary American conservatism, and don't doubt that this would be a more interesting and productive angle of inquiry than a project that involved Phi Beta Cons posts. But I'm not sure what the relationship is between that realm and the Phi Beta Cons-type anti-academia ranting, the ranting that forms, I suspect, what the typical conservative thinks of when he ("s/he" seems somehow appropriate) speaks dismissively of Universities Today. If an assigned author is from a long time ago, has name-recognition (although that's optional), isn't female, isn't of-color, this text is something worthwhile for The Youth to be assigned in class. I mean, it's not only that the CCOAs are asking their audiences to promote Plato without necessarily reading Plato. It's that there's no sense that they themselves have read or even read about any particular Great Books. There's this massive disconnect between the content or even presumed specific content of any text, and what CCOA and CCOA audience alike are assumed to assume. This matters because the disconnect discredits whichever criticisms they come up with, more than if they're defining "Aristotle" to mean "Reagan" or something. It discredits them because it makes them seem not like they've done a shoddy or biased reading, but like they are so convinced that everything that goes on at a university is pointless that they... have not bothered to learn what goes on at a university. And then they want Democrat-voting humanities profs to take their criticisms seriously? Or do they? I have no idea.
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