What if Leo Strauss was right?

I'm not that familiar with Strauss, but if this is what Strauss argued then... umm... what's the controversy? I'm a bit surprised that anyone would deny the existence of esotericism for various reasons including defensive. I thought that was the whole point of Renaissance alchemists coding political and philosophical speculation as secret formulae for transforming metals. Or go wade through some late-19th-century occult revivalist texts and tell me those are literal.

I also find the assertion that this practice ended rather dubious. Seems to me that quite a bit of our politics is coded-- for example the use of "family values" to refer to the desire to establish a Christian theocracy or increase white fertility by outlawing contraception, or "social justice" as code for wealth redistribution. One of the more obvious ones is how we use "defense" in foreign policy to refer to offense. We routinely take more controversial ideas and code them in bland-sounding rhetoric that "no true Scotsman" would find any problem with. After all who's against families or justice or defending ourselves?

If anything the idea that everyone communicates literally and that everything can be taken at face value is crackpotty. Does anyone really think that?