Another FReeper, I can’t recall who, stated that “neocons are warmongering socialists”. A little simplistic, but not far from the truth.
“Neoconservative” is a bit of a misnomer, really. They’re not conservatives at all. They are nearly diametrically opposed to Goldwater limited-government conservatism. Another good euphemism for ‘neocon’ would be ‘big-government republican’.
The original neocons were disaffected democrats who embraced democrat domestic policy, but did not care for the 60’s counter-culture and anti-war protests.
Trademark neocon positions are open-borders internationalism, free trade absolutism, military interventionism a la ‘nation building’, and Keynesian economic policies.
Alternatively, some believe the original neocons were members of the early-20th century Fabian Socialist movement and their real aim was to infiltrate the ranks of the Republican party and move it leftward from within to remove the only viable internal opposition to the socialization of the US economy and destruction of US economic hegemony.
That is certainly more rationally based position than to believe that "neocons" (a non-existent critter as created by the Nation, the New Republic, Demonrat agitprop meisters and paleoPaulie) "are warmongering socialists."
If being a "big government" Republican or "neocon" means putting an end by federal means to the federal SCOTUS hallucinated right to slaughter 50+ million babies and counting, if it means protecting the institution of marriage (federally if necessary) from the depredations of perverts who want to claim "equal rights" at the expense of normal American taxpayers, if it means maintaining a military far more powerful than any imaginable enemy and using it whenever desirable to kill the enemies of this nation and civilization and break their things (NOT nation building) and making the defeated enemy pay every nickel incurred out of what will be a Stone Age economy, then.... I am certainly what you wrongly describe as a "neocon." We call it being actual conservatives. We do not hallucinate as do the paleowhatevers that Robert Taft was a peacecreep after Pearl Harbor or that Ronald Reagan would tolerate Paulistinian imbecility and call it conservative. The paleos are bad plants without roots.
Goldwater (with a big assist from JFK and LBJ) made me a Republican but also note that his absolute rejection of morality in domestic policy, his cheerleading for abortion and homosexual perversion, his disloyalty to Ronaldus Maximus, his first wife's 35 year service until her death as a corporate director of Planned Barrenhood (the "legalized" Murder, Inc. of our era). His failure to return Reagan's support from 1964 and his support of Ford over Reagan complete with Barry Goldwater cutting an ad asking California primary voters whether they wanted Reagan near the nuclear weapons trigger, settled for me Goldwater's absolute lack of character and dishonesty. There is plenty of reason for the fact that antimorality of Goldwaterism is as dead as Goldwater or as the proverbial doornail in the GOP.
I will further address the meaning of the term neocon in a separate post upon mnehring's request.
The original Neocons" (i.e. the ONLY neocons) are mostly dead now. The survivors are in their eighties and nineties and probably won't be with us for much longer. This is not a good thing for America. The dead include, most importantly Ronald Wilson Reagan, the greatest POTUS we are ever likely to see; Daniel Patrick Moynihan (admittedly liberal but very useful in foreign policy as UN Ambassador and militant defender of the West). He was a native of Hell's Kitchen in New York like Jimmy Cagney and had a similarly pugnacious attitude. Cagney played less of a direct role in politics but left his estate to Young Americans for Freedom as did the New Dealer son of Thomas Edison, New Jersey Governor Charles Edison. These guys moved to the Republican side and Moynihan to the American side because of the war of ideas between Marxism/Leninism and Western Civilization and because they had functioning brain cells unlike Goldwater who became a Republican for business reasons when he lost a coin toss to his brother Bob. For totally non-military effort, read Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding about internal warfare on the left to resist communists who ultimately took control of NYC anti-poverty programs and used that control to supersede the conservatively inclined Tammany Hall in the days when several old Irish NYC Congressmen/Tammany Sachems and bosses like Delaney of Queens had 90% conservative voting records in Congress.
Also among the dead (I believe) are Walt Whitman Rostow who said of the Vietnamese population caught in the war: Grab them by the short hairs and their hearts and minds will follow. Also, his brother Eugene Rostow, and Sidney Hook (died an atheist and a socialist but a militant American and defender of academic freedom for conservatives); Irving Kristol (who wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism after rejecting socialism whatever the paleowhatevers may hallucinate); Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel; and roughly nine of the founding ten editors of National Review WFB excepted: James Burnham; Will Herberg; John Chamberlain; Max Eastman Who one hundred years ago was a nudist which did not make NR a nudist magazine); Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall and other people far more distinguished as thinkers than the lightweight likes of Goldwater or paleoPaulie; Jeanne Kirkpatrick was Reagan's UN Ambassador and a brilliant convert (with some weakness toward "legalized" abortion). She brilliantly tagged the Demonrats as "San Francisco Democrats" which easily translated to anti-American in foreign policy because "they always blame America first." She probably never met paleoPaulie. Reagan scrupulously kept most paleos out of his administration. They figured that out in about 1986 at a Mont Pelerin conference and invented themselves with hilarious claims of being the heirs of conservatism.
The living (I believe) include Judge Robert Bork; Gertrude Himmelfarb; Norman Podhoretz (brilliant editor of Commentary who moved it sharply rightward); Midge Decter who wrote much including a great book about red diaper babies _________Parents, Radical Children; Donald Kagan, former Dean of Yale College and a brilliant historian.
The original "NeoCons" had been socialists and even Trotskyites during the Depression as college students. They knew far better than Goldwater that the Democrat Party was seized by outright communists under McGovern in 1972. Most of them then moved to the GOP in intellectual defense of the West. If they hadn't, the likes of Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, James Baker, Howard Baker and other establishmentarian opportunists would have, as Lenin predicted, been happy to sell the rope by which we and they would be hanged by the soviets. Ford actually disgraced America and the GOP when he would not meet with Solzhenitsyn because it might offend his soviet buddies and yakathonpartners.
If it is a bad idea for distinguished Democrat intellectuals to convert to conservatism over foreign policy, would you also tell Ronaldus Maximus to go back to the Demonrats??? Many make mistakes in youth. I was once a Libertarian state party officer and then I grew up.
I personally do not obsess over keeping Mexicans out of the US does but most actual conservatives are certainly not describable as "Open Borders" types, nor as "internationalists" but as interventionists (wherever and whenever we please and not at all if we so please without a by-your-leave to the UN or NATO or any other nation).
One is compelled to observe that, although you personally may be utterly innocent of it, there certainly is a subtheme of antiSemitism among the paleos who have a notable hatred of our support for our ally Israel and who often (again not you) use "neoCon" as a sly synonym for Jew (I am Catholic) and who want to cuddle and smooch our Islamofascist enemies.
Antiwar protests and "counterculture protests," not only in the Sixties but ever after, are the right of each citizen here but also inevitably disgraceful behavior, however legal. Participants ought to be shunned until they repent individually. Rump-ranging does not equate to marriage. Nor does infant slaughter constitute an exercise in "reproductive rights." Next up: "marital" threesomes, foursomes and infinitysomes, "marriage" to household pets and space aliens or to trees and other vegetables. Equality is only right don'tcha know?
If "free trade absolutism" is not a hallmark of libertoonianism, what is??? Again, you are confusing various movements and their attributes. George Meany and the AFL-CIO of his era was much more opposed to "free trade" and to free immigration for that matter. "Military interventionism" and "nation building" are clean different things like filet mignon and strawberry shortcake. We can and ought to have military intervention when we please. We ought to bill the beneficiaries every nickel expended not waste resources on international socialist nation building. Keynes WAS a socialist and actual conservatives are not. Read Road to Serfdom by von Hayek, anything by von Mises, and most of Milton Friedman. Also use less powerful drugs to alter your consciousness and contact with reality and history less.
For a history of Fabian Socialism that is more accurate than your own, read Phil Crane's Democrat's Dilemma. The origin was Boston's Peck's Restaurant Group (mostly Harvard leftists) which met every Sunday afternoon and included FDR, Jack London (its president until he died young), Walter Lippman, many senators, writers and judges. They were not good news for America and they were certainly not "neocons."
Allegra: I think allegra can provide additional material that is beyond my technological capabilities in my advancing age.
That is certainly more rationally based position than to believe that "neocons" (a non-existent critter as created by the Nation, the New Republic, Demonrat agitprop meisters and paleoPaulie) "are warmongering socialists."
If being a "big government" Republican or "neocon" means putting an end by federal means to the federal SCOTUS hallucinated right to slaughter 50+ million babies and counting, if it means protecting the institution of marriage (federally if necessary) from the depredations of perverts who want to claim "equal rights" at the expense of normal American taxpayers, if it means maintaining a military far more powerful than any imaginable enemy and using it whenever desirable to kill the enemies of this nation and civilization and break their things (NOT nation building) and making the defeated enemy pay every nickel incurred out of what will be a Stone Age economy, then.... I am certainly what you wrongly describe as a "neocon." We call it being actual conservatives. We do not hallucinate as do the paleowhatevers that Robert Taft was a peacecreep after Pearl Harbor or that Ronald Reagan would tolerate Paulistinian imbecility and call it conservative. The paleos are bad plants without roots.
Goldwater (with a big assist from JFK and LBJ) made me a Republican but also note that his absolute rejection of morality in domestic policy, his cheerleading for abortion and homosexual perversion, his disloyalty to Ronaldus Maximus, his first wife's 35 year service until her death as a corporate director of Planned Barrenhood (the "legalized" Murder, Inc. of our era). His failure to return Reagan's support from 1964 and his support of Ford over Reagan complete with Barry Goldwater cutting an ad asking California primary voters whether they wanted Reagan near the nuclear weapons trigger, settled for me Goldwater's absolute lack of character and dishonesty. There is plenty of reason for the fact that antimorality of Goldwaterism is as dead as Goldwater or as the proverbial doornail in the GOP.
I will further address the meaning of the term neocon in a separate post upon mnehring's request.
The original Neocons" (i.e. the ONLY neocons) are mostly dead now. The survivors are in their eighties and nineties and probably won't be with us for much longer. This is not a good thing for America. The dead include, most importantly Ronald Wilson Reagan, the greatest POTUS we are ever likely to see; Daniel Patrick Moynihan (admittedly liberal but very useful in foreign policy as UN Ambassador and militant defender of the West). He was a native of Hell's Kitchen in New York like Jimmy Cagney and had a similarly pugnacious attitude. Cagney played less of a direct role in politics but left his estate to Young Americans for Freedom as did the New Dealer son of Thomas Edison, New Jersey Governor Charles Edison. These guys moved to the Republican side and Moynihan to the American side because of the war of ideas between Marxism/Leninism and Western Civilization and because they had functioning brain cells unlike Goldwater who became a Republican for business reasons when he lost a coin toss to his brother Bob. For totally non-military effort, read Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding about internal warfare on the left to resist communists who ultimately took control of NYC anti-poverty programs and used that control to supersede the conservatively inclined Tammany Hall in the days when several old Irish NYC Congressmen/Tammany Sachems and bosses like Delaney of Queens had 90% conservative voting records in Congress.
Also among the dead (I believe) are Walt Whitman Rostow who said of the Vietnamese population caught in the war: Grab them by the short hairs and their hearts and minds will follow. Also, his brother Eugene Rostow, and Sidney Hook (died an atheist and a socialist but a militant American and defender of academic freedom for conservatives); Irving Kristol (who wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism after rejecting socialism whatever the paleowhatevers may hallucinate); Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel; and roughly nine of the founding ten editors of National Review WFB excepted: James Burnham; Will Herberg; John Chamberlain; Max Eastman Who one hundred years ago was a nudist which did not make NR a nudist magazine); Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall and other people far more distinguished as thinkers than the lightweight likes of Goldwater or paleoPaulie; Jeanne Kirkpatrick was Reagan's UN Ambassador and a brilliant convert (with some weakness toward "legalized" abortion). She brilliantly tagged the Demonrats as "San Francisco Democrats" which easily translated to anti-American in foreign policy because "they always blame America first." She probably never met paleoPaulie. Reagan scrupulously kept most paleos out of his administration. They figured that out in about 1986 at a Mont Pelerin conference and invented themselves with hilarious claims of being the heirs of conservatism.
The living (I believe) include Judge Robert Bork; Gertrude Himmelfarb; Norman Podhoretz (brilliant editor of Commentary who moved it sharply rightward); Midge Decter who wrote much including a great book about red diaper babies _________Parents, Radical Children; Donald Kagan, former Dean of Yale College and a brilliant historian.
The original "NeoCons" had been socialists and even Trotskyites during the Depression as college students. They knew far better than Goldwater that the Democrat Party was seized by outright communists under McGovern in 1972. Most of them then moved to the GOP in intellectual defense of the West. If they hadn't, the likes of Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, James Baker, Howard Baker and other establishmentarian opportunists would have, as Lenin predicted, been happy to sell the rope by which we and they would be hanged by the soviets. Ford actually disgraced America and the GOP when he would not meet with Solzhenitsyn because it might offend his soviet buddies and yakathonpartners.
If it is a bad idea for distinguished Democrat intellectuals to convert to conservatism over foreign policy, would you also tell Ronaldus Maximus to go back to the Demonrats??? Many make mistakes in youth. I was once a Libertarian state party officer and then I grew up.
I personally do not obsess over keeping Mexicans out of the US does but most actual conservatives are certainly not describable as "Open Borders" types, nor as "internationalists" but as interventionists (wherever and whenever we please and not at all if we so please without a by-your-leave to the UN or NATO or any other nation).
One is compelled to observe that, although you personally may be utterly innocent of it, there certainly is a subtheme of antiSemitism among the paleos who have a notable hatred of our support for our ally Israel and who often (again not you) use "neoCon" as a sly synonym for Jew (I am Catholic) and who want to cuddle and smooch our Islamofascist enemies.
Antiwar protests and "counterculture protests," not only in the Sixties but ever after, are the right of each citizen here but also inevitably disgraceful behavior, however legal. Participants ought to be shunned until they repent individually. Rump-ranging does not equate to marriage. Nor does infant slaughter constitute an exercise in "reproductive rights." Next up: "marital" threesomes, foursomes and infinitysomes, "marriage" to household pets and space aliens or to trees and other vegetables. Equality is only right don'tcha know?
If "free trade absolutism" is not a hallmark of libertoonianism, what is??? Again, you are confusing various movements and their attributes. George Meany and the AFL-CIO of his era was much more opposed to "free trade" and to free immigration for that matter. "Military interventionism" and "nation building" are clean different things like filet mignon and strawberry shortcake. We can and ought to have military intervention when we please. We ought to bill the beneficiaries every nickel expended not waste resources on international socialist nation building. Keynes WAS a socialist and actual conservatives are not. Read Road to Serfdom by von Hayek, anything by von Mises, and most of Milton Friedman. Also use less powerful drugs to alter your consciousness and contact with reality and history less.
For a history of Fabian Socialism that is more accurate than your own, read Phil Crane's Democrat's Dilemma. The origin was Boston's Peck's Restaurant Group (mostly Harvard leftists) which met every Sunday afternoon and included FDR, Jack London (its president until he died young), Walter Lippman, many senators, writers and judges. They were not good news for America and they were certainly not "neocons."
Allegra: I think allegra can provide additional material that is beyond my technological capabilities in my advancing age.
mnehring: did I cover it here? Thanks for your kind words.