Posted on 04/30/2015 6:46:34 AM PDT by B4Ranch
The term "Fifth Column" came into popular use in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and thereafter as socialism and fascism were sweeping into conflict to take over the nations of the West. It means a group of guerrillas, activists, intellectuals, etc. who work to undermine a nation (or some larger organization) from within. Its activities can be out in the open, or they can be secret.
Today in America, the neoconservative political movement represents a "Fifth Column" for the forces of collectivism. Its intellectuals and activists promote themselves as conservatives who oppose the liberals, but their political philosophy has nothing to do with what is known as American conservatism, which has always stood for a limited constitutional government and free enterprise. These values are anathema to today's "neoconservatives" in the nation's political, literary and scholarly circles.
The late Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest, and Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, were the founders of the neoconservative movement in the late 1960s. In their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, they were followers of the communist Leon Trotsky. Having bought into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, they saw socialism as an ideal that needed to be spread to the West. While they and their followers subsequently modified the Marxist roots of their ideology in favor of a more gradualist methodology, they always remained adamant supporters of collectivism for America. Are they outright socialists? No, but their policy proposals have always been in favor of massive government welfarism domestically and an aggressive militaristic foreign policy that seeks what is termed "benevolent global hegemony," in which the U.S. military is to be used preemptively to spread democracy throughout the world.
The paradigm that neoconservatives have given their lives to is built upon a centralized mega-state running American society from Washington and also, as much as possible, the rest of the world.
In Irving Kristol's eyes, the laissez-faire vision of the Founders was a "doctrinaire fantasy." Its ideals "make it inadequate... for a political community," he wrote in 1977. In other words, to adhere today to what Jefferson and Madison advocated is anachronistic foolishness. According to Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives, such a view must be phased out of our collective conscience.1
Kristol died in 2009, but his worldview dominates all of today's younger neoconservatives. He believed that capitalism and individual rights are dangerous institutions. They must be constantly modified by a powerful state that redistributes wealth whenever necessary to mold market enterprises into an appropriately egalitarian social structure. In the neoconservative mind, freedom, while desirable, is not a primary political value. Machiavelli had the better idea; expediency is the best way to rule. People need to be manipulatively led by statist elites – via open dialogue and democracy if possible, but by deception, coercion and expediency when necessary.2
The neoconservatives, thus, represent tyranny's Fifth Column in America. They are deceiving the people into believing that they are genuine conservatives, but like the socialists who were their mentors, they call themselves what they know the people want to hear. These ersatz conservatives have now grown to dominate Washington's think tanks, Wall Street's brokerages and banks, and many major publications and universities. They are highly influential writers, scholars, pundits, publishers, institute heads, bankers and corporate moguls.
The Serpents
What follows are eight of the more influential neoconservatives in America, past and present. These are not friends of freedom, but enemies. They need to be recognized for who they are, traitors to what America was meant to be. They need to be exposed and attacked as we would attack serpents that are slithering into our back yards to threaten our safety and our families.
Irving Kristol
Considered to be the "godfather of neoconservatism." A powerful liberal writer during the 1950s and 1960s, he had grown disenchanted with the Democratic Party by 1970 and switched to the Republican Party, coining the name "neoconservative" for the band of intellectuals he brought with him. Immensely persuasive in the shaping of the movement.
Norman Podhoretz
One of the major founders with Irving Kristol of neoconservatism in the late 1960s, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, pouring out a myriad of articles and books on the need to build America into an all-pervasive "collectivist state," but one that respects traditional values instead of the amoral values of liberalism.
Richard Perle
Called the "Prince of Darkness" because of his extreme hawkish military stands. A member of the Reagan Pentagon, now serves in Washington think tanks such as the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. Vehemently promoted the invasion of Iraq, and to this day favors extensive intervention in the Middle East to bring about regime changes.
Paul Wolfowitz
The most hawkish advocate in the Bush administration and the architect of the Bush Doctrine. A visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is a former World Bank chief and Pentagon official who was closely involved in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He has been back and forth between academia and government for the entirety of his career.
William Kristol
Son of Irving Kristol and editor of the prestigious Weekly Standard, he was the cofounder of PNAC (Project for the New American Century) with Robert Kagan. He is a widely recognized pundit and influential Washington political operative. Director at the Foreign Policy Initiative and member of numerous think tanks in Washington as well as a Fox News regular.
Robert Kagan
Cofounder with Bill Kristol of the Project for the New American Century, Kagan is a policy pundit and historian based at the Brookings Institution. He serves also as a contributing editor at The New Republic and, thus, personifies the collectivist liberalism that infuses neoconservatism. They are statist ideological brothers.
Frank Gaffney
The director of the hawkish neoconservative Center for Security Policy, Gaffney has been a longtime advocate of interventionist U.S. foreign policies, ever-increasing military budgets and aggressive attacks upon the Islamic world. A regular on Fox News.
Charles Krauthammer
A writer for The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer is considered to be the most influential neoconservative political columnist in America. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner, Fox News talking head and was a weekly panelist on the PBS show "Inside Washington" from 1990 to 2013.
There are, of course, many other prominent neoconservatives than just these eight. Hundreds of others like Bill Bennett, Elliott Abrams, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, John Bolton, Max Boot, Karl Rove, David Frum and Condoleezza Rice are assiduously working to advance mega-statism throughout America and the world.
Socialist Roots of Neoconservatism
By 1910, socialism had become the new wave of the future in European universities. The Fabians were growing to power in Britain and numerous socialist intellectuals were emigrating to America to begin subversion of the citadel of capitalism.
One problem, however, confronted the invading intellectuals coming to our shores. The American people were vehemently resistant to socialism. Fabians and Cultural Marxists soon realized that the socialist revolution would never take hold in America as "socialism." They realized they must redefine their revolution and disguise it. Thus, between 1910 and 1920 they began to refer to themselves as "progressives," which solved their alienation problem. Americans were willing to listen to "progressive" ideas, but not to "socialist" ideas.
This is classic Marxist strategy: Become in name and image whatever will more readily convince potential converts. Retain your fundamental collectivist principles, but change the methods of implementation to fit the situation.
In the years between 1920 and 1940 the original neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Sidney Hook were coming of age and developing their worldview. At first openly socialist, they soon adopted the label of "progressive," and eventually began to use the term "liberal" because of it's widespread acceptance in American intellectual circles. Thus socialists became progressives who then became liberals who promoted progressive policies. The intellectual coup d'état was complete. Tyrannical socialism could now be promoted as something liberal, benign and progressive.
All intellectuals of the left were now solidified around promoting socialist ideology under the name of "liberalism." Such a strategy became spectacularly successful up through the late 1960s, moving America insidiously toward the collectivist ideal of an egalitarian society via massive government coercion. The goal was to bring about "equality of results" in life by leveling down productive people as much as possible to the lowest common denominator. The Marxist vision was making great progress by eroding the individualism that had created and built America.
Unfortunately, the mid-1960s came unglued socially because America's youth went bonkers by adopting a New Left radicalism that shook the politics of liberalism to its core. Counterculture rebellion raged among millions of young people who came home from college to kill their donkey parents ideologically. Stability and sanity collapsed into a heap of drugs, nihilism, and contempt for conventional liberalism. It was at this time that Kristol, Podhoretz and numerous of their powerhouse liberal colleagues switched to the Republican Party in face of George McGovern's 1972 takeover of the Democratic Party. They cast off the name "liberal" and adopted the name "neoconservative" so as to break totally from what they perceived as the lunatic fringe of New Left liberalism. Thus the neoconservative revolution was born via yet another name change. Socialists who became progressives who became liberals had now become "neoconservatives."
Of course, the fundamental principles of collectivism and mega-statism were not discarded, only the name of liberalism. Ideologically the neoconservatives were still very much collectivists and statists. But the new name gave them a new life in which they felt they could thrive more successfully. Mega-statism with traditional values had always been their political vision; now it could be openly promoted as neoconservatism. It caught on and attracted droves of big league scholars and pundits to join with it, which grew into today's neoconservative hold over Wall Street, the nation's corporate moguls, the Republican Party and many of Washington's prestigious think tanks.
The serpents had propagated. The Fifth Column had done its job. Thousands in the media became quite comfortable subscribing to "neo" conservatism and discarded the philosophy of "libertarian" conservatism, which had built the country and was the true conservatism, the true opposition to liberalism. The American people (conservative by nature) fell for the hoax and loyally supported the neoconservative movement, assuming it was what would keep the country free when actually it was working to do just the opposite. It was smuggling America into statism.
Thus both liberals and neoconservatives and their respective political parties – the Democrats and Republicans – are relentlessly moving our country into mega-statism today with full support from our professors, our media and our people. "Corrupt the money and the language," said Marx. Freedom and capitalism will then fall. Today's neoconservatives are not conservative; they are rabid collectivists. But you won't hear that from the American people. They have been bamboozled.
The only solution to this ideological deception and corruption is to revive the vision of "libertarian conservatism" subscribed to by the Founders. This means a free market, not a mega-state. It means the protection of equal rights, not the conveyance of special privileges. It means a mind-our-own-business foreign policy, not the pursuit of world hegemony. If the Founders were alive today they would be heaping the same scorn on the "neoconservatives" that they heaped on the Tories and King George. Tyranny is still tyranny whether it calls itself socialism, fascism, liberalism or neoconservatism.
You have packed so many worthy observations into few words. Thank you!
Glad to see you up and FReeping again, BlackElk.
Yeah, there's apparently another neo-Nazi move to subvert FR again. Earlier someone actually posted an article from a racialist, anti-Jewish web site--and written by an avowed neo-pagan.
Looks like there's going to be a spate of these things for a while. Even when they admit that the Left is anti-Israel they never stop. The status of Jews as the objectively chosen people of an objectively existing One True G-d sets these "nationalists" wetting their panties like nothing else. They can't get their "planet of peoples" where every ethnic group has its own "gxd," "holy land," and national religious truth. Poor little babies.
“The founders were neoconservatives.”
They were no such thing. They never dreamed of interventions to “spread democracy”. They only entertained the idea of fighting upon direct threats to US interests.
I noticed in your lengthy response you had nothing to say concerning the neocons making welfare statism mainstream within the Republican Party. Is this because you concede that this is true (which it is) and in your mind a necessary evil for the sake of having such dubious "intellectual" allies in the GOP, or is it because you yourself support the welfare state?
I also found it odd that you speak of Hoover's "failed policies" (with the implication that Roosevelt's were a great success), because it's wrong on two fronts. First it's wrong because it claims that Hoover and Roosevelt were antipodes in economic policy, the caricatured view of Hoover as a laissez-faire libertarian vs. Roosevelt's Keynesian policies. In fact, Hoover was the one responsible for initiating those aspects of the New Deal that WERE fruitful: investing federal dollars into infrastructre (roads, dams, and bridges), investments that contributed to wealth. Unfortunately, when he lost the election, Roosevelt perverted this fruitful and Constitutional use of public funds to create the foundations of a welfare state and make-work public programs.
f the GOP had done a better job of convincing Americans of its ideas, it might not have been necessary to welcome the heirs of Hubert Humphrey. Do you remember Hubert running as an old school Democrat for his party's POTUS nomination and being defeated and humiliated by McGovern's "rules" and communist cadres?
Not to change the subject, but one of the ironies of political history was that Richard Nixon (the prototypic welfare state Republican) was probably by today's standards well to the left of Humphrey on many issues. Nixon often stated that if he had his way handgun ownership would be illegal in the US, Humphrey was consistently pro 2d-amendment.
When I was a teenager in a labor Democrat family and when it was still possible to be a Democrat and a patriot, I became infatuated with Barry Goldwater's candidacy without knowing of his support for abortion and homosexuality. I saw Ronald Reagan's election eve 1964 speech for Goldwater and I became a Republican forever.
Just as neocons dishonestly claim realist Reagan as one of their own, religious Fundamentalists ignore the fact that legislating social issues was not Reagan's highest priority. As governor, Reagan signed a bill that made abortion much more permissive in California, for instance, and opposing abortion was never a centerpiece of his presidency either. On social issues, he and Goldwater probably weren't so far apart.
Would the country be somehow better off if they were judged by the color of their skin?
By skin color, no. By the content of their culture (which, like it or not, is as much a part of an individual's identity as personal character), yes. The race riots erupting in our cities today aren't a consequence of rotten individual characters, but of a depraved and rotten culture. Similarly, some groups of immigrants are extremely upwardly mobile and readily assimilable, going from poverty to education and prosperity within a generation. Others wallow in poverty and ignorance for generations with no improvement in sight. The differences are collective intelligence and cultural identity, not individual character.
At no time was it imaginable that conservatism could be confused with pacifist weenieism which was the dead hand of a dead "conservatism" of the 1930s: Lindbergh, Colonel McCormick
I don't know your personal history, but it seems to me there is no worse form of "weenieism" than the sort we get from people like the Kristols - they talk tough, they play commando from their armchairs, but neither they nor any members of their immediate family would ever volunteer for the front lines of their own pet causes. It seems to me that Charles Lindbergh, who opposed the war on principle but volunteered for service once it began, is much less a "weenie" than those who agitate for wars for others to fight in.
Neoconservatives are the biggest welfare queens in this country
Just look at what has happened to their net worth since the start of the Iraq War.
yet none will serve
11-12 million illegals hardly requires exaggeration, it speaks for itself. As does the fact that California went from the jewel of the western hemisphere to a Third World cesspool thanks to the immigration policies favored by liberals and by neoconservatives.
“Jefferson did commission the marines to attack the Muslim pirate bases in North Africa. That was not a “neo con conspiracy””
No it wasn’t. It was a use of military force when American interests were attacked. Neocons love using force where America is under no threat whatsoever, or where the outcome will be equally bad no matter who wins. Like Libya, Syria, Ukraine, the Balkans, Sub Saharan Africa,,,etc.
And being left alone works wonderfully when the nation is organized on trade with the world, defending against those who threated our interests. Not this is stated as “interests” this means our direct American interests, not the idea that we should arrange the governments everywhere on earth.
This embroils us in endless wars, and earns us the hate of people everywhere where we are always the interfering outsider.
You pretend we have always been neocon, but nothing could be further from the truth. The current wars have been active longer than our participation in the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam,,,,combined. Does that alone not tell you that something is different.
Lick the Bush/Obama/Clinton agenda all you want, but America was never intended to exist in a perpetual state of war.
And our founders were well aware that such conditions quickly destroyed the freedom they worked hard to create.
They didn’t even want a standing army, deferring to a militia and a strong Navy. That combo is bitterly hard for an invader to attack, but it is also a very poor combination for projecting power. That wasn’t an accident.
They envisioned robust defense of trade, and of fighting invaders. They never envisioned us based in 80+ nations and fighting 3 and 4 wars simultaneously,,,for 15 years with no end in sight.
Founders as neocon. That’s utterly mistaken.
“National defense and, frequently, interventionism are legitimate constitutional functions of the central government.”
The founders disagree. From the founding of the nation, we had the Barbary Pirates war, short and sharp, and in response to an external attack on shipping.
About 50 years later, we had the Mexican War in response to Mexican aggressive moves.
50 years later we had the Spanish American war. After all was said and done, the problem was Spain moving in violation of the well known Monroe doctrine.
So every 50 years,, we had a short and sharp foreign adventure. That is not what we have today.
When arguing for interventionist foreign policy, neocons love the old bait and switch. You point out how many of our recent (or not so recent) interventions have nothing to do with our national security or any rational strategic interest, and they change subject to argue in favor of intervention based on a defensive war, even though that defensive war was not the one you were arguing against to begin with.
Case in point: once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, nobody was arguing against retaliation. Yet the interventionists attacked the American First Committee (who were trying to pursue a foreign policy that would have PREVENTED Pearl Harbor) as if they had opposed the retaliation.
Similarly, critics of "Nation Building" in Afghanistan, who question the wisdom of using US troops to help one tribe defend its hilltop against an enemy tribe on another hilltop, are attacked with the Red Herring of opposing the initial bombing of Al Quaeda strongholds in Afghanstan following 9/11, even though this isn't the point being argued.
And when all else fails, they play the Hitler card. A historian who questions the merit of our involvement in World War I (which liberal crusaders for "Democracy" like Wilson supported, and conservatives like Coolidge and Hoover rightly opposed) somehow gets changed to a discussion about Hitler and World War II. Similarly, you might point out that there is little sense going to war against tin pot dictators like Assad, Qaddafi, or Milosevic when they people they're fighting are as bad or in some cases far worse, and they'll counter by saying "You're just Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler." If Assad were Hitler, you'd think he would have made a lot more progress in taking over much of the Middle East by now, as opposed to fighting to hold onto (or is it retake) Allepo from the Al Nusra front.
Yep, they can spin every war on earth into a dire immediate threat to America. Like Kosovo.
With Kosovo, they first tried to spin it as a mortal existential threat to the US. When most Americans weren't buying the notion of a tinpot dictator in a country smaller than New York state sending troops in to take Cleveland or St. Louis, they tried a different angle of the Hitler card, i.e. the "genocide" card. They took an ugly civil war with thousands of civilians murdered by both sides, and spun it into a tall tale of unilateral genocide perpetrated by thugs on solely one side against innocent unarmed civilians, solely on the other.
And a hallmark of Neocon wars like Kosovo is that we must care about it more than people who are much more involved. I didn’t see the armies of Europe mobilizing to deal with the existential threat of Kosovo.
Except of course, endless screaming that America should “do something”. And involving a sufficient minimal military commitment to ensure their officers could get joint staff and command duties. That’s very important to Europeans.
Amid plenty of good discussion, your remark is the best summary test of who is a neocon and what they stand for.
Looks like a good article, to read later.
Even if one construes the Barbary pirates as a mercantile threat, this remains a premise of supposed neoconservative thought.
This week Iran shot across the bow of a US flagged vessel. China would be happy to curtail global trade in their exclusive favor.
Russia seeks to militarily improve its trade positions.
North Korea ships missiles that are quite dangerous and even helps nations build nuclear weapons systems.
It is difficult to imagine how the present world would sit passively by while the post neo conservative elite governed America.
There was a tremendous amount of US military aggression from the inception of the nation. I think this thread has demonstrated that. The war of 1812 while an attack on us betrays the painful reality of how the world never leaves any nation alone.
the United States is doomed to transform the world into its own image. Many faux conservatives bemoan this but there is no magic anonymity to be had with such a vast array of truly despicable global powers.
Prior to 911, the Chinese militarily took down a US military aircraft into their own territory. That was hugely aggressive.
The world simply will not conform to the false dogma of isolationism/pacifism/ inaction that the critics of neo conservatism extol. It is only a matter of time until major terror attacks on the US convince the nation to again take up the mantle of militarism. I wish it were not necessary but it is empirically obvious.
“We went to war over the Republic of Texas applying to the United States for statehood and because Mexico would not sell us California. How is that agressive Mexican moves?”
Texas won independence 10 years earlier. Although defeated, Mexico never relinquished their former claim. Texas claimed to the Rio Grande as they applied for statehood.
Mexico claimed up to the Nueces.
The war established that Mexico did not own that strip and nailed down the limits of Mexican claims.
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