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, "America First" and admiration for the likes of Neville Chamberlain. I would imagine that the "paleos' thought Winston Churchill a dangerous warmonger and imagined that taking on Tojo and Hitler were dangerous misadventures. My only objection to US action in WW II was that we should have let Hitler and Stalin exhaust their militaries fighting each other to the death and that we should then have stepped in and finished off the "winner" instead of allying with Stalin.
Martin Luther King was no conservative but he sometimes said things that, in retrospect, serve conservatism such as wanting his children to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. Would the country be somehow better off if they were judged by the color of their skin? Does that make me a "neocon" for raising the question?
What has happened is that most Americans who used to be mere Republicans have been joined by those Democrats and aware others who do not want a communist dominated Demonrat Party dominating our country and necessarily joined with Republicans. If 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? I do. It was the end of the Democrat Party and the birth of the Demonrat Party which we know today. I thought Jean Kirkpatrick did a very nice job serving Ronald Reagan at the UN.
Actual conservatism is a far more muscular political creed than 1930s isolationism whose spokesfolks usually can be found, like ostriches, with their heads in the sand and their rumps in the air waiting to be kicked.
BMG: "I will fight and I know you will too until our cause has one day inspired the world and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesterdays." Unfortunately Barry did not mean it and always opposed Ronaldus Maximus but those words were penned by Karl Hess for BMG before Hess himself joined with the New Left. No matter, the words are words to live by. The "cause" was not paleowhatever.
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.