Posted on 02/11/2008 12:13:41 PM PST by forkinsocket
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.
1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.
This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals.
The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The fact that the label is so slippery helps him out. But his own record is also pretty slippery. At one point something of a neocon himself, at another point perhaps a liberal hawk, now that those positions are less fashionable he backs away and mocks idea that he may once have held himself.
Interesting snippet on his book here
I always considered WFB to be the founder of the Neo-Con movement. I also thought I was one of them.
True. Societies tend to slog their way to self-destruction.
When the USA goes to war, I want neocons in the Pentagon. Unfortunately with the Iraq war, nobody reminded the neocons about the history of the people in that region. They are a warring people who need an iron fist type of government to keep them from killing each other.
Interesting history lesson, anybody in Freepland able to prove or disprove? A counter or expansion in agreement would be quite edifying, I think.
joe fonebone??? are you Ringo’s Brother???
They aren’t Neocons, they’re just cons.
Being part of a new conservative movement does not necessarily make one a neo-con (new conservative). WFB is much more of a paleo-con: someone who remains grounded in history and historical perspective; sets modest, realistic goals; and does not embrace the fantasy so many share with their leftist brethren: if we just try hard enough, we really can create heaven on earth.
I doubt I’m a neocon because for 56 years I’ve believed in small government, strong defense, lower taxes, RKBA, and secure borders. I favored Ike in ‘52 when I was a little kid watching the convention on a black and white set with a round picture tube.
And just the other day, I was at my gym when one of the trainers half-jokingly referred to me as a Neo Con. I said that since I had never been a liberal, I couldn't exactly be a Neo Con.
Took a political quiz online once, they said I was a PaleoCon -- whatever that is -- so can anyone explain the differences between the two?
When I first heard the term, it was describing the advocates of a big government, militarist socialism. When I suggested that wasn’t very conservative, I was called an anti-semite.
These policies and the associated shouting down of detracters remind me of another group from the dustbin of history, those who invented Politcal Correctness.
In the 1950s liberals assumed that conservatism had died with Herbert Hoover, so anybody who defined himself or herself as a conservative was assumed to be a "neoconservative." For some, that meant Buckley, for others it meant people like Russell Kirk, who were bigger on community and tradition than free market capitalism.
In the 1970s, when a new group of liberal New Yorkers became disillusioned with Johnson, Lindsay, and McGovern, the socialist Michael Harrington revived the term to apply to them. And that's the usage which stuck, even though the second-generation "neocons" didn't go through that process of being on the left and moving right.
BTW, while we're on the history, Heilbrunn's a bit off the deep end in denying that the neocons were "liberals" before they went right. A lot of people were leftists or socialists in the 1930s. If they voted for Adlai Stevenson or Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s, it's no stretch to call them "liberals."
One can hate the "neocons," but the idea that they were at one point more socialist than most of their opponents on the left is as much a "mythology" as anything they said about themself. It's also debatable whether they really had a greater "penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat" then their bitterest opponents, right or left.
Depends which version of neocon you use. The actual version, coined by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, is basically a pro-war global love cop liberal (Trotskyite in extreme cases). They were far left but became Republicans (note I didn’t say conservatives) during Vietnam because of support for the war. In some ways, they are modern day Rockefeller Republicans. Big government, globalism before patriotism, ect. Of course, the left now calls anyone who supports the war a neocon, which is totally ironic considering the architects of the war are their own. Also, in just about any Tinfoil Times “news” site a neocon is basically a warmongering jew controlled by big oil, big banking, ect.
I tend to stick with the original meaning myself, but the meaning has become so muddled it’s irrelevant.
I don’t consider myself a neocon but people have tried to impugn me with the term. I’m very conservative after spending the first half of my life as being very liberal on a handful of positions. I have seen Pope Benedict labeled as a ‘neocon’ because the 1968 student riots caused him to re-think his liberalism and embrace a more orthodox Catholicism. Of course, anyone that a leftist doesn’t like is either a neocon, a fascist, a Nazi, bigot/racist/sexist/homophobe, so I don’t think the term means a whole lot...
When France and Russia (and China) signed multi-billion dollar contracts with Saddam in the late-nineties that would not be valid while sanctions were in place, and would similarly not be valid if Saddam were overthrown, I realized that the game was rigged. Sanctions would be on their way out, and Saddam would soon emerge from his box with UN and EU and Russian support.
You can’t expect much from the UN, for example, when the UN Security Council is in his pocket, and UN management is laundering his money for him.
Thats when I realized that our best choice was to take him down quickly. I voted for Bush in part because, reading between the lines, I thought he saw the same thing I did. And, reading between the lines, I believed he arrived in DC fully planning to take Saddam down at the first opportunity.
When we were hit on 911, I decided, and said frequently, that we would not be able to effectively wage war against all of Bin Ladin’s allies while leaving Saddam in place. That was my belief then, and remains my belief.
People who didn’t agree, and don’t agree, can call me anything they like.
As for the whole democratization thing, and the general rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan, no one questioned it when we rebuilt Germany and Japan, and democratized them after defeating them. Its part of the process. You defeat them, and then you install a government that preferably you won’t have to fight again in five years time.
I'd always operated under the impression that someone like David Horowitz or Ronald Radosh were NeoCons. Basically, red diaper babies who saw the light.
It does seem that Neo Con has taken on a much broader context. My friend (who's book was 'gotten' by said NC's) -- who's a flaming lib I don't dare discuss politics with (literary blacklist, my 'colleages' think I'm one of them, I'm ashamed to say) -- describes them as this sort of shadowy, uber fascist right leaning outfit. I guess that's the basic liberal take on 'neo con' these days, since the term crypto-fascist is just too much of a mouthful.
neocons are conservatives without borders
Government does kill. Rj rummel is right
Lincoln vision was global
Too bad for border bots
Debating liberals is like shooting fish in a barrel ... so, being who they are, they resort to name calling. Fact is, I'm warming up to the term "Neocon" ... may need a bumper sticker.
So, “Neocon” is just another way to say Jew.
I watched this guy on C-SPAN with his new book but I can’t figure out what the hell he is talking about. I had never heard of ‘neocons’ until we took over Congress in 1994. Newt, Delay, Lott and Limbaugh were suddenly neo-cons. None of them are Jews. And none of them were ‘form Trotskyites in the 1930s’.
Either ‘neocon’ is just a retarded myth like ‘evangelical democrats’ or it is a perjorative used by the Left to try to make us all sound like Nazis (which is exactly what it sounds like to the general public).
I don’t care about Irving Kristol. I don’t care about William Kristol. Neither one of them had anything to do with our invasion of Iraq and neither of them caused us to win the House & Senate in 2004. So I just consider anybody who seriously discusses it to either be uninformed or somebody with an agenda involving blaming Jews for everything.
The Kristols are cheerleaders for some of this admin's most failed polices---INCLUDING the amnesty atrocity. The Kristol crowd also backed abortion worshipping, gun grabbing gay lover RINO Giuliani.
When Giuliani kept tanking, his daddy called him and said, "Hurry up and do something Billy, or I'll take the magazine away from you."
Little Billy had to act fast----so Billy called all the neos and clued them in---Giuliani's 15 minutes were up.
"The lisping sucker won only one delegate, after all we did for him," Kristol whined. "The zipless wonder married a whore who wanted to sit in on Cabinet meetings, fer God's sake."
So now everybody was on the same page---the neos were switching to All-McCain, All The Time----just as long as McCain said something nice about a Hundred Year War in the Mideast at least once a day.
FReeper ex-snook said it better than I ever could: "Kristol showed McCain the Queen of Diamonds."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.