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Posted on 08/11/2011 10:29:39 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
In the wake of the recent and raucous debt ceiling debate, The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart noted two important developments:
The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.
Beinart’s observations are generally-and hopefully-correct. They’re also even more correlative than he suggests.
Neoconservatism is right-wing progressivism. During the Bush years, every self-described conservative who thought it was America's mission to "make the world safe for democracy" spoke the language, however unknowingly, of an earlier left-wing liberalism. Traditional conservatives have always understood that there are practical limits on what government can accomplish, and that the state typically does more harm than good. Progressives believe there are virtually no limits to what government can accomplish, and that any potential damage is far outweighed by the potential good.
It's hard to fathom a conservative who doesn't believe in a strong national defense. However, few if any have ever believed in an irrational offense, especially one based on utopian premises.
The neoconservatives' progressive promise was a democratic Iraq, and indeed, a democratic Middle East, in which the US would successfully impose American values on a part of the world that had never known nor wanted them. True to progressive form, this Arab democracy project would supposedly work simply because the neocons really wanted it to-and the contortions of logic they used to portray it as working became more transparently absurd as the war's many failures became more obvious to a majority of Americans.
In hindsight, it's amazing that such misty-eyed liberalism was ever confused for conservatism, but thankfully, post-Bush, things have become less confusing. Under Obama, right-wingers have traded war obsession for the more traditionally conservative focus of limiting government. As conservatives continue to call for greater spending reductions, not only left-wing progressives but right-wing progressives howl over the very thought of there being any cuts to their favorite programs. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat notes that the recent debt debate "clarifies something that’s been increasingly obvious for a while: The interests of right-wing tax cutters and right-wing defense hawks do not necessarily align with one another, and they will continue to diverge as we go deeper into the looming age of austerity."
Douthat also notes that the current environment is most favorable to conservatives of the traditional rather than neo variety: "At the moment, the hawks are at a clear disadvantage. From Rand Paul to Grover Norquist, there’s a broad constituency within the conservative movement for shrinking the national security state, either as a compromise necessary to keep domestic spending low or as an end unto itself."
Douthat adds: "But there's no mirror-image constituency among hawks for raising tax revenue for the sake of maintaining the Pax Americana."
As Sen. John McCain, almost alone, clamors for even more US intervention in Libya, Syria and beyond, most of the Right looks at the 2008 GOP presidential nominee in puzzlement-and the neocons' inherent nuttiness becomes even more clear. During the Bush years, foreign policy was the one issue the Right considered on-negotiable-but the size of government and spending was perfectly negotiable, per Bush's big government example and legacy. For today’s Tea Party, it is the desire to reduce government that is non-negotiable-while anything that might land on the chopping block to meet this end becomes fair game. Beinart explains:
The Tea Party... is a post-war-on-terror phenomenon. Many of the newly elected Republicans are indifferent, if not hostile, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're happy to cut the defense budget, especially since it makes it easier to persuade Democrats to swallow larger cuts in domestic spending. It’s the reverse of the Cold War dynamic. During the Cold War-especially in the Nixon and Reagan years-conservatives accepted that overall spending would go up in order to ensure that some of that increase went to defense. Today, conservatives accept defense cuts in order to ensure that overall spending goes down.
It is fitting that the diminution of Wilson's progressive domestic vision now coincides with the unpopularity of his foreign policy vision, whether as promoted today by President Obama or Bush Republican retreads. The Tea Party does not have a foreign policy per se, but it does have a domestic policy-as it continues to learn that "making the world safe for democracy" is not only impractical and impossible, but also racks up a pretty large bill.
To be consistent in their limited government desires, today’s conservatives must remain opposed to all forms of progressivism, both foreign and domestic, Democrat and Republican, left and right-wing. And if, or when, the serious cuts come, it is inevitable that both liberals and neocons will continue to shriek-as government shrinks.
But I won't pursue that here. I'd much rather talk about the progressivism that permeates the republican party establishment.
Bad memories, I was sold the NC Koolaid too for a while even though it was against everything I understood as conservatism only a few years before .
What is it with the northeast Republicans the makes them progressives? Is this about to change?
Right Wing Progressivism
Frist & Co. saw the huge pile of money the Shadow Democrat organizations were pumping in to DC, and rather than trying to fight it against it, they tried to copy it, and failed.
What they forgot is that HUGE amounts of that money goes in to buying MEDIA INFLUENCE, not politicians. Dems know that he who controls THE MEMES, controls the game.
This sounds like a win-win proposition to me. I'll take a sound republic over a bankrupt empire any day and progressivism is what got us in trouble in the first place.
Ascribing "anti-Semitism" to conservative critics of the Neocons--critics who were sometimes called Paleoconservatives for their "Old Right" views--was a defense tactic of the Neocons to discredit Paleos as a whole.
” Progressives believe there are virtually no limits to what government can accomplish, and that any potential damage is far outweighed by the potential good”
Pukeneos
Anyone come to mind??
Hint :’See you at the signing ’
We need to drastically cut non-defense discretionary spending, reform entitlements, and cut regulations/taxes BEFORE taking one cent out of defense. With the short-term threats of jihadi terror and rogue dictators like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il, and longer-term threats like an expansionist China, now's not the time to be touching the military.
Dubya.....who tried very hard to ram “amnesty with chain migration” down our throats.
Get along to go along, same as any other collaborator in occupied territory.
It's nice to be popular, I guess, but we wound up with a vastly increased spending streak which conservatives (who wanted responsible government) are taking the blame for. Conservatives also wanted our enemies smashed by the military, and instead, we spend billions of dollars a day trying to win the hearts and minds of our enemies by filling their wallets.
Conservatism was twisted to mean basically liberal things, but less liberal than liberals would prefer. Liberal lite. It shifted the whole discussion to the left, and left the right out in the cold.
Unfortunately, because Bush spoke the language of social conservatism well, and had the 'commander in chief' aura in a time of war, we really didn't call him on it as hard as we could have. Plus, Al Gore? John Kerry? I suppose we're paying the piper now, but I'm glad those morons didn't make it into the history books.
Now we have Obama, basically bashing Bush for being an arch-conservative warlord, when in fact he governed more like a weak liberal.
AMEN! I can see having a specific pentagon agency to oversee that we are not paying $3000 for a toilet seat or hammer but we should not be cutting their budget on defense at all.It is one of the things mentioned in the Constitution that IS the responsibility of our federal government.The things that need to be done away with are the non paying in entitlements and the ones that are paid into need changed.Social security was intended to pay for the final years of life beyond life expectancy not paying someone at 65 when life expectancy is now 76!
Maybe he should have sent them to college like that other guy. They can get a law degree for free specializing in immigration law and $$$ civil liability lawsuits, then use it for doctor malpractice cases when illegals show up for free.
the Founding Fathers believed in peace through strength and protection of our natural rights against both internal and external threats.
What, back in the 1970s?
The term was originally applied by socialists like Michael Harrington to backsliders who rejected the liberalism and socialism of the day.
It was a slur, I guess, but there wasn't much anti-semitism there, since so many of Harrington's associates and fellow believers were also Jews.
Irving Kristol embraced the label, and other neocons followed suit (except those like Moynihan and Bell who were still attached to liberalism or the left).
Later on some people came to see "neoconservative" a slur against Jews, but that's not the way it was early on.
It was only when the term became unpopular that those who once proudly accepted it began to complain about it and reject it.
See there, you taught me something.
I always thought that the term started during the Iraq war.(to which, it *was* used in an anti semitic way - until the progressive realized they shouldn’t do that)
I’m not in favor of gutting defense.
I can encapsulate my views on “cutting defense spending” the best with a single question:
“What’s our exit strategy out of germany?”
Can you think of other places where it’s about time we brought our troops home?
We always need a strong defense. Freedom must be defended.
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