Why Neo-Conservatives Are not Real Conservatives

self

[weikel]

I can never decide whether its all a damn conspiracy or everyone who goes into the government is just an idiotic control freak trying to get back at the world for being made fun of in childhood or whatever( I used to have that desire too but realized it was really really irrational).

[Texasforever]

LOL Well I have noticed lately that you have not advocated a Monarchy or Military Government. You have really tightened up your arguments and logic. That's impressive.

[Robert_Paulson2]

dang that was good....

[weikel]

I have not changed my views about monarchy as superior to Republic my view of the military leadership was shaken by the recent order to the special forces to conform to military dress code in Afghanistan thus making the troops sitting ducks. Most of the officier corp is intelligent conservartives but it looks like whatever Junta might take over if there was a coup would be composed of Clintons political generals with slim chance of a Pinochet( more likely a lunatic Santa Anna).

[BluesDuke]

Where, if I may, is this ideology selector test? My curiosity is piqued... ;)

[Texasforever]

Thank you.

[Robert_Paulson2]

ouch... that was cold! hee hee.... zingeroonie!

[weikel]

Its on Lews site( sometimes Lew is really good. Sometimes like anything he says about foreign policy, the Civil War, or Israel hes wrong and infuriating) the link is here Are you a neocon. The actual test is in a link in the article but you'll want the article's glossary on what each thing means.

[BluesDuke]

I have to admit, I think Rockwell's best thinking and writing involves his economic views. Thanks for that link! I'll have a crack at it when I'm a little more awake than I am now...lol

[lentulusgracchus]

3. No constitutional justification for a federal WoD exists. 10th Amendment says it belongs to the states.

Sorry, but there is constitutional authority for regulation of the nation's international trade, which is where the vast bulk of our opiates and cocaine come from. Marijuana and hash I'm less sure about.

I agree with you domestic marijuana growth, if it doesn't cross state lines, should be a state matter. But how many California growers sell interstate? I'd be willing to bet that more than 90% of them do. There is the Commerce Clause, plain and simple, and shorn of anti-10th Amendment liberal National Greatness folderol.

Oh, and Wm. F. Buckley is considered Old Right: he was conservative when confessing to conservatism in any of its forms would get you spat at by people confident you couldn't do anything about it.

It isn't intrinsic to the definition of an Old Right conservative that that the person so described should carry a number of psychic scars, but it's a good practical litmus test. Old Rightists were getting kicked around, abused, and vilified all through the 50's and 60's when NeoCons were coasting along comfortably, basking in the lap of Big-L Liberalism. They never had a bad day in the 50's and 60's, at least not until KGB Active Measures and their case officers turned their attention to fomenting opposition to the Vietnamese War.

[lentulusgracchus]

....who goes into the government is just an idiotic control freak trying to get back at the world ...

George Will once wrote a spear for Yankees fans in which he said that, when Will was a kid, the only Yankees fan in school was the nerdy, teacher's-pet kid with thick glasses whose daddy was in management and whose goal in life was to be Treasury secretary when he grew up.

[ActionNewsBill]

Bill Buckley is no libertarian.

But he is a pot head!

Does that make him not a conservative? Can a person choose to use pot and still be conservative in their political views?

[Sane Walker]

Neo Cons are likkudnik israel Firsters. Their loyalty is to israel and not the US

[JohnGalt]

Greenspan came from Randian circles of the late 60s, but later, dropped any connection to them to the disappointment of Objectivists.

[Mr. Mojo]

I scored "Paleo Libertarian" on the test on the link you provided, but I must say that one of the questions proves just how insanely and irrationally anti-Israel those nutballs over at Rockwell are. The question was: "Should the U.S. provide foreign aid to Israel?" Why not instead ask, "Should the U.S. provide foreign aid to any nation?" This outright obsession with Israel is mystifying. The $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer aid we provide them is routinely shown to be the mother of all evils, but the $2 billon we give to Arab dictatorship Egypt and the $500 million we give to a terrorist organization (The PLO) is never mentioned.

[JohnGalt]

From Murray Rothbard's 1992 "Strategy for the Right"

"The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the original right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. Senator Taft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had retired.

The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, were now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum had developed on the right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh from several years in the CIA, and National Review, an intelligent, well-written periodical staffed with ex-communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the right from an isolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet god that had failed them.

Also, Buckley's writing style, while in those days often witty and sparkling, was rococo enough to give the reader the impression of profound thought, an impression redoubled by Bill's habit of sprinkling his prose with French and Latin terms. Very quickly, National Review became the dominant, if not the only, power center on the right-wing.

This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by National Review editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating front groups: ISI for college intellectuals, Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists. Moreover, lead by veteran Republican politico and National Review publisher Bill Rusher, the National Review complex was able to take over, in swift succession, the College Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally to create a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.

And so, with almost Blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusading conservative movement, transformed and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of the right, some left over from the original right, all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much-desired respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, non-radical conserving right was worthy of power.

And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the roll-call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it. But if, by the middle and late 1960s, Buckley had purged the conservative movement of the genuine right, he also hastened to embrace any group that proclaimed its hard anti-communism, or rather anti-Sovietism or anti-Stalinism.

And of course the first anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communist Leon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuine right-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around the magazine The New Leader), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook, anyone who could present not anti-socialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinist credentials.

The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right-wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that we know so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left. And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi anti-war left. These displaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitous group with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservative movement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists.

And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing alternative to the left. The neocons now constitute the right-wing end of the ideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For the neocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the right of them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, old night, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least."

[Kevin Curry]

Nice post, Tf. Cogent, well-written, and precisely accurate.

[tacticalogic]

Can a person choose to use pot and still be conservative in their political views?

I've been asking that same question, in slightly broader terms.

Is it possible to be socially conservative, but politically liberal - and vice versa? So far, no one seems to want to touch it.

[hchutch]

My ranking went:

#1 conservative
#2 neo-conservative

It seems about right. I just prefer to think that I use common sense.

[headsonpikes]

Yours is the finest post I've read for weeks.

Excellent analysis!

I have faith in the young--one must.