Posted on 05/03/2003 8:44:59 AM PDT by quidnunc
Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label.
The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality as it had been defined for thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These Democrats finally concluded that liberalism, as they had known it, was dead.
Irving Kristol, father of the neocons, defined his band of brothers and sisters as "liberals mugged by reality." That reality was the "evil empire" as defined by Ronald Reagan, the leader they championed. The reality extended to a concern for crime and education and what came to be called "family values." A subdivision of the neocons, the "cultural conservatives," were wryly defined as liberals with daughters in junior high.
Jews were prominently identified with the neocons, largely because Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, made the magazine a sounding board for neocon criticism. But Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Baptist, and William Bennett, a Roman Catholic, were prominent neocon voices from the beginning. So were other Christians. "What are we," they might ask, "chopped liver?"
The Jewish neocons understood what the majority of Jews who vote Democratic didn't — that Jews and Evangelical Christians held many things in common, among them an admiration and affection for Israel.
Such definitions and ideological attitudes are amply documented in the political history of the second half of the 20th century, but the neocon label resurfaces today as many journalists and pundits identify the neocons as a new generation driving the foreign policy of George W. Bush.
It's a label that doesn't quite fit, since those credited with influence are hardly "neo" anything. For the most part, the label is attributed to second-generation conservatives. Some are sons of the Scoop Jackson Democrats whose fathers have the last name of Podhoretz and Kristol, but the label as accurately understood has a much more inclusive intellectual base, including, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney; his wife, Lynne; Condoleezza Rice; Don Rumsfeld; and Paul Wolfowitz, the hugely influential deputy defense secretary.
The term, however, is disingenuously bandied about at dinner tables and policy meetings in London and Paris and elsewhere, where it is colorfully coded to suggest a Jewish conspiracy working on the White House.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at tallahassee.com ...
Pfui!
See my reply #65 above.
I refuse to be sent off on a guilt trip for something which happened nine centuries ago.
As for the Holocaust, that wasn't committed in the name of Christianity, nor were the pogroms of the Russian czars.
In both cases Jews were scapegoated in order to distract the people from social and economic problems.
If you want to wear sackcloth and ashes for events which happened nearer to the Dark Ages than our own time then go right ahead, but don't expect me to join you.
Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label.
Politics does sometimes involved polarities, but that is not the typical situation. It is more likely to involve personalities and rival groups of office seekers. There are very few real clashes of basic principle in most contested races. Indeed, at the Federal level, there is an almost frenzied battle for the middle of the road; an almost desperate shunning of real polarity. And this is not something new. We tend to over-estimate the clashes that have occurred historically, because they stand out, and history tends to flatten out perceptions. But just look at the level and nature of debate in most local elections. It is not polarities, it is exposure and personality.
I only bother to comment, because this posting has brought out another pointless battle over newspeak terminology, rather than any serious intellectual issue. It serves to dumb down discussion over the course we should follow, and lends support to those who see a difference of opinion as a reason to smear the motivations of their foes.
William Flax
It always seems to me that the paleos care only about the issues on which they disagree with other conservatives. And those issue all seem to be about how America deals with the rest of the world: trade, immigration, foreign policy.
On the real "social" issues--abortion, guns, culture--there is general agreement between paleos and neocons. But the paleos always seem more interested in fighting than agreeing.
denydenydeny, member since 10/21/98, by the way.
That is my definition of a neocon
The world of Middle Ages was by and large a barbaric place by our standards.
What happened happened and there's no undoing it.
To attempt to tar the present-day West with the brush of Crusader atrocities is ridiculous.
The Crusades served two purposes; they attempted to reconquer formerly-Christian lands and they gave unlanded second-and third-son knights an outlet for their aggressive tendencies which wouldn't disturb the European status-quo.
So am I, but I have long worked with no ideological misgivings with -- let me call them Buckley conservatives. I also think that general philosophical questions are wider than the libertarian view, which is the key to the kingdom on economic and political questions but sheds no light on religion and related moral questions. From which perspective, traditional conservatism has a good deal to add to a libertarian spirit.
Thanks for the vocabulary lesson. Here's one for you:
n 1: witty language used to convey insults or scorn; "he used sarcasm to upset his opponent"; "irony is wasted on the stupid" [syn: sarcasm, satire, caustic remark] 2: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" 3: a trope that involves incongruity between what is expected and what occurs
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University
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