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 ...
He not only considers himself "paleo-conservative" but calls his silly magazine, Chronicles, the "flagship magazine of paleo-conservatism." Just because they have substantial collections of rejection slips from conservative publications does not make his writers conservatives of any stripe.
Do not for a moment indulge the fantasy that ANYONE involved in the Rockford Institute is describable as libertarian. Several of them pine for the good old days when Slobodan Milosevic was communist boss of Serbia and not a "puppet" of American interests like more recent Serbian governments. Fleming actually wants to move to Serbia or Montenegro upon retirement. Good move for him. Good move for America. Serbia's loss would be America's gain.
The quote that quidnunc included at #159 is quite representative of the reflexive anti-Americanism which permeates the Rockford Institute whose personnel are old enough to remember the anti-American and antiwar Americong of the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, they are willing to lie down with anti-war dogs in time of war.
Though the institute is NEITHER conservative NOR libertarian, one must also say of libertarians that those whose worldview is based upon secular ideology, who often cheerlead for the American holocaust of 45 million innocents slaughtered in the womb by surgical means alone since 1973, who root for the love that once dared not speak its name but will not now shut up, who think that all of political philosophy can be reduced to a few cliches out of Mill or Rand about non-initiation of force or fraud, are not conservative either. Conservatives may agree with libertarians on taxes and on limiting government regulations of business, but libertarians make poor partners on the major issues such as abortion and family and civilization.
Such as the Rockford Institute crowd make poor allies as well since they think that wallowing in novels and poetry is preferable to asserting military force in pursuance of the legitimate objectives of American foreign policy, even in the aftermath of 9/11. Also, in their passionate devotion to yakking about everything while acting about nothing, the Institute in the person of Fleming published a Chronicles editorial just a few months ago deriding pro-life champion Joe Scheidler's efforts as violative of the property rights of abortionists as though those rights should be asserted in defense of their grisly profession and confidently predicted that SCOTUS would uphold a racketeering verdict against Scheidler, about a week before SCOTUS decided by more than a mere majority in his favor and finished off RICO jurisdiction over pro-lifers.
I've visited in person and have known the people invoved for decades. The Rockford Institute is old-line conservative, albeit with a particular interest in "social" conservatism. This is the definition of paleo-con that I used (i.e., those who were the conservative movement before the neo-cons arrived) -- not the pejorative definition used by David Frum. They have little in common with self-designated libertarians Lew Rockwell, Joe Sobran, Justin Raimondo, et al., none of whom would dream of calling himself a conservative of any stripe. Frum had an ax to grind.
Rockford, as I recall, was a spinoff from Rockford College, led by John Howard, president emeritus of the Institute as well as the college. Allan Carlson is based at Rockford -- great conservative scholar in social questions. These are old line conservatives, not these allegedly horrid paleos. Tom Fleming -- well, he's feisty, but on the whole he's been a good asset over the years. (And beware -- there's another Tom Fleming in the public policy world, an historian.)
I am sorry to say that I am quite acquainted with Mr. Fleming and his collection of eccentric ideological robots at the Rockford Institute. He not only considers himself "paleo-conservative" but calls his silly magazine, Chronicles, the "flagship magazine of paleo-conservatism." Just because they have substantial collections of rejection slips from conservative publications does not make his writers conservatives of any stripe. Do not for a moment indulge the fantasy that ANYONE involved in the Rockford Institute is describable as libertarian. Several of them pine for the good old days when Slobodan Milosevic was communist boss of Serbia and not a "puppet" of American interests like more recent Serbian governments. Fleming actually wants to move to Serbia or Montenegro upon retirement. Good move for him. Good move for America. Serbia's loss would be America's gain. …
Thomas Fleming is also a founding director of the secessionist, neo-Confederate League of the South.
Fine and all, but what bothers me is that there seems to be an attempt to deny that those who supported Iraq war could have done so out of any other belief besides Making The World Safe For Democracy. There's an attempt here to pigeonhole people for the sake of an easy straw man to attack ("you're all Wilsonians!") and yes, I resent it.
You hate the term neoconservative, so you're doing whatever you can to dissuade people from using it,
actually I don't really care about the term. I just want its usage to make sense. like i said, this guy Podhoretz is a neoconservative, fine, call him one. Ann Coulter?!? give me a break
Neoconservative is very handy, because it describes a new (relatively speaking) turn in conservative thought,
and what turn would that be? Be specific, and don't claim to have read the minds of (and thus label and set up as straw men) everyone you disagree with either.
you implied that you thought it was inconsistent for them to oppose war X but support war Y. close enough
On the other hand, if you have any proof that a majority of folks who opposed Gulf War II were consistent pacists and agains "all wars" please provide it. I'm all ears.
uh, i never said that, that wasn't my point to begin with. bizarre
Sorry, can't agree. The fact that I like nearly all of those people and have known many of them does not make them all conservatives. I'll give you a few examples (of many) -- Whittaker Chambers explicitly denied being a conservative, and called himself a "man of the right." Hayek likewise -- he called himself a liberal (but the European kind). Mises -- interesting you put him on this list since Lew Rockwell (one of the damned) runs the Mises Institute. Podhoretz, Kristol, Decter, Himmelfarb and Bill Kristol are THE leadership of neo-cons (and interestingly, two married couples and one of their sons :-) ) They are a distinguished addition (to say the least!) but do not arise from the mainstream conservative movement or from the American tradition of constitutionally limited government.
A list that could include an opportunistic Maoist like Phillip Abbott Luce (who disappeared almost as fast as he arrived 30-odd years ago) might have a little more respect for a cultural conservative like Fleming or a highly intelligent Catholic like Joe Sobran, who was a very early opponent of abortion and still one of the compelling voices on the subject. It could also acknowledge the historical conservative aversion to foreign entanglements and war -- always the greatest spur to socialist government expansion -- without blasting people who hew to those principles as "unpatriotic."
Again, this thread is showing that labels are altogether too slippery for serious discussion. But there is no such problem seeing who's the enemy or lumping together all of the socialist family of ideologies. They all have the same -- false -- premises, and that is what we should be refuting.
First of all, I didn't say he wrote in opposition to the war following Pearl Harbor. What he did continue to write, however, were criticisms of FDR's policy of provocation of Japan in the months leading up to the attack. I don't know for sure if he wrote them for the New Haven register - in fact, if memory serves, he wrote them as books, not newspaper columns.
An attempt by whom? By me? "Pigeonholing" indeed.
actually I don't really care about the term.
Sure sounded like you did at #191.
I just want its usage to make sense.
And that's what I've been trying to do for you, and you keep dismissing it. I've based my conclusions on the common beliefs exhibited in their writing. It comes through for others as it does for me. You can close your ears and deny its existence, but that doesn't really change any of the facts. If you don't want to believe that such a belief exists, fine. But many others see it, and will be using this particular term to describe it. I just thought I'd help you out by explaining what it is we're talking about.
You're welcome.
Apples and oranges. It's not only the amount of money spent, but the fact that we're taking sides in a very deep-running conflict in that region, and supplying one side militarily. The aid to Egypt, by contrast, is just payoff money for making peace with Israel.
Of course, this did not stop conservatives from opposing the Kosovo war after we "were in it." There is an inconsistency here...but apparently you can't or won't admit it.
Apparently, by their "bizarre" standards of pro-conservatives these same conservatives who opposed Kosovo were not "antiwar peaceniks" then. Very bizarre indeed! I guess most pro-warriors only condemn folks as "antiwar peaceniks" when they oppose Republican wars.
Actually, your own answer convicts you of being a fanatical lunatic with whom it's impossible to have a rational discussion. Gas-X should help you keep the foam down.
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