What's In A Name? The Curious Case Of "Neoconservative"

4/30/03 | Paul Gottfried

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Thanks for the link to another good article.

It seems to me that the center of many political and philosophical disputes is the evolving fuzziness of the role of government in the moral arena. The desire of people to have the government enforce their moral vision is where we get into trouble.

The liberals want the government to be a parent and the people to be children. The libertarians want to be rebellious teenagers with no parental interference, not even an allowance nor room or board. We conservatives seem to be in no man's land sharing a little of each but with a strong adherence to the Constitution as originally written.

Does the Constitution give government the right to enforce moral values? According to the Tenth Amendment it does as long as the process does not infringe any of the enumerated and God-given rights. Should it? No.

It is the describing of the positions taken in this continuum that lead to terms like neoconservative.

[William McKinley]

Not buying it.

Roosevelt was a radical departure from many of the policies of McKinley, not a continuation.

[inquest]

It is the describing of the positions taken in this continuum that lead to terms like neoconservative.

Except that the continuum you described has to do with domestic policy. Neoconservative is a term that has mostly to do with foreign policy.

[inquest]

In what way?

[wardaddy]

I don't care what they call themselves as long as they don't forget we have a culture war here to fight that's every bit as dangerous as the Islamists.

[tacticalogic]

Roosevelt was a radical departure from many of the policies of McKinley, not a continuation.

Roosevelt was a Communitarian. Some historical reports say he tried to join the Communist Party, but they advised him not too, saying he was more valuable to the cause staying a Democrat, and enjoying the benefits of Pendergast's political machine.

[ex-snook]

"Despite this lengthy treatise, I still don't know what the heck a neocon is. "

Explanations are just explanations. Look at the issues that divide them.

Neo-cons are world controlling, drag America into war everywhere liberals posing as conservatives to achieve these aims. Conservatives are constitution loving, abortion hating, patriots whose aim is a strong defense and no foreign entantlements.

A dividing issue is Bush's American interest 'road map' for peace. Conservatives think the Neo-cons will be against peace. We'll see.

[Nephi]

Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol pioneered this practice in his Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983)?yes, he used the term?when he ingeniously argued: "A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society."

Today, there is no systematic difference between neoconservatives and real conservatives.

Oh, yeah, you're an expert on "real" conservatism.

[William McKinley]

In what way didn't he?

McKinley cut the number of civil servants, Roosevelt increased them.

McKinley believed that government should only attempt to reign in business when a corporation had a monopoly of interstate commerce. Roosevelt, on the other hand:

As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none. (From the whitehouse.gov website)

. They had severe differences on the constitutional role of a President, as this quote from Roosevelt makes clear:

"Under this interpretation of executive power I did and caused to be done many things not previously done by the President," he wrote. "I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power; I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance."

Roosevelt was the first President to intervene in labor disputes, a role which McKinley never would have imagined as being proper for the chief executive.

Maybe you can delineate how you think they were the same? It is commonly accepted that Roosevelt was a radical departure from his predecessors. McKinley's administration featured none of the reform goals, such as antitrust and worker protection, that the progressive Roosevelt would advocate after the turn of the century. McKinley never expanded the power of the Presidency the way Roosevelt did. Simply stated, they were not very similar, at all. One was a conservative Republican. The other was a Republican Progressive.

[William McKinley]

Wrong Roosevelt. You are a few decades later than the one we are discussing.

[Catspaw]

From your link:

Man, do I wish I could have responded to some of those...it might be worth getting a new Freeper account to do it. Keep an eye out for a new Freeper. He won't last long, though, as he intends to tell off some of the protecteds such as Cacheshit, Catspaw, and Chancellor. You know what happens to accounts when posters dare to challenge the untouchables, don't you?

[William McKinley]

By the way, I think it is misleading to say that a brand of conservatism that rejected isolationsim merely 'poked its head' up 100 years ago. That makes it sound like it was a passing fancy, around only for a few short years. Instead, it was the rule, not the exception, from Harrison to McKinley to Taft (with Roosevelt sharing the international aspirations but little of the rest of the belief system). In many ways it started even earlier, with the Presidency of Chester Arthur, who negotiated freer trade deals with Mexico, Spain and the British West Indies, and who started our development of a powerful, more modern, navy. It was Arthur's Secretary of State who really started the US down the road towards the construction of the Panama Canal.

And as my inclusion of Taft above indicates, it did not end with Roosevelt. It continued onward, starting to wane with Calvin Coolidge, who kept the economic internationalism of his Republican predecessors, but started moving the party towards the anti-war position that would be prevalent for a few decades (until being shattered by the reality of the Axis), starting with the naive the 1928 Kellog-Briand Pact.

The internationalist Republican, religious and socially conservative, supportive of business-- this is what today gets labelled by paleoconservatives and liberal commentators. Yet this is not new, as the prefix neo implies. It was the norm for nearly 50 years (if not more) within the Republican party.

[inquest]

OK, now that the thread's back up, we can continue with the show.

You mentioned "economic internationalism" in your last post, but that's not what neoconservatism is. It's more than just internationalism (as even the Founders advocated peaceful trade with all); it's interventionism. The interventionist itch in Washington didn't really get going until the 1890's, dropped off around 1910, got revived by Wilson in WWI, and then lay dormant until FDR's policies in the late 1930's. Neoconservatism is the extent to which conservatives participated in these deveolpments, which prior to WWII, was confined mostly to the McKinley/Roosevelt presidencies (or even just McKinley, if, as you've said, Roosevelt wasn't really all that conservative).

[NeoCaveman]

Neo-cons are world controlling, drag America into war everywhere liberals posing as conservatives to achieve these aims.

Nope, no conspiracy here....(rolling my eyes)

[William McKinley]

I didn't limit it to economic internationalism. The conservatives of the era were not isolationists militarily either. They built up a powerful navy and projected power. They expanded the country, they intervened in uprisings, they colonized.

[goldstategop]

First mention of the term "neoconservatism" came in a 1973 Dissent magazine article by the late socialist Michael Harrington and he used it to describe a group of 60s former Leftists who since moved to the Right over their disagreement over the expansion of the welfare state known as The Great Society and the Democratic Party's abandonment of a muscular anti-Communist foreign policy. It later came in vogue as a thinly disguised insult applied to certain conservatives of Jewish origin not associated with the traditional or "paleo" Right. The latter application of the term is what's behind the debate of the place of the neos in the conservative movement today. While I identify with the neo school of conservative thought, if I were asked, I would describe myself as a conservative, pure and simple. No conservative today whatever his orientation, can ever consider going back to the Left. And if I may be permitted to offer a closing thought here, its helpful to keep in mind that whatever our differences, we should spend more time targeting the real enemy of free society and less about who'll do a better job of building the conservative society of the future. All conservatives can and will play a role in bringing about both so there's plenty of room for whoever you are inside our great movement at the table.

[tpaine]

To: atavist; Catspaw
wwwlibertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_members&Number=602931&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&t=0#Post602931
Hmmmmmmmm...mmmmm?
20 posted on 05/10/2003 8:29 AM PDT by Cachelot


To: Cachelot; Chancellor Palpatine
From your link:
Man, do I wish I could have responded to some of those...it might be worth getting a new Freeper account to do it. Keep an eye out for a new Freeper. He won't last long, though, as he intends to tell off some of the protecteds such as Cacheshit, Catspaw, and Chancellor. You know what happens to accounts when posters dare to challenge the untouchables, don't you?
31 -catspaw-


--- Droll.. We all know what happens when the 'unclean' post feuds from antifreeper sites, yes.
Are the untouchables immune? Hmmmmmm...mmmmm?

[Catspaw]

This will be my last post to you, tpaine.

Do not ping to me. Do not post to me. I will not respond.

[tpaine]

Whatever.

[tacticalogic]

Sorry. You're right. TR was considerably more inclined to use executive power than McKinley.