The Neoconservative Persuasion: What it was, and what it is.

The Weekly Standard ^ | August 25, 2003 | Irving Kristol

[Johnbalaya]

good article

[Torie]

I can't make heads nor tails of your post. Sorry.

[DPB101]

You don't know every anti-Israel, left wing freak in the world is claiming "neocons" (Jews) are behind George Bush?

Come on...

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

From 'liberating the masses' to 'spreading democracy' I'm beginning to wonder when they'll have time to defend this nation of states.

The idea is that you won't need to defend yourself against liberated, democratic nations.

[Torie]

Is there any need for us to parse freak thought? I'm a WASP by the way.

[logician2u]

The idea is that you won't need to defend yourself against liberated, democratic nations.

Oh, I get it.

Democratic nations don't start wars, huh?

[pierrem15]

I know. I have most of his books (and those of his students) on my shelves and had two professors who were his students.

What I meant was, Why is his name brought up frequently as though he was some kind of Dr. Strangelove?

[pierrem15]

Not too much since WWI.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

In general no, they don't. Tin pot dictators and totalitarians do.

[woofie]

What is a Ghengis-con?

[DPB101]

No...no need to "parse freak". But there is a need to accept reality. The left has taken the word "neocon" and turned it into "Imperialist Republican Jew who wants to run the world"

The fact of the matter is the Jews in the GOP are a very small minority. What Wolfowitz wants only gets done because 95% of Republicans agree with him.

[Torie]

By the way, Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War is very, very readable (perhaps on of the most readable texts of the ancients), and reads like it was written yesterday. It is timeless. Self destructive civil war due to a failure of the public square and failed diplomacy, hubris, courage, ideolism, alliances, the failure of alliances, the momentum of war such that it becomes an end in itself, such that all perspective is lost, it is all there. Pick it up.

[Torie]

Cropsey was your professor too?

[MattAMiller]

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom."

This is what I find most interesting about the paleocon/neocon divide. And I'm not entirely satisfied with Kristol's explanation. It seems to me that neocons do not see the state as necessarily in conflict with the people while paleocons see government as inherently in conflict with the citizenry.

[pierrem15]

His descriptions of how family members murdered one another and how citizens sealed one another in temples in the civil war in Corcyra is blood curdling. The "Melian Dialogue" and the descriptions of the plight of the Athenian prisoners in Syracuse are also quite moving.

I always found his phenomenon of stasis to be an interesting one, since the word means the state of standing still, but he uses it to describe the state of a city in civil war: i.e., when all the normal "movement" of a city's political life has come to a stop because of the implacable opposition of factions within.

[pierrem15]

No. Lawrence "Logos Larry" Berns and Richard Kennington.

[mrustow]

Over 95% of Republicans agree with those "neocons" the left claims have snookered the party.

But you disagree with Papa Kristol. HE says that much of the GOP disagrees with neocon ideas, and that he and his compatriots did in fact snooker the party.

[mrustow]

The idea is that you won't need to defend yourself against liberated, democratic nations.

Oh, I get it.

Democratic nations don't start wars, huh?

ROTFL. Good thing I take my irony supplement several times a day.

[Belial]

That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.

Kristol-what a liar.

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. This superiority was planned by no one

Yeah, whatever. He's full of crap, but he's a good salesman. He makes you feel happy and at home in the latest perfection of abstract America.

[mrustow]

I know. I have most of his books (and those of his students) on my shelves and had two professors who were his students.

What I meant was, Why is his name brought up frequently as though he was some kind of Dr. Strangelove?

During the 1980s, I saw lefties do this, in the case of Alan Bloom. They cited the influence of Strauss as a knock on Bloom, but it was clear they had never read Strauss.

Personally, though I think Strauss was a very good scholar, and I think that his criticisms of historicism in Natural Rights and History apply exactly to multiculturalism (most of whose adherents probably never even HEARD of historicism), I can't help believing that much of his influence in America derives from his having spoken with a German accent, and exuded that Lehrstuhlinhaber air of authority that many American academics, who suffer from the same feelings of cultural inferiority vis-a-vis the Gerries that the Gerries themselves feel toward the French, love to kowtow to. (How's that for a Teutonic sentence?! It took years of German grammar lessons to build that hulk!) As a German speaker, my only concern with German accents is aesthetic. And that Germanic air of authority crap cuts no ice with me, whatsoever. The best German teachers I knew didn't need to put on that show.

If there is one phrase that told me that Strauss was not a great philosopher, it was "Platonic-Aristotelian" worldview. To me, it makes all the sense of "Judaeo-Christian." No one who takes Plato seriously, would ever meld the first two, anymore than anyone who took Judaism seriously would meld the second pair.