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The Neoconservative Persuasion: What it was, and what it is.
The Weekly Standard ^ | August 25, 2003 | Irving Kristol

Posted on 08/14/2003 9:38:27 PM PDT by quidnunc

"[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he's been captured by the neoconservatives around him." – Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003

What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the "have-nots" and the "haves" engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

-snip-

(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Extended News
KEYWORDS: irvingkristol; liberalagenda; neocon; neocons; neoconservative
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To: quidnunc
good article
21 posted on 08/14/2003 10:34:29 PM PDT by Johnbalaya
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To: DPB101
I can't make heads nor tails of your post. Sorry.
22 posted on 08/14/2003 10:34:45 PM PDT by Torie
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To: Torie
You don't know every anti-Israel, left wing freak in the world is claiming "neocons" (Jews) are behind George Bush?

Come on...

23 posted on 08/14/2003 10:40:14 PM PDT by DPB101
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To: billbears
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.

24 posted on 08/14/2003 10:40:15 PM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee (const tag& thisTagWontChange)
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To: DPB101
Is there any need for us to parse freak thought? I'm a WASP by the way.
25 posted on 08/14/2003 10:42:09 PM PDT by Torie
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To: KayEyeDoubleDee
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?

26 posted on 08/14/2003 10:42:09 PM PDT by logician2u
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To: Torie
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?

27 posted on 08/14/2003 10:47:46 PM PDT by pierrem15
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To: logician2u
Not too much since WWI.
28 posted on 08/14/2003 10:49:49 PM PDT by pierrem15
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To: logician2u
In general no, they don't. Tin pot dictators and totalitarians do.

29 posted on 08/14/2003 10:50:45 PM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee (const tag& thisTagWontChange)
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To: quidnunc
What is a Ghengis-con?
30 posted on 08/14/2003 10:51:19 PM PDT by woofie
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To: Torie
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.

31 posted on 08/14/2003 10:53:25 PM PDT by DPB101
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To: pierrem15
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.
32 posted on 08/14/2003 10:53:26 PM PDT by Torie
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To: pierrem15
Cropsey was your professor too?
33 posted on 08/14/2003 10:56:34 PM PDT by Torie
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To: quidnunc
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.

34 posted on 08/14/2003 10:56:41 PM PDT by MattAMiller
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To: Torie
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.

35 posted on 08/14/2003 11:00:50 PM PDT by pierrem15
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To: Torie
No. Lawrence "Logos Larry" Berns and Richard Kennington.
36 posted on 08/14/2003 11:02:35 PM PDT by pierrem15
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To: DPB101
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.

37 posted on 08/15/2003 12:19:47 AM PDT by mrustow (no tag)
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To: 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?

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

38 posted on 08/15/2003 12:22:13 AM PDT by mrustow (no tag)
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To: quidnunc
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.
39 posted on 08/15/2003 12:43:30 AM PDT by Belial
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To: 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?

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.

40 posted on 08/15/2003 12:50:18 AM PDT by mrustow (no tag)
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