‘Godfather’ Kristol’s Statist/Imperialist Manifesto (Neo-cons vs. Classical Liberals)

Lewrockwell.com ^ | August 20, 2003 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo

[Korth]

Irving Kristol, who identifies himself as the "Godfather" of neoconservativism, is finally beginning to come clean and admit what neoconservatism stands for: statism at home and imperialism abroad. He makes this candid admission in an August 25 article in The Weekly Standard entitled "The Neoconservative Persuasion."

Congratulating himself for becoming an "historic" figure (at least in his own mind) he declares:

[T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservativism 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 (emphasis added).

Like all neocons, Kristol claims to be a champion of democracy, but his words and actions often contradict this claim. Consider the language in the above quotation, "against their respective wills." According to the traditional theory of democracy, the role of competing ideas in politics is supposedly a matter of persuasion. Political debates are supposedly aimed at persuading voters that you are right and your rival is wrong. But Kristol will have none of this. He is the "Godfather," after all. What he apparently means by transforming traditiona l conservatives against their will is not to attempt to persuade them to become statists and imperialists like himself, but to intimidate and censor them by conducting campaigns of character assassination against anyone who disagrees with the neocon agenda. He means to purge all dissenters, Stalin style.

This decidedly un-democratic tactic was on display in David Frum’s National Review attack ("Unpatriotic Conservatives") on any and all conservatives who disagree with the neocon agenda of endless warfare around the globe. Indeed, the neocons are well known for resorting to personal smears rather than intellectual debate, beginning with their vicious campaign of character assassination against the late Mel Bradford when he was nominated by President Reagan to head the National Endowment for the Humanities in the early 1980s. That smear campaign established their political modus operandi.

Kristol claims that the three biggest neocon idols are Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Ronald Reagan; all other Republican party worthies are "politely ignored." Teddy Roosevelt, whom the neocons affectionately call "TR," was simply nuts. Mark Twain, who met him twice, called him "clearly insane." In any number of "TR" biographies we learn that after an argument with his girlfriend as a young man he went home and shot his neighbor’s dog. When he killed his first buffalo – and his first Spaniard – he "abandoned himself to complete hysteria," as biographer Edmund Morris recounts.

While president, TR would take morning horseback rides through Rock Creek Park wildly shooting a pistol at tree branches, oblivious to the harm he might do to residents or houses in the area. He once strung a wire across the Potomac River so that he could hang on it while crossing the river because, he said, his wrists needed strengthening. The TR biographies are filled with similar stories of his asinine antics.

Like the neocons, TR was a Lincoln idolater. (His secretary of state was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal White House secretary). After being lambasted in the US Senate over the fact that he had launched a military intervention in the Philippines that costs thousands of American lives and resulted in an incredible 200,000 Philippine deaths, Edmund Morris recounts in his latest biography of TR, Theodore Rex, how he responded to his senate critics during a Memorial Day address to aged Union army veterans. The criticisms against him were invalid, he told the white-bearded veterans of Lincoln’s army, because the mass killing of Philipinos was for their own good – its purpose was to spread democracy. Besides, he said, it was the exact same policy of the sainted Lincoln, so how could anyone object? Southerners were also killed by the hundreds of thousands for their own good, according to TR’s logic.

Like the neocon Lincoln idolaters, TR was a consolidationist who had no respect for states’ rights – or for constitutional restraints on government in general. He loathed Jefferson but idolized Lincoln, naturally. He nationalized millions of acres of land, initiated numerous antitrust witch hunts that were enormously harmful to the economy, imposed onerous regulations on railroads that led many of them into bankruptcy, and responded to the socialist Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle by regulating food and drugs. (FDA drug lag has been proven to have caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths due to the inaccessibility of life-saving drugs available in other countries).

His fellow Republicans accused him of trying to concentrate all governmental power in Washington, abolishing state lines, and creating a stifling bureaucracy to control the population. They were right, of course, which is why the neocons love TR so much. (Bill Clinton also said that Teddy Roosevelt was his favorite Republican in all of American history).

Like Kristol, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, and many other neocons, TR was infatuated with war and killing. A college friend of his wrote in 1885 that "he would like above all things to go to war with some one. He wants to be killing something all the time" (See Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, p. 36). As president, he constantly announced that America "needed a war," which is exactly what the neocons of today believe. War – any war – the neocons tell us, gives us "national unity."

TR was a statist in domestic policy, a foreign policy imperialist, and an inveterate warmonger. He was, in other words, the real "Godfather" of neoconservatism.

As for FDR, the neocons idolize him as well because the older ones like Kristol are all former leftists – like FDR – and they have never abandoned their statist beliefs. Further evidence of this lies in the one reason Kristol gives for why neocons idolize Ronald Reagan: Although they had nothing to do with initiating the "Reagan tax cuts," neocons supported them because they believed they would spur economic growth, which in turn would enable them to fully fund the welfare state. (In this regard California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is a neocon: In his initial press conference announcing his candidacy he said he wanted to "bring business back to California" so that the Golden state’s massive welfare entitlement bureaucracy could be fully funded).

Kristol claims that democracy used to mean "an inherently turbulent political regime," but not so once a country becomes prosperous. This is a breathtakingly absurd proposition. The very existence of the neocon cabal, at a time of the greatest world prosperity in history, contradicts it. If the neocons are about anything they are about political bullying to impose their will on others – turbulent democracy, in other words. Moreover, in The Birth of the Transfer Society Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill discuss how, as the idea of democracy replaced individual liberty as the reason for government in the post-1865 era, politics inevitably became more and more "turbulent" with one rent-seeking group after another cropping up to use the powers of the state to plunder its neighbors. The transfer state has continued to grow virtually unabated over the last century, making American democracy ever more turbulent and divisive. There has been a relentless shift away from the traditional constitutional functions of government and toward an ever-expanding transfer society. Kristol’s notion that twentieth century prosperity brought an end to "political turbulence" is preposterous and absurd.

Equally preposterous and ahistorical is his further claim that, with prosperity, Americans will become less susceptible to "egalitarian illusions." But the U.S. today is as prosperous as it has ever been, and mindless egalitarianism reigns. Just a few weeks ago one of Kristol’s favorite Supreme Court justices, Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor, wrote a majority opinion that said racial discrimination against whites in college admissions was desirable because, in her opinion, the mixing of skin colors on college campuses – to supposedly promote egalitarianism – trumped the constitution she once swore to uphold. A thousand other examples could readily be used to disprove Kristol’s thesis.

Kristol further admits that neocons do not in any way favor limited government. He mocks the idea of limited constitutional government by calling it "the Hayekian notion that we are on the road to serfdom." He is not just mocking Hayek, but the entire classical liberal tradition, as well as the Enlightenment ideas that informed the founding fathers in their limited government philosophy. In chapter 1 of The Road to Serfdom Hayek lamented the abandonment of classical liberal ideas in countries that had been adopting fascism and socialism (and its close cousin, New Dealism) during the 1930s and '40s by saying:

We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.

This is what Kristol and his fellow neocons are so opposed to: the same philosophy of individualism that early and mid twentieth century tyrants from Mussolini to Hitler to Stalin understood as being their biggest philosophical roadblock. "Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm of anxiety about the growth of the state," Kristol smugly pronounces, repudiating the ideology of the American founders.

And it is not an exaggeration to say that the neocons repudiate the basic political philosophy of the founders, even if they hypocritically invoke the founders’ words from time to time in their political speeches and writings. Just recall some of the harsh anti-government rhetoric of the founders. To Jefferson, "on the tree of liberty must spill the blood of patriots and tyrants." And, "a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."

Patrick Henry urged his fellow Virginians to take up arms against the British government "in the holy cause of liberty" and warned that it is the tendency of all centralized governmental powers to "destroy the state government[s], and swallow the liberties of the people." This of course finally happened in April of 1865, a month the neocon "Civil War" historian Jay Winik says "saved America."

In his Farewell Address George Washington warned that special interest groups in a democracy "are likely, in the course of time . . . to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reigns of Government." Sounds like a perfect description of the neocon cabal.

James Madison pronounced that "it is in vain" to expect that politicians in a democracy would ever render clashing political interests "subservient to the public good." And Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, and in its worst state an intolerable one."

Kristol repeats his old refrain that "libertarian conservatives" are different from neocons because they are supposedly "unmindful of the culture." He is either oblivious to or willfully ignores the fact that it has been libertarian scholars who have done more than anyone to research and write about the damage to the American culture inflicted by the welfare state (family breakup, rampant illegitimacy, loss of work incentives, short-sightedness, slothfulness, etc.). Neocons ignore all of this vast libertarian literature and continue to champion an expanded welfare state while pretending to be protectors of "the culture."

Nor does Kristol acknowledge that it is libertarians who have done more than anyone to expose how the government’s war on drugs has created a criminal culture, a bloody and violent culture, a culture that traps young children into short crime-ridden lives, and a culture that corrupts the police and the judicial system. Neocons all support an even more vigorous war on drugs while pretending to be ever so concerned about "the culture."

I can’t help but point out that the self-appointed neocon culture and morality czar, "Blackjack" Bill Bennett, recently revealed to the world what his idea of "culture" is: Sitting on a vinyl stool at a Las Vegas casino at 3 A.M. pouring thousands of dollars into one-armed bandits while being served free drinks by cocktail waitresses barely out of their teens and dressed like hookers. (Bennett admitted to having blown some $8 million at Vegas casinos in recent years).

In foreign policy Kristol says neocons are, well, imperialists. For a "great power" there are no boundaries to its pursuit of "national interest." He says we have an "ideological interest" to defend, and that means endless warfare all around the globe to ostensibly "defend" that ideology. (And Mark Twain thought TR was insane.) Of course, someone has to decide for us what that "ideological interest" is, and then force the population, with the threat of imprisonment or worse (for nonpayment of taxes, for instance) to support it.

In Kristol’s case, his primary ideological rationale for military intervention is: "We feel it necessary to defend Israel today" in the name of democracy. Well, no we don’t. If Irving Kristol wants to grab a shotgun and take the next flight to Tel Aviv "to defend Israel" then Godspeed, and I will offer to buy him a first-class plane ticket. But leave me and my family out of it.

Translating "we feel it necessary to defend Israel" from neoconese, we get this: "Young American soldiers must die in defense of Israel." Like hell they must. Young Americans who join the military for patriotic reasons do so because they believe they are defending their country. It is a fraud and an abomination to compel them to risk their lives for any other country, whether it is Israel, Canada, Somalia, or wherever.

The Godfather concludes his essay by gloating over how neoconservatism is "enjoying a second life" in the current Bush administration, with its massive expansion of domestic spending, record budget deficits, lying us into war, TR style, and of course killing. Lots of killing. That he used the word "enjoyed" to describe all of this speaks volumes about "Godfather" Kristol and his neo-comrades.

[Korth]

Maybe I should post the entire article and get a thread going on it.

Please do so.

[JohnGalt]

We are in agreement.

Why did you feel the need to reply that post back to me?

If there is one thing I had hoped you would take from our exchange is that my side of the culture is free-thinking. Just because you agree with Corporal Hitler on one point, does note mean you subscribe to the whole program. Just like the Irving Kristol and the Marxists.

[Restorer]

Mea culpa.

I assumed you were attempting to discredit what I said by pointing out that Hitler agreed with it. As I noted, this is not a valid debating point.

If this was not your intent, I apologize for the misunderstanding.

[ninenot]

Isolationism beats the hell out of stationing US regulars every 1000 miles or so around the globe.

On the other hand, we could declare the restriction on assasinations void and go get the people who are problems, as long as we can document that such action was defensive.

[Burkeman1]

That one line caused me to start rethinking our actions.

Yes, it was actually that very line that stuck with me and nagged at me.

[u-89]

You compare me to Baghdad Bob yet offer no substantial rebuttal to the facts listed in post 61. Those facts are historic realities so there is only room for a differing conclusion drawn from those facts. Since you don't like my take how do you define our actions?

Your rambling paragraphs about anti-Semitism, paleocons, the New Left, quotas, neocon luminaries, anti-gay remarks and Pearl Harbor are a bit difficult to respond to as the message is somewhat muddled. I'll pick a couple of lines though.

> America IS a good nation

This statement is simplistic and sloppy. You seem to combine many diverse elements under a broad and loose generalization. There are and have been many good people in America who do and have done many good works. What the government is and does should not be included in individual or small private group efforts. The principles that founded our government, a high point in human events, are long dead and gone, betrayed by dishonest activists and judicial tyranny based on socialist/marxist contempt for limited government and personal liberty. Seeing people in the collective and as one enitity defined by the government is a leftist notion. Did you say you were a neocon?

> our military should be as strong as we can make it and as prepared to do what is right and good;

Are you implying there is a mission beyond defense of American territory that is "right and good"? It sounds that way. Do you mean right and good things like securing foreign countries for US oil corporations, er, I mean regime change, nation building, spreading democracy?

> pacifism and isolationism are ross embarassments to any nation

Who among libertarians or traditional conservatives is calling for pacifism? Defense of the nation is constitutional i.e one of the few legitimate functions of the government.
How is peaceable trade with all and permanent entangling alliances with none or not searching the world for monsters to destroy isolation? Really, come on now. Isolation is what ancient China once was - cutting off all contact with the outside world. Just who in America is calling for that? The isolation line is a popular retort but it is inaccurate to the point of being dishonest.

> The original editors of National Review other than Buckley were all refugees from the hard left

And don't forget the CIA connections. Their mission was to get the right wing to accept the establishment's program i.e. the internationalist world vision of the progressives and socialists under the old ruse of the enemy is at the gate. They have served their masters well.

[Avoiding_Sulla]

Thank you BE. I had once asked LCS about these distinctions. You just filled in the picture some more.

[RaginCajunTrad]

I guess Rep Paul will be personna non grata at the White House and some other places.

[Burkeman1]

Interesting? Sobran is "brilliant" but yet destroyed himself because he "hates Jews"? Geesh- this "anti semitism" must be a catching disease because it seems anyone one the right who has the slightest question about this current gulf war seems to "catch" this strange disease called "anti semitism" as well?

[BlackElk]

Sobran's problems long predate the Iraqi War of 2003 and the Gulf War of 1991. I do not doubt that a rising tide of left-wing anti-Semitism has fueled the knee jerk antwar mania of the left. There is some on the "right" as well but there are certainly some folks who regard themselves as conservative who are simply allergic to a manly and interventionist foreign policy, recognizing that it is better to batter them in Baghdad than to have to pummel them in Peoria among American wives, children and old fplks. Do you really think Sobran is prospering professionally since being launched by Buckley from NR?

[BlackElk]

I have clicked on the link which identifies Marx as one of 58 individual signatories of the International Workingman's Association and as Corresponding Secretary for Germany. The archivist claims without any prood that the letter was actually written by Marx. It may well have been a letter of CYA boilerplate from the Marxists generally. Though purportedly writtenm in 1864 after the election of that year, it was first published in November, 1865 (in an obscure newspaper), when Lincoln, as a result of assassination, had become a secular saint. I have read the link. Nice find. I am not, however, impressed with the document for the foregoing reasons. I used the volume of Marx's Civil War Dispatches for the London Times as a source for my senior thesis in American Diplomatic History of the Civil War WEra. Marx was brutal in criticism of Lincoln which is another reason to believe that either the document you reference was not written by Marx or was political CYA for his buddies.

Murray Rothbard is a verry interesting guy but there are only so many major philosophical changs that one may undergo without forfeiting some impact. Hanging with Rand's circle of amoral atheists, marrying a "believer" in God (an Episcopalian) and being purged from Rand's dogmatic sewing circle, being a sharp libertarian historian and economist, spending his final years adbvocating alliance of Religious Right and Libertarians. A brilliant career cut all too short by death but not at all consistent from period to period. I had not known that he had flirted with paleos and that is certainly not to his credit nor is the hysterical quote.

There is no "paleo" movement and has not been one since 12/7/41 and even that is a very unfair rap on Lindbergh, Flynn and Garrett to compae them with these modern "paleos."

Once more. There are neo-conservatives and their circle is limited to a small group of aging former liberal scholars, mostly New York Jews, who have contributed much to the conservative movement without being fully on board. There are conservatives: the basic movement since 12/7/41: YRs, YAF, CRs, NR, Human Events, et al. We are nt Menshaviks.

There are a few handfuls of "paleos", eccentric trads, not terribly interested in politics because they are not very good at it and their ideas are not very widely acceptable. They are defined by narrow notions of the nation's role in world affairs and resentment of the conservative movement for not taking them seriously. They are soil and bloodline conservatives and they are an embarassment to our country and our conservative movement.

[BlackElk]

Calling itself a NATION.

[BlackElk]

The Republican and conservative places unless the subject is abortion. Ron Paul has gone from courageous brand-new Congressman to irrelevancy.

[BlackElk]

My friend, it depends on where they are stationed and why as to whether foreign deployments make sense. Isolationism is gone forever. Interventionism (unilateral if possible) and pre-emption beat the hell out of the alternatives. If we have to fight them in Milwaukee or Rockford, they better be home grown. Foreign enemies should be stomped on their own turf.

Your second paragraph makes much sense. I have always felt that tose responsible should be first to die and the only ones to diie, if possible. I am flexible on the documentation.

[BlackElk]

If the message seems muddled other than the last paragraph's editing omissions, go to your community college for remedial reading and try to get permission to use conservative texts to kill two educational birds with one stone.

1. You parrot the Iraqi line. Hence: Baghdad Bob.

2. Pay close attention. I am only going to repeat this for you this last time lest you get the idea that neo-Neville Chamberlainism is EVER going to be acceptable again as any kind of "conservatism." NEOCONSERVATIVES: A relatively small group of very old and usually Jewish ex-liberals and ex-leftists who do not fully accept economic conservatism but have made distinguished contributions to conservatism as prebviously posted. See Irving Kristol's Two Cheers for Capitalism. CONSERVATIVES: The conservative movement post 12/7/41 which believes and believed in an aggressive, interventionist foreign and military policy to advance American interests, social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, guns, lowest taxes, low public spending other than military. See Ronald Reagan.

"PALEOs": not conservatives, unemployable social eccentrics angry at Reagan for not hiring them, "constitutionalist" poseurs, people who consort with the likes of Raimondo.

You complain that calling the "paleocons" isolationists is dishonest???????? Your ranting that assumes that actual conservatives have any use for the CIA sounds like a delusion of the International ANSWER crowd. We all thought that Castro got his job via the incompetence of the Ivy League liberal weenies running the CIA and kept his job via the same.

America IS a good nation on balance whther the habitual malcontents like to think so or not.

Ranting about US corporations and oil or the evil CIA does not suggest your conservatism.

Internationalism is another diplo-weenie scheme to tie the US down an restrict its freedom of intervention. In the last analysis, the air power, naval power and infantry power o the US accomplishes far more than a lot more useless diplomatic yak-yak.

Do not assume that I accept your misuse of terms, either.

[JNB]

The term Paleo-Con, as used here on FR is ill defined. Many people will call anyone who wants immigration dramatically reduced and anyone who wants FAIR trade, with use of import duities if need be, and anyone who wants to stop job outsourcing is called a paleo-conservative. Most Freepers including myself who are put in the Paleo-Con group share little of the foreign policy(outside of economics) views of the likes of Lew Rockwell, and realise that isolationism is not a viable option, nor has been since Pearl Harbor.

One thing that many so called conservative smay have a problem with people they view as paleo-cons is that "paleos" tend to not view themselves as Americans first, but as part of somthing bigger, namely Western Civilisation, and defense of the Westeren Culture, and will not be silent when they think the US is doing the wrong thing. "My country right or wrong" is not what they believe in.

[RaginCajunTrad]

"Do you really think Sobran is prospering professionally since being launched by Buckley from NR?"

The last time I checked, prospering professionally did not necessarily correlate with being right or wrong on any particular issue.

[JohnGalt]

And just to be clear Richard Perle is a fine upstanding man, the embodiment of conservatism?

Self-government has nothing to do with Rs and Ds and 'politics' but through sound institutions. You may have accepted the statist mantra of liberal democracy, which by your posts you seem to almost deify, but I cling to a Patrick Henry world view that its the institutions themselves that preserve liberty not 'democracy' my Jacobinist friend.

But then Irving has granted that preservation of liberty is not his intention and yet you call him friend....? Strange days indeed.

[RaginCajunTrad]

"They are soil and bloodline conservatives and they are an embarrassment to our country and our conservative movement."

If you sir are talking about Buchanan, Sobran, Alan Keyes, Howard Phillips, among others, I must disagree. I guess you would be embarrassed by George Washington for advising us to avoid "foreign entanglements."

When intervention is called for, I believe we should take action. However, I believe that whether under Clinton or Bush, we have become promiscuous in projecting our force.

As to projecting our values on other countries, well, it would be nice if we would send them the "right" values. We do not need to export MTV, Planned Parenthood, video games, violent and sexual movies, lewd styles of dress, etc, etc. If we free the women in Afghanistan from their burkas and replace them with lewd dress, Planned Parenthood, abortion, the "right" to exotic dance, we have simply exchanged one form of cruelty for another.


We also do not, should not force democracy on them. If they want a monarchy, it is not for us to decide. If they want a theocracy, it's for them to decide. Myself, I wish we would go back to a true republican form of govt.

Buchanan has reminded us that we are a republic, not an empire. The Roman empire fell, the British empire fell. We will fall too if we stay an imperialist nation. We must find balance.

The neocons are simply big govt imperialists and need to go away or merge with the big govt neodems.

[mr.pink]

This has been a great thread to read and I have one question.

Where exactly has Richard (40,000 troops ought to do it) Perle been hiding the last couple of months?...and why is he hiding?

Considering he was one of the main architects of the Iraqi war, one would think he'd have at least taken a media friendly victory lap by now.