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

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.

While I am Catholic, I respect a useful operational concept of Orthodox and Chassidic Jews: Building a fence around Torah. They so revere Torah that they not only strive to obey it but to reach well beyond it, obeying an even stricter concept in many ways lest they get sloppy and inadvertently violate Torah itself.

Likewise it is better to fight our enemies in the Middle East on their turf at the risk of our soldiers and theirs but also with any civilian risk being theirs and any damage to property being theirs as well than to ignore their vows of destroying us, our religions, our civilization, our way of life and wait for the airliners full of our folks to be hijacked in our country and sent against White House, Congress, World Trade Center and Pentagon. If there must be a next time here, Mecca would make a good target along with the Dome of the Rock, Medina and anyone vowing vengeance. They should know that in advance as an incentive to corral Muhammed el Rootie Kazootie and the mad bombers. Enough of this.

You and I must have very different reactions to the goings on in Israel (the canary in the coal mine). I want these guys done BEFORE they start blowing up school buses here. If they will muder Israeli children, they will murder our children. In our world, we are NOT geographicaly protected as once we were, if at all. If we give up internationalist pretensions of how good our victory will be for them and concentrate on interventionist strikes that are good for us. We are not making enemies. The Islamonuts (not all Muslims) are our enemies and have been for a very long time and will be until they are crushed.

As to offense, few people of whatever persuasion had the effrontery or brazen nerve to hijack soviet airliners in the heyday of the KGB much less fly them into the Kremlin. They were far too feared for that. Soviet ambassadors were not assassinated. Likewise. Other than in the foolish overextension of trying to occupy Afghanistan, few soviet military barracks were attacked or soviet personnel. Likewise. As Macchiavelli observed, given a choice, it is better to be feared than to be loved. However unpopular, that is still the practical view. The UN, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, their collective Belgian and Luxembourgian poodles, and what not can fry ice. So can the UN. If we do some good along the way, it is nothing to be ashamed of.

Ahhhh, but Buchanan did not discover and embrace the heresies of Raimondo on foreign non-policy and military non-war until much later on.
First off, Raimondo is not the progenitor of Buchanan's position, and you know it. Secondly, Buchanan, on foreign policy, has not changed as much as you implied. It is not hard to make a distinction between Soviet Communist territories which are expansionistic by definition, ESPECIALLY those in the Western Hemisphere, and little hornets' nests in the Middle East, who NOBODY (but a handful of neo-cons) thought of going after until after 9/11. Buchanan was never one of these, "You vill haf democracee and ve vill tell you how you are to doo it" types. Reagan did cut and run in Lebanon when it was clear our presence there was serving no useful purpose, and all we were doing was exposing our men for no good reason. In any event, priorities are called for. Don't tell me to be gung ho in a war against Iraq, when Communist China has publicly stated that they are willing to nuke L.A. if we stop them from enslaving Taiwan. I could understand the argument that this is not a fight we can fight and win right now without unacceptable losses. What I cannot understand is putting OUR economy under THEIR control (they could turn our Just-In-Time consumer based economy inside out by simply nationalizing all their businesses tomorrow, or giving them to politically favored sons.) through our trade policies. On the Hit Parade of rogue nations that actually are a direct threat as a nation to the U.S., Iraq wasn't even on the radar. That is whether they had WMD or not. Finally, Frum has been caught in so many lies and embellishments that I do not believe anything that the "fired one" says. Reagan was an avid and active supporter of FDR and no more an ancestral Republican green-eyeshaded bean counter than me or at least half of thee.
It is the neo's who (for the most part) get the warm fuzzies or a case of "big-tent-itis" whenever someone is a fiscal conservative/social moderate. Buchanan has never particularly been a bean counter, and paleo's tend to consider principles over numbers running. If a neo-conservative is a liberal who got mugged, the paleo-conservative is a fellow who decided from the beginning that he did not want ANYbody to be mugged. Buchanan (as an example of Paleo) has a genuine deep-rooted sympathy for the working man that FDR could fake, I suppose. The David Frums of the world do not have it.

The Bush doctrine seems to be a strange amalgam of Wilsonism and TRism mized together. I am not comfortable with it, and never will be. Empire does not suit America.

Mr. S, as you well know, we have to agree to disagree on these matters of American foreign policy, American military policy, American strategic policy, and of Justine Raimondo ?????????? as an acceptable foreign policy guru for anyone conservative. I have the advantage of age and of having been a very active participant in three of the movement organizations: YAF, YRs and CRs. The word "antiwar" is enough to nauseate any veteran of the conservative movement in the 1960s and 1970s who has retained the original principles.

The Sharon Statement of YAF is available, unchanged, online as written in 1960. Its criterion for foreign policy is whether a particular action serves the just interests of the United States. You may disagree as to whether hammering the Islamofascisti into the desert rather than fighting them off in Manhattan or at our nation's capitol is in our interest or our just interest. You may disagree on whether we should stand idly by while our ally (like it or not) Israel suffers further actions by the generic and morally degenerate Muhammed el Rootie Kazootie and his homicide bombings of buses full of Hasidic Jewish children, including five Americans. I cheer when the IDF surgically takes out a carful of Hamas cowardly thug leaders who arrange the slaughter of little children.

I do not personally care whether those Islamofascist enclaves have democracy or not. In some ways, we would be better off if they did not so that we can squeeze their bosses until they bleed and surrender.

It is harder than you think to distinguish between the expansionism of the soviets and the expansionism of the so-called religion of peace.

Buchanan was NEVER an isolationist until after the Reagan administration was over. Like thee and me he was not impressed with Daddy Bush ideologically or as to his failure to care much about social issues. Patrick found his way to neo-isolationism and Raimondo was more than willing to attempt to divide the right by being the foreign policy court jester. Bill Buckley does not write for Pravda but Justine does. Justine is, shall we say, a little weaker than Daddy Bush on social issues by lifestyle and commitments and not a fit ally for traditional Catholics.

So don't be gung ho about the war with Iraq. We have an elected government and a volunteer military which should suffice.

The Chicoms are certainly a problem. All in good time. All in good time. We were set back a bit by the Arkansas Antichrist's enthusiasm for handing the Chicoms our latest technology of his time. We need to recover the massiveness of our edge by further technological racing to achieve the necessary ability to face them down if possible and deal with them more militantly as necessary or possible. Our Pacific fleet is a serious stumbling block to Chicom ambitions to seize Taiwan. Even after receiving from the Arkansas Antichrist all that technology, the Chicoms have done nothing but saber rattle as they have done for 55 years. Even the Chicom leaders understand that they will lose only one war and that, when they have the opportunity to lose one, they will lose it to the U.S.

When Reagan left Lebanon, it was a low priority compared to bringing down the Iron Curtain and the soviets, whose downfall has freed necessary resources to deal with the pestilences we are dealing with now. We also used battleship New Jersey and a heavy cruiser until New Jersey arrived to deal death from the sky (without POWs) onto the Bekaa Valley training camps of those responsible for the Marine barracks bombing. Those camps were a few millenia deeper in the Stone Age when the Navy finished its work there on that go round. I don't think Ronaldus Maximus would agree that there was no good reason or useful purpose.

You will surely concede that I have never, in all of our conversations, been a devotee of free trade any more than you or PJB and certainly not of exporting American jobs, much less to the Chicoms.

There are three groups who are being purposefully confused by political prestadigitation by the paleotheorists that Frum so well describes.

First there are actual neo-conservatives. There are more of them than ever there will be of paleos and they have had far greater impact on public policy which is understandable because they represent numerous constituencies in transition. Nonetheless they are a very small group of refugees from the Democratic Party: Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the late Senator Moynihan, the late Senator Scoop Jackson, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Donald Kagan, and a few others. Every generation of conservatives has had its refugees from the left. Winston Churchhill is famed for saying that the conservative under thirty has no heart and the liberal over thirty has no brain. Other than Bill Buckley, the early editors of National Review: John Chamberlain, Willmoore Kendall, Will Herberg, Frank Meyer, Elsie Meyer, James Burnham, Max Eastman were all refugees from the Stalinist, Trotskyite or Socialist left. As Catholics, we do not reject John Henry Cardinal Newman, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Sam Brownback, Robert Bork or so many others. That they are converts is a cause of joy and not for grumbling. Neo-conservatives thus defined were mugged by the McGovernization of a Democratic Party which was once willing to defend freedom and the United States in foreign affairs. Their arival in supoport of conservatism is welcome even if they are not perfect.

A second group are conservatives. They would include the conservative movement of my youth: YAF, YRs, CRs, Eagle Forum, American Conservative Union, National Review, Human Events, Conservative Book Club, taxpayer groups, Gun Owners of America, Richard Viguerie groups, Morton Blackwell groups and the many, many others which coalesced to elect Reagan as president and simmered with an increasing crescendo of resentment against all things leftist (including "antiwar" movements to make any sensible person gag) through LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Our enemies (and particularly our "antiwar" enemies) had to wait until 1992 to elect their Bobby Kennedy clone in Southern drag. Now they want to elect his wife. These are and have been since Pearl Harbor the conservatives and the conservative movement. It was and is a broad coalition of groups: moral groups, financial groups, military groups, taxpayer groups, gun groups, sportsmen. It does not believe with the Flemings that labor unions are all inherently communist. Nor with Justine that the extension of American military power by intervention in what our nation deems its best interest is somehow a tragedy. It does not believe with Justine or with libertarians that homosexuality and abortion are just acceptable alternative lifestyles and that if one does not like them one need not participate. The conservatives were not mugged by anyone but the tax collectors, the gun grabbers and the lifestyle left.

And now, "paleoconservatives" are the folks who want to take the remains of the good reputations of John Flynn (your former neighbor and mine), Charles Lindbergh, Colonel McCormick, Garrett Garrett and maybe even Robert Welch out of the grave from which they shall not rise until judgment day and illicitly poach on those reputations to claim a legacy not theirs to claim. As Frum has explained (and I have no doubt that book length explanations in minute detail will follow), we have here a group of ideological eccentrics, styling themselves "paleoconservatives" and nanny-nagging the legitimate conservatives in some futile effort to restore the personal and political misery of the Flynns, Lindberghs and McCormicks of yesteryear as "conservatism" or "paleoconservatism" or whatever. They will not concede their distance from social acceptability as the cause of their failure to secure coveted jobs and credentialling from the Reagan administration. Reagan often said of his more embarassing supporters: "Just because they support me, does not mean that I support them." Our local institute of paleo-Serbophiles (an interesting and picturesque little culture to be preserved, as though even interventionists, much less paleo-isolationists, should care a feather or a fig about such an insignificant little satrapy) devotes itself increasingly to love for our French enemies, the Dixie Tricks, all things anti-Jewish, and above-all the mantra of the year: (delivered in grave tones): "Once a nation embarks upon the path to empire, it will surely seal its ultimate destruction." This theory works for leftists like Paul Kennedy, Yale historian and otherwise an academic shill for Planned Barrenhood (quelle surprise!), and for "paleowhatevers" like the institute. While conceding that Rome embarked upon the path to empire more than 700 years BC by appropriating forcefully those Sabine women to bear Roman children, and that the Roman Empire "fell" a mere 1100 or 1200 years later, I am having a problem with tying the alleged cause to the alleged effect. Sounds more like entropy to me.

PJB: was certainly no "paleo-isolationist" under his political patron Richard Nixon. PJB arose NOT in the conservative movement but in the employ of Nixon, who was NOT, shall we say, a movement kind of guy: yours or mine. PJB was no "paleo-isolationist" under Reagan either. Neither Pat Buchanan nor any other conservative in Reagan's administration uttered a paleopeep in protest of doubling the Navy to 600 ships, bringing the battlewagons out of mothballs and very expensively refitting them as strategic weapons, advocating the Strategic Defense Initiative, raising military pay and recruitment, deploying Pershing missiles in Europe despite the squealing of the Euro-surrender monkeys, delivering a strategic airstrike against Qaddafi and his family in retaliation for Lockerbie which seems to have worked a permanent improvement in Qaddafi's manners, the walk in the woods at Reyjavik, the Evil Empire speech and myriad other efforts.

The allegation of empire as a goal of American foreign and military policy is ludicrous on its face. If we are going to fight terrorism in the region, we need a base. Iraq's desert is that base since it allows us to pressure the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians and others in the region. We cannot very well practice pure gunboat diplomacy in the desert. Sand clogs the screws. It is always useful to have infantry and armor and artillery components. Turkey might have made this unnecessary but Turkey did not. This is no more imperialism than Alfred Thayer Mahan's policy of acquiring Pearl Harbor, Subic Bay and other naval bases.

I know you do not agree with the above. I am sorry that you don't. You are one of the very few people who has ever changed my mind about any issue as an adult. That does not mean that you should attempt to climb Everest shoeless in a teeshirt and Bermudas without ropes, pitons, hammers or a radio.

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