Posted on 12/27/2002 7:01:27 AM PST by JohnGalt
December 24, 2002
THE DESPAIR OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES by Thomas Fleming
The human capacity for self-deception and self-righteous indignation is almost unlimited. Take the case of discredited Bush speechwriter David Frum. Like the rest of the neoconservative brotherhood, Frum has made a spectacle of himself over the years, telling any tales that will serve the neoconservative cause while pretending to be "an objective observer" of the conservative movement, and sucking up mercilessly to the Republican Party. But let a Republican fall from grace, and he—and they all—are after him like jackals attacking a wounded lion.
Trent Lott is a poor politician and unworthy of respect (except to the members of his party); Strom Thurmond, whom I met several times, was an odious character throughout his career. They are not my leaders, but the leaders of David Frum's party, and any Republican employee with a spark of loyalty or decency would have treated the leaders he was helping to topple with a least a modicum of respect. But not content with attacking Lott's character and purging the GOP and the conservative movement of the "racists," namely, anyone who politely disagrees with quotas, affirmative action, forced busing, and the judicial destruction of the US Constitution, Frum now goes on to say it is time to get rid of the anti-Semites.
Who are these anti-Semites? Why, the paleoconservatives, whose existence as a movement he denies. Does he contradict himself, very well then, he contradicts himself, for he contains multitudes (or, as they say back in Strom's home state, he's more full of s-t than a Christmas turkey). By the way, for the neocons who don't know American literature, that was a reference to Walt Whitman—the multitudes part, David, not the turkey.
It used to be said that an anti-Semite was anyone who won an argument with Norman Podhoretz. Frum goes farther. Now an anti-Semite is anyone who uses the term neoconservative. See, it's a codeword. (Forgive me: I can't help writing like an adolescent when I so much as think about NR's new kids on the block.) The logic is staggering. Trotskyists reinvent themselves and make up a word for their assumed identity, but we are anti-Semites if we dare use it in print. And since when is neoconservatism a Jewish movement? Virtually everyone, gentile or Jew, who writes for the Weekly Standard and National Review is a neoconservative, and so are Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and the editors of Crisis. (For the record, we have published some academic neoconservatives and admire many of their heroes like Edward Shils and Edward Banfield.) What Frum apparently means is that he regards neconservatism as some kind of Jewish conspiracy with gentile front men. Now that's anti-Semitic paranoia.
The sheer nuttiness of Frum is worth reading, if only as a reductio ad absurdum. (That's a Latin expression for neocon, David.) Bob Novak, for example, is a newcomer to conservatism, because he once supported Wendell Wilkie. I know Frum is only a poor Canadian (Next, we'll be accused of anti-Canadism), but can't he check an almanac? Wilkie was out of politics and Novak had turned conservative before Frum was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Frum insists that Irving Kristol was a conservative before 1972, but pace (translation, "peace to") my late friend Russell Kirk, whom the neocons accused (along with George Bush I and the Pope) of being anti-Semitic, Irving Kristol evolved at best into a Truman Democrat. Novak's liberalism, in other words, was slightly to the right of the godfather's conservatism.
But wait, there's more. Novak used to be a liberal because he supported civil rights. Frum says this even while declaring that support for civil rights is a sine qua non (that means, "without which not" or "something essential") of "mainstream" (i.e., neo-) conservatism. In a nasty bit of innuendo he would like us to believe that Novak, born and brought up Jewish (and later became a Catholic convert) is really an anti-Semite like all other paleoconservatives. Americans used to call this kind of broad-brushed tarring of enemies "bigotry"—and some of us still do.
Perhaps Frum would feel more comfortable back in his own homeland, where he could make it illegal to criticize David Frum. In Canada, it is already illegal to prefer one ethnic group to another and actionable even to mention Biblical strictures against sodomy in a sermon. From the beginning, the neoconservatives (if you'll pardon the expression) have worked to eliminate all vestiges of conservative thought from the conservative movement. Now, presiding over a movement they have destroyed, the David Frums want to silence all dissent.
You may think I making all this up in order to slur poor Frum, who has told lies about me in print on several occasions before I told him I would never give him another interview. (His response was to call me "weird" and "a failed poet"—or was it a "failed classicist"?) Read his hilarious piece (on National Review On-Line, the best internet source for unintended humor) for yourself, and you can find out what weird is.
Oh, just one more point. Frum says that someone told him that among ourselves paleoconservatives now use the term "judeocritical" instead of anti-Semitic. Another masterpiece of infantile innuendo. In thousands of hours of conversations with the so-called paleconservative leaders, I have never once heard such an expression. They desperately want to think we lie awake worrying about the brilliance of Krauthamer, the savagery of Frum, the wit of Jonah Golberg, and the devastating good looks and robust good health of John Podhoretz, but, although they may find this impossible to believe, whole weeks and months go by in which I do not so much as hear the word neoconservative, much less read the "mewling and puking" they ask us to admire.
They cannot believe this, because in their solipsistic (oh, just use a dictionary) universe, these little fellows make up their world as they go along. They have to. Lacking all knowledge of history, literature, philosophy, and science, they have to construct useful myths to inflate their imaginary significance. If they had any importance, it was during the Reagan years, when they destroyed the conservative movement. Now, they are just an echo of New Republic leftism, useful—to some extent—in continuing the destruction of the old republic and in tearing up what is left of civilization, but incapable of saying anything that leftists have not been saying for 200 years. In that sense, they really are conservative.
To be an NR conservative these days, you have to applaud Norman Podhoretz's Christophobic new book as a great Christmas book. Podhoretz, in his latest incarnation as biblical scholar, "proves" that Isaiah's prophecies do not apply to Jesus Christ. Season's Greetings from National Review. Will Herberg, the righteous Jew who served as NR's religion editor, must be rolling in his grave.
Finally (and this really is finally), neoconservatives don't care one bit about anti-Semitism, because they care nothing at all for Judaism. Believing Jews and brave Israelis alike would spit on these little slanderers and cowards. If they ever wake up and find something to believe in, something to love, something to risk lives and careers on, then they might be worth something either as enemies or friends. Even a gang-banger who loves his brothers and his territory is more worthy of respect—though the negrophobic neoconservatives can never find anything good to say about real black people in America. The dirty little non-secret of the neoconservatives is their paranoid hatred and fear of African Americans. Beneath their angry diatribes against Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their denunciations of affirmative action lies the recognition that black males are men, whose virile capacity for both joy and violence intimidates them. I have heard this repeatedly from unnamed sources close to their movement.
We know what they hate (Arabs, blacks, Christians, conservatives, America down to 1970), but what do they love? Certainly not Israel, which is to them a purely abstract notion to be invoked in their struggle for wealth without work and success without talent. To neoconservatives, real Israelis, whom they are egging on to kill and die, are only pawns in their own dirty little game—and many Israelis know this.
There is a terrible struggle going on in the Middle East, and we (I only speak for us at Chronicles) would like to see both Israel and the United States survive and thrive in a world where Islamic aggression is the main enemy we face. Sensible Americans should be forging alliances based on America's strategic interests and our respect for an ally we ought to regard as a European colony in a hostile Islamic world. Using the charge of anti-Semitism to silence dissent is not only a dangerous tactic that will surely backfire by alienating more and more non-neo-conservatives, but it is also a despicable and cynical abuse of the authentic sufferings of Jewish people.
I would say "For shame," but Frum and his epicene little friends are incapable of shame or honor or courage. When the Jihad comes to North America, he'll be banging on our doors, begging us to protect him from the big bad Arabs. The sad part of it is, I'll probably let him in. I guess that makes me a Christian, which—in David Frum's eyes—makes me an anti-Semite.
Contrast this with how this clown in just his last breath was playing the wounded lamb stating that Frum was "purging" the "racists" who simply opposed affirmative action from the movement? Oh, but the neocons who do so are "negrophobes."
I once subscribed to Chronicles; I'm approaching the conclusion there is nothing or no one this guy, the editor, has a kind word to say about. To hear him tell it the only legitimate "conservatives" left are the intransigent, professionally pissed off band of cranks who write for that magazine.
I'm sympathetic to a lot of paleo philosophy. But this sour, pathetic little man does nothing but rage and spew just as you read here one issue after the other against enemies, real or imagined.
Life's too short to live in Tom Fleming's little imagined hell.
That is because old communists (neo-cons) brought the bitter debating tactics with them when the joined/took over the conservative movement and passed it on to their heirs.
Perhaps someday, someone will arrive at a workable definition and thus a working framework for conservatives
Unless classified by a prefix like paleo just consider any mention of conservative in today's world to mean neoconservative because they won. The battling going on now is just mopping up of the battlefield, elimination of small pockets of resistence and making sure old time conservatism is so thoroughly disgraced that no respectable person would consider reading about it much less joining the ranks.
That is certainly the classic meaning of the word, "conservative". The usual meaning of conservative in the American context, I tend to say, is a devotion to (1) limited government, (2) individual rights, (3) private property. This is what in another era would have been called a classic liberal, but is now generally called a conservative.
There is obviously a big overlap, as the classic liberal type of conservative is often also a classic conservative in the traditionalist sense; it only works in the US, though, where "traditional values" include a love for liberty and constitutionalist government.
I understand the devotion to heritage, but I always get queasy, as often when someone I am talking to starts talking about "heritage", I find out halfway into the conversation that the heritage he means is not the same one I mean. Which leads me to the final element in the conservative canon, which for me is absolute, which is (4) color-blind citizenship.
Conservatives, the limited government kind, after a lifetime of insisting on color-blind citizenship, all during the bad old days of Jim Crow, continue to insist on colorblind government. This was our position when our opponents were racialists of the traditionalist school, and it continues to be our position in the face of the current left-wing racialism.
Trent Lott forgot that, for a Republican, our "heritage" is precisely a devotion to color-blind citizenship. We support states rights, the 9th and 10th ammendments, but for their rightful purpose, which is to protect individual liberty, not as a pretext to oppress it. In joining the Republicans, he should have been adhering to our heritage, as a moral decision, making it his own. Not using it as a cover for another heritage that we rejected our entire history.
True. We live in a shallow, silly age. The decline has become rot.
I am not interested in getting into the terminology game, which seeks to hyphenate Conservative
The term "neo-Conservative," if used at all, should be reserved for new recruits into Conservative ranks
Those who coined the term are the ones doing the dividing and hyphenating and they chose the term neo-con with care and it doesn't mean new to conservatism it means a new kind of conservatism. They are so entrenched and empowered now that your sentiments, however noble are a losing cause
It's too bad that Goldwater reconstructed his own sorry arse in his later years.
The author is being mealymouthed if he denies that paleos believe neocons=Jews.
I've seen William Safire--who worked for Richard Nixon, for God's sake--called a "neocon" on this board.
As a conservative I never agreed with government welfare in principle and always took great offense when liberals claimed welfare reform was code for being anti-black. Similarly I take offense when using the term neo-con is equated to being an anti-semite. It happens that the people who started the movement and many who define themselves as neo-cons are Jewish but the movement is far from being a wholly owned and operated Jewish organization and I have not seen in print or heard talk of anyone who has claimed it so. Calling one who questions this "new" conservative philosophy anti-semitic is a viscious smear meant to kill and bury classical conservativism.
Is using the term neo-con now in the category of the dreaded "N" word? blacks can call themselves the word but no one else can or they are racist - so only neo-cons can use the term neo-con or it's a hate crime now, I see. This tactic was despicable when the leftists used it and I think it despicable when the right uses it. Oh I forgot the right is now run by old time communists (is being anti-communist also being anti-semitic?)
Absolutely true. Most of the Pro-Lifers are also Pro-Gunners (with some exceptions), and most all have kind words for Reagan and would consider themselves "Reaganites".
Even with the Paleos and the Neos, some more precise self-definition would be useful. You can usually tell a "Neo" from a "Paleo" on foreign policy (Neos are "globalists" and Paleos are "isolationists", to use two labels which usually offend the respectively labelled groups about equally) and on economic policy (Neos tend to be more favorable towards Big Government "social programs", Paleos tend to be more favorable towards Big Government tariffs and trade restrictions); but those are the main "identifiers" which immediately come to mind... lemme know if you think of any others.
The libertarians are standing over here on our side too, mostly watching us bicker and occasionally helping with the heavy lifting, but don't count themselves as conservatives per se though they are more like the Constitutionalists among the paleos than the liberals of the neos. Clear as mud, eh? 14 posted on 12/27/2002 11:00 AM PST by gnarledmaw
Again, I think it comes down to a matter of self-definition.
"Libertarianism" is a term with definite meaning, for the most part -- a North American libertarian and a South American libertarian and a European libertarian, around the globe and decade after decade, will ALL agree on the fundamental Libertarian Axiom, the Principle of Non-Aggression:
There will be some Regional differences; for example, Dutch libertarian Pim Fortuyn (recently assassinated by a "Green" environmental terrorist) was a staunch opponent of Muslim immigration into the Netherlands. But aside from such regional particularities, the term "libertarian" has a substantive and established definition, across the world and across the ages.
"Conservatism", on the other hand, can mean almost anything to anybody... from one region to another, or even within the same region, from one decade to another. And without such a fundamental soul of self-definition, "Conservatism" can't even conserve the matter of exactly who or what a "conservative" is... as is candidly illustrated by the intramural bickering above.
To: gnarledmaw -- Or you could say that libertarians are mostly "secular conservatives." 15 posted on 12/27/2002 1:35 PM PST by MySteadySystematicDecline
You could, but you'd be wrong -- at least these days.
The reason being, not that the term "libertarian" is changing, but that the intellectual vanguard of the Christian Right (such as RJ Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, accurately but very briefly identified in NewsWeek around two weeks after Reagan's inauguration as "the Think-Tank of the Religious Right") are steadily becoming steadily and progressively more libertarian. This is as it should be -- at its core, Libertarianism is just the "political" expression of the Ethical Law of Romans 13: 8-10:
The Non-Aggression Principle: "No one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, nor to delegate its initiation."
Judging by the previous experience of the Christian Right, late-1950s to early-1980s, it will take about 20 to 25 years before the Christian Right Movement "as a whole" is converted to the libertarian theonomy of the intellectual vanguard. But, that's simply a matter of time -- once you acheive ideological domination over a Movement's guiding think-tanks, you've basically captured the key fortress in the entire front line; the rest is just an extended mopping-up exercise.
Libertarians as "Constitutionalists"???????!!!!!, OH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 25 posted on 12/27/2002 7:48 PM PST by TJFLSTRAT
Of course.
Well, it's a good place to start, at any rate. Theonomic Libertarians tend to believe that even the strictest interpretation obf the Constitution grants the Federal Government more Power than is Biblically proper... but if the Government would restrict its operations to the most-limited possible interpretation of the Constitution, we'd be happy to argue from there that the Government should not even necessarily exercise every Power which the Constitution permits.
So, Libertarians are certainly Constitutionalists, in the sense that we believe that the strictest-possible interpretation of the Constitution should be the extreme-outside-limit of Government Power.
Sad, but true.
What's of interest here is how much Fleming mischaracterizes the neo-conservatives. The neos seem far less like the Old Leftists that their parents were in the 1930s, and more like slick, glib, opportunistic Ivy Leaguers that they themselves really are.
It's the paleos who have inherited the sectarian pettiness and resentments of the Old Left. Fleming's article is the sort of maniacal screed Trotskyites were writing in 1940.
While I would agree with you that people should not be arbitrarily held back because of their racial or other inherited traits, but allowed to achieve as their individual abilities and efforts warrant, that does not mean that a Society with diverse groups can just blithely imagine that everyone is the same. Nor is there anything wrong with Whites preferring Whites, Blacks preferring Blacks, Red men preferring Red men, etc., in their own private dealings. Republicans from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, certainly did not ascribe to a need to imagine that racial consciousness was wrong.
That said, it is very unfortunate that either party would want to pour gasolene on a smoldering problem, today, by politicizing it--read "demagoguing" it. Certainly there have been times when each party has done so, but latterly the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has taken such demagoguery to a new low. But that said, there is neither virtue nor conservatism in pretending that there are not differences between us. It is far better to discuss them in a spirit of good will, than arrogantly pretend there is virtue in not doing so.
Other than that, I applaud what you have to say, except for the suggestion that we should pass judgment on how others employ the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Clearly, the essence of freedom has always been the right to use your freedom in a manner of which others do not approve. When George Washington spoke of our system being dependent upon "private morals," he was not postulating Federal dictation of morals, but the individual responsibility of a people to make their own decisions and to respect the right of others to make their own decisions in all matters that were not part of the limited common sphere established.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Never underestimate the power of determined people of principle, willing to fight cynical pragmatism with analytic and principled pragmatism. The deck is no more completely stacked against the true Conservatives today, than it was stacked against the Left in America in the early days of the 20th Century, when a sustained ideological attack began to overturn our bastions, one after another. The Fabian Socialists captured Academia, because the then defenders of the older traditions had become stale--verbally defending their traditions in terms of question begging arguments. The Left seemed more aware of the broader issues involved. That their whole pursuit was based upon completely false premises, got lost in what seemed to be "new ideas," new approaches towards resolving old problems.
We can take America back, the same way we lost it. The exchange of ideas, at this very forum, is a very powerful tool in that quest. It is here that you have the intellectual foment that can lead to another change of direction. Never give up!
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Obviously, though, this does not include the freedom to oppress others. I will repeat my earlier statement, that the purpose of the 9th and 10th ammendments is similar to other provisions which separate power into the various branches of government, executive, legislative, judiciary, so that if one branch becomes oppressive, other branches can intervene.
State and local power must stand as a corrective to federal power, which must also stand as a corrective to state and local power. State and local authorities are the closest to the individual, and in a perfect world should be most responsive to local concerns. They are, however, also most easily corrupted, and most likely to exert abuse on an individual.
Anyone who has ever been hassled by corrupt inspectors, or deputies, or has seen the inner workings of local government, will know what I am talking about.
In the present world, it is the federal government that is out of control, using its unconstitutional authority to seize lands and dictate their use. Local episodes of corruption, and police criminality certainly exist, but are at levels one could consider "normal", in the sense that public jobs are always held by humans, and these things are always going to be with us. But there are sufficient correctives available, so that if you or I are beaten or unfairly prosecuted, we have options, and will likely eventually get a fair hearing.
This was not always so, particularly where black citizens were concerned, and when abuses occurred, local correctives were not always available or effective. These were the bad old days. If you believed in liberty, these days had to come to an end. Thank God, they have come to an end. If you listen to the racial entrepreneurs, you might not think so, but anyone with a memory for how things once were must recognize that the old days are gone.
The love of liberty, and the ability to live as a free man, is rooted in moral character. The ability, and desire, to govern oneself cannot be separated from morality, which means that culture, and character, and religion, matter.
But these things do not reside in the genes. Much of what we love about America comes out of Anglo-Saxon tradition, and Western philosophy combined with the Judeo-Christian prophets. The early revolutionaries who articulated these beliefs were largely English, or European. So its easy to conflate the love of liberty with European culture. But classic liberalism is a very special subset of European tradition. Other strains of European philosophy have opposed liberty at every step, sometimes with astonishing brutality.
The Brutes can certainly lay claim to their roots in Western Civilization, as can we. But they are rooted in precisely that part of Western Civilization that we have fought to put an end to. Remeber, the Pilgrims escaped from Europe. The Founding Fathers declared war on European political philosophy, and won their freedom from European philosophy by killing the agents of that philosophy. By force of arms, they rejected the legal tradition rooted in English tradition, to establish a new tradition, rooted in a special subset of English revolutionary thinking.
The lovers of liberty are conservatives, only in the American context, because liberty is embedded in the founding of the country. But American conservatives are not conservative in the larger context, but revolutionaries. If you look outside the US, we continue to upend whole societies just by our presence on this planet. A conservative outside the US may very well be our blood enemy, if he comes out of a tradition that does not value liberty.
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