The Current FReepathon Pays For The Current Quarter's Expenses?
Posted on 08/14/2014 7:20:17 AM PDT by don-o
In introducing his new book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America?
Straussians, writes Gottfried, “wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the Enlightenment, once properly instructed, should be able to carry out this … task.”
For traditional conservatives, before the nation is born, ”ethnic and cultural preconditions” must exist. All “successful constitutional orders,” he writes, “are the expressions of already formed nations and cultures.”
To the old right, America as a nation and a people already existed by 1789. The Constitution was the birth certificate the nation wrote for itself, the charter by which it chose to govern itself. The real America had been born in men’s hearts by the time of Lexington and Concord in 1775.
In a recent issue of Modern Age, Jack Kerwick deals with this divide.
Irving Kristol, he writes, and quotes that founding father of modern neoconservatism, saw America as “a ‘creedal’ nation, a nation to which anyone can belong irrespective of ‘ethnicity or blood ties of any kind, or lineage, or length of residence even.’”
“For Kristol and his ilk,” Kerwick goes on, “one’s identity as an American is established by nothing more than an intellectual exercise whereby one rationally assents to the propositions encapsulated in the Declaration.”
“Given this unqualified quasi-religious commitment to ‘the Rights of Man,’ (for a neoconservative) America must be future-oriented, for as long as human rights are threatened, and regardless of where they are imperiled, her work in the world will never be complete.”
Here one arrives at a root cause of the conflict between neocons and the right.
(Excerpt) Read more at theimaginativeconservative.org ...
Pat never forgave those Jews for getting positions in the Reagan administration and installing tax cuts and ending the Soviet Union without war. But Pat was in the Reagan administration, too. I believe he left under a cloud.
I think the idea of neoconservatism as really just another utopian “creedal” political worldview is insightful and profound. Neoconservatism also is doomed to failure, and results in democracy becoming a moral law for the world that must be enforced.
Within this nation, creedal Americanism results in zero cultural assimilation, because all one has to do is confess the creed (in Spanish, or whatever) to be an American in America, while not actually being American in any meaningful way.
The difference between neocons and conservatives is that the neocons are big government leftist supporters of the NWO.
The Current FReepathon Pays For The Current Quarter's Expenses?
Really? You cannot understand his thesis?
This is where it gets sticky for me. To the extent that America conducts foreign affairs with any nation, I think the state of Israel must be an ally. And Buchanan has been tagged as anti Israel. Is that justified?
I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could claim legitimacy for groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Pat has internalized it now, but being anti Israel was, at first, a convenient stick for Pat. He could say that his hatred for Israel is why he is considered anti-Semitic, instead of his anti Israel pronouncements actually being a cover for his anti-Semitism and frustration.
Paul Gottfried is Jewish.
A self hating one if there ever was one. A Jew for the anti-Semite, the late Joe Sobran? The guy is crazy. Is he the one that Tom Sowell said was one of the bad right wing professors in one of his book on education?
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