Why Neo-Conservatives Are not Real Conservatives

I have always tried to figure out how real conservatives differ from neo-conservatives. I have listed a few points, with which you should feel free to agree or disagree with, and if you like, you can mention other ways in which you feel real conservatives and neocons differ.

1. Real conservatives (whether Old Rightists or New Rightists) are motivated by high moral principles and deep conviction, that the role of government in people's lives should be minimized, and people should be allowed to run their own lives. But Neo-conservatives are actually liberals and Marxists who pretend to be conservatives, and are motivated by nothing more than opportunism and hypocrisy, and have no moral principles worthy of mention.

2. Heros of real conservatives include individuals such as Gen. Douglass McArthur, Gen. George S. Patton, former Sen. Robert Taft, Robert E. Lee, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Alan Keyes. Heros of the neo-cons include Harry Truman, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Leon Trotsky, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, and Sen. John McCain.

3. Real conservatives always put the interests of America first, ahead of other nations. They also believe that institutions not elected by American voters, have no right to make decisions affecting the lives of Americans. But neo-conservatives support globalization, mass immigration, the WTO, the United Nations, and most other forms of globalism.

4. Real Conservatives often win elections on fundamental moral and constitutional issues like defending the lives of the unborn, the restoration of school prayer, the right of ordinary citizens in a democracy to defend themselves through protection of Second Ammendment rights, and the rebuilding of the Christian foundation that made America a great nation. Neo-cons win elections on materialistic issues like government entitlements, tax privileges for some, and whining about the dangers of the "religious right" and other "extremists" in an attempt to discredit real conservatives.

5. Real conservatives oppose New Deal policies which resulted in big government. Neo-Conservatives support the New Deal.

6. Real conservatives oppose political correctness and victimology. But neo-conservatives are the greatest promoters of victim politics in America, as a result of finger-pointing habits they developed when they were still marxists and liberals. Neo-cons are fond of slandering their enemies using liberal buzz words such as "sexist", "racist", "anti-semitic", "homophobe", "isolationist", "bigot", "nativist", "xenophobe", etc.

In 1981, neo-conservative attack dogs ganged up and destroyed a prominent Southern conservative, the late M. E. Bradford. Bradford, a highly distinguished scholar, had been nominated by Ronald Reagan to be chair of the NEH, and smears by vicious and hateful neo-conservatives forced Ronald Reagan to withdraw the nomination. Many other real conservative scholars and columnists have had their reputations destroyed by hateful and vindictive neo-conservatives. Ironically, one common smear used by neo-cons, the "anti-semitic" smear, disregards the fact that many defenders of the old right are Jewish. Men like the late Murray Rothbard, Howard Phillips, and Paul Gottfried are strong defenders of old fashioned conservatism.

7. Liberals and Marxists hate old fashioned conservatives, whether in America or Europe, because they see real conservatives as a huge obstacle to the imposition of their socialist one-world agenda. Have you all noticed how European conservatives who oppose the European Union and the EU's liberal immigration policy are treated by the media? On the other hand, Liberals, Socialists, and Marxists, love neo-conservatives, whom they see as allies. Maybe the "ex-liberal" and "ex-Marxist" labels that neo-conservatives are often given, are nothing more than a sham (i.e. the "ex" part).

8. There is broad intellectual diversity among real conservatives, and they express their disagreements without being disagreeable. Some are Old Rightists, while others are New Rightists. Some are paleo-libertarians who are very anti-statist, while others are less hostile to the state. Some support Israel, while others do not. Some support free trade, while others are protectionist. Some want the IRS abolished entirely, while others favor reform of the IRS. But almost all oppose New Deal policies, and are strict constructionists in the various ways they interpret the US Constitution. Neo-cons on the other hand, do not tolerate dissent in their ranks, and all match in lockstep. The dictatorial nature of neo-conservatism can be traced to the authoritarian style of one old neo-con hero, Leon Trotsky.

3. No constitutional justification for a federal WoD exists. 10th Amendment says it belongs to the states.

Sorry, but there is constitutional authority for regulation of the nation's international trade, which is where the vast bulk of our opiates and cocaine come from. Marijuana and hash I'm less sure about.

I agree with you domestic marijuana growth, if it doesn't cross state lines, should be a state matter. But how many California growers sell interstate? I'd be willing to bet that more than 90% of them do. There is the Commerce Clause, plain and simple, and shorn of anti-10th Amendment liberal National Greatness folderol.

Oh, and Wm. F. Buckley is considered Old Right: he was conservative when confessing to conservatism in any of its forms would get you spat at by people confident you couldn't do anything about it.

It isn't intrinsic to the definition of an Old Right conservative that that the person so described should carry a number of psychic scars, but it's a good practical litmus test. Old Rightists were getting kicked around, abused, and vilified all through the 50's and 60's when NeoCons were coasting along comfortably, basking in the lap of Big-L Liberalism. They never had a bad day in the 50's and 60's, at least not until KGB Active Measures and their case officers turned their attention to fomenting opposition to the Vietnamese War.

From Murray Rothbard's 1992 "Strategy for the Right"

"The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the original right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. Senator Taft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had retired.

The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, were now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum had developed on the right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh from several years in the CIA, and National Review, an intelligent, well-written periodical staffed with ex-communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the right from an isolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet god that had failed them.

Also, Buckley's writing style, while in those days often witty and sparkling, was rococo enough to give the reader the impression of profound thought, an impression redoubled by Bill's habit of sprinkling his prose with French and Latin terms. Very quickly, National Review became the dominant, if not the only, power center on the right-wing.

This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by National Review editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating front groups: ISI for college intellectuals, Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists. Moreover, lead by veteran Republican politico and National Review publisher Bill Rusher, the National Review complex was able to take over, in swift succession, the College Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally to create a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.

And so, with almost Blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusading conservative movement, transformed and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of the right, some left over from the original right, all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much-desired respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, non-radical conserving right was worthy of power.

And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the roll-call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it. But if, by the middle and late 1960s, Buckley had purged the conservative movement of the genuine right, he also hastened to embrace any group that proclaimed its hard anti-communism, or rather anti-Sovietism or anti-Stalinism.

And of course the first anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communist Leon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuine right-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around the magazine The New Leader), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook, anyone who could present not anti-socialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinist credentials.

The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right-wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that we know so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left. And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi anti-war left. These displaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitous group with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservative movement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists.

And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing alternative to the left. The neocons now constitute the right-wing end of the ideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For the neocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the right of them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, old night, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least."

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