"Neocons Are Liberals Who Have Been Mugged by Reality"
Max Boot writes in Foreign Affairs: "The Iranian and North Korean peoples want to be free; the United States should help them by every means possible, while doing nothing to provide support for their oppressors. Regime change may seem like a radical policy but it is actually the best way to prevent a nuclear crisis that could lead to war. Endless negotiating with these governments--the preferred strategy of self-described pragmatists and moderates--is likely to bring about the very crisis it is meant to avert." (Max Boot, Foreign Policy - January 1, 2004)
What is Wrong with (Self) Preservation?
Joshua Muravchik (Foreign Policy, Nov 1, 2006), describes his fellow neocons as a "loose group" of perhaps less than a hundred, which in response to the 60s were "driven" from the Democratic Party, which stole from them their label of "liberalism" and relabeled them neoconservatives. Neocons were originally liberals.
He says most of what has been attributed to neoconservatism is myth.
"In reality, of course, we don't wield any of the power that contemporary legend attributes to us. Most of us don't rise at the crack of dawn to report to powerful jobs in government. But it is true that our ideas have influenced the policies of President George W. Bush, as they did those of President Ronald Reagan. That does feel good. Our intellectual contributions helped to defeat communism in the last century and, God willing, they will help to defeat jihadism in this one. It also feels good to see that a number of young people and older converts are swelling our ranks."
"The price of this success is that we are subjected to relentless obloquy. "Neocon" is now widely synonymous with "ultraconservative" or, for some, "dirty Jew." A young Egyptian once said to me, "'Neoconservative' sounds to our ears like 'terrorist' sounds to yours." I am shocked to hear that some among us, wearying of these attacks, are sidling away from the neocon label. Where is the joie de combat? The essential tenets of neoconservatism--belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted--are as valid today as when we first began. That is why we must continue to fight. But we need to sharpen our game. Here are some thoughts on how to do it:"
"Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy...."
The sunset years of the neocons. (future of neoconservatism)
Michael Harrington, who influenced my thinking with his book, Another America, which I had to obtain from Canada because it was not being published in the United States was for first to label those dissident writers and scholars who were challenging Great Society liberalism, neoconservatives, a label which was to stick. Norman Podhoretz said his preference would have been to be called "neo-nationalists," since it was their objective to defend America's "fundamental institutions and values." Harrington was the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I was a charter member.
The neocons did influence the public policy debate.
"The actual genesis of neoconservatism dates back to 1965, when Kristol responded to the tumult of that decade by founding the Public Interest, a policy quarterly, with sociologist Daniel Bell. Kristol once remarked that when a neoconservative sees a problem, he starts a journal. In 1960, for example, the precocious 30-year-old Podhoretz became editor of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary. Toward the end of that tumultuous decade, Podhoretz began publishing attacks on the New Left, student uprisings and the Black Power movement. In the 1970s, the magazine sounded a clarion call warning of the "present danger" of Soviet expansionism." (Michael Rust, Insight on the News - December 13, 1993)
"...Original neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, who memorably defined neocons as liberals who'd been "mugged by reality," were (and still are) in favor of welfare benefits, racial equality, and many other liberal tenets. But they were driven rightward by the excesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when crime was increasing in the United States, the Soviet Union was gaining ground in the Cold War, and the dominant wing of the Democratic Party was unwilling to get tough on either problem." (Max Boot, Foreign Policy - January 1, 2004)
"A few neocons, like philosopher Sidney Hook or Kristol himself, had once been Marxists or Trotskyites. Most, like former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, simply had been hawkish Democrats who became disenchanted with their party as it drifted further left in the 1970s. Many neocons, such as Richard Perle, originally rallied around Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic senator who led the opposition to the Nixon-Ford policy of detente with the Soviet Union. Following the 1980 election, U.S. President Ronald Reagan became the new standard bearer of the ncoconservative cause." (ibid)
"A few neocons, like Perle, still identify themselves as Democrats, and a number of "neoliberals" in the Democratic Party (such as Senator Joseph Lieberman and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke) hold fairly neoconservative views on foreign policy. But most neocons have switched to the Republican Party. On many issues, they are virtually indistinguishable from other conservatives; their main differences are with libertarians who demonize "big government" and preach an anything-goes morality." (ibid)
It constantly saddens me to see how so many on the left have fallen for these canards which allege Jewish conspiracy and any support for Israel's existence is conceptually neoconservative - and less important, if at all, for liberal Democrats and not at all for those LEFT wing of the Democratic Party.
There is obviously much more than the limited quoting I've used here to preface my comments about neoconservatism, who were once the leading lights in Commentary Mag when I also read it along side of Dissent Mag - in the 60s. Much has changed since then. I was a cheerleader for the great socialist experiment but watched it self-destruct as too so did the Soviets. It was a disappointing period for those of us who had a basic belief in human nature to alter the way humans treat each other. Not only was our understand of nature and Stalin's wrong headed ideas about science wrong, so were we about some nebulous idea that civilization progresses. (and progressives were somehow more enlightened)
Culture and societies do not progress along a horizontal plane rising ever higher. We are the same competitive predatory animals we always were; we just have better and more lethal weaponry than we once did when we fought each other with rocks and clubs.
Morality is a human mental construct. We are moral if we think we are moral. And, ethics is defined by the human condition.
Most younger members of the neoconservative movement, including some descendants of the first generation, such as William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have never gone through a leftist phase, which makes the "neo" prefix no longer technically accurate. Like "liberal," "conservative," and other ideological labels, "neocon" has morphed away from its original definition. It has now become an all-purpose term of abuse for anyone deemed to be hawkish, which is why many of those so described shun the label. Wolfowitz prefers to call himself a "Scoop Jackson Republican." (ibid)
"Neocons Are Jews Who Serve the Interests of Israel"
"A malicious myth. With varying degrees of delicacy, everyone from fringe U.S. presidential candidates Lyndon LaRouche and Patrick Buchanan to European news outlets such as the BBC and Le Monde have used neocon as a synonym for Jew, focusing on Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, and others with obvious Jewish names. Trying to resurrect the old dual-loyalties canard, they cite links between some neocons and the Likud Party to argue that neocons wanted to invade Iraq because they were doing Israel's bidding." (Max Boot)
"Yes, neocons have links to the Likud Party, but they also have links to the British Tories and other conservative parties around the world, just as some in the Democratic Party have ties to the left-leaning Labour Party in Great Britain and the Labor Party in Israel. These connections reflect ideological, not ethnic, affinity. And while many neocons are Jewish, many are not. Former drug czar Bill Bennett, ex-C1A Director James Woolsey, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, social scientist James Q. Wilson, theologian Michael Novak, and Jeane Kirkpatrick aren't exactly synagogue-goers. Yet they are as committed to Israel's defense as Jewish neocons are--a commitment based not on shared religion or ethnicity but on shared liberal democratic values. Israel has won the support of most Americans, of all faiths, because it is the only democracy in the Middle East, and because its enemies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and Syria) also proclaim themselves to be the enemies of the United States." (Boot)
"The charge that neocons are concerned above all with the welfare of Israel is patently false. In the 1980s, they were the leading proponents of democratization in places as disparate as Nicaragua, Poland, and South Korea. In the 1990s, they were the most ardent champions of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo--missions designed to rescue Muslims, not Jews. Today neocons agitate for democracy in China (even as Israel has sold arms to Beijing!) and against the abuse of Christians in Sudan. Their advocacy of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is entirely consistent with this long track record. If neocons were agents of Likud, they would have advocated an invasion not of Iraq or Afghanistan but of Iran, which Israel considers to be the biggest threat to its own security." (Boot)
Neoconservative concern for self-preservation is not wrong headed. If we can do that humanely that would certainly be laudable, but often we cannot and force must be used to keep our families safe; and preserve our culture, our society, our country and the world community, all species and the planet. But first of all we must preserve ourselves and those closest to us. A dominant hierarchy is natural. There are winners and there are losers. There is no virtue in losing. This is also a neocon objective and if it necessitates preemption or sacrifice by others to further our survival, so be it.
Hank Roth
- NOTES
- * PNAC "...The Project for the New American Century, the leading neocon foreign policy think tank, has a staff of five. Its resources pale next to those of the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, and Cato Institute, three of the biggest Washington think tanks, none of them sympathetic to the neoconservative vision of foreign policy. The Bradley, John M. Olin, and Smith Richardson foundations have given some money to neocons (including me), but their combined grants ($68 million per year) are less than a tenth of those doled out by just three liberal foundations--Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur ($833 million per year). And funding for neoconservative causes is about to shrink because Olin is going out of business. The leading neoconservative magazines, the Weekly Standard, the Public Interest, and Commentary, have lower circulations than the National Review, the Nation, or the New Republic, to say nothing of The New Yorker or Time." (Boot)
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Today is Friday November 21, 2008
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)
While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth