Posted on 02/11/2008 12:13:41 PM PST by forkinsocket
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.
1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.
This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals.
The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“I don’t care about Irving Kristol. I don’t care about William Kristol. Neither one of them had anything to do with our invasion of Iraq and neither of them caused us to win the House & Senate in 2004. So I just consider anybody who seriously discusses it to either be uninformed or somebody with an agenda involving blaming Jews for everything.”
I think you forgot your sarcasm tag.
Neo-con and neo-liberal extend back to the 1970s at least. The neo-cons supported both military and public spending (think Scoop Jackson) as well as a militant foreign policy (esp. as it pertained to supporting Israel). The neo-liberals supported a sort-of third way; big public sector but trying to harness markets (think Paul Tsongas or Bill Bradley) I think that Tsongas wrote a book of the name neo-liberal in the late 1970s, and the New Republic was a neo-liberal magazine.
Has anyone read David Horowitz’s current blog on this Heilbrunn character? Seems that he has a proclivity for lying and distortion. Why is everyone taking him so seriously?
Has anyone read David Horowitz’s current blog on this Heilbrunn character? Seems that he has a proclivity for lying and distortion. Why is everyone taking him so seriously?
Neocons are the thinkers of the XXI century who understood the threat of radical islam and rogue states years before others.
God bless them
only very partially sarcastic. very partially.
For all I know, people think I’m a neocon. And that I don’t think they are saying it with any love in their hearts.
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