Posted on 04/15/2022 4:08:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
Matthew Continetti, writing in Commentary, credits leading neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and his son Bill Kristol, with "modernizing" conservatism so that the Republican Party — which neoconservatives reluctantly joined after they lost influence with the Democrat party — could suitably govern a modern democracy. And he laments the fact that since the rise of the Tea Party movement, neoconservatives have gradually lost influence with a populist-nationalist Republican Party. Leading neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg (then at National Review) publicly opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. As a result, neoconservatism is now a movement without a political party.
The immediate causes of neoconservatism's decline in influence within the GOP were the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, begun during the George W. Bush administration. Initially, most conservatives supported the war in Afghanistan, even while some questioned the need to invade Iraq. But Bush transformed those wars into a crusade for democracy, which is when many conservatives — including William F. Buckley, Jr. — got off the bandwagon. Neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz called the terrorist attacks of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, culminating on 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghan wars, "World War IV" in articles in Commentary that were later collected into a book with that title.
Podhoretz is a compelling writer, and his comparison of Bush's Global War on Terror to America's hot war against Nazi Germany and Japan and its Cold War against the Soviet Union convinced many that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of a larger existential conflict with radical Islam. And that is how Bush portrayed them in speech after speech and in formal national security documents.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I hope it is like being burried in sand up to your neck and having ants eating out your eyeballs.
Yes, if one is imagining Bush in the role of Neville Chamberlain…
I’d rather it was quick and they were all dead.
I need to add Matthew Continetti is married to Bill Kristol’s daughter.
And if anyone believes that the US is getting out of the Ukraine, after we spent $billions to arm it, they're CRAZY.
Excellent addition. Thanks.
The neocons are utterly anhistorical. Their entire thesis, what they wanted what they claim to be about is buried in the ruins of Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War. They clearly never read or never studied Thucydides.
Populist-nationalist conservatives
A long-winded way of saying what Pat Buchanan (I think) said we are: Paleo-Conservatives.
You are welcome. According to Wikipedia, Matthew Continetti married Anne Kristol in 2012. I wanted to double check.
A history of Neocon:
Irv Kristol, crypto-Trotskyite, and wife Getrude Himmelfarb, beget Bill Kristol,
Norm Podhoretz,
John Podhoretz,
Mona Charen,
Jennifer Rubin,
Paul Wolfowitz,
Johah Goldberg,
Stephen “Please Don’t Call Me House Goy” Hayes
Contennetti’s wife is Bill Kristol’s daughter.
Contennetti, was a panelist on Fox Special report.
These people aren’t Conservatives, they’re freaking collaborators!
NEOCON Incest
I was adding that as you scribed!
Neoconservative was a term for a group of Jewish thinkers who abandoned the Democrats over national security issues, but remained leftists in all other aspects.
Their great vision was to US military power to reshape the Middle East, which in the 1990s looked like one of the last parts of the world that had not embraced liberalism and capaitalism.
Elliott Abrams
Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett
John Ellis "Jeb" Bush
Dick Cheney
Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter (married to Norman Podhoretz)
Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle
Also Bill Kristol was cofounder of Project for the New American Century with Robert Kagan.
Robert Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of Ukraine policy under Obama and now Biden.
It doesn’t seem true that NeoCons no longer have a party. They have just moved back to the Democratic Party.
Gary Bauer; William J. Bennett; Jeb Bush; Dick Cheney; Steve Forbes; Frank Gaffney, and hundreds of others would disagree.
Well, if you think the neocons captured and used the US military to bring liberalism and capitalism to the Middle East, instead of to degrade and eventually destroy Israel's enemies, I've got this nice bridge in Brooklyn...
All of those were Republicans before Neoconservativism was a thing.
The group that left the Democratic Party because of NeoCon ideology was almost exclusively Jewish and concerned with the fate of Israel.
And to be clear this is no attack on that religion. They were right to leave the Democrats, and right to understand hat Dem policies threatened Israel’s survival. Their failure was in understanding Islam and how western style Democracy could never be grafted on to that culture.
And we shouldn’t overlook Richard Perle:
White Man’s Burden
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it’s possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical
1. The doctrine
WASHINGTON - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate Iraq wasn’t looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as mighty America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi’ites didn’t rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to support the war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence in President George W. Bush.
Washington is a small city. It’s a place of human dimensions. A kind of small town that happens to run an empire. A small town of government officials and members of Congress and personnel of research institutes and journalists who pretty well all know one another. Everyone is busy intriguing against everyone else; and everyone gossips about everyone else.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don’t think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you’re scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.
https://www.haaretz.com/1.4764706
Going way, way back to the origins, “neoconservatives” were mainly anti-communist liberals who broke with the “no enemies to the left” orthodoxy that dominated the democrat party. The anti-communist liberals have a long and honorable record. Many of them switched parties when Ronald Reagan turned out to be a Lincoln-level coalition builder.
The same fault lines are apparent now as old-fashioned liberals still committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equal standards, color blindness as an ideal, civility and fair dealing with political opponents, etc. confront the woke totalitarian cancer that is consuming the democrat party today.
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