Posted on 07/31/2003 6:58:27 PM PDT by Destro
Why the Neoconservatives Just Keep Winning
One of the inescapable messages emerging from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was the vitality of the US neoconservative critique. Neocons not only proved to be the most adept at explaining the mass homicides, they also offered decisive solutions to the problems that entailed. And up to now these appear to have worked.
It’s never easy for a libertarian who fundamentally mistrusts state power to approve of the state-centered neo-Wilsonianism of many neoconservatives, or for an advocate of free markets to sanction their glorification of an uncompetitive form of US domination. Yet the neocons have caught their critics in a vise whether isolationist libertarians, conservative realists, old-left liberals or Clintonian multilateralists.
The triumph of the neoconservative worldview came in September 2002, when the Bush administration issued a new National Security Strategy. The document was a bureaucratic compromise that placed the neocon dogma of the Pentagon and its White House allies alongside conventional State Department multilateralism. Reading the document, anyone could see the power was in its innovation most prominently its promotion of US security and global supremacy and its defense of pre-emptive strikes to preserve this. In that context the State Department’s multilateral impulses were redefined by neocon priorities.
The success of the neocon message resulted from two processes: one involving definition, the other solutions. Underlining this was the fact that Washington neoconservatives make up a compact group of true believers who rarely let bureaucracy divide them. For example, a prominent neocon is Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who works under Colin Powell. However, he was appointed at the insistence of a neocon ally, Vice-President Dick Cheney. That’s why Bolton is still seen by many of his colleagues as a neoconservative Trojan horse.
Where the neocons were most effective after Sept. 11 was in defining the problem created by the attacks in a way that was both accessible and accepted. They argued, with reason, that what had occurred was the opening shot in a fight between good and evil. The evil was not Islam, but Muslim extremism, and the only way to overcome this was to attack America’s enemies before they again did the same to America. Since there were many such enemies around the world, what was required was a worldwide strategy to eliminate the threat.
This led to a distinctive facet of the neocon critique: the need to overcome and reshape countries menacing the US in effect to engage in nation building. While not embraced by all neocons, this approach posed a problem for their ideological adversaries. The reason was that neocons were advocating spreading US values such as democracy and free markets. Liberals and isolationist libertarians were outmaneuvered by this determined neo-Wilsonianism the former because it approximated traditional Wilsonianism, with its focus on the moral aims of foreign policy, albeit minus the deference to international institutions; the latter because they could not defend free minds and markets in the US while neglecting this overseas.
The last line of defense came from conservative realists, who always scorned the inflated aspirations of any kind of Wilsonianism, old or new, and who were too anchored in the traditional state system based on a balance of power to sanction US unilateralism. Yet they were neutralized because they, too, advocated force when the international system demanded it, and the post-Sept. 11 world fit the bill. Moreover, the neocons had been their allies during the last years of the Cold War and there was an ideological affinity there, even if realists had a different sense of priorities when dealing with the former USSR.
The realists collapsed when it came time to offer a policy rejoinder to Sept. 11. The realist belief in an international system built on state sovereignty was irrelevant to the retaliation US President George W. Bush and the US public demanded, one that involved undermining the sovereignty of enemy states. The process began in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq. Worse, the realists were compelled to support such actions, though they tried to save face by criticizing the clumsy preparations for war. Their adversaries routed, the neocons may yet be undone by the details. Many of the Bush administration’s critics would like to see the US fail in Iraq, largely as it would let them score a rare point against the neocons. It is far too early to assume that the US is trapped in an Iraqi quagmire, and it is, again, underestimating the neocons to suppose they will sit by and allow a disaster to happen.
However, the real battleground on which the neocons’ adversaries will have to fight is that of ideas. There are alternatives to American triumphalism and unilateralism, whose end-result would also be freedom and open markets. The only problem is that the neocons’ ideas are the only ones that sound convincing today, partly because they were so well adapted to the anxious post-Sept. 11 mood of Americans, most of whom did not care about what the neocons actually said.
When a body of principles so effortlessly conforms to a country’s sensitivities, it becomes extremely powerful. That’s why it is pointless to criticize neoconservatives. What would be far more useful is to offer self-sustaining and relevant policy alternatives to theirs, and ensure the US public agrees.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR
Bunky you are making my case for me. He LATER became conservative making him a "neo-con". LOL
Good advice. You should listen to yourself.
The Brady Bill was passed in 1994. Reagan had been out of office for 6 years. Sarah Brady can claim support from Ronald Reagan, or George Washington if she wants to. I'm not sure why you think her remark proves Ronald Reagan supported the bill.
"According to an article in the Friday, November 12, 1999 edition of the New York Daily News, Dr. Fulani, in her endorsement of Buchanan's attempt to win the Reform Party nomination for the White House, stated that, "I'm going to take Pat Buchanan to 125th Street in Harlem. We're going to have lunch at Sylvia's, I'm going to take him to speak at the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network." She further stated that, "he is not a racist or a fascist or a bigot. He is not a hater."
How about answering 159?
President Reagan favored waiting periods at the state level while in office.
He later supported it at the federal level, the Brady Bill.
Wow. Amazing powers of mind you have. Does Gallup Polling know about you?
I see that you are posting comments by Fulani and selections from the Reform Platform. When you post something relevant let me know. Somehow I imagine even you understand that Dubya isn't accountable for what the GOP platform says, or what others write about him. Someday you may learn that this is a general principle. On the other hand, you may not, judging from what you think is evidence to bolster your case.
I was under the impression you wanted to talk about buchanan, now you say you don't. Okay, want to talk about baseball?
Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court decision of the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin Luther King Jr. as his own editorials in the St. Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s. "We were among Hoover's conduits to the American people," he boasted (Right from the Beginning, p. 283).
White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969 memo not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, warning that a visit would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)
In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92)
In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)
In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)
Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York Times, 4/21/87)
"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." (syndicated column, 11/22/83)
"The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p. 149)
"If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to every difficult marriage, that career comes before children ... no democratic government can impose another set of values upon her." (Right from the Beginning, p. 341)
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