Posted on 08/14/2003 9:38:27 PM PDT by quidnunc
"[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he's been captured by the neoconservatives around him." – Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003
What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.
Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.
Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.
One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the "have-nots" and the "haves" engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.
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(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Come on...
The idea is that you won't need to defend yourself against liberated, democratic nations.
Oh, I get it.
Democratic nations don't start wars, huh?
What I meant was, Why is his name brought up frequently as though he was some kind of Dr. Strangelove?
The fact of the matter is the Jews in the GOP are a very small minority. What Wolfowitz wants only gets done because 95% of Republicans agree with him.
This is what I find most interesting about the paleocon/neocon divide. And I'm not entirely satisfied with Kristol's explanation. It seems to me that neocons do not see the state as necessarily in conflict with the people while paleocons see government as inherently in conflict with the citizenry.
I always found his phenomenon of stasis to be an interesting one, since the word means the state of standing still, but he uses it to describe the state of a city in civil war: i.e., when all the normal "movement" of a city's political life has come to a stop because of the implacable opposition of factions within.
But you disagree with Papa Kristol. HE says that much of the GOP disagrees with neocon ideas, and that he and his compatriots did in fact snooker the party.
Oh, I get it.
Democratic nations don't start wars, huh?
ROTFL. Good thing I take my irony supplement several times a day.
What I meant was, Why is his name brought up frequently as though he was some kind of Dr. Strangelove?
During the 1980s, I saw lefties do this, in the case of Alan Bloom. They cited the influence of Strauss as a knock on Bloom, but it was clear they had never read Strauss.
Personally, though I think Strauss was a very good scholar, and I think that his criticisms of historicism in Natural Rights and History apply exactly to multiculturalism (most of whose adherents probably never even HEARD of historicism), I can't help believing that much of his influence in America derives from his having spoken with a German accent, and exuded that Lehrstuhlinhaber air of authority that many American academics, who suffer from the same feelings of cultural inferiority vis-a-vis the Gerries that the Gerries themselves feel toward the French, love to kowtow to. (How's that for a Teutonic sentence?! It took years of German grammar lessons to build that hulk!) As a German speaker, my only concern with German accents is aesthetic. And that Germanic air of authority crap cuts no ice with me, whatsoever. The best German teachers I knew didn't need to put on that show.
If there is one phrase that told me that Strauss was not a great philosopher, it was "Platonic-Aristotelian" worldview. To me, it makes all the sense of "Judaeo-Christian." No one who takes Plato seriously, would ever meld the first two, anymore than anyone who took Judaism seriously would meld the second pair.
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