WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM ?

The Neoconservative Persuasion - The Weekly Standard - From the August 25, 2003 issue. ^ | Explained by Irvin Kristol

[Eva]

No, Specter is simply in line for the chairmanship due to rotation and term limits.HERE is a link to the article. It's a huge concern.

[Consort]

It may be a moot point. If Toomey knocks off Specter in the primary and Toomey and is too Conservative for the voters, then a Dem may likely head up the Committee.

[RightWhale]

This is a non-operant. It is a mere word, a description with no function. It is yet another scientific classification and measures nothing. Linguistic analysis has not died out as yet, but soon we will relearn how to think.

[Eva]

That's the whole problem in a nutshell. Republicans constantly shoot themselves in the foot, by insisting on putting up candidates who do not have broad appeal. We need to find more charismatic, moderately conservative candidates.

[Consort]

Yes, but we are too intelligent to allow the Left to divide us neo paleo macro poly meta archeo pluri pan mono multi myria meso medio mani oligo hypo veteri plaid seni iso syn ultra ceno uni novi ideo intimi omni nema staunch paro idio mega ortho para peri pachy proto pseudo sym tauto hypno teleo duct-tape syl real auto hyper holo RINO exo endo dys caco amphi allo acro scissorshead ambi ante apo sover contra pater de intus super broken-glass rockhead circum narco extra conto ento infra intra trans post con retro sub ecto supra inter meth per socio conservatives. We are united.

[Eva]

The problem isn't that they are dividing the conservatives, the problem is that they are dividing the conservatives from the independents, while the socialists are duping the moderate independents into thinking that the Democrats are liberals.

[Consort]

The Conservatives seem to be looking for groups to exclude; while the Democrats are always looking for votes from any groups of any persuasion. If the Dems keep that up....they will eventually win every election for a long time to come.

[Eva]

The Conservatives seem to be looking for groups to exclude; while the Democrats are always looking for votes from any groups of any persuasion. If the Dems keep that up....they will eventually win every election for a long time to come.

I couldn't have expressed it better. You should be nominated for quote of the day for that one.

[alexandros]

Mr. Kristol's theories seem to forget one very important thing, and that is typical of most 'intellectuals', those he so harshly criticizes all the time: that - for a truly democratic mind - the individual comes before 'society'. Thus, for instance, when he speaks of 'military power' he pretends not to be aware of the fact that 'military might' cannot function without people (i.e. soldiers). As a matter of fact, his supposedly 'realistic' attitude (esp. in foreign policy) is from this point of view the exact equivalent of the utopian attitude of 20th-century left-wing intellectuals, only more dreary. No wonder, since Mr. Kristol has spent most his lifetime in the convenient position of a scholar (as did Left-wing intellectuals).

Take the war in Iraq as an example, both ideological and practical: it is a controversial war, not necessarily wrong but certainly one that leaves room for doubt about its efficacy (from a merely practical point of view, which then triggers the moral side to it: an unnecessary war is not simply a 'mistake', but a crime against humanity). Hundreds of thousands of young men and women have been sent to this hostile Middle East region, the death toll among American soldiers is rising every day, and there is not one single clue that suggests the peace process is moving in the right direction. In fact, the whole plan of 'restructuring the Middle East' is so ambitious it may soon turn out to be utterly impossible to complete (it doesn't look any more promising than the Marxist proletarian revolution). What would you think of Mr. Kristol and his Realpolitik if you were one of the soldiers bogged down in the Iraqi desert right now? You'd want to kill him, probably.

Like many 20th-century Left-wing thinkers, he thinks all 'big ideas' require a certain amount of bloodshed. He and his disciples are actually a kind of late 20th-century reincarnation of the Left-wing thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries: they believe in the use of force as a 'necessary' means to 'change the world', and use a key-concept ('democracy', for the Left-wingers it was 'socialism') as a pivot around which the whole world is supposed to revolve. Plus, sad but likely to be true, his ideas often seem to be nothing but a smokescreen for the hidden agendas of the economic and political establishment (abolition of the welfare state, aggressive foreign policies in strategic areas, such as the oil-rich Middle East).

[BplusK]

I think that we need to have in mind a long term perspective. If we just look at the present time and the immediate future, the war in Iraq may seem unnecessary and futile. However, if there is a LONG TERM PLAN to encourage and establish democracy in the Middle East, then, the Iraqi War is only the first step toward a greater goal.

The alternative, "Live and let live", which is close to an anarchist philosophy where the personal rights of individuals are more important than what is in the interest of a whole society / civilization, does not seem really more preferable than the Neocons' interventionist philosophy.

Granted, pushed to its extreme, pushing and pushing what is good for society versus what is good for individuals can become abusive. However, every philosophy pushed to its extreme can be misused and can become abusive. What we always need is a balance between the rights of the individual and the stabiliy and prosperity of a healthy society.

[alexandros]

Granted, the 'live-and-let-live' philosophy is a losing one. But this kind of 'muscular' interventionism can be as dangerous as its opposite, if 'geopolitical calculations' are made in the wrong way (and, alas, this seems to have happened very frequently in history, especially when plans are too broad and sketchy).

But practice not is not the only point about neoconservatism. Theory is another very important point. Kristol has worked for years in order to provide the conservative Right with the same amount of 'critical theory' that made the Left intellectually powerful throughout the 20th century. And has ended up making very similar mistakes to those of the Left, especially one: the loss of common sense. But if this loss was dictated (among - for example - German Jewish Marxists of early 20th century such as Walter Benjamin or Theodor W. Adorno) by the belief in the 'progressive powers' of modernity and the ability of Socialism to bring happiness to everybody (naively good values, which turned out to be mostly unfeasible), Mr. Kristol's 'values' spring from a source of a very different nature: they stem out of cold sociological 'calculations' (often very unscientific), like some of Leo Strauss's ideas (e.g. simple people need religion as a set of fixed truths to believe in, or that the deeper truths about life and mankind ought to be kept circulating only among the 'high minds' who can handle them).

There is a fundamental philosophical mistake at the very basis of the values that Kristol and the Neocons propose, and that reveals either a grave lack of philosophical strength or plain mala fides: ideas such as the ones I've quoted (e.g. simple minds need to nurture simple ideas) are obvious to everybody, and such obvious categories should not be charged with an excessive amount of philosophical weight. Otherwise, they automatically turn into something very different. A realism of this kind, if charged with too much philosophical strength, can become a sort of Nazism. Extremism was fatal to Socialist as well as Nazist ideas (they were inherently extremist, and look what that meant in terms of bloodshed: 100 million dead people? roughly).

I have good reasons to believe also that many of the arguments Mr Kristol put forward in his writings were deliberately misleading. Take this one, for example. In one of the articles collected in the book 'Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea' he focuses on equality, a central issue in the political and cultural debate of the 1960s. How is it - he wonders - that in this era of unprecedented economic prosperity (British communist historian Eric Hobsbawm calls it the 'Golden Age') Left-wing intellectuals are complaining as they never did before about social inequality? It must be - he argues - because what they're really trying to achieve here is another goal: they want to raise and then ride a wave of popular discontent in order to gain power for themselves. Now, although there may be truth in this, how could Kristol possibly overlook the fact that there was a kind of 'social awakening' during that period, a phenomenon that was generated by the (blessed, whatever the Left said at that time) flourishing of American capitalism? It was capitalism that brought average people to become rich and made them feel confident enough to demand a bigger share of the public good. Now, Kristol was and is intelligent enough to be aware of things this simple. Which means his 'neoconservative' purposely misleading argument pointed toward another aim: that of concealing the truth, in order to serve the interests of 'someone' (we know who that 'someone' might be: the very capitalistic establishment that had contributed to the well-being of the masses but was frightened about its potential dangers).

The whole Neocon ideological world is made up of similar pseudo-arguments ('relics of the past', one might call them, and they are: they come from the Cold War period). They were useful, even precious during certain times (Cold War in particular) but now, after the demise of Socialist ideals, they have become unuseful and dangerous. This new world needs a strong message of peace and fraternity from the US (that does not exclude military interventions - 'peace and love' is not enough, as we know), but the message 'Neocon America' is giving out is of a very different kind: an ice-cold (once again), calculated set of strategic moves aimed at 'changing the world' (but most people around the globe see it as 'serving the interests of the American capitalist establishment'). And that set of moves looks very unscientifically calculated. Overlooking history when planning one or more wars may turn out to be a much more costly mistake than getting ideas wrong in a sociological essay.

[Porterville]

Neo Conservatives is a term added to the lexicon to make liberals and the uneducated relate the word to Neo Nazi. It keeps a barrier, no matter how thin, from pulling additional middle road democrats to the Republican side... it works on the subconcious level. The thing is, liberals are so stupid, they have never learned about the Nazis.

[BplusK]

From the example you quoted from the book of Iving Kristol, you concluded that Kristol is misleading people because he said that the reason why the left-wingers have made a lot of fuss during a period of prosperity in the sixties is because they wanted more power for themselves.
In response I would say that often there are several reasons behind the way people behave. I have no doubt that many left-wingers had other reasons. However, for a number of left-wingers that was their MAIN reason. They probably had other reasons, but the desire to be in control was strongly there. So, if what Kristol said is not the pure truth all the time for all people, it was certainly the truth for a number of left-wingers and one of several reasons for many left-wingers to push for social changes. Because of that, I don't think that it is quite fair to accuse Kristol to be definitely deceptive and manipulative (especially with simple minded people) when he shares his ideas.

[Protagoras]

ANYONE RECOGNIZES HIMSELF/HERSELF HERE ?

If so, hang your head.

[Protagoras]

We need to find more charismatic, moderately conservative candidates.

RINOs of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your freedom.

[TopQuark]

The U.S. is not a "democracy." The U.S. is a "republic."

Our form of government is sometimes referred to as indirect, or representative democracy.