Posted on 08/17/2003 3:43:43 PM PDT by BplusK
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.
How is anything in the neocon playbook conservative? More government, interfering in world situations that have nothing to do with the safety of this nation, spending on the level that would make FDR and LBJ balk?
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.
Forgot one. Wilson. Without him we may have never had a neoconservative movement. At least not one involving foreign policy. Or else it would have been quickly relegated to the trashpile where it belongs
AND THEN, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience.
That has to be the most ridiculous thing I've read today. No set of beliefs? From 'liberating the masses' to 'spreading democracy' I'm beginning to wonder when they'll have time to defend this nation of states.
(The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
Well at least he admits it
These attitudes can be summarized in the following "theses" (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.
Well unless it's under the 'right' leadership, eh Irving?
Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.PNAC Statement of Principles
In the words of the great satirist Ambrose Bierce:
"PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first."
He had Irving pinged dead on.
The "New Left" so over it did it with their love of Communism in Viet Nam and then in Cambodia and their disgusting hate filled screeds about American Servicemen that they made "militersim" a "conservative" position. Thus- somehow- it is "conservative" to blindly support the military and the President. It is "conservative" to never question our foreign policy and only "left wingers" do that anyway.
Neoconservatism is not conservative in any sense. It is perpetual war or "creative destruction" as Michael Leeden likes to say in his fevered screeds.
That younger college type Republicans think being "conservative" is wearing a Bush T-shirt depresses me.
You got that one nailed down. The state is a veritable Ring of Gyges - it's extremely powerful and makes its users capable of many things, but it also corrupts and ruins even the noblest of participants in the process and will never reach efficiency as a result.
Yes we are. But as most Romans had no say in what happened in their Empire most Americans don't either as both parties will support our current policies to one degree or another and our modern vote is near wothless as compared to the Roman vote. By the way - there were many members of the Roman forum who were against Roman Imperialism and for the Republic?
Sounds unConstitutional to me.
Guilty as charged. Not to mention obscure.
Here are some excerpts from the essay Why I became a conservative by Roger Scruton, published in the February 2003 issue of The New Criterion.
Law is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.
Burke was not writing about socialism, but about revolution. Nevertheless he persuaded me that the utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human mind - a geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings live. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress.
Society, [Burke] argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority - by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it.
Burke was holding up old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state [... ,] a far more effective guarantee of the liberties of the individual than the new idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined.
Although society can be seen as a contract, [Burke] argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseaist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the [French] Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke's eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the "hereditary principle", according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke's view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with theliving members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whim of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity, will excite them only in the short term.
Yes, well, I was sloppy. I reacted against what I perceived to be a short-sighted definition as the people currently holding office.
Also, I apologize for tangential posting.
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