Neo-Conservatism Explained

[Xenodamus]

In this article, Lew Rockwell explains us what the concept of neoconservatism and exposes the true nature of the neoconservative movement.


http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/...explained.html

Neo-Conservatism Explained
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Commentators across the spectrum have finally clued in to neo-conservatism as the intellectual framework of the Bush administration. We are suddenly faced with long think pieces on the role of political philosopher Leo Strauss in influencing the architects of the Iraq war and Bush's governance in general. We are also learning about the ideological path taken by former college Trotskyites into the Republican Party of the 1970s. It’s an instructive example of tenacity and dedication in translating ideas into practice.

Along with the political victory of the neocons (by victory I mean the reality that they now control many levers of power) has come shock and alarm of those who disagree with their policies. Their critics left and right regard their use of domestic police powers as contrary to constitutional guarantees, and their foreign policy as nothing but untrammeled aggression that violates human rights and makes us ever more vulnerable.

Despite its political victory, the future of neo-conservatism rests with the war on Iraq and its aftermath. They brought about this war over the objections of most of the world, and relied heavily on the crudest form of chauvinistic sloganeering to sell it to the American people. Iraq has been destroyed, with most people living amidst appalling wreckage that neocons apparently failed to anticipate. Their raw military power unleashed utter chaos, barbarism, and fanaticism in what was once the most secular and liberal Arab state.

The neocons had a limitless faith in two tools: bombs for destruction and dollars for reconstruction. With their appalling ignorance of the complexity of society, they believed that these two tools were enough to reconstruct the region, and maybe the whole world. It was only a matter of political will, so they believed. The bombs caused the regime to flee, but the dollars have not been able to put it back together again. As only a slight symbol of the Pyrrhic victory, the Saddam dinar is now at its highest value relative to the dollar since 1996. No WMDs were ever found, and terrorism in the region is getting worse.

Seeing this disaster, and sensing that they are losing the propaganda war, neocons are scrambling to control the spin. This has taken several forms: 1) defending neocon policies, 2) denying that such a thing as neo-conservatism exists 3)admitting that neocons do exist but claiming that they represent nothing really new and thus pose no threat, and 4) accusing critics of neo-conservatism of bigotry.

That these claims cannot be reconciled is hardly surprising: the goal is to relieve the new pressure, not to sort out confusions. For years, they've labored in journals and journalism, and their sudden defensiveness is precisely what one would expect now that they have seized and exercised power with such awful results. Naturally, the critics go to great lengths to examine the ins and outs of the neocon philosophical orientation to discern what disaster we can expect next.

That these claims cannot be reconciled is hardly surprising: the goal is to relieve the new pressure, not to sort out confusions. For years, they've labored in journals and journalism, and their sudden defensiveness is precisely what one would expect now that they have seized and exercised power with such awful results. Naturally, the critics go to great lengths to examine the ins and outs of the neocon philosophical orientation to discern what disaster we can expect next.

However, very little commentary on neo-conservatism deals with the crucial question to ask of any non-libertarian ideology: to what extent does it seek to use the welfare-warfare state to achieve its end? The answer with regard to neo-conservatism is clear in the actions of the Bush administration:

• it has increased overall government spending by more than any administration since LBJ;
• it has unleashed government spies like never before;
• it has unleashed a series of wars against foreign countries that posed no threat whatever to the US, laying waste to their economies and cultures.

Now, this is remarkable given that the essence of conservatism in America is skepticism about political power, though it is true that all conservatives (a word that only became common parlance in American politics after the Second World War) have been excessively friendly to the state.

Yet conservatism did mean a desire to jettison utopian schemes and to defer to the tacit wisdom associated with what is. Conservatism was an unstable ideology, and, in fact, not an ideology at all. It was a predilection to preserve rather than innovate in matters of public policy. Generally speaking, conservatism offered valuable critiques of the left, but had no positive program apart from its endorsement of Truman's Cold War. In order to ensure support for the Cold War, conservatives came to terms with Leviathan and systematically resisted the libertarian implications of their domestic program in foreign and military affairs.

It is often forgotten that it was not only American conservatives who backed anti-communism. Another group of anti-communists of the period was variously called Scoop Jackson Democrats, Cold War Liberals, Democratic Socialists or Social Democrats, or simply the anti-Stalinist Left. They favored big government at home and abroad, and had a particular distaste for the Reds in Russia because they saw them as having discredited the great dream of socialist planning (and killed Trotsky). They were passionately for the Cold War but saw it as less an ideological struggle than a political one. They favored New Deal-style planning but rejected the excesses of Soviet-style totalism.

Of them, Mises wrote:

He continues:

After Vietnam, the Democratic Party became home to an ever-more influential group of Cold War skeptics, so many leftist Cold Warriors gravitated to the Republican Party, where they sought to cement the GOP's attachment to welfare and especially warfare. As Max Boot admits: "It is not really domestic policy that defines neo-conservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neo-conservatism carries the greatest meaning, even if its original raison d'être – opposition to communism – has disappeared."

Now, it would be wrong to say that the neoconservatives had not undergone any kind of intellectual change. They became less enamored of formal socialism and more at home with mixed-economy capitalism. They grew to hate much of the egalitarian-left cultural agenda of Democratic Party special-interest groups. Many of them wrote treatises decrying the excesses of their ex-brethren.

But the transformation was never complete, and the core of their ideology never changed: these people had then and have now a remarkable faith in the uses of state power, at home and abroad. Their intellectual formation in Straussianism convinced them of the centrality of the elite management of society by philosophers, and their background in Trotskyite organizing kept a ruthless political strategy as the operating mode.

As David Gordon sums up Rothbard's early analysis: "As Strauss sees matters, classical and Christian natural law did not impose strict and absolute limits on state power; instead, all is left to the prudential judgment of the wise statesman." The younger generation absorbed this tendency as much as the old.

Thus with neoconservatism, we have the statist aspects of the old conservatism minus the libertarian aspects that led the old conservatives to favor decentralist political institutions and free enterprise. Add to that the natural tendency of anyone in power to use the tools they have at their disposal. What we end up with is a danger to liberty as fierce as any ever posed by the left.

But by the standard of loving Leviathan, today's neo-conservatism is worse than every brand of conservatism that preceded it. It is worse than Reaganism, which included some libertarian impulses, and worse than National-Review-style conservatism from the 1960s and 1950s. One expects pro-state affections from socialists, but the puzzle of neo-conservatism is how it could exist within a group of self-professed non-socialists who even claim to despise what the collectivist left has done to the world.

Thus the great fallacy of neo-conservatism is the one that afflicts all non-libertarian ideologies: they believe that society can be managed by the state in both its political and economic life. They believe this to a lesser extent than some left socialists, but to a far greater extent than most thinkers on the right.

What they miss or do not want to face is precisely what the socialists never wanted to accept: that society is made up of acting, choosing human beings with their own values and ideas and plans, and it is they and not the state who do the hard work of creating civilization, a creation that is easy to destroy through statist means but impossible to rebuild through such means; that many social forces like culture and economics are beyond the final control of state power; and in the long run, it is people, and not philosopher kings whispering in the ears of gullible statesmen, who will determine the course of history.

[...]

[Patrician]

The worst place to find a description of neoconservatism is from a virulent hater of neoconservatism. Not very objective Xeno This is like asking a nazi to tell you all about judaism.

[Xenodamus]

Originally posted by kOnTrA
The worst place to find a description of neoconservatism is from a virulent hater of neoconservatism. Not very objective Xeno This is like asking a nazi to tell you all about judaism.

Whatever Kontra. So far what Rockwell wrote about neoconservatism turns out to be true.

[Patrician]

Originally posted by Xenodamus


Whatever Kontra. So far what Rockwell wrote about neoconservatism turns out to be true.

ROFL! Of course a neocon hater like yourself would agree with rockwell...paleocons hate neocons, its mostly jealousy, the rest is anti-semitism as they associate neoconservatism as jewish. I assume that why you also hate neoconservatism but I'm not really sure why you single it out when, all in all, neocons are far more tolerant of gays and the gay lifestyle than the old style paleos. All this article does is express false stereotypes about an ideology which is in direct competition with the author's. You cannot hope for a fair or balanced view of it...it amazes me how often you will look to anyone but neocons for the answer to what a neocon is...its like looking for the answer to what marxism is anywhere but marx's writings.

[Xenodamus]

Originally posted by kOnTrA


ROFL! Of course a neocon hater like yourself would agree with rockwell...paleocons hate neocons, its mostly jealousy, the rest is anti-semitism as they associate neoconservatism as jewish. I assume that why you also hate neoconservatism but I'm not really sure why you single it out when, all in all, neocons are far more tolerant of gays and the gay lifestyle than the old style paleos. All this article does is express false stereotypes about an ideology which is in direct competition with the author's. You cannot hope for a fair or balanced view of it...it amazes me how often you will look to anyone but neocons for the answer to what a neocon is...its like looking for the answer to what marxism is anywhere but marx's writings.

Can you tell me where jews are mentioned in his article?

And what does this have to do with queers? Oh wait, you're only mentioning it because of me. Real lame Kontra. We're here to discuss neoconservatism, not queer issues.

EDIT: BTW Rockwell isn't a moronic paleo-conservative. He's a paleo-libertarian.

[Ironweed]

Xeno, are you a Libertarian? Specifically, do you believe this:

Thus the great fallacy of neo-conservatism is the one that afflicts all non-libertarian ideologies: they believe that society can be managed by the state in both its political and economic life. They believe this to a lesser extent than some left socialists, but to a far greater extent than most thinkers on the right.

which it appears you bolded and underlined? It's not just an indictment of neo-con philosophy, but of every school of thought except Libertarianism.

I guess I've misread quite a few of your posts if that's the case, since I always assumed you were some form of Statist, at least until we all have nano-tech thingies swimming in our bloodstream.

[Xenodamus]

Originally posted by Ironweed
Xeno, are you a Libertarian? Specifically, do you believe this:



which it appears you bolded and underlined? It's not just an indictment of neo-con philosophy, but of every school of thought except Libertarianism.

I guess I've misread quite a few of your posts if that's the case, since I always assumed you were some form of Statist, at least until we all have nano-tech thingies swimming in our bloodstream.

To be honest, I'm little skeptical and ambivalent about liberal statism, something bothers me about it. However, I'm also skeptical about libertarianism as well, perticularly in environmental and social concerns. I guess you could label me somewhere between a paleo-libertarian and a liberal.

[Red]

Xeno, have you bothered to read Tam's announcement about posting articles at the top of this forum?

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i'm gonna have to start locking threads if this continues.

[Manstein]

paleocons hate neocons, its mostly jealousy

LOL

What???

Show me how Pat Buchanan is jealous of the Neo-Cons vehement support of Israel.

the rest is anti-semitism as they associate neoconservatism as jewish.

What a horrific oversimplification.

I hate how my country's administration thinks Israel is Gods Gift to humanity, how does that make me, or other paleo-cons, anti-semitic?

[Ironweed]

Originally posted by Manstein


LOL

What???

Show me how Pat Buchanan is jealous of the Neo-Cons vehement support of Israel.

I'd buy that if it just were Pat Buchanan. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff posted at www.originaldissent.com is one step - a short step, in my view - from Stormfront level twaddle. Are the posters there incorrect to call themselves paleocons?

I rather like Buchanan. I voted Libertarian in 2000, but should have voted for him.

Originally posted by Manstein
What a horrific oversimplification.

I hate how my country's administration thinks Israel is Gods Gift to humanity, how does that make me, or other paleo-cons, anti-semitic?

I agree to an extent, but again, at OD they do stuff like assign posters charming titles like "Smirking Jewess," which seems a bit more than opposition to the latest aid to Israel bill from where I'm sitting. I think Kontra has a point, you have a point, and that the truth probably falls somewhere in between.

It may be that the OD folks are no more paleo-con than they are Scientologist. In which case the error is all mine.

[Bo]

[FaDe]

ROFL! Of course a neocon hater like yourself would agree with rockwell...paleocons hate neocons, its mostly jealousy, the rest is anti-semitism as they associate neoconservatism as jewish.

kOnTrA cannot make up his mind whether neoconservatism exists or does not exist.

[Legionnaire]

Originally posted by Ironweed
I agree to an extent, but again, at OD they do stuff like assign posters charming titles like "Smirking Jewess," which seems a bit more than opposition to the latest aid to Israel bill from where I'm sitting.

Actually, members at OD are free to choose their own custom titles after 50 posts.

[Legionnaire]

Originally posted by FaDe


kOnTrA cannot make up his mind whether neoconservatism exists or does not exist.

A little like Schroedinger's cat, isn't it?

[Johnson]

Maybe neo-cons are behind Roswell, eh fade?

[Patrician]

Originally posted by Xenodamus


Can you tell me where jews are mentioned in his article?

Irrelevant

And what does this have to do with queers? Oh wait, you're only mentioning it because of me. Real lame Kontra. We're here to discuss neoconservatism, not queer issues.

Don't flatter yourself...I was pointing out you hypocrisy.

EDIT: BTW Rockwell isn't a moronic paleo-conservative. He's a paleo-libertarian.

YOU are calling someone moronic? haw haw.

Originally posted by Xenodamus


To be honest, I'm little skeptical and ambivalent about liberal statism, something bothers me about it. However, I'm also skeptical about libertarianism as well, perticularly in environmental and social concerns. I guess you could label me somewhere between a paleo-libertarian and a liberal.

rofl..do paleo-libertarians think public schools should have mandatory gay acceptance classes? Do they beleive in giving gays special rights?

[Patrician]

Originally posted by Manstein


LOL

What???

Show me how Pat Buchanan is jealous of the Neo-Cons vehement support of Israel.

I meant because paleocons are a minority, both in number and in influence, as opposed to neocons and neoconservatism.

What a horrific oversimplification.

I hate how my country's administration thinks Israel is Gods Gift to humanity, how does that make me, or other paleo-cons, anti-semitic?

It may be simple but its true..look at JAT and Fade...they can't stop talking about jews for 5 minutes...

I don't think our administration sees Israel that way...maybe you just have a disproportionate hatred for Israel, like most paleocons.

[Patrician]

Originally posted by FaDe


kOnTrA cannot make up his mind whether neoconservatism exists or does not exist.

rofl, please quote me, I never said anything of the sort...I don't understand why you just make stupid **** up for

[Xenodamus]

Originally posted by kOnTrA
rofl..do paleo-libertarians think public schools should have mandatory gay acceptance classes? Do they beleive in giving gays special rights?

It's true that the paleo-libertarians may be against driscrimination laws in general but they're also against the sodomy laws and the ban on queers in the military. They are also in favor of removing the so called "institution of marriage", meaning that the concept of marriage would no longer exist in state laws. Any couple can form their own civil union including same sex couples. If they want their civil union to be blessed by their religion, then they have the freedom to do so, although the blessing would mean nothing to the state.

[Patrician]

Originally posted by Xenodamus


It's true that the paleo-libertarians may be against driscrimination laws in general but they're also against the sodomy laws and the ban on queers in the military. They are also in favor of removing the so called "institution of marriage", meaning that the concept of marriage would no longer exist in state laws. Any couple can form their own civil union including same sex couples. If they want their civil union to be blessed by their religion, then they have the freedom to do so, although the blessing would mean nothing to the state.

Marriage is a cultural tradition whose definition cannot be changed...doing that would destroy the very concept..I am a proud defender of marriage and my culture...

I have no problem with gay civil unions, but Marriage is a specific custom with a specific definition...you are a memeber of the 'looter' class as Ayn Rand said...you don't build cultures, you tear them apart.

Your sir are a statism, I dont think you have a libertarian bone in you body, except when it comes to certain gay issues.