Thursday, February 28, 2008
Cryptoneoconservative?
The good thing about American liberals rebranding themselves as progressives is that it's that exceptional case of honesty in labeling. American conservatives would be called liberals in any other part of the world, while mainstream Democrats would probably be conservatives or Christian Democrats in continental Europe.
Anyway, this aside from a British reporter is a great example of how completely meaningless the term "neoconservative" has become:
Where previous conservatives (even Buckley to a large extent) justified their conservatism by appeals to things like religion, tradition, and natural law, the neocons looked at issues like urban poverty through the lens of social science, and found utilitarian justifications for right-wing policies. The neocons were disproportionately but not even close to exclusively Jewish, and it's not clear that there was anything essentially Semitic about their philosophy. In fact, by crafting appeals to conservatism that even atheists or Wiccans might agree with on purely pragmatic grounds, the neocons were arguably among the most influential tent-enlargers out there.
The other defining characteristic of the neocons was that most of them were ex-leftists, in some cases ex-radicals. But their hawkishness and arch anti-communism put them squarely in the mainstream of conservatism of their day. You really have to come up to the late 90s to see the development of a unique school of thought around foreign policy on the right. With the end of the Cold War, some on the right (Pat Buchanan especially) saw the opportunity to finally return us to the imagined prelapsarian isolationism that preceded the second world war.
Buckley at this point largely represented the mainstream view, which was pro-trade, and pro-direct engagement in global affairs, which is to say, in line with the American mainstream. It is true that at this time you had a core of more aggressive activists forming around folks like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and a some other guys who weren't hook-nosed bankers, if you know what I mean. In any case, by the time "neoconservative" became an epithet, Buckley was on the record as being largely opposed to the war in Iraq, which is now the defining issue that some people use to decide whether your opinion is worth considering, or if you should just be liquidated at the first possible opportunity. So no matter how you define "neocon," Buckley wudn't one. ¶ 1:31 PM
The good thing about American liberals rebranding themselves as progressives is that it's that exceptional case of honesty in labeling. American conservatives would be called liberals in any other part of the world, while mainstream Democrats would probably be conservatives or Christian Democrats in continental Europe.
Anyway, this aside from a British reporter is a great example of how completely meaningless the term "neoconservative" has become:
Calling Buckley a "neoconservative" is sort of like calling the Rolling Stones a disco group because they were playing popular music in the 1970s. Neoconservatism was a novel strain of thought that grew up around a small core of scholars led especially by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in the 60s.The great conservative columnist William F. Buckley has died. We shall be looking at the legacy of the rare columnist who managed to make neoconservatism attractive in the liberal American media.
Where previous conservatives (even Buckley to a large extent) justified their conservatism by appeals to things like religion, tradition, and natural law, the neocons looked at issues like urban poverty through the lens of social science, and found utilitarian justifications for right-wing policies. The neocons were disproportionately but not even close to exclusively Jewish, and it's not clear that there was anything essentially Semitic about their philosophy. In fact, by crafting appeals to conservatism that even atheists or Wiccans might agree with on purely pragmatic grounds, the neocons were arguably among the most influential tent-enlargers out there.
The other defining characteristic of the neocons was that most of them were ex-leftists, in some cases ex-radicals. But their hawkishness and arch anti-communism put them squarely in the mainstream of conservatism of their day. You really have to come up to the late 90s to see the development of a unique school of thought around foreign policy on the right. With the end of the Cold War, some on the right (Pat Buchanan especially) saw the opportunity to finally return us to the imagined prelapsarian isolationism that preceded the second world war.
Buckley at this point largely represented the mainstream view, which was pro-trade, and pro-direct engagement in global affairs, which is to say, in line with the American mainstream. It is true that at this time you had a core of more aggressive activists forming around folks like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and a some other guys who weren't hook-nosed bankers, if you know what I mean. In any case, by the time "neoconservative" became an epithet, Buckley was on the record as being largely opposed to the war in Iraq, which is now the defining issue that some people use to decide whether your opinion is worth considering, or if you should just be liquidated at the first possible opportunity. So no matter how you define "neocon," Buckley wudn't one. ¶ 1:31 PM
