Monday, December 04, 2006
Failure is an Option
Scott McConnell surveys the wreckage of neoconservatism in the December 18 American Conservative and concludes: "The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn't work out. The reports of the movement's demise are thus very much exaggerated. " I think he is right. In the world of politics and punditry, merely being completely wrong doesn't mean that you lose your positions of power and influence.
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This theory explains why utterances by Jimmy Carter would be given credibility.
JKS
What would they become if they weren't neo-conservatives? Liberals? Hell, at least they would be honest.
Communism failed yet you still have communism. Nazism failed yet you still have skinheads. You'll always have the bitter-enders becuase to give up the cause is to give one's idenity and who wants to do that and become a nowhere man?
Of course they will survive - as long as Israel and its domestic amen corner,including its fundy cheerleaders, rule over the allowable parameters of the debate over middle east policy in the media and amongst the Republicrats - there will be a place for them.
Neoconservatism will not be killed off until the proverbial stake can be driven through its dark heart. Neoconservatism is prominent not merely because its is well-financed, although that is, unfortunately, all too true, but also because it, and the liberalism that preceded it, succeeded in creating social conditions conducive to its acceptance as a governing philosophy. Neoconservatism, as a doctrine, posits America, not as an historic nation, but as an idea or series of ideas - or, at best, as the instantiation of the Idea which most nearly approximates the grandeur of that Idea. Hence, their derisive dismissals of a more traditional patriotism as the love of mere mud. Neoconservative policies, almost without exception, aim to minimize and ultimately efface the distinctiveness of America as a nation, people, history, and identity.
Neoconservative doctrine elaborates the notion of America as the proposition nation by means of various tropes, such as "freedom", "liberty", "democracy", "capitalism" and so on. Because each of these is necessarily abstract, and adherence to them not contingent upon any particular historical inheritance, neoconservatism also commends mass immigration, for, if all of these things are the universal inheritance of mankind, and belief in them constitutive of Americanism, there exists no reason why everyone cannot, in principle, become American. Neoconservatism, therefore, gives us rights-talk in place of inherited, prescriptive liberties, creative destruction in place of stable communities and the ability of those communities to preserve workable modes of life, democratic imperialism in place of a simple, republican patriotism of hearth and home, mass immigration and multiculturalism in place of a loyalty to ancestors without whom there would be no America - in a phrase, rootless, acquisitive striving in place of stability and pietas.
If we want to drive a stake through the heart of this vampire, we must implement policies which reverse, and ultimately abolish, to the greatest extent feasible, the social conditions within which neoconservatism flourishes. The thing has been refuted and exposed for the farrago or lies, idiocies, and dissemulations that it is times without number, and yet it lives. In order to slay it, its social presuppositions must be undone, its conditions of possibility displaced.
Getting the requisite policies enacted has always been the rub.
See http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/general/bldef_frankfurtschool.htm
"The Frankfurt School was founded in 1921 by a German-Jewish businessman and was attached to the University of Frankfurt. It was intended to be a sort of think tank dedicated to working on problems of labor, socialism and Marxism. However, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School was in no way traditional.
* * *
Horkheimer and Adorno, like other members of the Frankfurt School,
were also deeply suspicious of the development of mass culture in the United States. They believed that it was inherently fascist in nature, assuming that a healthy cultural life could only best be developed from above and through those who knew how to differentiate between that which was uplifting and that which was degrading."
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0102/0102frankfortschool.htm
"The Frankfurt School would mainstream the dicktat of the Moscow Central Committee laid down in 1943. This declaration, right from the horse's mouth, illustrates exactly what were up against:
"Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic...The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind.""
Gentlemen, like Pat Buchanan, I do not cringe when neocons and other liberals call me racist, fascist or anti-semite. I consider it a badge of honor. It means I am clearly on right track.
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