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| 2005/2/10-11 [Politics/Domestic/President/Clinton, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:36129 Activity:very high |
2/10 http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html Heil Bush. Article by conservative writer about the birth of fascism in Germany and present-day US. \_ Does it use the word 'neocon'? (okay, I checked--what a surprise it does.) \_ I know you guys are upset because we came up with a word that pisses you off as much as us being called liberals pisses us off. Payback's a b****. \_ I don't get pissed off by "liberal". I'm liberal and proud. --scotsman \_ Except conservatives didn't come up with 'liberal'. The whole 'neocon' usage has been a too-thinly-veiled attempt to associate conservatives with neo-nazis IMO. That fact that no one can define 'neocon' doesn't help. \_ Wrong: http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html Here is another (similar) definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_(United_States What is the definition of a liberal? \_ Hehe. There is no way me and Cheney can belong to the same ideological group. We disagree on almost everything. -- ilyas \_ I don't believe you and I'm not trolling. If this is so, I would like to see it elucidated. Near as I can tell from reading your stuff here for the past couple of years, you've been a consistent apologist for Cheney and his ilk the entire time. That might not, I suppose, mean you *agree* with him. That's fine. On a great number of things I didn't agree with Kerry or Dean. -- ulysses \_ Oh, I just go by the issue quiz I took during the 2000 election, where I agreed with him the least, and with Lieberman the most (omg j00!). I don't think I am an 'apologist' for the Bush administration policies -- I don't like a number of things they did; the war in Iraq is not one of them. (I also liked how you framing me as an 'apologist' also neatly frames their entire tenure as something that needs an apology). Bush admin != Cheney. Near as I can tell the only remotely controversial thing about Cheney was the Halliburton thing, which I have no problems with for reasons unrelated to my disagreements with Cheney himself. One thing I really like about Cheney is that he's really smart. -- ilyas \_ I suspect you and Cheney can both agree that Tom is a twink. \_ Touche. -- ilyas \_ There is one obvious solution: you are not a neocon. \_ A fair number of people on soda will disagree with you. Which is sort of my point. It's a non-concept. -- ilyas \_ How about "signatories to PNAC"? \_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_States \_ What pisses me off is the neo-liberals hijacking the "liberal" name. \_ Thanks for the article. I realize that Nazis are often used to criticize political opponents who are nothing of the sort, but I this is a valid comparison. I used to wonder how the Nazi party could come to power in a democracy, but after living through the first Bush administration I can now imagine it. When the leaders of a country are so convinced that they are right that they will repeatedly deceive everyone else about their policies, disaster can't be far behind. Unfortunately, I think that our country is so polarized that people can no longer have a rational discussion about this. \_ You are actually comparing Bush's first term to Nazi Germany? WTF? How tight is your tin-foil hat? \_ Did you read the article? It compares the rise of fascist tendencies in Germany pre-WW2 to a similar rise in post-9/11 America. There is no direct comparison between Bush's first term to Nazi Germany, but rather a comparison between the term and the factors existing in Germany that _preceeded_ fascism. -op \_ I think you are just needlessly confusing things by your repeated referencing of Nazi Germany. There were many many countries that have been fascist that were not racialist, the way the Nazis were. Franco or Mussolini are better examples to use because they less emotion laden. \_ point taken. edited accordingly. -op \_ Dude, you said racialist. \_ No, I have not read the article and have no intention of doing so. I'm worn out from so many stupid attempts to call Bush Hitler. It was done in that UCB study last year, and it's been done elsewhere. Here's an idea. Read the essay again and try to match anyplace else to Nazi Germany. I'm confident you'll be able to compare Clinton or anyone else as well as Bush. \_ The article doesn't call Bush Hitler. In fact, it doesn't even call Bush fascist: "I don't think there are yet real fascists in the administration ..." As mentioned in prior posts, the article is about the populace more than the leadership. -op \_ The magazine it is written is The American Conservative, not some lefty rag. For that reason at least, you should be willing to read it. \_ Meh. I've never read the mag before, why should I read it now? This paragraph grabbed my attention and made me realize it's full of crap: "But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as .hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.. One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it.s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. .It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth.not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.." \_ You're missing quotation marks. The last two sentences are a quote from Rockwell, and not the author of the article. The rest of the paragraph describes facts, except for the one statement that the mood described in these facts is "latently fascist." So why was it full-of-crap? Because you don't agree that those facts are latently fascist, or because he quoted another author's wording to illustrate the other author's point? \_ The Free Republic is not hate filled! \_ And it isn't free either ... Any post that doesn't toe the party line is instantly nuked. \_ And this is different from motd and DUmmies (aka "democratic"underground) how? \_ Rockwell and Raimondo were former, and maybe current, Free Republic posters. Raimondo has been driven from/left the site too many times to count. |
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| www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html February 14, 2005 Issue Copyright 2005 The American Conservative Hunger for Dictatorship War to export democracy may wreck our own. by Scott McConnell Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, M cCarthyism, the Sixties (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trialsall hav e their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score pole mical points, but we never do. Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks o f 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the co ming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the brownshirting of American conservatisma word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a H oover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treas ury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal edito r, it was striking. com w ebsite, wrote a column headlined, Todays Conservatives are Fascists. Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists , widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospect ive backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of fascism with a democratic face. His fellow libertarian , Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called The Reality of Red State Fascism, which claimed that the most signifi cant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unrema rked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bour geoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressio nal elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Where as the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state , particularly its military wing. I would argue that Rockwellwho makes the most systematic argument of the threeoverstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victo ry, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of th e 60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at w ar, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of th e world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillanceof Muslim i mmigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarian s helpfully remind us, but it doesnt mean that war leads to fascism. But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention t o a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Roc kwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holo caust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now. One of the biggest r ight-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of A rab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right le ave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrot e a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose an d demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dw arfs anything that existed during the Cold War. It celebrates the shedd ing of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideolog y of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earthnot just godlike, but really serving as a proxy fo r God himself. The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking str aw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profil e of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of his tory at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant men tors. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passio n in a way I had never imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Sterns students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again in my early twenties, th eir phraseology becoming imbedded in my own consciousness. Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career ex ploring how what may have been Europes most civilized country could hav e turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readi ness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and tha t many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certain ties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist part ies. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fra gility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore. He would have been on the Right side of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriatseriously anticommunist, and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to the revolutio nary students of 1968. He might have described himself as a conservativ e social democrat, of the sort that might plausibly gravitate toward neo conservatism. An essay of his in Commentary in the mid-1970s drew my att ention to the magazine for the first time. But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding someth ing about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon in the ea rly 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary regularly and w as beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently Kristolized. It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of th e barricades with him today. the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bushs policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and i mplement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern s letters to the editor in the Times (Now the word freedom has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. The essential element of a democratic societytrusthas been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. Now freedom is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germanys foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as the instrument of providence and fused his racial dogma w ith Germanic Christianity. This pseudoreligious transfiguration of po litics largely ensured his success. The Times Chris Hedges asked Ste rn about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mooddrawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism com ing from below as much as imposed by elites above. There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new aut horitarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a gr eater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood th en and the mood now, although significant differ... |
| www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html The Monitor Breakfast Excerpts from discussions between reporters and Washington newsmakers. Empire builders: Neoconservatives and their blueprint for US power Key figures JavaScript needs to be enabled to view this interactive. |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_(United_States Neoconservatism is a controversial term whose meaning is widely disputed. The term is used more often by those who oppose "neoconservative" polit ics than those who subscribe to them; Critics of the term argue that the word is o verused and lacks coherent definition. For instance, they note that many so-called neoconservatives vehemently disagree with one another on majo r issues. People's Republic of China (PRC) and the US Today, a rift still divides the neoconservatives from many members of the State D epartment, who favor established foreign policy conventions. Though every such neoconservative has an individ ual story to tell, there are several key events in recent American histo ry that are often said to have prompted the shift. Some of today's most famous neocons are from Eastern European Jewish immi grant families, who were frequently on the edge of poverty. New Left in America, which popularized anti-Sovietism along with anti-capitalism. The New Left became very popular among the childre n of hardline Communist families. The current ne oconservative desire to spread democratic capitalism abroad often by for ce, it is sometimes said, parallels the Trotskyist dream of world social ist revolution. American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Int erest, a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality." Woodrow Wilson's idealistic goals to spread American idea ls of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish thes e objectives. John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with thes e neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, T he New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and la tely The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservat ives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers. edit Neoconservatism as a "Jewish" movement One of the most controversial issues surrounding neoconservatism is its r elation to specifically Jewish intellectual traditions; in the most extr eme form of this view, neoconservatism has been regarded by some as prim arily a movement to advance Jewish interests. aken as a whole, neoconservatism is an excellent illustration of the key traits b ehind the success of Jewish activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence and we alth, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness." Leo Strau ss, a philosophy professor, taught several of the putative founders of t he neoconservatism, MacDonald concludes he is a central figure in the ne o-conservative movement and sees him as "the quintessential rabbinical g uru with devoted disciples". Marxism, neoconservatism uses arguments that appeal to non-Jews, rather than appealing explicitly to Jewish interests. MacDonald argues that non -Jewish neo-conservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Donald Rumsfeld ar e examples of an ability to recruit prominent non-Jews while nevertheles s preserving a Jewish core and an intense commitment to Jewish interests : "it makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for a ny movement resemble the people they are trying to convince." htm) He considers it significant that neoconservatism's commitment to mass immigration is unc haracteristic of past conservative thought and is identical to liberal J ewish opinion. i=200 40223&c=2&s=lind) Lind argues that, while "there were, and are, very few Northeastern WASP mandarins in the neoconservative movement", its origins are not specific ally Jewish. Cold War ended, "many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center... Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideo logy on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger n eocons were never on the left is irrelevant; Support for such regimes was based primarily on their usefulness, however, which could at times be impaired by their undemocratic natures. Hence, the US could turn against them if circums tances changed. In the days that followed, however, with the widespread popular re fusal to accept Marcos as the purported winner, turmoil in the Philippin es grew. The Reagan administration then urged Marcos to accept defeat an d leave the country, which he did. In this sense, the neoconservative foreign policy makers were different t han some of their more traditionalist conservative predecessors. While m any from the old school believed that America's allies should be unquest ionably defended at all costs, no matter what the nature of their regime , many neocons were more supportive to the idea of changing regimes to m ake them more compatible and reflective of US values. The belief in th e universality of democracy would be a key neoconservative value which w ould go on to play a larger role in the post-Cold War period. Some criti cs would say however, that their emphasis on the need for externally-imp osed "regime change" for "rogue" nations such as Iraq conflicted with th e democratic value of national self-determination. Most neocons view thi s argument as invalid until a country has a democratic government to exp ress the actual determination of its people. For his own part, President Reagan largely did not move towards the sort of protracted, long-term interventions to stem social revolution in the Third World that many of his advisors would have favored. In general, many neocons see the collapse of the Soviet Union as having o ccurred directly due to Reagan's hard-line stance, and the bankruptcy th at resulted from the Soviet Union trying to keep up the arms race. They therefore see this as a strong confirmation of their worldview. edit The comeback of neoconservatism under George W Bush Many critics charged that the neoconservatives lost their raison d'tre f ollowing the collapse of the Soviet Union. Weekly Standard, Max Boot argued that "The most realistic re sponse to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role." He cou ntered sentiments that the "United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchan an's phrase, 'a republic, not an empire'," arguing that "In fact this an alysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insu fficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more e xpansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation." Ame rican Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential conservative thinktank in Washington that has been under neoconservative influence since the el ection of Reagan, argued in his AEI piece "The Underpinnings of the Bush doctrine" that "the fundamental premise of the Bush Doctrine is true: T he United States possesses the meanseconomic, military, diplomaticto r ealize its expansive geopolitical purposes. Further, and especially in l ight of the domestic political reaction to the attacks of September 11, the victory in Afghanistan and the remarkable skill demonstrated by Pres ident Bush in focusing national attention, it is equally true that Ameri cans possess the requisite political willpower to pursue an expansive st rategy." The doctrine also states t hat the United States "will be strong enough to dissuade potential adver saries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equa ling, the power of the United States." Neoconservatives perhaps ar e closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party today since the attac ks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than any competing faction , especially considering the nature of the Bush Doctrine and the preempt ive war against Iraq. Nevertheless, many of the prominent people labeled as neoconservatives are actually registered Democrats. At the same time, there have been limits in the power of neoconservatives in the Bush administration. isolationist strain, neoconservatism is characterized by support for significantly increased defense spending, challenging regimes deemed ho stile to the values and interests of the United States, pressing for fre e-market policies abroad, and ensuring that the United S... |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_States World War II already being fought in Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt b oldly proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond mere government non- interference in people's private lives. Communism and conservatism, Cold War lib eralism resembled earlier "liberalisms" in its views on many social issu es, but its economic views were not those of free-market liberalism; ins tead, they constituted a mild form of social democracy. However, unlike European social democrats, US liberal s never widely endorsed nationalization of industry. In the 1950s and '60s, both major US political parties included both li beral and non-liberal elements. Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other sim ilar legislation. However, the relationship between white liberals and the Civil Rights mov ement was often strained, with Civil Rights leaders often wanting to mov e forward more rapidly than liberal government officials. Consequently, the Civil Rights movement first threw a wedge between liber als and Southern Democrats (when the liberals supported it), then betwee n white liberals and African Americans (when few white liberals were rea dy to support its later manifestations). Although it can be argued that the war expanded only u nder the less liberal Johnson, there was enormous continuity of their ca binets. As opposition to the war grew, a large portion of that opposition came fr om within liberal ranks. Nixon's Enemies List was compo sed largely of liberals - in some ways the continuity of many of Nixon's policies with those of the Kennedy-Johnson years is more remarkable tha n the differences. War on Drugs" allocate d two thirds of its funds for treatment, a far higher ratio than was to be the case under any subsequent president, Republican or Democrat. edit End of the liberal consensus During the Nixon years (and through the 1970s), the liberal consensus was coming apart. The alliance with white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil Rights era. While the steady enfranchisement of African Ame ricans would expand the electorate to include many new voters sympatheti c to liberal views, it would not be quite enough to make up for this. A tide of conservatism was rising in response to perceived failures of lib eral policies. Organized labor, long a bulwark of the liberal consensus, was past the peak of its power in the US and many unions had remained in favor of the Vietnam War even as liberal politicians increasingly tu rned against it. feminism or various ethnic empowerment movements, but they resulted in a critique of the liberal left as "pale, male, and stale," to borrow a phrase from a slightly later time. Meanwhile, in the Republican ranks, a wing of the party was emerging well to Nixon's right. edit Some positions associated with contemporary US liberalism In the early 21st century, the term "liberalism" in the United States has become somewhat confused, applied to a broad spectrum of viewpoints. As the Democratic Party, generally seen as the standard-bearer of liberali sm, adopted the more centrist outlook of the DLC, the term "liberal" (ap plied to the party as a whole) became associated even with more centrist candidates and issues who, for example, support the death penalty or ta ke pro-business positions. progr essive to describe their views, disassociating themselves from what they see as an increasingly conservative politics that still holds the name of liberalism. Some Americans define liberals as those who support the use of government power to promote equality, but generally not to promote order. US lib erals also are more likely to openly support the legitimacy of governmen t social intervention than are conservatives. The following views could be considered typical of American liberalism to day: * Support for government social programs such as welfare, medical care, unemployment benefits, and retirement programs. US conservatives in recent years, often those of the Republican Party, sometimes use liberal as a subversive adjective for anyone who is a memb er of or supports any policy of the Democratic Party. |