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Neocons to take over Democrats? by Sean Scanlon

Thread ID: 10440 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-10-12

Faust [OP]

2003-10-12 09:11 | User Profile

[QUOTE]Guest column by Sean Scanlon:

Neocons to take over Democrats?

While many talk about which nation or series of nations the neoconservatives have next on their target package, their dreams of conquest do not lie just within the Middle East. Right here in America, the neocons have something in mind that they wish to take over. And that's the Democratic Party. Neocon Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter in the Reagan and Bush I Administrations, recently wrote a March 3, 2003 essay on the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal online service on the future of the Democratic Party, which would appear in a journal of such essays by other writers compiled by former HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo. Actually the essay was more a screed, heavy on the criticism and light on the practical solutions for the problems within the party, other than to be a form of GOP-lite.

        What was interesting about the essay was how much the old party still tugged on her cultural heartstrings. She waxed nostalgically about the days of Camelot when JFK was in the White House, no doubt a thrill for the then young Irish Catholic from Brooklyn. Indeed, in her mind's eye, the differences between the two parties had nothing to do with philosophy, but everything to do with culture:

        "...When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats seemed to me the party of the working class and middle class--the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others forgot.


        I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or college and being moved by someone's wonderful old turn of the century agitprop poem--'The golf links were so near the mills that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and see the men at play.' I assumed those men were Republicans.


        My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what was then called relief. He'd talk about the rancid butter people like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt was the only president who'd ever done anything to help the workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman...."


        Of course, what Noonan doesn't say is that JFK and his vice-president LBJ set forth policies, not just on Vietnam, but on race, on the economy, on trade and on government that helped tear the Democratic Party, then the majority and considered the natural governing party of the United States due to the breadth of support, into little pieces and set in motion the chain of events and cultural shifts that turned Noonan and Catholics, along with Jewish ethnics of the east, like her into neoconservatives and henceforth Republicans.

But the old allegiances die hard. You can tell throughout her essay that Noonan would love to see a revived Democratic Party. For one thing, being the democracy freaks that they are, a two party system is supposed to be necessary for the health of any democracy. The other reason is cultural. Despite their influence and power within the GOP, the neocons still feel uncomfortable in it because it is not the natural or historic home for many Catholics and Jews.

        The neconservatives' power within the GOP is based more or less on alliances on certain foreign policy and domestic issues with other groups within the party, such as Christian dispensationalists and fundamentalists, the Southern establishment, ruralites, big business and what few WASP golf players there are left on the course. Such alliances are tenuous, as they know, and can easily break if other issues, cultural shifts, demographic changes, and economic fortunes intervene. Thus the panic amongst them, for example, back in 1996 when it looked like Pat Buchanan might have a real shot of winning the Republican presidential nomination. A Buchanan nomination would have left them without a party at all and utterly impotent.


        To prevent such an occurance from ever happening, the neocons will not sit out the 2004 election until the fall. They very much intend to find a candidate that shares their worldview, or at least comes close to it, in an effort to "save" the Democrats from themselves, to purge them of their loony left the way their new found friend and fellow social democrat Tony Blair did to the Labor Party in Great Britain. In many ways, such an effort will be similar to what a young group of eastern industrialists, bankers and publishers did back in 1940 by getting the GOP convention to back an unknown Wall Street utilities lawyer named Wendell Wilke. While the Democratic Party at that time was chock full of internationalists like then Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who believed in free trade and were anglophiles in favor aiding Britain (if not trying to outright manipulate the U.S. into World War II), the problem for people like Henry Luce was, culturally speaking, they were not Democrats. Thus they needed the GOP to head in the same direction to have any influence at all in political and foreign policy circles.


        Now the neoconservatives will not have the power, as the eastern chain banks once did, to threaten some local Republican delegation with foreclosure on their businesses and farms. But they will put their impressive propaganda machinery, from Fox News to the Weekly Standard, to use backing a fellow traveling Democrat. And they will try to connect their financial backers to lend money to such a campaign. The only question is who's will it be? Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) is someone who the neocons can rally to and has a history of getting support from conservative groups in the past (Remember that William Buckley once directed supporters through his BuckPac to give money to Lieberman during his 1988 Senate race in which he defeated Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican of a type despised by necons like Noonan.) But Lieberman is one of many northeasterners in a crowded field and the neocons also know that despite this supposedly tolerant and politically correct society we live in, many Americans would still be opposed to having a Jewish president.


        That leaves Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) as the next Wendell Wilke of the neocons. Like Wilke, Edwards is young and earnest, unknown but having a touch of charisma. Edwards also supported the war resolution in Congress on Iraq and shares with Wilke, and Hull for that matter, the same internationalist thinking, which could leave the permanent revolution and world liberation polices of the neocons alone or at least only slightly altered. Being the only Democrat from the South, he could very well have a monopoly on delegates there. Such internationalist view would fall flat with parts of the Democratic electorate, like that in upper Midwest states like Iowa and Wisconsin, but it could carry the day in states like Illinois, New York and California, leading Edwards on the same path to winning the nomination as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did, two other internationalist Democrats. While the neocons track record with supporting presidential candidates, such as the late Henry Ã¢â¬ÅScoopÃ¢â¬Â Jackson and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) is rather dismal, Edwards just might be a horse worth betting on.             Of course most neocons would support President Bush's re-election, but capturing the Democratic Party with a nominee like Edwards would be just as important a victory. It would permantly cement the control of the social democrats of the nation's foreign and domestic policy and provide more political flexibility. After all, if the Republicans ever turned their backs on them, Peggy Noonan and her friends could prove Tom Wolfe wrong and indeed go home again.

[url]http://www.alamanceind.com/editor/editor_15.html[/url][/QUOTE]

Paragon

2003-10-12 16:52 | User Profile

Riiigghhhttt.. This article is just highlighting how liberals hijacked the Republican party and created "neokahnservatism." The similarities between neokahns and Dems are explicit, they only 'allegedly' disagree on foreign policy. But we all know Lieberman would destroy the world for Israel. With the neokahn hijacking of the Republican Party you have a one party-well, one ethnicity system: Jewry.

Franco

2003-10-12 22:41 | User Profile

Paragon nailed it. If you scratch a neokahnservative, you find a.......Jewish Democrat just beneath the surface.

Neokahn: "I'm a conservative! Really! Sure, I support gay rights, uncurbed immigration, the welfare state, gun control, feminism -- but I'm still a conservative!" No, you are a sneaky sheenie hiding behind one of many masks that your Tribe wears to outwit Joe Sixpack.

:ohmy:

Valley Forge

2003-10-13 23:02 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Franco]Paragon nailed it. If you scratch a neokahnservative, you find a.......Jewish Democrat just beneath the surface.

:ohmy:[/QUOTE]

Neo-Con Watch actually should be named JEW WATCH.