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Thread ID: 3274 | Posts: 12 | Started: 2002-10-29
2002-10-29 06:15 | User Profile
[url=http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021111&s=corn]Pat Buchanan, Editor[/url]
by DAVID CORN
[from the November 11, 2002 issue]
Is Bill Kristol the Antichrist?
Patrick Buchanan, sitting in his sparse MSNBC office, explodes with a guffaw. He knows why he's being asked this. In late September he launched The American Conservative, a new magazine with a succinct mission statement: Kick the bejesus out of the neoconservatives. And Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and son of original neocon Irving Kristol, is the Michael Corleone of the clan Buchanan accuses of hijacking his beloved conservative movement.
"No, he is not the Antichrist," the 63-year-old pundit and three-time presidential candidate replies. "But there is no doubt the neocons have come to define the conservative movement, which bothers me. They do not represent traditional conservatism. Commentary, National Review and The Weekly Standard are nearly interchangeable in terms of foreign policy and empire. It's all degenerating into outright imperialism. This is not conservatism. The idea of our magazine is to recapture the flag of the conservative movement."
Buchanan craves a pissing match on the right. Paleocons versus neocons. Sure, he and his nemeses agree on a lot of things: boosting military spending; opposing abortion rights; hailing tax cuts; championing ballistic missile defense; scoffing at the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations; and bemoaning government regulation, affirmative action and an alleged overall cultural decline. But they split on trade (Buchanan despises so-called free-trade pacts for undermining US sovereignty and claiming American jobs; to most neocons free trade is a religion), immigration (Buchanan says keep 'em out, while the Wall Street Journal welcomes the cheap labor) and, most important, foreign policy. Buchanan, a self-appointed heir to the isolationist America First movement of the 1930s, opposes war against Iraq. "The old policies of containment and deterrence work," he says. Moreover, he fears the larger agenda of the get-Saddam neocons: "They not only want to go into Iraq and disarm and overthrow this regime. They want to make Iraq a satellite of the US, democratize it and use it as a base camp for modernizing the Arab and Islamic world. That is imperialism pure and simple."
Why does an old Reaganite cold warrior recoil from imperialism? Because he believes modern-day adventurism of this sort cannot work and is unnecessary for protecting US security. Intervention abroad will only bring trouble back to America. "I don't think 1.2 billion Muslims, who are increasingly militant and who do have bloody borders, can be pacified and converted into little Western states," Buchanan remarks. "This Wilsonian ambition will end in disaster for this country." In other words, it's an uncivilized world out there, and the civilized United States ought not to become more involved than it absolutely must.
The first issues of the magazine--starting out with a modest circulation of about 15,000--were dominated by old-con critiques of the coming war. The premiere's cover featured "Iraq Folly," an article whose author, Eric Margolis, observed, "Lust for destruction is not policy, no matter how much Pentagon hawks and neoconservative media trumpets may yearn to plow salt into the fields of Iraq." In the same issue, Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com and a gay conservative activist, asserted, "there is no security at the top of the world." And in his column, Buchanan predicted, "a US army in Baghdad will ignite calls for jihad from Morocco to Malaysia." Issue two's cover story was an 8,000-word essay, "Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War," by historian Paul Schroeder. This time out, Buchanan chastised Democrats for supporting Bush's war: "to vote for a war the Left opposes is to make them poodles of Perle." Filing from Baghdad, Nicholas von Hoffman reported on dying children who are not receiving adequate chemotherapy because of the US-led embargo.
Much of what has appeared in The American Conservative--which Buchanan edits with columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, the jet-setting son of a shipping tycoon and convicted drug felon who is underwriting the publication--echoes the sentiments and skepticism of the anti-interventionist left. In fact, conservative author Ronald Radosh quipped that readers of Buchanan's magazine "might have been excused for wondering if they had accidentally picked up The Nation." The first issue even contained a caustic piece by Kevin Phillips--"Why I Am No Longer a Conservative"--that assaulted "Washington conservatism" for representing "Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks and the Rush Limbaugh Axis." Phillips called for supporting "Democratic retention of at least the Senate."
Old right and current left do overlap in their opposition to war and corporate-friendly free-trade pacts, but convergence is hardly imminent. Buchanan notes that the populist right is not predisposed toward collaborating with the antiglobalists of the left. "I was in Seattle in 1999," he recalls, "and we were crowded out by the anarchists and their rock-throwing." And Buchanan won't make common cause with antiwar Democrats who dare to criticize the President while visiting Baghdad. Unlike war critics on the left, Buchanan is soft on Bush: "The President is not a neocon.... September 11 put the steel in his spine and gave him his mission--to eliminate these evildoers. But it's the neocons who want to remake the whole Middle East and Islamic world and deradicalize them. They are the berserkers." Buchanan still hopes that Bush, who scorned nation-building during the campaign, will end up disappointing the Kristolites: "If the President goes to war, our side of the argument will be seen as being defeated. But the great battle will come on the question of American empire"--that is, What happens after the war?
The magazine, while initially short on the culture-war screeds that earned Buchanan his infamy, has provided a few nuggets one might expect from a Buchanan endeavor. There was a positive allusion to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in an item lambasting National Review editor Rich Lowry for comparing Saddam to Pinochet. And Taki wrote, "My main aim is to remind Americans that since we are a predominantly white society rooted in Christianity, our responsibility to immigrants is to bring them into our culture, not the other way around." (Conversion before citizenship? Paging Ann Coulter.) Buchanan has taken shots for hooking up with the philandering Taki, who's hardly a role model for family values. "I don't think if I wrote a piece about advancing the pro-life cause, he would object to it," says Buchanan. "I don't know if he would agree with it." But if Taki were to pen an article praising the value of mistresses, as he has done in the past, would Buchanan object? "I'm not going to touch that," he replies.
Preoccupied with the false-cons, The American Conservative, unlike most right-wing media, has mostly ignored the left, taking few pokes at liberals or Democrats. "The pagans have always been out there," Buchanan explains. "It's what you'd call the Arian heresy that we have to deal with." He's referring to Arianism, a Christian sect that in the fourth century nearly pushed over mainstream Christianity before being quashed. "This is inside the church," Buchanan says. "It is a civil war."
Can the cause of de-neoconization sustain a biweekly magazine in an Internet world of three news cycles a day? (And this is a publication without a major website--which is so paleocon.) Buchanan has miscalculated before. Remember that he thought he could lead the Buchanan Brigades--those angry, populist-minded GOPers who voted for him in 1996--into the Reform Party for his presidential bid in 2000. That was an ugly flop. How many troops can Buchanan rally for his purge-the-church crusade, and how many of them are magazine readers? TAC considers the defining issue of the day to be the supposedly titanic conflict between isolationist conservatives (who put aside their reservations during the cold war to fight the Commies) and messianic, let's-remake-the-world-and-help-Israel neocons. It's a self-consciously sectarian magazine spoiling for a fight. The question is, Who, if anyone, is going to show up for Buchanan's big battle?
2002-10-29 12:19 | User Profile
Paul,
What a disgusting excuse, DAVID CORN is for commentary. Why would one need to focus on the Liberals when their own critique discredit their own argument? The fight that Pat and Tiki presents is the one that needs to be fought.
How many times have you seen the Corn attitude from 'so called' conservative editors? Horowitz is just one visible example. We have known of at least a dozen publishers who are conservative impostors.
It seems that if you don't pass the foreign policy test - you get the spike. For me, that is just fine. Have no interest in contributing to phony patriots.
In fact, the time is rapidly coming to name names . . . The real TEST needs to be administered. Pat, Tiki and Justin deserve our support.
When The American Conservative first came out we asked which one of our friends would get published first in the magazine. Maybe the time has come to make submissions!
Did you save the contact names that were listed on the BATR group?
Hope you will consider the idea?
SARTRE :ph34r:
2002-10-29 15:47 | User Profile
SARTRE,
What a disgusting excuse, DAVID CORN is for commentary. Why would one need to focus on the Liberals when their own critique discredit their own argument? The fight that Pat and Tiki presents is the one that needs to be fought.
You're right. I've had a tendency to focus on exposing the "false Right" rather than the openly-declared Left, figuring that the hidden neocons/liberals are more dangerous since they prevent the formation of a true opposition, and create unseen traps and dead-ends for the unwary. At least with the open liberals people know what they're getting. I've always been in favor of political truth-in-advertising.
As far as Corn, it is interesting that a liberal like himself feels the need to comment on a civil war taking place on the Right--and he seems to implicitly favor a neocon final victory in that conflict. That should make people ask some questions--exposing the commonalities that liberals and neocons have, exposing their compatible agenda.
**Did you save the contact names that were listed on the BATR group?
Hope you will consider the idea?**
I'd thought of it, although I have nothing planned.
2002-10-29 15:59 | User Profile
Paul,
Corn is steady diet for NeoCons and is grown in the back yards of their ilk.
SARTRE :ph34r:
2002-10-29 17:08 | User Profile
**Sure, he and his nemeses agree on a lot of things: boosting military spending; opposing abortion rights; hailing tax cuts; championing ballistic missile defense; scoffing at the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations; and bemoaning government regulation, affirmative action and an alleged overall cultural decline. **
While I think Buchanan supports a military build up at home ( I would disagree), Removing all our troops and bases from overseas would drastically reduce our total military spending. Bill Kristol tried to get the pro life plank removed from the Republican party platform, and has criticized the Bush tax cut. I don't know if Buchanan supports Star Wars, but most paleos oppose it. Kristol has no problem with any of those international organizations unless they get in the way of Israel and the US's imperial ambitions. Kristol also complains about how conservatives are too pessimistic about cultural decline. So the only thing that they both agree on is Affirmative Action, and there is huge difference between Buchanan's reason and Kristol's complaint that it betrays the true vision of Martin Luther King.
In sum, paleos and neos have absolutely nothing in common but mutual hatred.
2002-10-29 18:41 | User Profile
Seems like we've had quite a few threads and articles on the American Conservative recently. It shows at least Pat is making a good stir. I know this is just a partial list.
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=3775&hl]The Red and the Brown[/url]
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=12&t=3740&h]Room For Improvement - Buchanan and Taki's[/url]
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=3774&hl]Useful Idiots- Robert Locke on the American Conservative[/url]
2002-10-30 22:18 | User Profile
OLD,
Regarding Buchanan and Kristol:
**So the only thing that they both agree on is Affirmative Action, and there is huge difference between Buchanan's reason and Kristol's complaint that it betrays the true vision of Martin Luther King.
**
This is true. The A.D.L. is also against affirmative action and I bet it is for the same reason that Kristol is. They are afraid that it might be used against them in terms of high Jewish enrollment at Ivy League schools and they wouldn`t want to hoisted by this petard!
It certainly isn`t due to that legendary and phoney sense of "social conscious" they try to fool us with.
2002-10-30 22:55 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@Oct 30 2002, 02:11 Being cosmopolitan Manhattainites, their instincts are leftist on cultural issues, so they mouth a few catch phrases about "traditional culture" to swindle the GOP voters when their actions make clear that they have no quarrel with the "modernism" of the liberal establishment.
I don't agree with that. *City Journal* is an excellent source of cultural criticism and review, though it does mouth the usual neocon platitudes. *New Criterion* is also quite good. The problem isn't sincerity--they do believe in Western Civ, a la Allan Bloom's Straussian elitism--so much as it is erroneous assumptions: that the Feds, with the neocons' all-knowing guidance, can restore traditional culture.
Best, P
2002-10-31 05:42 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@Oct 30 2002, 02:11 **In fact, there is precious little that true conservatives such as ourselves and the neocons actually agree on. I'm sure you can find issues where Buchanan agrees with Kristol, but by the same token there are dozens of issues where the GOP agrees with the Democrats and even the fringe Left (such as the evils of "racism"). Indeed, any observer would probably notice that the Kristolites share a lot more with the Clintonistas than they do with the true Right.
If anyone should compromise and become "team players" by putting differences aside, it is the liberals and the neocons. They agree on so much except on rhetoric and details that they would do the political arena a huge favor by putting all pretense of difference aside and unite as a common internationalist-cosmpolitan front. That would make the battle lines so much more clear.
**
Basically neoconism is the ideology of the corporate managerial establishment, and as you might expect it basically reflects all the values of this class. Liberalism is just the ideology of a slightly different part of the managerial establishment, government, lawyers, etc.
They certainly do have the ability to work together when they need to. If you look at the real changes that have happened in this country - welfare reform, the recent gulf war approval - it has almost all happened with Democrats and Pubbies working in unison.
Naturally they don't let on to this of course, picking fights over incidental issues like judicial appointments etc. Every conspiracy knows the value of token discord for (deceptive) appearances sake. The battle lines are unclear precisely because they don't want them to be.
2002-10-31 08:17 | User Profile
**Basically neoconism is the ideology of the corporate managerial establishment, and as you might expect it basically reflects all the values of this class. Liberalism is just the ideology of a slightly different part of the managerial establishment, government, lawyers, etc. **
Good point. The Wall Street Journal and Commentary are the real nexus of neoconism. The former connects the elites to economic theorists and the latter prints imperialist cookie cutter foreign policy solutions. Neither gives a damn about culture or traditional values nor have met a international organization they didn't like. The other "conservative" mags and projects fill the same role as triple tracked guitars do in heavy metal - increase the noise but play the exact same notes.
The modern left is a product of the government educational institutions. Educators always want more power to enact their theories though government regulation. It goes without saying, institutions that draw from this quarter (legal, educational, journalism, government regulators) are naturally dominated by people who think government regulation is the solution to everything. So you have the left.
It does appear that the two sides are opposed on most issues: trial lawyers vs. big business, etc. In reality, they agree on an underlying philosophy, speak the same language and serve as proxies for various special interests in the exact same manner. It's all minor details.
What's really amazing, is that they have joined together to form a totalitarian middle. Turning moderation into a tyranny is an impressive feat. On second thought, the "moderate" stance is actually a radical leftist one so I rescind my previous praises. Nothing has changed since Jacobin's time.
2002-10-31 19:04 | User Profile
Originally posted by Oklahomaman@Oct 31 2002, 08:17 > Basically neoconism is the ideology of the corporate managerial establishment, and as you might expect it basically reflects all the values of this class. Liberalism is just the ideology of a slightly different part of the managerial establishment, government, lawyers, etc. **
Good point. The Wall Street Journal and Commentary are the real nexus of neoconism.....
The modern left is a product of the government educational institutions. Educators always want more power to enact their theories though government regulation. It goes without saying, institutions that draw from this quarter (legal, educational, journalism, government regulators) are naturally dominated by people who think government regulation is the solution to everything. So you have the left.
It does appear that the two sides are opposed on most issues: trial lawyers vs. big business, etc. In reality, they agree on an underlying philosophy, speak the same language and serve as proxies for various special interests in the exact same manner. It's all minor details.**
I think this appearance is just deception. Our political system is based on the adversarial system, so it is important, in order to have a public discussion that apears legitimate, is to have some putative adversaries, who appear to disagree.
Once you have this nominal disagreement which is accepted, you have set in place the best way to defeat the adversarial system - collusion. Everyone knows that collusion (between litigant, defendent, and judge) is one of best ways to subvert the means of the system. Therefore this is what often goes on.
One example is the oft cited difference between lawyers/liberals and "big business" over government regulation. Much of big business actually is rather blause about regulations, because they know regulation give them a competitive edge over their smaller competitors, so they quietly go along with regulation, workplace, environmental, etc. A good example was the Superfund law. It was passed in the lame-duck 1980 congress with the complicity of Du Pont etc., even though they could have held it up for the far more conservative newly elected congress andadministration if they'd but spoken a word.
What's really amazing, is that they have joined together to form a totalitarian middle. Turning moderation into a tyranny is an impressive feat. On second thought, the "moderate" stance is actually a radical leftist one so I rescind my previous praises. Nothing has changed since Jacobin's time.
The conservative theory of the evolution and dynamics of this totalitarian middle was given by Burhnam and Francis. Suba gives a succinct summary of their theory.
[url=http://www.suba.com/~rcarrier/revcon.html]The managerial revolution, conservatism's triumphant foe [/url]
The managers effected a revolution** in which control of a company became separated from legal ownership of a company, and in which they became the new dominant economic class. The replacement of the individually owned company by the corporation as the dominant force in the economy, along with the takeover of de facto ownership of the corporations from the stockholders by the managers, resulted in the replacement of capitalism by a new economic form that is neither capitalist (because legal ownership no longer entails economic control) nor socialist (because there is no expropriation of capital by the state or by the people).
At the same time, a parallel development occurred within government in the emergence of a professional civil service. These governmental managers had become necessary in an executive branch where there was an increasing distance between "legal ownership" (by the voters and their representatives in Congress) and "administrative control" (by the new civil service, the product of the efforts of "reformers" who sought to eliminate graft and patronage). As the corporate managers assumed control from the stockholders and were no longer responsible to them, so the governmental managers assumed control from the voters and their representatives and were no longer responsible to them.
These two groups of managers became allies, and eventually together formed the new ruling class of managerial society. After all, they fulfilled similar functions in their respective spheres; many were capable of moving back and forth between the two spheres; and they shared a common background of training and culture. This commonality of background has been reinforced by the development of a third distinct group in the managerial ruling class. Alongside corporate managers and governmental managers have arisen cultural managers who administer mass cultural institutions such as the universities, the mass media, and the realm of law.
Although the cultural managers were historically the last managerial group to emerge, they are in a way the most important of the three branches of the ruling class. This is because cultural managers are the ones who establish the terms of "acceptable" political and social discussion. They control the institutions wherein the ruling class receives its training and credentials, (i.e., the education establishment)and so can ensure that new recruits to the ruling class will have the same understanding and attitude. And they control the institutions of public discourse, and so can disseminate propaganda designed to legitimate the new ruling class and to derogate its opponents.
The most important reason for the alliance of the corporations and the government bureaucracies (and, later, the institutions of mass culture) is that they shared the same enemies. All three groups were opposed to capitalist society--the corporate managers because they had seized power from the individual owners who wished to control the companies they owned; the governmental managers because they had seized power from the constitutionally elected representatives who were supposed to supervise them and defend the rights of property; and the cultural managers because they had seized power from that host of institutions wherein the understanding of and attitude toward society as a whole and in its parts was instilled in its members and defended from corruption.
The managerial class is in opposition to "bourgeois society," whose elements are the individual ownership and control of companies, constitutionally limited government that protects property rights, and the web of capitalist and pre-capitalist cultural and social institutions that allow these to flourish. It seeks to destroy "bourgeois society" by replacing the individual capitalist with the transnational corporation, the "rule of law" with the mass state, and the variety of social and cultural institutions (the family, the church, regional and ethnic groups, and so on) with a uniform and centralized "culture." What is today called "liberalism" is the ideology of the managerial class, its weapon of words in its efforts to secure its recently won dominion over society. **
More on the dynamics of this interaction, and the evolution of neoconservatism, is found in Francis essay on Burnham in "Beautiful Losers". He basically argues that neoconservatism grew out of the movement of liberals (such as ex-Trotskyites like Irving Kristol) who saw the revolution they had initially started going a little too far and too fast, and saw the need to put checks on it, especially as it turned from mainstream liberalism into New Left radicalism, hostile to the position of not only the old establishment/middle class, but the new managerial middleclass and its institutions (such as the state of Israel, etc.).
2002-10-31 22:42 | User Profile
**Is Bill Kristol the Antichrist? **
No, but he's a reasonable facsimile. B)