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Thread 4828

Thread ID: 4828 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-02-06

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Hereward [OP]

2003-02-06 19:51 | User Profile

Gottfried uses a term that's new to me: "minicons." It's such an apt word for the likes of Jonah Goldberg that I may use it exclusively for that subspecies. And he captures the mindset of the Jews in this country perfectly: their fellow Americans (insert sneer-quotes where you will), no matter how philosemitic in word or deed, remain medieval peasants about one bad harvest or missing child away from a pogrom.

[url=http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Gottfried/NewsPG020603.html]http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Got...wsPG020603.html[/url]

RETHINKING THE GLOBALIST RIGHT by Paul Gottfried

On January 29, Robert Locke, an editor of FrontPage, ran a thoughtful essay dealing with, among other subjects, neoconservatism and the Right. According to Locke’s argument, “neoconservative principles, freed of the constraining principle of the Cold War, have produced the bastard child of globalism.” During the Cold War, non-conservatives effectively defended the struggle against the Soviets, by linking it to a global democratic vision. What John Zmirak calls the neoconservative preoccupation with “America the abstraction” began as a useful quirk. It presented the U.S. as the embodiment and defender of human rights standing up against a Communist creed that also claimed to be universal. But when that protracted struggle was over, it became necessary to go back to how things were meant to be. Unlike neoconservatives, real conservatives believe in the value of national identities and inherited hierarchies. One cannot successfully build a conservative movement upon an abstract notion of universal equality that belongs properly on the Left. Moreover, neoconservative globalism “forcibly opens up foreign nations to a capitalist and democratic world system abroad, while making a universal nation at home.” Such a combination, far from representing a conservative worldview, seems to offer a recipe for perpetual turmoil.

Locke states his position with gravitas and avoids making bitter accusations. He also provides a relentlessly honest view of the origins and character of the neoconservative straying of the American Right. But what makes his presentation most striking is what he fails to address. In my opinion, he may exaggerate the continuity of mainstream neoconservative opinions from Irving Kristol down to his less talented son, who now recites platitudes about globalist abstractions. There is in fact a considerable amount of discontinuity between the old issues of Commentary, including distinguished authors Peter Bauer, Elie Kedourie, Richard Pipes, and James Q. Wilson, and today’s greatly dumbed-down Commentary and its insipid imitations in National Review and Weekly Standard. Neoconservative writers of today are generally less well educated and more identifiably leftist than those from whom they are descended spiritually and/or physically. It is hard to imagine among the older generation the kind of abysmal cultural illiteracy that one finds in Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry, who make appalling factual mistakes about the French Revolution and about who was on which side in the Spanish Civil War. Curiously these minicons, who seem to believe that the French Jacobins articulated “conservative” positions while Catholic counterrevolutionaries were postmodernist leftists, also complain bitterly about their “neo” label. For several months now these adolescent publicists have been proclaiming themselves to be the only genuine Right, in contrast to the unmentionable paleos, whom they roundly condemn as Nazi bigots.

While the older generation certainly had unpalatable habits, calling those who disagreed with its hard-line positions on Israel anti-Semites and venting spleen on Southerners, Germans, and occasionally on the New Testament, today’s minicons engage in these bad habits even more frenetically. One may attribute this quantitative difference to relative positions of power, the minicons having more money and visibility than their parents did.

But other variables may be equally at work. Minicons have grown up with an intensely paranoid view of their own ethnic group being surrounded by hostile gentiles and self-hating Jews. Such attitudes, strangely enough, are useful in a guilt-ridden white Christian culture, which rewards designated victims for screaming “prejudice.” What Pat Buchanan once called the “branding iron of anti-Semitism” is a valuable instrument for those who apply it, however hysterically, among those who welcome it.

In the short or middle term, it is inconceivable that Locke’s theoretical analysis will change anything on the American establishment Right. It may have the same effect that a former Marxist-Leninist in the Soviet Union would have had by announcing that Lenin’s notion of a workers’ revolution did not quite square with Marx’s prediction. But not to worry, this commentator goes on. Mistakes can be undone! How seriously would the Russian government in 1930 or even in1960 have taken the suggestion that the Soviets abandon power to a textbook-pure Marxist regime? The Russian critic would have prevailed to the same degree as someone who now tells us that having the neocons run the Right is ideologically improper. What if anything does Locke intend to do about this kettle of fish? The situation he is looking at is one that the neoconservatives control with an iron fist, after a vicious quarrel that has gone on for decades. An entire generation of dissenting conservatives has suffered grievously, and in many cases irreparably, as the price of this status quo. Other journalists and foundation directors have compromised themselves so thoroughly by serving the neocons that they have become loathsome to what remains of the Old Right, while being utterly expendable to their present masters. Equally relevant, the neocons view those on their right as being Nazis and anti-Semites whom they feel morally driven to keep down. Since these globalists hold the good cards among those competing for the conservative label, it is hard to imagine that they’ll surrender their infrastructure to another group, especially to one they hate and have worked to isolate. What Locke is describing is not a game of musical chairs or a Victorian debating society. It is an ugly war in which the winning side has not behaved (to use meiosis) in a friendly manner toward its perceived enemies. The other side will not likely make a comeback simply because neocons do not fit (and certainly they don’t) a rightist or conservative profile. And if the apparent losers do get back into the war by some unforeseen circumstance, their longtime persecutors will not become a loyal opposition.