← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 5272 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-03-01
2003-03-01 12:53 | User Profile
My Dogs Watch FoxNews
by Paul Gottfried This morning, when I turned on FoxNews for our three dogs, who seem to like the staccato sounds on Rupert Murdoch Central, I caught sight of the well-publicized visage of David Frum. Apparently Frum was being asked to comment on the Christian faith of George W. Bush, a spiritual disposition that had just received high grades from an Evangelical Republican who was particularly struck by the Prez's remarks about everyone having the potential for democracy. Frum, who was in agreement with the Evangelical, spoke about how effusively Bush's faith had come out in his speech before the American Enterprise Institute. Supposedly, someone who is about to bring democracy to the Middle East should be a man of strong Christian faith.
As a cultural historian, I find all of this indescribably interesting. Why is a Jewish agnostic authorized to speak with pontifical authority on a "conservative" news channel about the Christian spiritual well-being of an American president? And why would anyone, particularly a "conservative," believe that someone is a devout Christian because he intends to impose a facsimile of the current US regime upon countries in Asia with vastly different cultural and social traditions?
Most important, what does this conversionary goal have to do with Christianity or with the constitutional understanding of limited republican government provided by the American Founding Fathers? Needless to say, the answer to all these rhetorical questions is: nothing at all. What has become the acid test for a lot of things, especially in the utterly misnamed "conservative movement," is accepting and promoting a Trotskyist vision of permanent revolution under neoconservative auspices.
One of the best treatments of this subject I've recently encountered is by a French scholar who teaches at the London School of Economics, Nicholas Guilhot; he delivered the study at the most recent plenary gathering of the French Political Science Association in Lille. What makes this paper, which a former student of mine sent from France, especially intriguing is that Guilhot is clearly on the Marxist Left and, moreover, apparently unfamiliar with my writings. Nonetheless, he arrives at identical conclusions about "la matrice trotskiste" that nurtured the neoconservative view of the American managerial state as an instrument of world revolution.
Guilhot goes back to the contacts among the Russian Marxists who paved the way for the neoconservative moment. Surveying the dissident Marxist Max Schachtman and other members of the anti-Stalinist Left, which is the subject of a distinguished monograph by Alan Wald, and the leadership of the Young People Socialist League at City College, Guilhot treats these figures and anti-Stalinist Marxism generally as the architects of a distinctly neoconservative worldview. He is right to present both the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the work of S.M. Lipset as representing an inchoate neoconservatism.
By the fifties the anti-Stalinist Left is depicting the working class as authoritarian and anti-Semitic, but at the same time continues to favor a global movement toward a scientifically managed, pluralistic society. This would be brought about, explains Lipset in 1963 in Political Man, by pushing other countries toward the "American model," which he found the only morally acceptable one. What made the US exceptional was the acceptance by the middle class of economic redistribution and extensive public administration for progressive ends. Thus the reactionary deficiencies of blue-collar voters would not matter in the end because of the openness of the American bourgeoisie to managerial direction.
Guilhot is correct to observe that such ideas foreshadow the entire history of neoconservatism as a political position. The notion of "permanent revolution" drawn from Trotskyist ideology is given a new meaning by being linked to an expansive American public administration that tries to replicate itself throughout the world. And though neocons in the seventies and eighties turn fanatically anti-Communist, Guilhot recognizes that his subjects are "anti-radical radicals," opposing the Communists for betraying the revolutionary vision.
Alan Wald makes the observation that "the anti-Stalinist Left moves to the right for social and not ideological reasons." What may be more accurate to say is that they appear to move to the right in response to improved social positions, especially after taking over policy positions in the Reagan administration from a WASP establishment gone bad in the teeth. But this ascent to power does not really signify that those who are ascending are on the right. It merely enables the ascending group to pull toward the managerial Left the American Right and Right Center, while concluding a compromise with corporate capitalists.
In return for the support of an expanding welfare state, neocons would deal Big Business in, exactly the way the Fascists did with European capitalists, that is, conditionally. Thus neocons would defend "democratic capitalism" or a mixed economy, together with global democratic military crusades and the opening up of foreign markets as a method of global transformation. Guilhot notes that the neocon usage of "modernization," since the popularization of the term by Lipset in the fifties, has meant positive revolutionary change. It is a bootlegged Marxist value judgment pretending to be a neutral descriptive term.
Finally I would note that the "droitisation," or veering rightward, that Guilhot ascribes to the neocons in the seventies and eighties is entirely an optical illusion. Rather what happens is that the Right, by then in its Buckleyite revised version, does the veering, toward the social democratic Left, partly in response to neocon guidance. The neocons took over a pliant conservative movement organization, whose leaders and staff scurried to do their bidding. Guilhot, as I have told him, would do well to read the second edition of my book on the conservative movement, which explains the phases of this friendly take-over that occurred in the 1980s. What my book failed to deal with, however, is the profound stupidity and utter venality that drove this process on the American Right. Today's "conservatives" shout Trotskyist slogans that they mistake for patriotism and religion. Unlike my two wizened Dachshunds and a Basset puppy, I would prefer not to listen.
March 1, 2003 Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of, most recently, the highly recommended Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt. Copyright é 2003 LewRockwell.com Paul Gottfried Archives ààààààààFind this article at: [url=http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried45.html]http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried45.html[/url] ÃÂ
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2003-03-01 14:18 | User Profile
Bush the Elder, in the "bad cop," good cop" scenario, paved the way for King Klinton. But even Klinton, despite his many character flaws, would not have marched America off to an unnecessary war under the Zionist banner.
Lemmings loved to be duped, but I feel they will have a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny under Bush the Younger than to laugh at their folly. Perhaps the idiot son is paving the way for Queen Hillary and "politically correct" indoctrination camps to impose the Marxist will upon America. Hillary and her social engineering pals, in their efforts to make America "morally acceptable" to the tribe, could make the Bolsheviks look like Sunday school teachers.
-Z-
2003-03-02 06:07 | User Profile
Now that is a great Article.
2003-03-02 09:57 | User Profile
Does war talk make Gottfried's dogs piddle when they watch Fox News?
What about him?
Will he be following these dangerous neocon to war? ("....> **Why is a Jewish agnostic authorized to speak with pontifical authority on a "conservative" news channel about the Christian spiritual well-being of an American president?"**
Is he joking? That's a no-brainer. For Jews pushing war, that **is** american "conservatism". Why shouldn't anyone hold this ramblin' Bible man to his OT roots? -- Jew or anyone else? Is Gottfried showing anti-Semiticism here? What has he got against these Jews on TV, except some of then are "ex-Trotskyites", and therefore always dangerously close to backsliding into socialsm. He tells you so: > ** ..the utterly misnamed "conservative movement," is accepting and promoting a Trotskyist vision of permanent revolution under ceoconservative ausices.**
Well, that's the european "conservative" twist, all right. If you read the cultural history of these particular slipdicks -- talkin' your fauxnews variety -- its pro--Vietnam war, anti-60's religio-moralistic fervor -- the original, enduring, ongoing agenda was, and is, to ***[u] purify the American spirit of unholiness![/u]*** brought on by the dope-smoking, screwing, devotion to hard-rock to metal music, <b>HELL NO! WE WON'"T GO!"</b> chanting generaton of military war recruiters, "Masterminded" by "liberal" professors such as I (not really, on either count, but let that pass), Zionist Jews and media-flirty southern religious rightist, doin' that neat Buchanan Nixon-religion flip (Bay-type multis are Ok) and whatever else comes naturally (heard CBS is saving a slot for Ralph, Jerry and Gerald on their "could you survive this? did you? on their updated Jeb and Granny routine. Hey! if it works! Is this a pragmatic country, or what?. Republicans will do anything. What Murdoch has in common with Scorcese.
No, Gottffried's cultural history somehow gerrymanders around this particularphenomenon, as if it, and we, never existed. First its two guys in a white van seen firing on unarmed Americans, next its two black converts to Islam, hiding in the open in a dark Chevy Caprice. First its partners in the peace process, then its terrorist cells for al quaida. Turn anything into anything you want, if you've got the guns. That's what was, and is at stake -- first abroad, then at home. To bring "us" under someone's gun: the process the Vietnam war started, now being mopped up by neocons, and who will join them?. It's their way of "finishing Daddy's job", restoring the faith, re-birthing america, etc. Call them "Sons Of North" (or Casey, or d'Abuissan). Fox news is their new america is it yours.
This generation of vipers children, trying to make up for their Father's generational flatulence ("tell us who to off; why should we give sh*t?") are the ones who made this America, this politics, and this war terror, this situation of permanently installed police state terror exist.
True then, now, and forevermore. Our History isn't up for european cultural re-write, thank you but no thank you.
In America, the Vietnam war goes on and on, and the Gottfreidians still haven't said whether they prefer Jews stirring up racial disconent in the South -- in the name of "Civil rights" -- thus avoiding the question of the Vietnam war, and tacitly or openly supporting it, like "Scoop" Jackson did -- just like they intend to avoid the question of this one -- or whether its not all right, after all, to have a Jew up there, on Fox news, talking up ridding Saddam Hussein of his Weapons of Mass Destruction? Until he/they answer that question clearly, now, to show how they are taking the present situation, they do not concern true American interests. "Hanoi Hilton" Jane Fonda probably had about as much love for Ho Chi Mihn, as I do for Shiite Muslims, but right wing Republicans, all stripes and varieties included, like to make you hot by sexing up the opposition. If politics don't make you hot, what have you got?
At least GWB wasn't one of those post-60's feisty ramblin' NAMBLA men. I don't guess. Maybe they all are. I never thought to wonder WWJD before that.
2003-03-05 06:40 | User Profile
I'm a newly-minted fan of Paul Gottfried. I'm just finishing his book on the "Managerial State" now.
I don't get how Gottfried, who is IP by birth, sees his way to speak the truth so forthrightly.
The neocons did something to really alienate this guy, much to their harm.
This is a truly great piece of writing. It cuts right to the heart of our predicament: the utter betrayal of the conservative movement by its leaders under Reagan.
Walter