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Thread ID: 6427 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2003-05-01

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Okiereddust [OP]

2003-05-01 04:31 | User Profile

[url=http://http:\www.vdare.com]Vdare[/url]

By Paul Gottfried

How can something exist and not exist both at the same time? The answer: by being neoconservative.

Since last winter, neoconservative columnists David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, and John Podhoretz have been insisting that the word “neoconservative” is either a tautologous term for a right-winger or an anti-Semitic slur aimed at pro-Israeli conservative Jews.

On April 22, Republican booster and talk show host Rush Limbaugh entered the fray. He denounced

“these media people speaking in their own code language. A case in point is their use of the term ‘neoconservative.’ Whether they choose to hyphenate the label or not, it’s a pejorative code word for ‘Jews.’ That's right. They use it as a way to say guys like Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz and others are just trying to support Israel at the USA's expense

Anti-Semites Use "Neo-Con" Code Word, Rushlimbaugh.com, April 22, 2003

Rush’s website commentary links to a lead essay “I Confess” written by John Podhoretz for the New York Post (April 22), which might help clarify Rush’s gripe.

Both Podhoretz and Limbaugh assert that neoconservatives are the genuine conservatives, whom anti-Semites are slandering by attaching the derogatory prefix “neo.” Limbaugh mumbles about “these media people”—as if the Establishment mediacrats that the neocons socialize and share their goodies with were the problem. [“A friend of mine suggests it [neocon] means the kind of right-winger a liberal wouldn't be embarrassed to have over for cocktails. - What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'? By Max Boot, Opinionjournal.com, December 30, 2002]

Podhoretz understands that this snickering is coming from the Old Right, which is emphatically non-Establishment. But snickering can be contagious–hence the neocon efforts to anathematize their detractors.

There are, it seems to me, two reasons that neoconservatives are starting to shed their label.

Firstly, the term ** “neoconservative” is now too closely identified with the personal and ethnic concerns of its Jewish celebrities. Despite their frequent attempts to find kept gentiles, the game of speaking through proxies may be showing diminishing results. Everyone with minimal intelligence knows that Bill Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ed Feulner, Michael Novak, George Weigel, James Nuechterlein, and Cal Thomas front for the neocons. It is increasingly useless to depend on out-group surrogates to repackage a movement so clearly rooted in a particular ethnicity—and even subethnicity (Eastern European Jews). Better to seek cover by changing a culturally-specific label into something more generic.

And neocons, given their iron control of today’s “movement conservatives,” can call themselves whatever they want. It is doubtful they would meet much opposition if tomorrow they order movement conservatives to call them Martians.

Secondly, the recent attacks on ** “neoconservatives” that have appeared here and in Europe depicting them as global revolutionary radicals have created other terminological problems for those who wish to be associated, however fictitiously, with the Right. While posing as a friend of order, one does not want to be burdened with a moniker that connotes “creative destruction,” as Michael Ledeen was unwisely boasting recently. Thus it seems a good idea for neocons in some circumstances to abandon the label associated with the worship of revolution—for example, when playing to Midwestern small-town Republicans or to corporate executives.

Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol pioneered this practice in his Reflections of a Neoconservative[u] [/u] (1983)—yes, he used the term—when he ingeniously argued: “A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.”

“Welfare State” = New Deal.

The same year George Will, by then a wannabe neocon, was explaining in Statecraft as Soulcraft that Aristotle and Burke were the true fathers of the American welfare state. Only radicals, like Taft Republicans, says Will, stood athwart this essentially conservative institution. Moreover, “two conservatives [Bismarck and Disraeli] pioneered the welfare state and did so for impeccably conservative reasons: to reconcile the masses to the vicissitudes and hazards of a dynamic industrial economy.”

Thus, although the neoconservatives are now the party of global “creative destruction,” in 1983 they were still reaching for Tory-Democratic window-dressing to present themselves and Big Government as “conservative” forces.

Abandoning the label “neoconservative” is a project of astonishing ambition and daring, comparable in a small way to the project of persuading the Americans to conquer and colonize the Middle East. “Neoconservative” has been a conventional descriptive term since the seventies when Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Bell themselves began applying that term to their thinking. By the 1980s, when John B. Judis of the New Republic noticed that “conservative wars” had erupted (New Republic, 11 August, 1986), neocons were proudly flaunting their identity, in order to distinguish themselves from the traditional American Right.

Unlike that rejected traditional Right, neocons saw themselves as friends of a large federal welfare state. They despised Taft Republicans and followers of the late Senator Joe McCarthy as rightwing extremists. Bill Kristol’s enthusiastic endorsement (during an interview in 1997 with * Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne) of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the tone of which is faithfully reproduced by Sam Francis in his essay Chronicles (May 2003), reflects this line of thought. Neoconservatives, as opposed to constitutional conservatives, do not disguise their adoration of the contemporary managerial state.

And young militant Max Boot, writing in the Wall Street Journal (December 30, 2002) did not shy away from the N word, when he told us that “support for Israel [is ]a key tenet of neoconservatism.”  Zionism inheres specifically in neoconservatism, which also, as Boot reminded us, is in favor of the welfare state. (I write this as a supporter of Israel. I am less enthusiastic about the welfare state). [Open borders may be another “key tenet”. Click here for Scott McConnell’s account of the hostile neoconservative reaction to the reopening of the immigration debate – from sixth paragraph.]

Irving Kristol, of course, titled two of his most widely distributed collections of thoughts Reflections of a Neoconservative[u] /u and Neoconservatism: Autobiography of an Idea (1999). In both works, “neoconservativism” is celebrated as a positive quality that Kristol discerns in himself and in his spiritual progeny.

Moreover, in 1995 Mark Gerson, a “twenty-three years old rising neoconservative,” (see www.amazon.com) brought out a flattering history of Kristol’s movement, The Neoconservative Vision, which was profusely praised in First Things (October 1996, 7-8). In this work Gerson stressed the distinctions between his beloved “neoconservatives” and those who had occupied the Right before. Gerson hoped to make the difference between the two crystal-clear (the pun is deliberate) when he published simultaneously The Essential Neoconservative Reader, which is meant to introduce us to the authors of identifiably “neoconservative” verities.

Many of these authors are featured on an internet fansite [url=http://neoconservatism.com/]http://neoconservatism.com/[/url] An especially exciting feature of this website, which lists neocon affiliate groups in England and France, is the availability of the commentaries of Max Boot, David Frum, John Podhoretz, and Jonah Goldberg and those of such golden oldies as Michael Ledeen, Daniel Pipes, and Frank Gaffney.

Curiously enough, this site has posted its heroes’ recent comments denying the very existence of that movement whose sacred shrine we have just entered. These angry denials are juxtaposed with a pervasive affirmation of neoconservative identity.

How can this be?

Perhaps the neocons are imitating the American Communist practice of assuming multiple identities at different organizational levels. Remember the way that J. Edgar Hoover depicted the Communists as “masters of deceit” because of their skill at infiltrating other groups, partly by appearing to be other than Communists, e.g., Ban-the-Bombers or members of the U.S.-Soviet Friendship League.

To the question of whether alleged Communists were really what they were, the ready answer of their defenders was, no, they were not. They were simply misrepresented friends of peace and/or dedicated anti-fascists.

Those who were in the know understood the game. But everyone else—let’s say the Rush Limbaughs—tried to believe the disinformation that the Communists spread throughout their support system. The fellow travelers did not look too deeply and put out of their minds unwelcome facts that contradicted what they wished to think.

Once again our global revolutionaries may be taking a leaf from their leftist home base.

That is where they return, like other habitual leftists, for strategic and rhetorical nurture.

Paul Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of After Liberalism, * Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, and Multiculturalism And The Politics of Guilt: Toward A Secular Theocracy.

Ragnar

2003-05-01 05:05 | User Profile

Originally posted by Okiereddust@May 1 2003, 04:31 ** Everyone with minimal intelligence knows that Bill Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ed Feulner, Michael Novak, George Weigel, James Nuechterlein, and Cal Thomas front for the neocons. **

I say it's good strategy to keep everyone's mind on who the waterboys are. :P

The "welfare state" argument is a libertarian red herring. Industrial societies divide work in ways that make parts of what welfare states do necessary unless we want to go back to hunting and gathering.

Neocons are not the first to notice this fact but they noticed it the best. As long as libertarians and ordinary movement conservatives keep wanting to destroy Social Security -- the biggest investment poor working Americans usually make -- large numbers of people have no choice but to look leftward.

This suicidal tendency of the right was noticed as far back as 1964 when Goldwater was destroyed by the far-from-popular Lyndon Johnson over precisely this issue. Some rightists literally cannot understand that you either craft policies that make families and communities more self-sufficient, or you lay back and let the welfare state plug the holes.

Okiereddust

2003-05-01 05:31 | User Profile

Originally posted by Ragnar@May 1 2003, 05:05 > Originally posted by Okiereddust@May 1 2003, 04:31 ** Everyone with minimal intelligence knows that Bill Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ed Feulner, Michael Novak, George Weigel, James Nuechterlein, and Cal Thomas front for the neocons. **

I say it's good strategy to keep everyone's mind on who the waterboys are. :P

The "welfare state" argument is a libertarian red herring. Industrial societies divide work in ways that make parts of what welfare states do necessary unless we want to go back to hunting and gathering.

Neocons are not the first to notice this fact but they noticed it the best. As long as libertarians and ordinary movement conservatives keep wanting to destroy Social Security -- the biggest investment poor working Americans usually make -- large numbers of people have no choice but to look leftward. **

I am not certain that neocons noticed this best at all. One could assert based on writers like MacDonald that their strategy is actually one of duplicity - undermining the existing economic support system ordinary Americans have through their supprt for globalization etc,, and at the same time posing as their protectors through "the welfare state".

I would asset that when neocons discuss "the welfare state" they are really referring solely to the form of it that their ancestors controlled with an iron hand - the New Deal, not any form of the welfare state that ordinary Americans could hope to exercise a reasonable amount of sovereignty over and through.

Its ufortunate this distinction gets lost sometimes in the work of paleoconservatives. It appears they often are trying to court the support of their paleolibertarian friends, like at LewRockwell and the JBS, excessively.

However the Linderites have adopted a linguistic strategy of courting the paleolibertarians and anti-government rhetoric. The motivation is that any state in today's politic will be a multicultural state, so anti-government rhetoric is harmless.

I don't think its really true, as you note, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

il ragno

2003-05-01 12:33 | User Profile

You know, I could almost swear Gottfried is reading OD. Some of the similarities are....uncanny.

I think the Jews are stuck with "neoconservative" because "neo" itself is a wholly successful subterfuge. Jews invented the term as camouflage 20 years ago and it took that 20 years for columnists to either catch on (if they weren't too bright), or work up the onions to say it (if they were).

Neoconservativism may be linked to Jews all right, and we may all know it - but nobody's about to drop the charade-of-nomenclature and simply talk about 'power Zionists' except maybe Sobran. On the other hand, since we all know it, any attempt by Jews to now rename the clubhouse has to take place in the light of day with everybody looking....and visibility is not Hymie's best light.

It's like when they tried to get people to start saying 'homicide bomber' instead of 'suicide bomber'. 20 yrs ago, when no one was paying much attention, it might've stuck. But now....well, who but a hurry-sundown shabbas goy would be of a mind to carry out a direct order barked at you by John Podhoretz or Debbie Schlussel?

PS to Okie:[u]very [/u]impressed by how you posted this with all the underlined reference links "live". (Raimondo's columns are similarly full of interactive footnotes.) How did you do it, pray tell?

Texas Dissident

2003-05-01 15:44 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@May 1 2003, 07:33 **You  know, I could almost swear Gottfried is reading OD. Some of the similarities are....uncanny.

**

I've thought this for some time now, because everytime I read one of these type articles it seems the author is talking in and around us, without nary a mention. Since you mentioned it IR, now I know I'm not crazy. :unsure: Sooner or later one of these high profile columnists is going to have to slip us in somewhere.

PS to Okie:[u]very [/u]impressed by how you posted this with all the underlined reference links "live". (Raimondo's columns are similarly full of interactive footnotes.) How did you do it, pray tell?

Yes, fine job, Okie. You really gave this one the white glove treatment, so I assume you thought highly of it, as did I. Gottfried continues to roll.

Okiereddust

2003-05-01 17:37 | User Profile

Originally posted by Texas Dissident@May 1 2003, 15:44 > Originally posted by il ragno@May 1 2003, 07:33 You  know, I could almost swear Gottfried is reading OD. Some of the similarities are....uncanny.

**

I've thought this for some time now, because everytime I read one of these type articles it seems the author is talking in and around us, without nary a mention. Since you mentioned it IR, now I know I'm not crazy. :unsure: Sooner or later one of these high profile columnists is going to have to slip us in somewhere. **

Well I don't know for sure, to some extent anyone who starts to to watch the neocons closely wil adopt the same tacticsand start dealing with the same questions. The issue of the site neoconservatism.com is a case in point. Any good writer has his own good list of sources. Wouldn't hurt if we're one of them, and wouldn't surprise me if we're one of the better ones. Not many people provide running archives critical of the neoconservatives - so it isn't a big world, being in the anti-neocon camp. I'm sure active people recognize this.

Neocons recognize this of course, and are actually very quick to atack paleo's who they can find have links or use material from the far-right. You remember the remark Jonah Goldberg made insinuiting Pat Buchanan must have got the phrase "Soviet Canuckistan" from the radical white nationalist web? So prominent paleocons have to be very careful who they credit, especially in writing.

> PS to Okie:[u]very [/u]impressed by how you posted this with all the underlined reference links "live". (Raimondo's columns are similarly full of interactive footnotes.) How did you do it, pray tell?**

Yes, fine job, Okie. You really gave this one the white glove treatment, so I assume you thought highly of it, as did I. Gottfried continues to roll.**

Basically you just open up the document, and view the document source (frame source) in notepad. Cut and past the document into Microsoft Word. In Microsoft word, use the "find" function, select "paragraph mark" and hit "replace all".

This seems to work just fine.

il ragno

2003-05-01 18:07 | User Profile

If Charley Reese starts referring to "Team Shmuel", we'll know.

MikeK-

2003-05-07 16:19 | User Profile

Today (5/6) on his Radio Factor, Bill O'Reilly vigorously denounced a group of White high school students in Georgia who are seeking to arrange a Whites-only graduation prom. The following is a copy of my email to O'Reilly.

Bill O'Reilly,

Although I didn't agree with every issue you addressed on your programs in the past I had thought of you as being more on the level than the majority of radio (now tv) talkers. And while in the past I routinely ignored issues on which we disagree you really blew it today as far as I'm concerned. So I've moved you into the same slot with such obnoxious motormouths as Hannity, Limbaugh, and Matthews, with one exception: none of those three are as brazenly adept at pandering as you obviously are.

For you to criticize those White kids in Georgia for seeking to arrange a White-only prom is nothing but shameless pandering for which I hope you pay dearly in terms of lost ratings. The way things have been going along racial lines in the past few decades I'd say it's about time that some Whites had the righteous temerity to assert the Natural fact that birds of a feather prefer to flock together. I was really surprised to hear you putting those kids down -- especially now that you're living in an upscale Long Island community where you come in contact with few to zero Blacks and are ipso facto in the same league with the Sarandon, Baldwin, Penn, and Streisand crowd.

For your information, there is no longer Jim Crow segregation in America. Blacks are not excluded from education, employment, or decent housing -- in spite of what Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have to say about it. But this issue is not about jobs, housing, or employment. It's about social contact. It's about boys and girls getting together -- an area in which your kind of politically correct bloviation is definitely out of place!

Your argument that if Blacks are good enough to fight and die for America they are good enough to have government force Whites to socialize with them is nothing but shallow, presumptuous nonsense. You are assuming first of all that Blacks wouldn't want to have their own prom, a notion which any Black with a modicum of racial pride would find offensive. And serving in the military does not confer any licenses where social contact is concerned, nor should it. In case you are still too shallow and unsophisticated to realize it, an increasing number of Blacks are no less desirous of racially exclusive social contact than are Whites -- and some of them moreso.

I would venture a guess that a significant percentage of Blacks in that Georgia school would prefer to have an all Black prom. And it's a good bet that most of those who would not are spiteful troublemakers of the kind who enjoy aggressively imposing themselves on Whites.

Several years ago there was a serious brawl involving White and Black boys in the New Jersey neighborhood I lived in. The way it was explained to me is Blacks from a nearby neighborhood began showing up at a weekend dance which previously had been attended exclusively by Whites. The Blacks were not welcome there and they knew it but, although there were several weekend dances going on in their own neighborhood, they preferred coming to this place and dancing with the White girls.

One of the White girls had told her date that some of the Blacks she had previously agreed to dance with rather than be thought of as racist had "come on very strongly" to her and so she didn't want to dance with them anymore. When a Black approached her and she declined to dance with him he wouldn't take no for an answer (which is typical of them) and her date stepped in. A fight started that ended up on the street and more than a dozen arrests resulted. The bottom line is the Whites stopped coming to that dance, which was held in the gym of a Catholic high school, and before long that weekend dance was called off.

I believe that [u]this[/u], not resurrected southern racism, is the reason why those kids in Georgia want to have an all White prom. But opinionated loudmouths like you see this as an opportunity to wave your PC flag and pander to the minorities in your audience.

I really hope that a significant number of your listeners are as turned off by you as I am.

Mike K--------- Lakewood NJ

madrussian

2003-05-07 17:50 | User Profile

It's a good thing that O'Reilly said that. The less pretense the neocons have about the issues the more obvious they are. Perhaps even some of the FReak types will see the light.