Neoconservatism
The questions of the definition of neoconservatism and
of the extent to which it is a movement dominated by Jews
have received considerable scrutiny of late,
by, e.g.,
and Goldberg (comparatively briefly),
then provide a brief closing comment.
For more information on neoconservatism, see the references.
has many worthwhile passages,
but I suspect is a little long (~50 pages)
for most readers to wade through.
Below, from the green start line to the red finish line,
I have extracted some of his conclusions and observations
that seemed especially interesting or controversial.
These are just some (highly debatable) highlights
(or perhaps, from your perspective, lowlights);
the full article provides supporting examples, arguments,
and references.
Emphasis, links, headings,
and an occasional comment in square brackets and this color,
have been added.
[Cf. Israel Shahak: JHJR, JF; MacDonald: Zionism.]
...
[B]y far the best predictor of neoconservative attitudes,
on foreign policy at least, is
what the political right in Israel
deems in Israel’s best interests....
Neoconservatism [can be] described in general as
a complex interlocking professional and family network
centered around Jewish publicists and organizers
flexibly deployed to
recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews in
harnessing the wealth and power of the United States
in the service of Israel.
As such,
neoconservatism
should be considered a semicovert branch of
the massive and highly effective pro-Israel lobby...
...
[T]he organized Jewish community
shares the neocon commitment
to the Likud Party in Israel.
...
[T]he organized Jewish community has played a critical role
in the success of neoconservatism and
in preventing public discussion
of its Jewish roots and Jewish agendas.
...
[T]he main Jewish activist organizations
have been quick to condemn those who have
noted the Jewish commitments of the neoconservative activists
in the Bush administration or
seen the hand of the Jewish community
in pushing for war against Iraq and other Arab countries....
[W]hen Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC)
made a speech in the U.S. Senate
and wrote a newspaper op-ed piece [cf. this commentary]
which claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by
“President Bush’s policy to secure Israel”
and advanced by a handful of Jewish officials and opinion leaders,
Abe Foxman of the ADL stated,
“when the debate veers into anti-Jewish stereotyping,
it is tantamount to scapegoating and an appeal to ethnic hatred….
This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards [sic] about
a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”
[Compare ...]
Despite negative comments from Jewish activist organizations,
and a great deal of coverage in the American Jewish press,
there were no articles on this story
in any of the major U.S. national newspapers
...
[Foxman and his allies are avoiding the real issues,
which are:]
Since ... 1981,
the positive attitudes toward the Likud Party
characteristic of the neoconservatives have become
the mainstream view of the organized American Jewish community,
and [various liberal Jewish critics] have been relegated
to the fringe of the American Jewish community.
...
[N]eoconservatives have been staunch supporters of arguably
the most destructive force associated with the left
in the twentieth century—
massive non-European immigration.
Support for massive non-European immigration
has spanned the Jewish political spectrum
throughout the twentieth century to the present.
A principal motivation of the organized Jewish community
for encouraging such immigration
has involved a deeply felt animosity
toward the people and culture responsible for
the immigration restriction of 1924–1965—
“this notion of a Christian civilization.”
As neoconservative Ben Wattenberg has famously written,
“The non-Europeanization of America
is heartening news
of an almost transcendental quality.”
In general,
neoconservatives have been far more attached
to Jewish interests,
and especially the interests of Israel,
than to any other identifiable interest.
were inevitable and
advocated rule by an aristocratic elite of philosopher kings
forced to pay lip service
to the traditional religious and political beliefs of the masses
while not believing them.
This elite should pursue its vision of the common good but
must reach out to others using deception and manipulation
to achieve its goals.
As Bill Kristol has described it,
elites have the duty to guide public opinion, but
“one of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that
all politics are limited and
none of them is really based on the truth.”
A more cynical characterization is provided by Stephen Holmes:
“The good society, on this model, consists of
the sedated masses,
the gentlemen rulers,
the promising puppies, and
the philosophers who
like an alarmingly accurate description
of the present situation in the United States.
Given Strauss’s central concern that
an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival,
it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that
the aristocracy would serve Jewish interests.
...
Strauss understood that neither communism nor fascism
was good for Jews in the long run.
But democracy cannot be trusted
given that Weimar ended with Hitler.
A solution is to advocate democracy
and the trappings of traditional religious culture, but
managed by an elite able to manipulate the masses
via control of the media and academic discourse.
Jews have a long history as an elite in Western societies,
so it is not in the least surprising
that Strauss would advocate an ideal society in which
Jews would be a central component of the elite...
[The neocons] form an elite that is deeply involved
in deception, manipulation and espionage
on issues related to Israel and the war in Iraq.
They also established the massive neocon infrastructure
in the elite media and think tanks.
And they have often become wealthy in the process.
Their public pronouncements advocating
a democratic, egalitarian ideology
have not prevented them from having
strong ethnic identities and
a strong sense of their own ethnic interests;
nor have
their public pronouncements supporting
the Enlightenment ideals of egalitarianism and democracy
prevented them from having
a thoroughly anti-Enlightenment ethnic particularist commitment
to the most nationalistic, aggressive, racialist elements within Israel—
the Likud Party, the settler movement, and the religious fanatics.
[Cf. Israel Shahak: JHJR, JF.]
is really an awesome display of Jewish power and influence.
People who are very strongly identified as Jews
maintain close ties to Israeli politicians and military figures
and to Jewish activist organizations and pro-Israeli lobbying groups
while occupying influential policy-making positions in the defense and foreign policy establishment.
These same people, as well as a chorus of other prominent Jews,
have routine access to the most prestigious media outlets in the United States.
People who criticize Israel are routinely vilified and subjected to professional abuse.
Perhaps the most telling feature of this entire state of affairs
is the surreal fact that
in this entire discourse
Jewish identity is not mentioned.
When
Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Michael Rubin, William Safire, Robert Satloff,
or the legions of other prominent media figures
write their reflexively pro-Israel pieces
in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times,
or opine on the Fox News Network,
there is never any mention
that they are Jewish Americans
who have an intense ethnic interest in Israel.
When Richard Perle authors a report for an Israeli think tank;
is on the board of directors of an Israeli newspaper;
maintains close personal ties with prominent Israelis,
especially those associated with the Likud Party;
has worked for an Israeli defense company;
and, according to credible reports,
was discovered by the FBI passing classified information to Israel—
when, despite all of this,
he is a central figure in the network of those pushing for wars
to rearrange the entire politics of the Middle East
in Israel’s favor, and
with nary a soul
having the courage to mention
the obvious overriding Jewish loyalty
apparent in Perle’s actions,
that is indeed a breathtaking display of power.
One must contemplate the fact that American Jews
have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel
over the last thirty-seven years,
despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal suppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—
an occupation that will most likely end with expulsion
or complete subjugation, degradation, and apartheid.
During the same period Jewish organizations in America
have been a principal force—in my view the main force—
for transforming America into a state
dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among Europeans,
for encouraging massive multiethnic immigration into the U.S., and
for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology
that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests
of non-European ethnic minorities—the culture of the Holocaust.
All this is done without a whisper of double standards
in the aboveground media.
discusses the neoconservatives in the context of
overall American Jewish political power and influence.
Below, from the green start line to the red end line,
are some excerpts from pages 160–162 of its Chapter Six,
“Six Days in June: The Triumph of Jewish Insecurity.”
The emphasis is added.
Not all the neoconservatives were Jewish,
and those who were Jewish were ambivalent about it;
they still clung to the secularism and anticlericalism
of their old Marxist days.
Nonetheless, they became known as a Jewish group,
for several reasons.
For one thing, most of them were Jews.
More important, they were an anomaly:
a school of thought dominated by Jews,
on an American right which had always been alien territory
to Jews.
...
[The chapter’s conclusion:]
In this new mood,
the cause of Jewish advocacy underwent
a fundamental transformation of values.
The world after 1967 was regarded as a hostile place,
divided between the Jews’ friends and their enemies.
The values that for so long had characterized American Judaism—
equality,
tolerance, and
social justice—
became suspect in New Jewish leadership circles.
A new set of basic values came to replace them:
loyalty to the Jewish people,
commitment to its survival, and
hostility to its enemies.
The Jews who rose to the leadership of the Jewish community after 1967
were those who most embodied these new values.
Jews now expected to be represented,
not by those who best expressed their beliefs and aspirations,
but by those who seemed to them to be "most Jewish":
most loyal to the Jewish people and its traditions, or
most hostile to its enemies.
substantiate and support
the arguments and conclusions of MacDonald, both
those on neoconservatism excerpted above from
Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,
and those on Zionism, presented in
Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism.
Further, they totally reflect the picture
that is presented in the media.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the “revolt of the generals”
is that the neocons have come out so uniformly and vitrolically
against the generals who are criticizing Rumsfeld.
Consider the following example:
Charles Krauthammer,
"I-know-better" generals get on the slippery slope
(to be completed)
(Those dated 2003 or earlier
are mainly from Kevin MacDonald’s excellent essay
“Thinking About Neoconservatism”.)
Some basic questions answered.
Christian Science Monitor, undated
Neoconservative think tanks, periodicals, and key documents.
Christian Science Monitor, undated
McCarthy Was Right
OUR HIJACKED FOREIGN POLICY
Neoconservatives take Washington – Baghdad is next
Too Many Smoking Guns to Ignore:
Israel, American Jews, and the War on Iraq
All in the Neocon Family
The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War
The Axis of Deceit — Still Pushing for U.S. Imperial Expansion!
An Introduction to Neoconservatism
Are Trotskyites Running the Pentagon?
I Was Smeared
[Responding to 2003-06-23-Wald.]
What a Tangled Web the Neocons Weave
Neoconservatives have more in common with French revolutionaries
than American traditionalists
By Claes G. Ryn
The American Conservative, 2004-01-19
[Ryn comparies American neoconservatives
to eighteenth-century French Jacobins.
An excerpt (paragraph numbers and emphasis are added):]
[8]
[Allan] Bloom’s book [The Closing of the American Mind] actually exemplified
just
the anti-traditional, ideological universalism
that is at the heart of the current push for American empire.
Bloom wrote, for example,
“When we Americans speak seriously about politics,
we mean that our principles of freedom and equality
and the rights based on them
are rational and everywhere applicable.”
[9]
This kind of thinking bears a strong resemblance to that of the Jacobins,
who inspired and led the French Revolution of 1789.
Their ideology was summed up in the slogan
“liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
Equally universalistic and monopolistic,
they demanded that other countries change their ways.
Good stood against evil.
Europe was thrown into protracted wars and upheaval.
A Tragedy of Errors
The Nation, 2004-02-23
Dual Loyalties: The Bush Neocons and Israel
by Jim Lobe
CommonDreams.org, 2004-11-06
by Tom Barry
Antiwar.com, 2005-02-11
For Neocons, the Irony of Iraq
by Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2006-05-24
They’re looking to make a comeback after the elections
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-03
The neocons turn on their ‘leader’
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-06
The moralistic ideology has utterly failed.
But as long as Bush still abides by it,
his disastrous "war on terror" will drag on.
By Gary Kamiya
Salon.com, 2006-11-14
by Leon Hadar
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-16
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Antiwar.com, 2007-01-05
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com, 2007-03-29
[T]he dominant right-wing political movement in this country
that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency
has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to --
the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism.
...
[T]he Bush presidency and the political movement that supports it is not driven by any of the abstract political principles traditionally associated with “liberalism” or “conservatism.” Whatever else one wants to say about the Bush presidency, it has nothing to do with limiting the size, scope and reach of the federal government. The exact opposite is true.
...
That is the central point of our current political predicament: the Bush presidency, and more importantly the right-wing movement which created and sustained it (and which will survive Bush’s departure), are not adherents to any mainstream American political ideology. And many people, including neoconservatives themselves, have acknowledged this, and that is also the critical insight of Brooks’ column today.
George Will previously called the “neoconservatism” which drives the right-wing movement in this country “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism.” One of America’s most influential neoconservatives, Robert Kagan, previously admitted -- just like Brooks -- that the current right-wing ideology has nothing to do with the Goldwater/Reagan limited government mythology; in fact, it is overtly hostile to it:
...
Pat Buchanan founded The American Conservative based principally on the same observation: namely, that
the right-wing, Bush-supporting movement has nothing to do with
the political principles they manipulatively tout...
...
Brooks’ column (like those of Will and Kagan before it) makes clear just how radical it is, how unmoored it is to any principles which previously defined the political mainstream. The terms “left” and “right” do not mean what they meant even ten years ago, though they still have meaning. At least for now, until this movement is banished to the dustbin, those terms have come to designate whether one is loyal to, or whether one opposes, this government-power-worshipping, profoundly un-American right-wing cultism that has been the dominant political faction in America for many years.
The neocons are discredited – but not defeated
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2007-05-25
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
The President,
reined in by his party’s fear of electoral disaster and his nation’s war weariness,
has hesitated to go all the way
with the neocons’ plan to open up the second phase of their bid
to “transform” the Middle East into a pile of “democratic” rubble:
no one in this country but Dick Cheney and his boys think going to war with Iran is such a grand idea,
but that isn’t stopping the neocons from trying to pull it off anyway.
Clemons informs us that the plan is to
have the Israelis mount the first strike,
after which the Iranians will retaliate against U.S. troops in Iraq –
and the fight will be on.
...
The Cheney administration, in alliance with the Israel lobby
and the currently dominant “red-state fascist” wing of the GOP,
is determined to gin up a war with Iran, and they just may get away with it. Politically, there is almost no opposition to or even much awareness of this headlong rush to war,
with all “major” presidential candidates
committed to confronting Iran militarily, if “necessary,”
over the nuclear issue.
...
George W. Bush is totally out of the loop.
The Cheney cabal is mobilizing all its considerable power
to launch a final Middle Eastern offensive,
and their Lebanese excursion – reportedly a major reason
for the sudden reassignment of John Negroponte to the State Department –
is just the beginning of what they have in store for us.
In the end, however,
when it comes down to launching a full frontal assault on Iran,
it all depends on the Israelis.
The War Party is counting on them to strike the first blow,
with the guarantee that the Americans
will strike the second, third, fourth, and fifth blows, ad infinitum.
Blows directed not only at Iran,
but also against Syria, Hezbollah, and the Palestinians.
...
In any case, there are reasons to believe the current Israeli government
would like to be the spearhead of the coming blitz,
especially if it rehabilitates leaders
who have lost all credibility
with the stark failure of the IDF’s most recent incursion into Lebanon.
The neocons reportedly were quite displeased with the Israelis
for not going all out to smash Hezbollah and
this could be a way for Tel Aviv to make up for it.
The idea that the US would have to “finish the job”
if the Israelis started it shows how
we have become the prisoners of our own satellites.
[More exactly, satellite.]
According to the scenario as presented by Clemons,
Israel is to be the catalyst that forces the hand of a reluctant President
and traps us in a regional conflagration
that will make the Iraq war seem like a mere skirmish.
Yet, as Clemons makes clear, the real catalytic element here is Cheney,
widely regarded as Bush’s co-president,
the patron and protector of neoconservative ideologues
whose agenda involves much more than advancing Israeli interests.
As Colin Powell told Bob Woodward, after 9/11,
the neocons centered around the office of the vice president
set up “a separate government.”
That government – widely discredited,
and reeling from the recent trial and conviction of one its principal figures –
is now engaged in a struggle for power with the legal and duly constituted government,
the outcome of which has yet to be determined.
What is clear, however, is that
the Cheney administration will stop at nothing in its effort to win that fight –
even if it means starting World War IV.
This is an outcome the neocons would dearly love to see,
and I have to say that, sadly, their chances of success are quite good.
Raimondo overlooks a key component of the neocon network in Washington:
the media.
Notice how when Tenet in his memoir
discussed the key role the neocons played
in getting us into this disastrous Iraq war,
the U.S. media fell all over itself to discredit, not the neocons, but Tenet.
Thus when Tenet mentioned how Rice had all but ignored
his 2001-07-10 plea for an all-out effort
to prevent the terrorist attack that he saw coming,
Woodward, in his review, criticized not Rice but Tenet.
Tenet, according to Woodward, should have gone around Rice
and made his case directly to the president.
But what would the president have said if Tenet had done so?
Very likely, something like this:
“Look, Condi is the national security adviser, closer to these issues than I am,
and she didn’t believe we should take your advice.
If she doesn’t think your advice is valid, then why should I?
If I were to do so, it would undercut her, and I might as well replace her.
That’s not going to happen.
Have a nice day, George.”
The Muslims Are Coming cruise
by James Wolcott
(more here;
there is also a bootleg copy of the full article here,
but the download took about a minute
(it contains an illustration from the original The New Republic article))
Vanity Fair Blog, 2007-06-25
by Jim Lobe
LobeLog, 2007-07-03
One of the most irritating things
about mainstream media coverage of the Bush administration,
including its coverage of the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence,
is its pervasive use of the word “conservative”
to describe the administration’s (and Libby’s) core supporters.
To me, this has given respectable semantic cover
to what really are a collection of right-wing radicals –
mostly
ultra-nationalist hawks, like Libby’s former boss and John Bolton;
pro-Likud (and, in the case of the older generation, often former Trotskyite) neo-conservatives, and
leaders of the Christian Right —
who have made clear time and again that
they have little or no respect for law and tradition
if either one should somehow constrain their freedom
to make the world a better place.
[I have two exceptions to Lobe’s comments:
First, in many respects these people aren’t right-wing at all (e.g.).
Second, “making the world a better place”
is entirely dependent on your point of view.
As we all should know by now,
there is little agreement in the world as to what “makes it a better place.”]
...
by Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 2007-07-10
by Jim Lobe
LobeLog, 2007-07-31
By MICHAEL COOPER and MARC SANTORA
New York Times, 2007-10-25
By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com, 2007-12-06
Since the neoconservatives began to emerge as a political force
in the mid-to-late 1970s,
they have followed a consistent strategy of
targeting the information flows inside the United States,
paying particular attention to
controlling the nation’s intelligence analysts
and
purging independent thinking from the U.S. news media.
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
Those were the two key switching points that allowed the neocons to
push out favorable information
and
suppress contrary facts
to
shape how Americans perceived reality.
Thus, the neocons could guide the public on issues such as
the severity of the Soviet threat in the late Cold War
or
the WMD danger from Iraq and Iran this decade.
That neoconservative strategy reached its zenith after the 9/11 attacks as
the U.S. intelligence community and
the Washington press corps
caved under intense political pressure.
Essentially, President George W. Bush and the neocons
got to manipulate reality itself –
and they used that power to scare the heck out of the American people.
[I think the reality here is that
the neocons, the Bush administration, and the Washington press corps
are all either part of or tools of a single entity:
the Israel Lobby (cf.)]
...
Public revulsion over Bush’s arrogance and the neocons' bloody fiasco in Iraq
led to the Republican congressional defeat in 2006.
But the Democrats then frittered away their advantage with
a feckless approach on Iraq troop withdrawals and
a failure to mount sustained investigations of administration wrongdoing.
Then, in fall 2007,
Bush and the neocons sold the Iraq War “surge” as a great success,
even though the result appears to be
an open-ended U.S. military occupation of a hostile Arab country
with one or two American soldiers and scores of Iraqis still dying each day.
...
[after publication of the 2007-12-03 Iran NIE],
the political battle is far from over.
The neocons retain extraordinary strength within the U.S. news media
as well as
in the leading Washington think tanks and
inside many of the presidential campaigns.
Except for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas,
the Republican contenders are enthusiastic backers of the neocon agenda
of an imperial United States with an all-powerful Executive
who will subordinate America's constitutional rights
to the waging of an indefinite “war on terror.”
While all the Democrats criticize Bush's approach to some degree,
the neocons view purported front-runner, New York Senator Hillary Clinton,
as an ally who often votes with neocon hawks,
such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut.
Until recently, Sen. Clinton was getting foreign policy advice
from “surge” advocate Michael O’Hanlon.
So, if the early political handicapping holds up,
the neocons could find themselves in the enviable position next fall of having
a super-neocon Republican
versus
a neocon-lite Democrat.
Then, whoever wins,
the neocons can expect their policies in the Mideast to continue.
If that's how Election 2008 does turn out,
the again-triumphant neocons might be looking to dish out some payback
to those newly independent-minded CIA analysts.
[Could be....]
by Kevin MacDonald
Kevin MacDonald’s Blog, 2008-01-24
[An excellent commentary.
It is so worthwhile that I am reprinting it in full.
MacDonald may exaggerate reality some when he says
“the neocons have now become the conservative establishment,”
but there is a lot of truth in general in what he says,
and it is useful antidote to the line we get from the ADL.
There is an interesting duality between the ADL and, say, MacDonald:
The ADL is surely hypersensitive to criticism of Jewish actions;
MacDonald,
I think to balance the undeniable way in which
the ADL acts as America’s speech- and thought-police,
emphasizes what Jews do
and how (the people doing them believe)
these actions benefit the Jewish people.
Paragraph numbers (starting with 0) and emphasis are added.]
[0]
I haven’t read Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons yet,
but I’m not sure I need to after seeing Philip Weiss’s review.
Weiss’s review makes it clear that
Heilbrunn’s book corroborates several of the themes
in my writing on the neocons
and on Jewish intellectual and political movements generally.
[A generous and relevant excerpt from those writings appears above.]
[1]
First,
neoconservatism is a Jewish movement.
That should have been clear to everyone by now,
but
references to the Jewish basis of the movement
have been noticeably missing from much of the mainstream media,
to the point that
Bill Kristol was introduced as a columnist at the New York Times
as simply a “conservative.”
This is critical because
the neocons have now become the conservative establishment.
When Kristol (or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity) hold forth at Fox News,
most people have no idea that they are tuning into
the public face of a fundamentally Jewish movement
that elbowed out more traditional conservatives.
[2]
Secondly,
Jewish neocons not only have a strong Jewish identity,
they also have strong Jewish interests.
This is obvious from
I have argued that
the neocons are more strongly identified as Jews
than the mainstream liberal/left Jews —
that the neocons form the vanguard of the Jewish community.
After all, neocons were the first segment of the Jewish community
to strongly condemn the USSR,
both for its domestic anti-Semitism
and for its alliances with Arab governments.
Prominent neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz
began their political careers
by making alliances with Cold War hawks like Henry Jackson.
This was at a time
when the Jewish left was prominently involved in defending the USSR,
apparently blind to the fact that the status of Jews as an elite in the USSR
had changed greatly following World War II.
[3]
And the neocons are notorious for their strong ties to
the most extreme racialist and nationalist segments of Israeli society —
elements that the mainstream liberal/left Jewish community
probably wishes would disappear or at least be less visible.
(Hence the uproar over Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Jewish Warriors
(cf.).)
Indeed, the Jewish liberal/left has a huge blind spot,
continuing to pursue its leftist multicultural agenda in the U.S.
while ignoring the fact that
the organized Jewish community is deeply complicit in
dispossessing the Palestinians and
erecting a racialist, apartheid state in Israel.
As [Philip] Weiss has noted elsewhere,
“Steve Rabinowitz, Clinton friend, told me this year that
if anyone did a study of how much [Democrat] money comes from Jews,
it would fuel conspiracy theories.”
The Jewish liberal/left lavishly supports Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
but makes no attempt to wrest control of the pro-Israel lobby
from the hands of what James Petras terms
the “reactionary minority of American Jews”
who head the major American Jewish organizations.
[4]
But more interestingly, Heilbrunn points to
the “lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons …
[that] prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.”
In this regard, the neocons are entirely within the American Jewish mainstream.
As I noted in a previous blog (also commenting on Philip Weiss),
“Jews have become an elite,
but an elite that does not identify with its subjects —
a hostile, estranged but very wealthy elite
that still sees themselves as outsiders.”
[Very close to what Arnold Toynbee dubbed a “dominant minority”.]
And along with the American Jewish mainstream,
the neocons have been vital players
in the establishment of a variety of policies
opposed to the interests and attitudes of the American majority,
most egregiously unrestricted immigration
which has successfully altered the ethnic composition of the country.
Indeed, neoconservative Ben Wattenberg famously wrote that
“The non-Europeanization of America
is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”
[5]
This
what the neocons dislike about traditional conservatives
is simply that they “are conservative at all”:
is a striking commentary on the death of American conservatism.
[6]
There are several other themes highlighted in Weiss’s review
that are worth mentioning because
they are typical of other Jewish intellectual and political movements.
Heilbrunn describes neocon “cabals”
in the State Department and in academic departments at elite universities.
This is a reference to Jewish ethnic networking.
In general, all of the important Jewish intellectual and political movements —
from psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology to neoconservatism —
have a mutually reinforcing core of Jews centered around charismatic leaders.
In the case of the neocons,
individuals such as Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz
have played this role.
Neoconservative cabals have been largely successful
in controlling or at least heavily influencing
elite institutions in academia, the government, think tanks, and the media.
[7]
And finally, the neocons are prime examples
of another important theme of Jewish intellectual life —
self-deception.
Weiss writes:
The neocons may believe it, but the rest of us need not be so foolish.
For example,
Douglas Feith is depicted by Heilbrunn as
having published a letter defending the capture of the West Bank
while still a teenager.
Feith has also been credibly charged with spying for Israel,
and was deeply involved in the disinformation used by the U.S. government to justify the invasion of Iraq.
He has close ties to the settler movement,
and was a participant in the notorious “A Clean Break” paper
that advised the Israeli government that
removing Saddam Hussein should be an Israeli strategic goal.
The authors of this report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens:
“Our claim to the land—
to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—
is legitimate and noble.”
[“Our claim”?
Americans sure don’t have any claim to the Holy Land.]
[8]
European Americans may have a difficult time processing all of this.
Their individualism and their own fragile and beleaguered sense of ethnicity
make them less likely to attribute ethnic motives to others.
And there is an imposing edifice of taboos
surrounding even the mention of Jewish influence,
much less anything that hints that Israel is the first loyalty of Jewish neocons —
an edifice aggressively maintained by the organized Jewish community.
But the rather unpleasant facts are staring European Americans in the face,
even if the New York Times insists on calling them conservatives.
by Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 2008-01-25
[An excerpt; paragraph numbers and emphasis are added.
Considering how carelessly the charge of “anti-Semitism” is flung around,
when reading this perceptive and deeply controversial commentary
it is worth bearing in mind that
both Messrs. Lobe and Heilbrunn are American Jews.]
[0.3]
[A]s pointed out in Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday),
the neocons, despite the fiasco in Iraq,
are already trying to
detach themselves from both Bush
and the Mesopotamian adventure they so avidly championed
and
entrench themselves ever more deeply
into institutional Washington.
[They certainly have effective control over the Washington Post’s editorials.]
[0.4]
“Whether it’s the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
or the National Endowment for Democracy,
the Weekly Standard or the New York Sun,
the neoconservatives
are battle-hardened fighters who have created a permanent base for themselves.
They will not disappear,”
according to Heilbrunn, a former neoconservative himself
and senior editor at the Nixon Center’s The National Interest journal.
[0.5]
Heilbrunn’s much-anticipated book ...
affirms a number of central truths about neoconservatism
that are generally ignored or avoided in mainstream discussion
of what he correctly calls a “mindset” rather than an “ideology.”
[1.1]
First,
neoconservatism “is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,”
even if many adherents – albeit a minority – are not Jewish
and even if, it should be added,
most US Jews are not neoconservatives.
Moreover,
neoconservatives, both Jew and gentile,
are bound by
a “shared commitment to
the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.”
[That severely understates the situation.
Their commitment is not just to “the survival of Israel,”
a goal with which most Americans would concur.
It is to the expansion of Israel beyond the Green Line by a process
which was initiated by what became a war of aggression and
which is supported by Israel’s illegal and immoral colonization,
without the unforced consent of the Palestinians from whom they conquered it,
of the lands that Israel conquered,
and all of this with
the full support of the American political system
and most of the American media,
in particular, the editorial board of the Washington Post.]
[2.1]
Second,
its substance is largely determined by
the lessons its followers draw
from what they see as causes of the Nazi Holocaust:
the alleged failures of German “liberals” in the Weimar Republic
to stand up to the twin challenges of Nazism and Communism
and of the western European liberal democracies
to stand up to Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II;
and the necessity of having overwhelming military power
to crush any new Hitler preemptively.
[2.2]
As Heilbrunn,
whose Jewish father fled Germany before the war, correctly notes,
neoconservatives “see new Munichs everywhere and anywhere” –
a reference to the 1938 Munich pact
by which Britain and France tried to “appease” Hitler
by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.
[2.3]
Indeed, it is characteristic of neoconservatives
to depict virtually every foreign policy challenge –
from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua 25 years ago
to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad –
to US (or Israeli) hegemony
as a potentially cataclysmic replay of the 1930s.
The neoconservatives, according to Heilbrunn,
“have shaped a romantic narrative for themselves in which
they are the new Churchills staring down the forces of evil.”
[One hopes that President Bush
has not bought into this narrative,
casting himself as the Churchill-in-chief.]
[2.4]
Fear that Saddam Hussein intended a “second holocaust” against Israel
served as one of the main motivations
for the neoconservative promotion of war with Iraq,
according to Heilbrunn.
“As Jews, they (and their Catholic conservative allies) were haunted by
the memory that the allies had not stopped the Holocaust –
and they strongly believed that it was America’s obligation
to act preemptively to avert another one.”
[3.1]
Third,
the movement’s Trotskyist roots –
incarnated by its “founding father, Max Shachtman –
among the Jews from Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century
not only
imbued its members with a distrust, even a hatred, of liberalism
(despite their latter-day purported embrace of democracy promotion).
They also largely shaped their polemical and political tactics,
even as they moved rightward –
into the Democratic Party after World War II and thence,
after the traumas of the 1960s and early 1970s,
including two Arab-Israeli wars –
into Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.
[3.2]
“Their fling with Trotskyism [endowed] them with a temperament
as well as a set of intellectual tolls [tools?]
that many never completely abandoned –
a combative temper and
a penchant for sweeping assertions and grandiose ideas.”
[Most of them wrong.]
The fact that they see themselves as “a kind of aristocratic intelligentsia,”
[Ha ha ha.
Lying bozos is more like it.
But Condi Rice, the NYT, and the WP love them.]
according to Heilbrunn, derives from their Trotskyite origins.
[4.1]
Fourth,
“the social exclusion experienced by Jews
at the hands of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite”
that persisted in the US into the early 1960s
stirred a “deep resentment”
among many of the movement’s most influential leaders,
notably Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
[4.2]
Indeed, Podhoretz,
who edited Commentary magazine from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s
and now advises Giuliani,
sees the movement as
the war against the “WASP patriciate,”
according to Heilbrunn.
[And, of course, who better epitomized the WASP patriarchy
than George Herbert Walker Bush?
But GHWB had alienated the Jewish community.]
[4.3]
Neoconservatives “know that they will never be accepted by the establishment,”
he writes in a passage about Perle.
“Indeed, they outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are outsiders.
But beneath the veneer of confidence is
a seething rage
at the government bureaucracy and social elites.”
[No doubt, that explains
the torrent of
cheap shots, vicious smears,
second-guessing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking, and
failure to recognize the stunning success that it has had
in preventing another 9/11
that have been directed against the CIA over the last few years,
a torrent legitimized by the literary establishment
with the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to
that ultimate cheap shot against the “old Grotonians”,
Timothy Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes.]
Ultimately, Heilbrunn is critical of the neoconservatives,
but he accepts much of their worldview.
[All in all, after reading the above excerpts and commentary,
it should be noted how similar
the views expressed by these two American Jews (e.g.)
are to those expressed by the accused anti-Semite, Kevin MacDonald.
Note in particular MacDonald’s reaction to Philip Weiss’s review.]
by Philip Weiss
The American Conservative, 2008-01-28
Review of:
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn,
Doubleday, 289 pages
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2008-02-13
Why the neocons endure
By Fred Hiatt (editor of the Post’s editorial page)
Washington Post, 2008-09-15
[Its conclusion; emphasis is added.]
If, as seems likely, ...
U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq for some time to come,
we can hope that the next national security adviser again has
the strength to resist the crowd and
the deftness to steer the country in the right direction.
[Remember, the editorial page of the Post has been vociferous
in calling for intervention in the affairs of other countries
to promote what it calls “democracy” around the world.
But what does “democracy” mean in the United States?
According to Mr. Hiatt, certainly not following “the crowd.”
And just what is “the crowd,” anyhow?
Isn’t it the people that democracy presumes to represent?
Another example of the disdain for mere popular opinion
of the Post’s prominent commentators a while back
came from its senior columnist, David Broder,
who dismissed the popular push to restrict immigration
in an op-ed column titled “A Mob-Rule Moment”
(words chose, I presume, by the Post’s editorial page staff).
Democracy is evidently good, according to the Post,
only when it produces the results that they like
(which, somehow, invariably turns out to be
what the powers in the Jewish community want).]
Review by Kevin MacDonald of
By now the history of the neoconservative movement
is a bit of a twice-told tale.
There have been book-length academic treatments
and substantial coverage in the media,
especially as the influence of the neocons
in the George W. Bush Administration and
in promoting the war in Iraq
came to be public knowledge.
Those with some familiarity with this history will find that
Heilbrunn’s treatment adds little to available accounts.
But what it does better than other mainstream media accounts is to
really get at the Jewish nexus of the movement.
This in itself is a major accomplishment because
mainstream accounts of neoconservatism routinely ignore
the Jewish origins and composition of the movement.
Or they dismiss any discussion of Jewish identities and Jewish interests
that are so central to neoconservatism
as the ravings of anti-Semites.
Heilbrunn is quite clear about the role of Jewishness in neoconservatism.
After dismissing other views of what neoconservatism is,
he states flatly that
neoconservatism “is about a mind set,
one that has been decisively shaped
by the Jewish immigrant experience,
by the Holocaust, and
by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism” (p. 10).
“Indeed, as much as they may deny it,
neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,
reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns” (p. 11).
Explosive Sectarianism in the Middle East
by Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss.org, 2008-09-26
[The relevant extract; emphasis is added.]
Neoconservatives are at heart an element of American identity politics.
They arose in some measure out of sociological resentment,
as Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrated, and
as I knew in my Jewish-son-of-a-CCNY grad bones,
and they think in very sectarian terms.
It’s fascinating that
their plans for the Middle East,
which included
cementing the Jewish occupation of Arab lands in Palestine
by
engineering an American occupation of Arab lands in Iraq,
have helped uncap sectarian fervor across the region.
by Paul Gottfried
Taki Magazine, 2010-01-12
By David Margolick
Newsweek, 2010-01-22
Neoconservatism was once deemed dead— ‘Buried in the sands of Iraq.’
But it persists,
not just as the de facto foreign-policy plank of the Republican Party
but, its proponents assert,
in Obama’s unapologetic embrace of American military might.
...
Perhaps the surest measure of the neocons’ continued influence is the frustration and anger they generate within the Republican Party. Many of those they’ve targeted—like Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft—won’t talk about them. (Some neocons gloat that Kissinger has even tried to become one of them.) One prominent activist on the libertarian end of the party—who hates what he sees as their costly foreign--policy adventurism and the GOP electoral losses (i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress) he attributes to them—calls them “parasites”: with little electoral power of their own, he claims, they have had to attach themselves to others, like George W. Bush. Comfortably ensconced behind a cloak of anonymity, he bristles, but also marvels, at their endurance and effectiveness, comparing them to “an infection that keeps coming back.” “They’ve perfected this absolutely incredible thing: they announce who they are, how powerful they are, how influential they are, and get people to write articles about them,” he says. “But when their policies are perceived to have caused mass chaos, they don’t exist, they didn’t have anything to do with it, they weren’t there, and they get really snotty. And anyone who attacks them is anti-Semitic.”
“Everybody in the true conservative movement talks privately about the neoconservatives, and most don’t like them,” says Patrick Buchanan. “They’re vindictive; they’re not collegial…One disagreement and you’re at war to the death.” As Buchanan depicts it, in the 1980s the neocons insinuated themselves into the world of right-wing foundations and, funding newly in hand, proceeded to hijack his party’s intellectual establishment, building for themselves an elaborate institutional infrastructure that’s better funded—and more militant and monochromatic—than anything comparable on the left. The epicenter is the American Enterprise Institute, but it fans out to other organizations, including the Hudson Institute (the refuge for two neocons bruised in the Bush administration, Douglas Feith and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, run by neocon Clifford May.
Even the old-line, establishment Council on Foreign Relations, the embodiment of those values—diplomacy, moderation, respectability—the neocons so abhor, now shelters two of them: the military historian Max Boot and Elliott Abrams, the former Reagan and George W. Bush administration official convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-contra scandal. (Bill Kristol, then Vice President Dan -Quayle’s chief of staff, helped secure Abrams a presidential pardon.) “They are effectively insulated from failure,” says Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, one of the neocons’ most frequent antagonists. “Even if you’ve totally screwed up in office and things you’ve advocated in print have failed, there are no real consequences, either professionally or politically. You go back to AEI and Weekly Standard and continue to agitate or appear on talk shows as if nothing has gone wrong at all.” But to Walt, too, their very durability is impressive. “You have to give them grudging admiration for sticking to their guns, to continuing to pound away no matter how discredited they’ve been,” he says.
Several neoconservatives—Robert Kagan, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt—played important roles in John McCain’s presidential campaign. A second and third generation of neoconservative commentators, including Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, Frederick Kagan and Danielle Pletka of AEI, and Jamie Fly and Dan Senor of the Foreign Policy Initiative (another Bill Kristol production), are making themselves known and heard. Meantime, the Fox News watchers who form the Republican base are not exactly neocons but, in their support for pugnacious policies abroad, find their world view compatible. Neoconservatism re-mains, as former GOP congressman Vin Weber puts it, “the dominant intellectual force on -foreign-policy thinking in the Republican Party.” Leaders of the alternative “realist” school—Kissinger, Scowcroft, Colin Powell, James Baker—are getting old, and with few exceptions, like Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, seem, like some celibate religious sect, unable or disinclined to reproduce.
“Its idealistic and patriotic appeal may be better suited to young thinkers than the prudent and reasonable calculations of realism,” says Justin Vaïsse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism. “It’s not very exciting to be a young realist, really.”
In the meantime, Buchanan’s isolationist, paleoconservative wing of Republicanism has withered. “A lot of them tend to be libertarian cranks: neo-Confederates, really insane, racist, xenophobic types,” says Max Boot, who is also a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. “Neocons are vilified as being barely human beasts who have to be kept chained in a cage somewhere, lest they start eating babies alive or something, but when you look at the spectrum of conservative thought, they are actually fairly centrist. The people who kind of speak to the rank and file of the Republican Party—the Newt Gingriches, the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys…they’re actually fairly supportive of an aggressive foreign policy.”
No one has ever done a head count of neoconservatives; their critics, disposed to see them as furtive and conspiratorial, have pegged the number—facetiously, it’s true—as low as 64, or 17, or six. Sometimes they seem even scarcer, and more incestuous: fully half of the eight featured speakers on Commentary’s Alaskan cruise this summer, for example, are Podhoretzes (paterfamilias Norman; his wife, Midge Decter; his son, John; and Elliott Abrams, his son-in-law). John Podhoretz’s ascension at the magazine is a subject of enormous amusement to neoconservatism’s critics, who say it smacks of the nepotism and affirmative action neocons supposedly abhor.
would reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President
by Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 2010-08-15
[Despite the title, this begins with
a nice discussion of who the neocons are and what they support:]
What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do?
This political grouping includes WASPS such as
former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN ambassor John Bolton,
but at its core is
politically active and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats
who broke with their party in the 1980s
to become war hawks in Republican administrations,
and most of whom are rooted in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in
the thought of prominent fascist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky.
(They are almost mirror images of the general American Jewish community,
79 percent of which voted for Barack Obama,
which is skittish about foreign wars and liberal on social issues).
The Neoconservative faction
is in the political wilderness in the United States.
Eager to play the role in Iran
that the enormous floods have played in Pakistan,
of paralyzing and destroying much of a thriving country,
eager to reduce the shining city of Isfahan to rubble
and displace its population into massive tent cities,
they find their path blocked at every turn.
Always much happier
when the militant and aggressive Likud Party is in power in Israel,
they are nevertheless impatient with what they see as
the timidity of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu,
compared to the reckless warmongering of
the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally
(who managed to set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006
and to reduce the large penal camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble).
...
by Stephen M. Walt
foreignpolicy.com, 2011-03-21
by Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com, 2011-03-24
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2011-03-25
The antiwar right vs the neocon-neoliberal alliance
Antiwar.com Radio, 2011-03-29
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Antiwar.com, 2012-06-22
In introducing his new book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America?
Straussians, writes Gottfried, “wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the Enlightenment, once properly instructed, should be able to carry out this … task.”
For traditional conservatives, before the nation is born, “ethnic and cultural preconditions” must exist. All “successful constitutional orders,” he writes, “are the expressions of already formed nations and cultures.”
To the old right, America as a nation and a people already existed by 1789. The Constitution was the birth certificate the nation wrote for itself, the charter by which it chose to govern itself. The real America had been born in men’s hearts by the time of Lexington and Concord in 1775.
In a recent issue of Modern Age, Jack Kerwick deals with this divide.
Irving Kristol, he writes, and quotes that founding father of modern neoconservatism, saw America as “a ‘creedal’ nation, a nation to which anyone can belong irrespective of ‘ethnicity or blood ties of any kind, or lineage, or length of residence even.’ ”
“For Kristol and his ilk,” Kerwick goes on, “one’s identity as an American is established by nothing more than an intellectual exercise whereby one rationally assents to the propositions encapsulated in the Declaration.”
“Given this unqualified quasi-religious commitment to ‘the Rights of Man,’ (for a neoconservative) America must be future-oriented, for as long as human rights are threatened, and regardless of where they are imperiled, her work in the world will never be complete.”
...
Prominent Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and vote for Clinton instead.
By Michael Crowley
Politico, 2016-03-02
of the extent to which it is a movement dominated by Jews
have received considerable scrutiny of late,
by, e.g.,
- Irving Kristol, an ur-neoconservative
(as opposed to “neo-urconservative”),
who defines “the neoconservative persuasion”; - Kevin MacDonald, who, in a short informal essay
and a much longer quasi-academic article,
argues that neoconservatism is a Jewish movement; - Joshua Muravchik, Max Boot, and Jonah Goldberg,
who argue strenuously that it is not intrinsically Jewish
(note the error in Muravchik’s article:
Scooter Libby is Jewish); - J. J. Goldberg, who, writing long before the 2003 Iraq War,
states flat out that neoconservatism is
“a school of thought dominated by Jews”; - Scott McConnell, who, in response to
David Frum’s characterization of paleocons as
Unpatriotic Conservatives,
examines the (generally hostile) relations
between paleocons and neocons.
and Goldberg (comparatively briefly),
then provide a brief closing comment.
For more information on neoconservatism, see the references.
Kevin MacDonald
MacDonald’s long article Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movementhas many worthwhile passages,
but I suspect is a little long (~50 pages)
for most readers to wade through.
Below, from the green start line to the red finish line,
I have extracted some of his conclusions and observations
that seemed especially interesting or controversial.
These are just some (highly debatable) highlights
(or perhaps, from your perspective, lowlights);
the full article provides supporting examples, arguments,
and references.
Emphasis, links, headings,
and an occasional comment in square brackets and this color,
have been added.
In alliance with
virtually the entire organized American Jewish community,
neoconservatism is a vanguard Jewish movement
with close ties to
the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist
and religiously fanatic elements
within Israel. [Yikes!]
[Cf. Israel Shahak: JHJR, JF; MacDonald: Zionism.]
...
[B]y far the best predictor of neoconservative attitudes,
on foreign policy at least, is
what the political right in Israel
deems in Israel’s best interests....
Neoconservatism [can be] described in general as
a complex interlocking professional and family network
centered around Jewish publicists and organizers
flexibly deployed to
recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews in
harnessing the wealth and power of the United States
in the service of Israel.
As such,
neoconservatism
should be considered a semicovert branch of
the massive and highly effective pro-Israel lobby...
...
[T]he organized Jewish community
shares the neocon commitment
to the Likud Party in Israel.
...
[T]he organized Jewish community has played a critical role
in the success of neoconservatism and
in preventing public discussion
of its Jewish roots and Jewish agendas.
...
[T]he main Jewish activist organizations
have been quick to condemn those who have
noted the Jewish commitments of the neoconservative activists
in the Bush administration or
seen the hand of the Jewish community
in pushing for war against Iraq and other Arab countries....
[W]hen Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC)
made a speech in the U.S. Senate
and wrote a newspaper op-ed piece [cf. this commentary]
which claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by
“President Bush’s policy to secure Israel”
and advanced by a handful of Jewish officials and opinion leaders,
Abe Foxman of the ADL stated,
“when the debate veers into anti-Jewish stereotyping,
it is tantamount to scapegoating and an appeal to ethnic hatred….
This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards [sic] about
a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”
[Compare ...]
Despite negative comments from Jewish activist organizations,
and a great deal of coverage in the American Jewish press,
there were no articles on this story
in any of the major U.S. national newspapers
...
[Foxman and his allies are avoiding the real issues,
which are:]
- whether it is legitimate to open up to debate
the question of the degree to which
the neocon activists in the Bush administration
are motivated by
their long ties to the Likud Party in Israel, and - whether the organized Jewish community in the U.S.
similarly supports the Likud Party and
its desire to enmesh the United States
in wars that are in Israel’s interest.
Since ... 1981,
the positive attitudes toward the Likud Party
characteristic of the neoconservatives have become
the mainstream view of the organized American Jewish community,
and [various liberal Jewish critics] have been relegated
to the fringe of the American Jewish community.
...
[N]eoconservatives have been staunch supporters of arguably
the most destructive force associated with the left
in the twentieth century—
massive non-European immigration.
Support for massive non-European immigration
has spanned the Jewish political spectrum
throughout the twentieth century to the present.
A principal motivation of the organized Jewish community
for encouraging such immigration
has involved a deeply felt animosity
toward the people and culture responsible for
the immigration restriction of 1924–1965—
“this notion of a Christian civilization.”
As neoconservative Ben Wattenberg has famously written,
“The non-Europeanization of America
is heartening news
of an almost transcendental quality.”
[Why is it that so many Jews and Dems
hate European-Americans?
Why is it that no one is calling them haters?
What else does Wattenberg’s comment represent?
If you don’t think that there’s a double standard
going on here,
consider what the reaction would be to
“The non-Jewification of America
would be heartening news
of an almost transcendental quality,”
where it was made clear
that “non-Jewification” didn’t mean
that they were being eliminated in any sense,
but just that their relative power
was being diminished.]
In general,
neoconservatives have been far more attached
to Jewish interests,
and especially the interests of Israel,
than to any other identifiable interest.
[Concerning the teachings of Leo Strauss
(if you’re really interested, cf. Robert Locke and straussian.net):]
were inevitable and
advocated rule by an aristocratic elite of philosopher kings
forced to pay lip service
to the traditional religious and political beliefs of the masses
while not believing them.
This elite should pursue its vision of the common good but
must reach out to others using deception and manipulation
to achieve its goals.
As Bill Kristol has described it,
elites have the duty to guide public opinion, but
“one of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that
all politics are limited and
none of them is really based on the truth.”
A more cynical characterization is provided by Stephen Holmes:
“The good society, on this model, consists of
the sedated masses,
the gentlemen rulers,
the promising puppies, and
the philosophers who
- pursue knowledge,
- manipulate the gentlemen,
- anesthetize the people, and
- housebreak the most talented young” —
like an alarmingly accurate description
of the present situation in the United States.
Given Strauss’s central concern that
an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival,
it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that
the aristocracy would serve Jewish interests.
...
Strauss understood that neither communism nor fascism
was good for Jews in the long run.
But democracy cannot be trusted
given that Weimar ended with Hitler.
A solution is to advocate democracy
and the trappings of traditional religious culture, but
managed by an elite able to manipulate the masses
via control of the media and academic discourse.
Jews have a long history as an elite in Western societies,
so it is not in the least surprising
that Strauss would advocate an ideal society in which
Jews would be a central component of the elite...
[The neocons] form an elite that is deeply involved
in deception, manipulation and espionage
on issues related to Israel and the war in Iraq.
They also established the massive neocon infrastructure
in the elite media and think tanks.
And they have often become wealthy in the process.
Their public pronouncements advocating
a democratic, egalitarian ideology
have not prevented them from having
strong ethnic identities and
a strong sense of their own ethnic interests;
nor have
their public pronouncements supporting
the Enlightenment ideals of egalitarianism and democracy
prevented them from having
a thoroughly anti-Enlightenment ethnic particularist commitment
to the most nationalistic, aggressive, racialist elements within Israel—
the Likud Party, the settler movement, and the religious fanatics.
[Cf. Israel Shahak: JHJR, JF.]
MacDonald’s Conclusion
The current situation in the United Statesis really an awesome display of Jewish power and influence.
People who are very strongly identified as Jews
maintain close ties to Israeli politicians and military figures
and to Jewish activist organizations and pro-Israeli lobbying groups
while occupying influential policy-making positions in the defense and foreign policy establishment.
These same people, as well as a chorus of other prominent Jews,
have routine access to the most prestigious media outlets in the United States.
People who criticize Israel are routinely vilified and subjected to professional abuse.
Perhaps the most telling feature of this entire state of affairs
is the surreal fact that
in this entire discourse
Jewish identity is not mentioned.
When
Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Michael Rubin, William Safire, Robert Satloff,
or the legions of other prominent media figures
write their reflexively pro-Israel pieces
in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times,
or opine on the Fox News Network,
there is never any mention
that they are Jewish Americans
who have an intense ethnic interest in Israel.
When Richard Perle authors a report for an Israeli think tank;
is on the board of directors of an Israeli newspaper;
maintains close personal ties with prominent Israelis,
especially those associated with the Likud Party;
has worked for an Israeli defense company;
and, according to credible reports,
was discovered by the FBI passing classified information to Israel—
when, despite all of this,
he is a central figure in the network of those pushing for wars
to rearrange the entire politics of the Middle East
in Israel’s favor, and
with nary a soul
having the courage to mention
the obvious overriding Jewish loyalty
apparent in Perle’s actions,
that is indeed a breathtaking display of power.
One must contemplate the fact that American Jews
have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel
over the last thirty-seven years,
despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal suppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—
an occupation that will most likely end with expulsion
or complete subjugation, degradation, and apartheid.
During the same period Jewish organizations in America
have been a principal force—in my view the main force—
for transforming America into a state
dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among Europeans,
for encouraging massive multiethnic immigration into the U.S., and
for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology
that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests
of non-European ethnic minorities—the culture of the Holocaust.
All this is done without a whisper of double standards
in the aboveground media.
J. J. Goldberg
J. J. Goldberg’s 1996 book, Jewish Power,discusses the neoconservatives in the context of
overall American Jewish political power and influence.
Below, from the green start line to the red end line,
are some excerpts from pages 160–162 of its Chapter Six,
“Six Days in June: The Triumph of Jewish Insecurity.”
The emphasis is added.
Not all the neoconservatives were Jewish,
and those who were Jewish were ambivalent about it;
they still clung to the secularism and anticlericalism
of their old Marxist days.
Nonetheless, they became known as a Jewish group,
for several reasons.
For one thing, most of them were Jews.
More important, they were an anomaly:
a school of thought dominated by Jews,
on an American right which had always been alien territory
to Jews.
...
[The chapter’s conclusion:]
In the popular mind, the New Jews of 1967—
the Zionists, the Orthodox, and the neoconservatives—
quickly came to be identified
as the leadership of the American Jewish community.
Their defiance was so strident, and their anger so intense,
that the rest of the Jewish community respectfully stood back
and let the New Jews take the lead.
The minority
was permitted to speak for the mass
and
became the dominant voice of Jewish politics.
[Compare ...]
In this new mood,
the cause of Jewish advocacy underwent
a fundamental transformation of values.
The world after 1967 was regarded as a hostile place,
divided between the Jews’ friends and their enemies.
The values that for so long had characterized American Judaism—
equality,
tolerance, and
social justice—
became suspect in New Jewish leadership circles.
A new set of basic values came to replace them:
loyalty to the Jewish people,
commitment to its survival, and
hostility to its enemies.
The Jews who rose to the leadership of the Jewish community after 1967
were those who most embodied these new values.
Jews now expected to be represented,
not by those who best expressed their beliefs and aspirations,
but by those who seemed to them to be "most Jewish":
most loyal to the Jewish people and its traditions, or
most hostile to its enemies.
Conclusion
Goldberg’s examples and arguments, in my view,substantiate and support
the arguments and conclusions of MacDonald, both
those on neoconservatism excerpted above from
Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,
and those on Zionism, presented in
Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism.
Further, they totally reflect the picture
that is presented in the media.
The neocons vs. the generals
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the “revolt of the generals”
is that the neocons have come out so uniformly and vitrolically
against the generals who are criticizing Rumsfeld.
Consider the following example:
2006-04-21-Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer,
"I-know-better" generals get on the slippery slope
(to be completed)
Miscellaneous References
(Those dated 2003 or earlier
are mainly from Kevin MacDonald’s excellent essay
“Thinking About Neoconservatism”.)
CSM-Neocon-101
Neocon 101Some basic questions answered.
Christian Science Monitor, undated
CSM-Neocon-Spheres-of-Influence
Spheres of influence:Neoconservative think tanks, periodicals, and key documents.
Christian Science Monitor, undated
2002
2002-01-10-Gottfried
Paul Gottfried,McCarthy Was Right
2002-02-25-Raimondo
Justin Raimondo,OUR HIJACKED FOREIGN POLICY
Neoconservatives take Washington – Baghdad is next
2003
2003-01-25-Christison
Bill and Kathleen Christison,Too Many Smoking Guns to Ignore:
Israel, American Jews, and the War on Iraq
2003-03-27-Lobe
Jim Lobe,All in the Neocon Family
2003-04-06-Lind
Michael Lind,The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War
2003-05-23-Grichar
Jim Grichar,The Axis of Deceit — Still Pushing for U.S. Imperial Expansion!
2003-06-10-North
Gary North,An Introduction to Neoconservatism
2003-06-23-Wald
Alan Wald,Are Trotskyites Running the Pentagon?
2003-06-30-Lind
Michael Lind,I Was Smeared
[Responding to 2003-06-23-Wald.]
2003-12-23-Lobe
Jim Lobe,What a Tangled Web the Neocons Weave
2004
2004-01-19-TAC-Ryn-Jacobians
Appetite for DestructionNeoconservatives have more in common with French revolutionaries
than American traditionalists
By Claes G. Ryn
The American Conservative, 2004-01-19
[Ryn comparies American neoconservatives
to eighteenth-century French Jacobins.
An excerpt (paragraph numbers and emphasis are added):]
[8]
[Allan] Bloom’s book [The Closing of the American Mind] actually exemplified
just
the anti-traditional, ideological universalism
that is at the heart of the current push for American empire.
Bloom wrote, for example,
“When we Americans speak seriously about politics,
we mean that our principles of freedom and equality
and the rights based on them
are rational and everywhere applicable.”
[9]
This kind of thinking bears a strong resemblance to that of the Jacobins,
who inspired and led the French Revolution of 1789.
Their ideology was summed up in the slogan
“liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
Equally universalistic and monopolistic,
they demanded that other countries change their ways.
Good stood against evil.
Europe was thrown into protracted wars and upheaval.
2004-02-23-Lind
Michael Lind,A Tragedy of Errors
The Nation, 2004-02-23
2004-09-06-Christison
Kathleen and Bill Christison,Dual Loyalties: The Bush Neocons and Israel
2004-11-06-Lobe
Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America...by Jim Lobe
CommonDreams.org, 2004-11-06
2005
2005-02-11-Barry
Liberals and Neocons: Together Againby Tom Barry
Antiwar.com, 2005-02-11
2006
2006-05-24-Meyerson
For Neocons, the Irony of Iraq
by Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2006-05-24
2006-11-03-Raimondo
The Neocons, UndauntedThey’re looking to make a comeback after the elections
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-03
2006-11-06-Raimondo
The War God That FailedThe neocons turn on their ‘leader’
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-06
2006-11-14-Kamiya
Neoconservatism — RIPThe moralistic ideology has utterly failed.
But as long as Bush still abides by it,
his disastrous "war on terror" will drag on.
By Gary Kamiya
Salon.com, 2006-11-14
2006-11-16-Hadar
Rumors of Neoconservatism’s Death Exaggeratedby Leon Hadar
Antiwar.com, 2006-11-16
2007
2007-01-05-Buchanan
Cakewalk Crowd Abandons Bushby Patrick J. Buchanan
Antiwar.com, 2007-01-05
2007-03-29-Greenwald
Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrumby Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com, 2007-03-29
[T]he dominant right-wing political movement in this country
that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency
has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to --
the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism.
...
[T]he Bush presidency and the political movement that supports it is not driven by any of the abstract political principles traditionally associated with “liberalism” or “conservatism.” Whatever else one wants to say about the Bush presidency, it has nothing to do with limiting the size, scope and reach of the federal government. The exact opposite is true.
...
That is the central point of our current political predicament: the Bush presidency, and more importantly the right-wing movement which created and sustained it (and which will survive Bush’s departure), are not adherents to any mainstream American political ideology. And many people, including neoconservatives themselves, have acknowledged this, and that is also the critical insight of Brooks’ column today.
George Will previously called the “neoconservatism” which drives the right-wing movement in this country “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism.” One of America’s most influential neoconservatives, Robert Kagan, previously admitted -- just like Brooks -- that the current right-wing ideology has nothing to do with the Goldwater/Reagan limited government mythology; in fact, it is overtly hostile to it:
This is where Bush may lose the support of most old-fashioned conservatives. His goals are now the antithesis of conservatism. They are revolutionary.
...
Pat Buchanan founded The American Conservative based principally on the same observation: namely, that
the right-wing, Bush-supporting movement has nothing to do with
the political principles they manipulatively tout...
...
Brooks’ column (like those of Will and Kagan before it) makes clear just how radical it is, how unmoored it is to any principles which previously defined the political mainstream. The terms “left” and “right” do not mean what they meant even ten years ago, though they still have meaning. At least for now, until this movement is banished to the dustbin, those terms have come to designate whether one is loyal to, or whether one opposes, this government-power-worshipping, profoundly un-American right-wing cultism that has been the dominant political faction in America for many years.
2007-05-25-Raimondo
The Cabal Strikes BackThe neocons are discredited – but not defeated
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2007-05-25
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
The President,
reined in by his party’s fear of electoral disaster and his nation’s war weariness,
has hesitated to go all the way
with the neocons’ plan to open up the second phase of their bid
to “transform” the Middle East into a pile of “democratic” rubble:
no one in this country but Dick Cheney and his boys think going to war with Iran is such a grand idea,
but that isn’t stopping the neocons from trying to pull it off anyway.
Clemons informs us that the plan is to
have the Israelis mount the first strike,
after which the Iranians will retaliate against U.S. troops in Iraq –
and the fight will be on.
...
The Cheney administration, in alliance with the Israel lobby
and the currently dominant “red-state fascist” wing of the GOP,
is determined to gin up a war with Iran, and they just may get away with it. Politically, there is almost no opposition to or even much awareness of this headlong rush to war,
with all “major” presidential candidates
committed to confronting Iran militarily, if “necessary,”
over the nuclear issue.
...
George W. Bush is totally out of the loop.
The Cheney cabal is mobilizing all its considerable power
to launch a final Middle Eastern offensive,
and their Lebanese excursion – reportedly a major reason
for the sudden reassignment of John Negroponte to the State Department –
is just the beginning of what they have in store for us.
In the end, however,
when it comes down to launching a full frontal assault on Iran,
it all depends on the Israelis.
The War Party is counting on them to strike the first blow,
with the guarantee that the Americans
will strike the second, third, fourth, and fifth blows, ad infinitum.
Blows directed not only at Iran,
but also against Syria, Hezbollah, and the Palestinians.
...
In any case, there are reasons to believe the current Israeli government
would like to be the spearhead of the coming blitz,
especially if it rehabilitates leaders
who have lost all credibility
with the stark failure of the IDF’s most recent incursion into Lebanon.
The neocons reportedly were quite displeased with the Israelis
for not going all out to smash Hezbollah and
this could be a way for Tel Aviv to make up for it.
The idea that the US would have to “finish the job”
if the Israelis started it shows how
we have become the prisoners of our own satellites.
[More exactly, satellite.]
According to the scenario as presented by Clemons,
Israel is to be the catalyst that forces the hand of a reluctant President
and traps us in a regional conflagration
that will make the Iraq war seem like a mere skirmish.
Yet, as Clemons makes clear, the real catalytic element here is Cheney,
widely regarded as Bush’s co-president,
the patron and protector of neoconservative ideologues
whose agenda involves much more than advancing Israeli interests.
As Colin Powell told Bob Woodward, after 9/11,
the neocons centered around the office of the vice president
set up “a separate government.”
That government – widely discredited,
and reeling from the recent trial and conviction of one its principal figures –
is now engaged in a struggle for power with the legal and duly constituted government,
the outcome of which has yet to be determined.
What is clear, however, is that
the Cheney administration will stop at nothing in its effort to win that fight –
even if it means starting World War IV.
This is an outcome the neocons would dearly love to see,
and I have to say that, sadly, their chances of success are quite good.
Raimondo overlooks a key component of the neocon network in Washington:
the media.
Notice how when Tenet in his memoir
discussed the key role the neocons played
in getting us into this disastrous Iraq war,
the U.S. media fell all over itself to discredit, not the neocons, but Tenet.
Thus when Tenet mentioned how Rice had all but ignored
his 2001-07-10 plea for an all-out effort
to prevent the terrorist attack that he saw coming,
Woodward, in his review, criticized not Rice but Tenet.
Tenet, according to Woodward, should have gone around Rice
and made his case directly to the president.
But what would the president have said if Tenet had done so?
Very likely, something like this:
“Look, Condi is the national security adviser, closer to these issues than I am,
and she didn’t believe we should take your advice.
If she doesn’t think your advice is valid, then why should I?
If I were to do so, it would undercut her, and I might as well replace her.
That’s not going to happen.
Have a nice day, George.”
2007-06-25-Wolcott
Ship of GhoulsThe Muslims Are Coming cruise
by James Wolcott
(more here;
there is also a bootleg copy of the full article here,
but the download took about a minute
(it contains an illustration from the original The New Republic article))
Vanity Fair Blog, 2007-06-25
2007-07-03-Lobe
Libby and His “Conservative” Supportersby Jim Lobe
LobeLog, 2007-07-03
One of the most irritating things
about mainstream media coverage of the Bush administration,
including its coverage of the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence,
is its pervasive use of the word “conservative”
to describe the administration’s (and Libby’s) core supporters.
To me, this has given respectable semantic cover
to what really are a collection of right-wing radicals –
mostly
ultra-nationalist hawks, like Libby’s former boss and John Bolton;
pro-Likud (and, in the case of the older generation, often former Trotskyite) neo-conservatives, and
leaders of the Christian Right —
who have made clear time and again that
they have little or no respect for law and tradition
if either one should somehow constrain their freedom
to make the world a better place.
[I have two exceptions to Lobe’s comments:
First, in many respects these people aren’t right-wing at all (e.g.).
Second, “making the world a better place”
is entirely dependent on your point of view.
As we all should know by now,
there is little agreement in the world as to what “makes it a better place.”]
...
2007-07-10-Lobe
Neocons Try to Rally, Bully Republicansby Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 2007-07-10
2007-07-31-Lobe
The Cheney-Edelman Connectionby Jim Lobe
LobeLog, 2007-07-31
2007-10-25-NYT-Giuliani-and-the-Neocons
Mideast Hawks Help to Develop Giuliani PolicyBy MICHAEL COOPER and MARC SANTORA
New York Times, 2007-10-25
2007-12-06-Parry-Media
Neocons Down, Not OutBy Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com, 2007-12-06
Since the neoconservatives began to emerge as a political force
in the mid-to-late 1970s,
they have followed a consistent strategy of
targeting the information flows inside the United States,
paying particular attention to
controlling the nation’s intelligence analysts
and
purging independent thinking from the U.S. news media.
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
Those were the two key switching points that allowed the neocons to
push out favorable information
and
suppress contrary facts
to
shape how Americans perceived reality.
Thus, the neocons could guide the public on issues such as
the severity of the Soviet threat in the late Cold War
or
the WMD danger from Iraq and Iran this decade.
That neoconservative strategy reached its zenith after the 9/11 attacks as
the U.S. intelligence community and
the Washington press corps
caved under intense political pressure.
Essentially, President George W. Bush and the neocons
got to manipulate reality itself –
and they used that power to scare the heck out of the American people.
[I think the reality here is that
the neocons, the Bush administration, and the Washington press corps
are all either part of or tools of a single entity:
the Israel Lobby (cf.)]
...
Public revulsion over Bush’s arrogance and the neocons' bloody fiasco in Iraq
led to the Republican congressional defeat in 2006.
But the Democrats then frittered away their advantage with
a feckless approach on Iraq troop withdrawals and
a failure to mount sustained investigations of administration wrongdoing.
Then, in fall 2007,
Bush and the neocons sold the Iraq War “surge” as a great success,
even though the result appears to be
an open-ended U.S. military occupation of a hostile Arab country
with one or two American soldiers and scores of Iraqis still dying each day.
...
Campaign 2008
Though Bush and the neocons again find themselves on the defensive[after publication of the 2007-12-03 Iran NIE],
the political battle is far from over.
The neocons retain extraordinary strength within the U.S. news media
as well as
in the leading Washington think tanks and
inside many of the presidential campaigns.
Except for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas,
the Republican contenders are enthusiastic backers of the neocon agenda
of an imperial United States with an all-powerful Executive
who will subordinate America's constitutional rights
to the waging of an indefinite “war on terror.”
While all the Democrats criticize Bush's approach to some degree,
the neocons view purported front-runner, New York Senator Hillary Clinton,
as an ally who often votes with neocon hawks,
such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut.
Until recently, Sen. Clinton was getting foreign policy advice
from “surge” advocate Michael O’Hanlon.
So, if the early political handicapping holds up,
the neocons could find themselves in the enviable position next fall of having
a super-neocon Republican
versus
a neocon-lite Democrat.
Then, whoever wins,
the neocons can expect their policies in the Mideast to continue.
If that's how Election 2008 does turn out,
the again-triumphant neocons might be looking to dish out some payback
to those newly independent-minded CIA analysts.
[Could be....]
2008
2008-01-24-MacDonald
The Neocons as a Hostile Conservative (!) Eliteby Kevin MacDonald
Kevin MacDonald’s Blog, 2008-01-24
[An excellent commentary.
It is so worthwhile that I am reprinting it in full.
MacDonald may exaggerate reality some when he says
“the neocons have now become the conservative establishment,”
but there is a lot of truth in general in what he says,
and it is useful antidote to the line we get from the ADL.
There is an interesting duality between the ADL and, say, MacDonald:
The ADL is surely hypersensitive to criticism of Jewish actions;
MacDonald,
I think to balance the undeniable way in which
the ADL acts as America’s speech- and thought-police,
emphasizes what Jews do
and how (the people doing them believe)
these actions benefit the Jewish people.
Paragraph numbers (starting with 0) and emphasis are added.]
[0]
I haven’t read Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons yet,
but I’m not sure I need to after seeing Philip Weiss’s review.
Weiss’s review makes it clear that
Heilbrunn’s book corroborates several of the themes
in my writing on the neocons
and on Jewish intellectual and political movements generally.
[A generous and relevant excerpt from those writings appears above.]
[1]
First,
neoconservatism is a Jewish movement.
That should have been clear to everyone by now,
but
references to the Jewish basis of the movement
have been noticeably missing from much of the mainstream media,
to the point that
Bill Kristol was introduced as a columnist at the New York Times
as simply a “conservative.”
This is critical because
the neocons have now become the conservative establishment.
When Kristol (or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity) hold forth at Fox News,
most people have no idea that they are tuning into
the public face of a fundamentally Jewish movement
that elbowed out more traditional conservatives.
[2]
Secondly,
Jewish neocons not only have a strong Jewish identity,
they also have strong Jewish interests.
This is obvious from
- their involvement in pro-Israel activism,
- their personal relationships with Israeli leaders, and
- close ties with other Jews and with the wider Jewish community.
I have argued that
the neocons are more strongly identified as Jews
than the mainstream liberal/left Jews —
that the neocons form the vanguard of the Jewish community.
After all, neocons were the first segment of the Jewish community
to strongly condemn the USSR,
both for its domestic anti-Semitism
and for its alliances with Arab governments.
Prominent neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz
began their political careers
by making alliances with Cold War hawks like Henry Jackson.
This was at a time
when the Jewish left was prominently involved in defending the USSR,
apparently blind to the fact that the status of Jews as an elite in the USSR
had changed greatly following World War II.
[3]
And the neocons are notorious for their strong ties to
the most extreme racialist and nationalist segments of Israeli society —
elements that the mainstream liberal/left Jewish community
probably wishes would disappear or at least be less visible.
(Hence the uproar over Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Jewish Warriors
(cf.).)
Indeed, the Jewish liberal/left has a huge blind spot,
continuing to pursue its leftist multicultural agenda in the U.S.
while ignoring the fact that
the organized Jewish community is deeply complicit in
dispossessing the Palestinians and
erecting a racialist, apartheid state in Israel.
As [Philip] Weiss has noted elsewhere,
“Steve Rabinowitz, Clinton friend, told me this year that
if anyone did a study of how much [Democrat] money comes from Jews,
it would fuel conspiracy theories.”
The Jewish liberal/left lavishly supports Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
but makes no attempt to wrest control of the pro-Israel lobby
from the hands of what James Petras terms
the “reactionary minority of American Jews”
who head the major American Jewish organizations.
[4]
But more interestingly, Heilbrunn points to
the “lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons …
[that] prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.”
In this regard, the neocons are entirely within the American Jewish mainstream.
As I noted in a previous blog (also commenting on Philip Weiss),
“Jews have become an elite,
but an elite that does not identify with its subjects —
a hostile, estranged but very wealthy elite
that still sees themselves as outsiders.”
[Very close to what Arnold Toynbee dubbed a “dominant minority”.]
And along with the American Jewish mainstream,
the neocons have been vital players
in the establishment of a variety of policies
opposed to the interests and attitudes of the American majority,
most egregiously unrestricted immigration
which has successfully altered the ethnic composition of the country.
Indeed, neoconservative Ben Wattenberg famously wrote that
“The non-Europeanization of America
is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”
[5]
This
hostility toward the traditional peoples and culture of America
among people calling themselves conservatives
is striking —
the antithesis of normal and natural conservative tendencies.
what the neocons dislike about traditional conservatives
is simply that they “are conservative at all”:
There are countless stories of howThat the New York Times can call Kristol a conservative without shame or irony
neoconservatives have succeeded in
entering conservative institutions,
forcing out or demoting traditional conservatives, and
changing the positions and philosophy of such institutions
in neoconservative directions….
Writers like M. E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran,
Pat Buchanan, and Russell Kirk,
and institutions like Chronicles, the Rockford Institute,
the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
have been among
the most respected and distinguished names in American conservatism.
The dedication of their neoconservative enemies to
driving them out of the movement they have taken over and
demonizing them as marginal and dangerous figures
has no legitimate basis in reality.
It is clear evidence of
the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism
to dominate and subvert American conservatism
from its original purposes and agenda
and turn it to other purposes….
What neoconservatives really dislike about
their “allies” among traditional conservatives
is simply
the fact that
the conservatives are conservatives at all—
that they support “this notion of a Christian civilization,”
as Midge Decter put it,
Francis, S. (2004). The neoconservative subversion.
- that they oppose mass immigration, ...
- that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement
over American foreign policy in the Middle East,- that they oppose reckless involvement
in foreign wars and foreign entanglements, and- that, in company with the Founding Fathers of the United States,
they reject the concept of a pure democracy
and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it.
In B. Nelson (ed.), “Neoconservatism.”
Occasional Papers of the Conservative Citizens’ Foundation,
Issue Number Six, 6–12.
St. Louis: Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, p. 9.
is a striking commentary on the death of American conservatism.
[6]
There are several other themes highlighted in Weiss’s review
that are worth mentioning because
they are typical of other Jewish intellectual and political movements.
Heilbrunn describes neocon “cabals”
in the State Department and in academic departments at elite universities.
This is a reference to Jewish ethnic networking.
In general, all of the important Jewish intellectual and political movements —
from psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology to neoconservatism —
have a mutually reinforcing core of Jews centered around charismatic leaders.
In the case of the neocons,
individuals such as Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz
have played this role.
Neoconservative cabals have been largely successful
in controlling or at least heavily influencing
elite institutions in academia, the government, think tanks, and the media.
[7]
And finally, the neocons are prime examples
of another important theme of Jewish intellectual life —
self-deception.
Weiss writes:
The reader is left with the shadowy sense thatMarried to an Israeli.
the neocons have a pro-Israel agenda
that they are not upfront about.
But it isn’t a conspiracy, Heilbrunn warns.
The neocons have convinced themselves that
the U.S. and Israel have congruent interests.
“They just believe this stuff. They’re not agents,”
an anonymous source tells him,
speaking of Cheney aide David Wurmser,
who is married to an Israeli.
The neocons may believe it, but the rest of us need not be so foolish.
For example,
Douglas Feith is depicted by Heilbrunn as
having published a letter defending the capture of the West Bank
while still a teenager.
Feith has also been credibly charged with spying for Israel,
and was deeply involved in the disinformation used by the U.S. government to justify the invasion of Iraq.
He has close ties to the settler movement,
and was a participant in the notorious “A Clean Break” paper
that advised the Israeli government that
removing Saddam Hussein should be an Israeli strategic goal.
The authors of this report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens:
“Our claim to the land—
to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—
is legitimate and noble.”
[“Our claim”?
Americans sure don’t have any claim to the Holy Land.]
[8]
European Americans may have a difficult time processing all of this.
Their individualism and their own fragile and beleaguered sense of ethnicity
make them less likely to attribute ethnic motives to others.
And there is an imposing edifice of taboos
surrounding even the mention of Jewish influence,
much less anything that hints that Israel is the first loyalty of Jewish neocons —
an edifice aggressively maintained by the organized Jewish community.
But the rather unpleasant facts are staring European Americans in the face,
even if the New York Times insists on calling them conservatives.
2008-01-25-Lobe
Neocons Shaken, But Not Deterredby Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 2008-01-25
[An excerpt; paragraph numbers and emphasis are added.
Considering how carelessly the charge of “anti-Semitism” is flung around,
when reading this perceptive and deeply controversial commentary
it is worth bearing in mind that
both Messrs. Lobe and Heilbrunn are American Jews.]
[0.3]
[A]s pointed out in Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday),
the neocons, despite the fiasco in Iraq,
are already trying to
detach themselves from both Bush
and the Mesopotamian adventure they so avidly championed
and
entrench themselves ever more deeply
into institutional Washington.
[They certainly have effective control over the Washington Post’s editorials.]
[0.4]
“Whether it’s the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
or the National Endowment for Democracy,
the Weekly Standard or the New York Sun,
the neoconservatives
are battle-hardened fighters who have created a permanent base for themselves.
They will not disappear,”
according to Heilbrunn, a former neoconservative himself
and senior editor at the Nixon Center’s The National Interest journal.
[0.5]
Heilbrunn’s much-anticipated book ...
affirms a number of central truths about neoconservatism
that are generally ignored or avoided in mainstream discussion
of what he correctly calls a “mindset” rather than an “ideology.”
[1.1]
First,
neoconservatism “is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,”
even if many adherents – albeit a minority – are not Jewish
and even if, it should be added,
most US Jews are not neoconservatives.
Moreover,
neoconservatives, both Jew and gentile,
are bound by
a “shared commitment to
the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.”
[That severely understates the situation.
Their commitment is not just to “the survival of Israel,”
a goal with which most Americans would concur.
It is to the expansion of Israel beyond the Green Line by a process
which was initiated by what became a war of aggression and
which is supported by Israel’s illegal and immoral colonization,
without the unforced consent of the Palestinians from whom they conquered it,
of the lands that Israel conquered,
and all of this with
the full support of the American political system
and most of the American media,
in particular, the editorial board of the Washington Post.]
[2.1]
Second,
its substance is largely determined by
the lessons its followers draw
from what they see as causes of the Nazi Holocaust:
the alleged failures of German “liberals” in the Weimar Republic
to stand up to the twin challenges of Nazism and Communism
and of the western European liberal democracies
to stand up to Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II;
and the necessity of having overwhelming military power
to crush any new Hitler preemptively.
[2.2]
As Heilbrunn,
whose Jewish father fled Germany before the war, correctly notes,
neoconservatives “see new Munichs everywhere and anywhere” –
a reference to the 1938 Munich pact
by which Britain and France tried to “appease” Hitler
by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.
[2.3]
Indeed, it is characteristic of neoconservatives
to depict virtually every foreign policy challenge –
from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua 25 years ago
to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad –
to US (or Israeli) hegemony
as a potentially cataclysmic replay of the 1930s.
The neoconservatives, according to Heilbrunn,
“have shaped a romantic narrative for themselves in which
they are the new Churchills staring down the forces of evil.”
[One hopes that President Bush
has not bought into this narrative,
casting himself as the Churchill-in-chief.]
[2.4]
Fear that Saddam Hussein intended a “second holocaust” against Israel
served as one of the main motivations
for the neoconservative promotion of war with Iraq,
according to Heilbrunn.
“As Jews, they (and their Catholic conservative allies) were haunted by
the memory that the allies had not stopped the Holocaust –
and they strongly believed that it was America’s obligation
to act preemptively to avert another one.”
[3.1]
Third,
the movement’s Trotskyist roots –
incarnated by its “founding father, Max Shachtman –
among the Jews from Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century
not only
imbued its members with a distrust, even a hatred, of liberalism
(despite their latter-day purported embrace of democracy promotion).
They also largely shaped their polemical and political tactics,
even as they moved rightward –
into the Democratic Party after World War II and thence,
after the traumas of the 1960s and early 1970s,
including two Arab-Israeli wars –
into Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.
[3.2]
“Their fling with Trotskyism [endowed] them with a temperament
as well as a set of intellectual tolls [tools?]
that many never completely abandoned –
a combative temper and
a penchant for sweeping assertions and grandiose ideas.”
[Most of them wrong.]
The fact that they see themselves as “a kind of aristocratic intelligentsia,”
[Ha ha ha.
Lying bozos is more like it.
But Condi Rice, the NYT, and the WP love them.]
according to Heilbrunn, derives from their Trotskyite origins.
[4.1]
Fourth,
“the social exclusion experienced by Jews
at the hands of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite”
that persisted in the US into the early 1960s
stirred a “deep resentment”
among many of the movement’s most influential leaders,
notably Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
[4.2]
Indeed, Podhoretz,
who edited Commentary magazine from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s
and now advises Giuliani,
sees the movement as
the war against the “WASP patriciate,”
according to Heilbrunn.
[And, of course, who better epitomized the WASP patriarchy
than George Herbert Walker Bush?
But GHWB had alienated the Jewish community.]
[4.3]
Neoconservatives “know that they will never be accepted by the establishment,”
he writes in a passage about Perle.
“Indeed, they outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are outsiders.
But beneath the veneer of confidence is
a seething rage
at the government bureaucracy and social elites.”
[No doubt, that explains
the torrent of
cheap shots, vicious smears,
second-guessing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking, and
failure to recognize the stunning success that it has had
in preventing another 9/11
that have been directed against the CIA over the last few years,
a torrent legitimized by the literary establishment
with the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to
that ultimate cheap shot against the “old Grotonians”,
Timothy Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes.]
Ultimately, Heilbrunn is critical of the neoconservatives,
but he accepts much of their worldview.
[All in all, after reading the above excerpts and commentary,
it should be noted how similar
the views expressed by these two American Jews (e.g.)
are to those expressed by the accused anti-Semite, Kevin MacDonald.
Note in particular MacDonald’s reaction to Philip Weiss’s review.]
2008-01-28-Weiss
The Long Fuse to the Iraq Warby Philip Weiss
The American Conservative, 2008-01-28
Review of:
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn,
Doubleday, 289 pages
2008-02-13-Raimondo
The Monster That Wouldn't Dieby Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2008-02-13
Why the neocons endure
2008-09-15-WP-Hiatt
The Battle For Hope In IraqBy Fred Hiatt (editor of the Post’s editorial page)
Washington Post, 2008-09-15
[Its conclusion; emphasis is added.]
If, as seems likely, ...
U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq for some time to come,
we can hope that the next national security adviser again has
the strength to resist the crowd and
the deftness to steer the country in the right direction.
[Remember, the editorial page of the Post has been vociferous
in calling for intervention in the affairs of other countries
to promote what it calls “democracy” around the world.
But what does “democracy” mean in the United States?
According to Mr. Hiatt, certainly not following “the crowd.”
And just what is “the crowd,” anyhow?
Isn’t it the people that democracy presumes to represent?
Another example of the disdain for mere popular opinion
of the Post’s prominent commentators a while back
came from its senior columnist, David Broder,
who dismissed the popular push to restrict immigration
in an op-ed column titled “A Mob-Rule Moment”
(words chose, I presume, by the Post’s editorial page staff).
Democracy is evidently good, according to the Post,
only when it produces the results that they like
(which, somehow, invariably turns out to be
what the powers in the Jewish community want).]
2008-Kevin-MacDonald-reviews-Heilbrunn
The Neoconservative Mind (PDF)Review by Kevin MacDonald of
They Knew They Were Right
The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn,
By now the history of the neoconservative movement
is a bit of a twice-told tale.
There have been book-length academic treatments
and substantial coverage in the media,
especially as the influence of the neocons
in the George W. Bush Administration and
in promoting the war in Iraq
came to be public knowledge.
Those with some familiarity with this history will find that
Heilbrunn’s treatment adds little to available accounts.
But what it does better than other mainstream media accounts is to
really get at the Jewish nexus of the movement.
This in itself is a major accomplishment because
mainstream accounts of neoconservatism routinely ignore
the Jewish origins and composition of the movement.
Or they dismiss any discussion of Jewish identities and Jewish interests
that are so central to neoconservatism
as the ravings of anti-Semites.
Heilbrunn is quite clear about the role of Jewishness in neoconservatism.
After dismissing other views of what neoconservatism is,
he states flatly that
neoconservatism “is about a mind set,
one that has been decisively shaped
by the Jewish immigrant experience,
by the Holocaust, and
by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism” (p. 10).
“Indeed, as much as they may deny it,
neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,
reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns” (p. 11).
Sections:
- The Psychological Milieu of Neoconservatism
- 1.1 Psychological Intensity, Anti-White Hostility
- 1.2 Moral Posturing and Double Standards
- 1.3 Paranoia and Self-Deception
- 1.4 Grandiosity
- 1.5 Jewish Hero Worship and Ethnic Networking
- Non-Jewish Neoconservatives
- Neocons and Paleocons
- The Neocons on Domestic Policy
- Gaps in Heilbrunn’s Account
- Neoconservative Disloyalty
- Heilbrunn as a Jewish Apologist
2008-09-26-Weiss
Neocons' Identity Politics Have Helped to FuelExplosive Sectarianism in the Middle East
by Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss.org, 2008-09-26
[The relevant extract; emphasis is added.]
Neoconservatives are at heart an element of American identity politics.
They arose in some measure out of sociological resentment,
as Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrated, and
as I knew in my Jewish-son-of-a-CCNY grad bones,
and they think in very sectarian terms.
It’s fascinating that
their plans for the Middle East,
which included
cementing the Jewish occupation of Arab lands in Palestine
by
engineering an American occupation of Arab lands in Iraq,
have helped uncap sectarian fervor across the region.
2010
2010-01-12-Gottfried
Picking Apart Washington’s Scumby Paul Gottfried
Taki Magazine, 2010-01-12
2010-01-22-Margolick
The Return of the NeoconsBy David Margolick
Newsweek, 2010-01-22
Neoconservatism was once deemed dead— ‘Buried in the sands of Iraq.’
But it persists,
not just as the de facto foreign-policy plank of the Republican Party
but, its proponents assert,
in Obama’s unapologetic embrace of American military might.
...
Perhaps the surest measure of the neocons’ continued influence is the frustration and anger they generate within the Republican Party. Many of those they’ve targeted—like Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft—won’t talk about them. (Some neocons gloat that Kissinger has even tried to become one of them.) One prominent activist on the libertarian end of the party—who hates what he sees as their costly foreign--policy adventurism and the GOP electoral losses (i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress) he attributes to them—calls them “parasites”: with little electoral power of their own, he claims, they have had to attach themselves to others, like George W. Bush. Comfortably ensconced behind a cloak of anonymity, he bristles, but also marvels, at their endurance and effectiveness, comparing them to “an infection that keeps coming back.” “They’ve perfected this absolutely incredible thing: they announce who they are, how powerful they are, how influential they are, and get people to write articles about them,” he says. “But when their policies are perceived to have caused mass chaos, they don’t exist, they didn’t have anything to do with it, they weren’t there, and they get really snotty. And anyone who attacks them is anti-Semitic.”
“Everybody in the true conservative movement talks privately about the neoconservatives, and most don’t like them,” says Patrick Buchanan. “They’re vindictive; they’re not collegial…One disagreement and you’re at war to the death.” As Buchanan depicts it, in the 1980s the neocons insinuated themselves into the world of right-wing foundations and, funding newly in hand, proceeded to hijack his party’s intellectual establishment, building for themselves an elaborate institutional infrastructure that’s better funded—and more militant and monochromatic—than anything comparable on the left. The epicenter is the American Enterprise Institute, but it fans out to other organizations, including the Hudson Institute (the refuge for two neocons bruised in the Bush administration, Douglas Feith and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, run by neocon Clifford May.
Even the old-line, establishment Council on Foreign Relations, the embodiment of those values—diplomacy, moderation, respectability—the neocons so abhor, now shelters two of them: the military historian Max Boot and Elliott Abrams, the former Reagan and George W. Bush administration official convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-contra scandal. (Bill Kristol, then Vice President Dan -Quayle’s chief of staff, helped secure Abrams a presidential pardon.) “They are effectively insulated from failure,” says Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, one of the neocons’ most frequent antagonists. “Even if you’ve totally screwed up in office and things you’ve advocated in print have failed, there are no real consequences, either professionally or politically. You go back to AEI and Weekly Standard and continue to agitate or appear on talk shows as if nothing has gone wrong at all.” But to Walt, too, their very durability is impressive. “You have to give them grudging admiration for sticking to their guns, to continuing to pound away no matter how discredited they’ve been,” he says.
Several neoconservatives—Robert Kagan, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt—played important roles in John McCain’s presidential campaign. A second and third generation of neoconservative commentators, including Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, Frederick Kagan and Danielle Pletka of AEI, and Jamie Fly and Dan Senor of the Foreign Policy Initiative (another Bill Kristol production), are making themselves known and heard. Meantime, the Fox News watchers who form the Republican base are not exactly neocons but, in their support for pugnacious policies abroad, find their world view compatible. Neoconservatism re-mains, as former GOP congressman Vin Weber puts it, “the dominant intellectual force on -foreign-policy thinking in the Republican Party.” Leaders of the alternative “realist” school—Kissinger, Scowcroft, Colin Powell, James Baker—are getting old, and with few exceptions, like Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, seem, like some celibate religious sect, unable or disinclined to reproduce.
“Its idealistic and patriotic appeal may be better suited to young thinkers than the prudent and reasonable calculations of realism,” says Justin Vaïsse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism. “It’s not very exciting to be a young realist, really.”
In the meantime, Buchanan’s isolationist, paleoconservative wing of Republicanism has withered. “A lot of them tend to be libertarian cranks: neo-Confederates, really insane, racist, xenophobic types,” says Max Boot, who is also a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. “Neocons are vilified as being barely human beasts who have to be kept chained in a cage somewhere, lest they start eating babies alive or something, but when you look at the spectrum of conservative thought, they are actually fairly centrist. The people who kind of speak to the rank and file of the Republican Party—the Newt Gingriches, the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys…they’re actually fairly supportive of an aggressive foreign policy.”
No one has ever done a head count of neoconservatives; their critics, disposed to see them as furtive and conspiratorial, have pegged the number—facetiously, it’s true—as low as 64, or 17, or six. Sometimes they seem even scarcer, and more incestuous: fully half of the eight featured speakers on Commentary’s Alaskan cruise this summer, for example, are Podhoretzes (paterfamilias Norman; his wife, Midge Decter; his son, John; and Elliott Abrams, his son-in-law). John Podhoretz’s ascension at the magazine is a subject of enormous amusement to neoconservatism’s critics, who say it smacks of the nepotism and affirmative action neocons supposedly abhor.
2010-08-15-Cole-Goldberg
An Israeli Attack on Iranwould reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President
by Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 2010-08-15
[Despite the title, this begins with
a nice discussion of who the neocons are and what they support:]
What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do?
This political grouping includes WASPS such as
former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN ambassor John Bolton,
but at its core is
politically active and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats
who broke with their party in the 1980s
to become war hawks in Republican administrations,
and most of whom are rooted in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in
the thought of prominent fascist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky.
(They are almost mirror images of the general American Jewish community,
79 percent of which voted for Barack Obama,
which is skittish about foreign wars and liberal on social issues).
The Neoconservative faction
is in the political wilderness in the United States.
Eager to play the role in Iran
that the enormous floods have played in Pakistan,
of paralyzing and destroying much of a thriving country,
eager to reduce the shining city of Isfahan to rubble
and displace its population into massive tent cities,
they find their path blocked at every turn.
Always much happier
when the militant and aggressive Likud Party is in power in Israel,
they are nevertheless impatient with what they see as
the timidity of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu,
compared to the reckless warmongering of
the previous Kadima Party and its Labor ally
(who managed to set back the Lebanese economy a decade in 2006
and to reduce the large penal camp of Gaza to further misery and rubble).
...
2011
2011-03-21-Walt-neocon-liberal-alliance
What intervention in Libya tells us about the neocon-liberal allianceby Stephen M. Walt
foreignpolicy.com, 2011-03-21
2011-03-24-Giraldi-Neocon-Foreign-Policy
Neocon Foreign Policyby Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com, 2011-03-24
2011-03-25-Raimondo
Conservatives Challenge Obama Over Libyaby Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2011-03-25
The antiwar right vs the neocon-neoliberal alliance
2011-03-29-Walt-Horton-Antiwar-radio
Scott Horton Interviews Stephen M. WaltAntiwar.com Radio, 2011-03-29
2012
2012-06-22-Buchanan-for-neocons-america-is-an-ideology
For Neocons, America is an Ideologyby Patrick J. Buchanan
Antiwar.com, 2012-06-22
In introducing his new book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America?
Straussians, writes Gottfried, “wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the Enlightenment, once properly instructed, should be able to carry out this … task.”
For traditional conservatives, before the nation is born, “ethnic and cultural preconditions” must exist. All “successful constitutional orders,” he writes, “are the expressions of already formed nations and cultures.”
To the old right, America as a nation and a people already existed by 1789. The Constitution was the birth certificate the nation wrote for itself, the charter by which it chose to govern itself. The real America had been born in men’s hearts by the time of Lexington and Concord in 1775.
In a recent issue of Modern Age, Jack Kerwick deals with this divide.
Irving Kristol, he writes, and quotes that founding father of modern neoconservatism, saw America as “a ‘creedal’ nation, a nation to which anyone can belong irrespective of ‘ethnicity or blood ties of any kind, or lineage, or length of residence even.’ ”
“For Kristol and his ilk,” Kerwick goes on, “one’s identity as an American is established by nothing more than an intellectual exercise whereby one rationally assents to the propositions encapsulated in the Declaration.”
“Given this unqualified quasi-religious commitment to ‘the Rights of Man,’ (for a neoconservative) America must be future-oriented, for as long as human rights are threatened, and regardless of where they are imperiled, her work in the world will never be complete.”
...
2016
2016-03-02-Politico-trump-clinton-neoconservatives
Neocons declare war on TrumpProminent Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and vote for Clinton instead.
By Michael Crowley
Politico, 2016-03-02
Labels: neoconservatism, politics
posted by KHarbaugh at 21:00
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