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5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
| I can stomache criticism from Buckley, but Buchanan's a Paleoconservative whose vanity was more important to him than the Republican Party. I hope he and the other 17 members of the Reform Party are having a good time and that they'll stay out of Republican business, thankyew. |
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow. - The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right. This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals. The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia.
After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas.
Posted by: Fred 2008-02-11 |
