Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Update # I: NEOCONS MAD ABOUT MCCAIN

Elections 2008, Neoconservatism

The “Fairness Doctrine” is a wicked, illiberal effort to limit speech—a no-brainer for principled individuals on both the left and the right. Yet Michael Medved attempts here to frame McCain’s apparent opposition to this FCC instrument as a sign of his man McCain’s principled conservatism. This is indeed a very poor argument, as even bad liberals will—and have—reject such abuse of power.
More material, Medved, whose ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left, is mad about McCain. Need I say more?
In the dust-up between Talk radio and the Republican Party establishment, I’m beginning to detect a trend: The neoconservative whey is separating from the conservative curd. What remains is not the best concoction, but it’s an improvement. McCain is the curdling bacteria.
 
McCain can run but cannot hide from the pollution he has dropped along his political path:
* McCain-Kennedy illegal-alien amnesty bill
* McCain’s opposition to a defensive, passive barrier on the border with Mexico
* McCain’s vote for radical lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court
* McCain’s collusion with 7 Democrats and other bottom-feeding Republicans to sabotage conservative SC nominee
* McCain-Feingold: self-explanatory
* McCain’s 100 year-war in Iraq, and the promise of more wars
* McCain’s opposition to tax cuts—twice
* McCain-Lieberman’s legislation of Al Gore’s Malthusian hatred of humanity and progress, including to reject drilling in Alaska
 
If I’ve forgotten anything, please remind me and BAB readers.
posted by Ilana Mercer on 02.05.08 @ 8:19 pm

Update # I (Feb. 6): As usual, BAB readers and posters have filled in the blanks, pointing out by way of examples that McCain is guilty of major philosophical infractions:

* He puts “patriotism,” by which he means allegiance to the state, ahead of the thing that makes the world go around, profit. The last he maligns, which show an utter lack of grasp of the natural laws of human action.
* He departed from conservatives and sided with Democrat neocons in prosecuting the one war conservatives opposed: the war on Serbia. Lesson: McCain loves war so dearly, he’ll cross party lines in the off chance his pepes are not behind the war du jour.
* We’re waiting confirmation (URL anyone?), but it seems that McCain didn’t miss out on the biggest business shakedown in history—the prosecution of cigarette manufacturers under the “scientific” guise that free will is null and void and that smokers believed they were inhaling water vapor.
* I’m not sure what the “Keating Affair was about, but I see in the URL provided hereunder that McCain likes to move in packs of Democrats.

The Authentic Right Vs. The Neocons (Part 2)

Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Professor Gottfried and I continue the conversation we began last week. In The Authentic Right Vs. Neocons (Part 2),” the sequel to “The Authentic Right Vs. The Neocons (Part 1), professor Gottfried, once again, helps us understand how the American Right fell into the clutches of “minicon scribblers.”

I describe the “propositional nation” neoconservatives are dreaming up for us (the Left, naturally, loves the idea too): “No longer will communities comprise individuals bound by a shared language, literature, culture, faith, history, habits and heroes. Rather, what we’re being fashioned into is a disparate people, forced together by an abstract, highly manipulable, coercive, state-sanctioned ideology.”

And Paul elaborates on “The farce of democracy that we now have—which is a pluralistic society spinning into a multicultural one, run by meddlesome bureaucrats, inventive judges, and a multitude of social engineers—has nothing to do with serious self-government. It is a social experiment that is spinning out of control.”

Read on.

Update: In reply to the reader in the Comments Section: Paul is not anti-Semitic; he is anti-foreign aid to Israel—as well as to all her Arab enemies.

His position is similar to the one I expressed here:

“Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent – and out of the affairs of others – recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane U.S. foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, Israel included, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.”

I was asked to write a piece for the Paul Campaign encapsulating his position vis-à-vis Israel. I did weeks ago, but they have yet to publish it. I continue to receive many letters expressing the misconception our reader voices. I’m surprised the campaign has not made use of a useful op-ed that refuted the accusations very effectively.

Andrew Sullivan Endorses Ron Paul (But Still Loves McCain)

Elections 2008, Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans

Before doing the right thing and endorsing Rep. Ron Paul, Andrew Sullivan gives us a glimpse as to why he’s been so misguided over the years (he’d never admit to learning by following those of us who’ve gotten it right). Sullivan first slobbers over McCain:
“I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time – the great question of the last six years – Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain’s position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense.”
Andrew has always done proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. And since when has the mummified McCain’s opposition to Iraq been anything but tactical? At least Sullivan doesn’t pretend he wasn’t once firmly in the McCain camp with respect to Iraq. Why would he need to pretend? When the American punditocracy is wrong, which is almost always, it doesn’t incur adverse effects. Being a party to the neoconservative-Centre-Left coalition means never having to say you’re sorry (or being dismissed).
Another indictment of McCain came today in the form of an endorsement from Joe Lieberman. Ideologically, very little distinguishes neoconservatives such as McCain, or other big government, open-borders Republicans from the center-Left.
Sullivan doesn’t make much more sense when he gets to Dr. Paul, although the overall endorsement is a good thing:
“The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration,” he salivates.
The current Republican Party is based in freedom and toleration? It has not stood for these principles in many decades, and, as some argue, never, since this is the party of Lincoln.
Andrew improves when he praises “Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government…”

Values Vulgarizers

Foreign Policy, Individual Rights, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, The West

One of our regular contributors here on Barely a Blog makes an uncharacteristically incoherent comment on his own blog:

“…on the subject of the war against civilization …Mercer gets it (she just wants us to fight it Marquis of Queensbury rules with our foot in a bucket.)”

Can he be serious? Apparently. Wait for this: Accolades for offering a strident defense of the West go to the prototypical open-borders Objectivist, whose positions are generally indistinguishable from those of the neoconservatives.

Philosophical incoherence at its best.

But it’s predictable. In my commentary over the years—cultural and political—I’ve mounted a systematic defense of Western values as I see them. This includes—gasp!—defending the distinctly Western character of the US (and the West), something the neocons and the Objectivists who ape them daren’t do.

The neocons and their Objectivist friends, on the other hand, have cheered the unprovoked bloodletting in Iraq and have deceptively framed as individual rights the “values” the US is planting in that country’s blood-soaked soil.

Because of their incremental convergence over the decades with the liberal left, this axis has, to all intents and purposes, embraced “equality” as a value for which they’re prepared to drag the country kicking and screaming to war.

Iraq is a colossal bit of social engineering. To the fact that the US is not defending individual rights in Iraq—not by any stretch of the imagination—add the matter of jurisdiction. A constitutional American government has no right to use the property of Americans to free people around the world. The Iraqi people, moreover, did not sanction the American government’s faith-based democratic initiative. These are the fictions for which neocons and their Objectivist tagalongs are willing to kill and have others killed.
Nation building and assorted mindless meddling have also found a place within this “philosophy.”

So what is my apparently constricting prescription? First, bring the armed forces home, so they can protect this country, not Kosovo, Korea, and Kurdistan. Next, scale back mass immigration, legal and illegal. Defending negative liberties at home is more effective and less violative than waging aimless, unwinnable, rights-sundering wars.

As anyone who’s followed my writing over the years knows, I most certainly support fighting and winning just wars. (The position I deride in this post equates unjust war with a defense of the civilization—a position too dumb and evil for words.) My stance is congruent with individual and national sovereignty, constitutional principles, and just war ethics.

Again, the prototypical warring Objectivist our misguided friend praises is indistinguishable from a neoconservative. He is tough on crime, in general (a good thing), big on war crimes (a bad thing), and even bigger on the idea of inviting the Third Word to our shores. All of which the left supports. There’s a reason the media has grown fond of the neocon/Objectivist/Catoite hybrid.

In the age of unreason, violence-for-values verbiage defeats my own coherent defense of the West. Atavism trumps reason, because it appeals to primitive emotions.
This is the vulgarization of values.