David Brooks and Roger Cohen have recently published Op-Eds in the New York Times that typify the diaspora from the right.
Neither of these guys has any idea what they'retalking about.
The first (Brooks) wants to redefine conservatism and disown the collapse of its failed idiology. the plain truth is that regardless how Brooks wants to define it, conservatism -"creedal" or "dispositional" stands on the belief that government needs to be restrained. When that restraint then leads to failures like Katrina, the decline in healthcare and education, and policy blunders committed by factions within that weakened government, conservatives then turn on a dime and say "see, look at these problems government has wrought."
If you reduce government to "the size where it could be drowned in the bathtub" as Grover Norquist is so fond of saying, you can't then be surprised when it cannot handle any crisis (deluge) larger than a bathtub.
The second guy (Cohen) wants to claim that the term "neocon" has become a generic insult for anything "the left" (whatever that means) doesn't like. A sort of "Auslander" for liberals. This of course is horseshit.
"Neocon" refers specifically to the group decended from the teachings of Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago professor who believed that the"liberal" cultural economic and political ideals of the west (particularly the USA) that had risen in the first half of the 20th century had resulted in its decline in the latter half. He thought that the only counter to that collapse was to create cultural myths that (though made up entirely) would scare the dumb public into acting properly. The public of course was too stupid to be able to think for itself.
The most elemental of those myths was that there were Really Bad Guys out there who were organizing to attack us, and that we needed to defeat them by any means necessary.
Strauss' disciples included Wolfowitz, Perle, the Kristols (Irving and later Bill) the Pipes (Richard and then Daniel) Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all of their successive proteges. The irony is that, somewhere along the line the disciples actually started to believe the myths they'd created, and like religious fanatics, followed their beliefs right off the cliff despite any evidence to the contrary.
Neocon then is not simply a generic slur, but refers to all who advance a certain set of principles:
- Liberalism leads to collapse of social order
- Therefore society needs to be "scared-straight"
- Evil Ones want to defeat us
- They must be prevented by any and all means including offensive wars ("offensive" meaning opposed to defensive rather than offending) .
- American hegemony.
Others might add unquestioning support for Israel, though I don't think this is required because I don't think that all neocons place Israel's interests as equal to ours (kinda defeats the hegemony idea). Many conservatives have become neocons since 2000 (Giuliani) , others have supported the neocon agenda though they have not themselves been historically neoconservative (McCain, Hatch, Specter, Graham), and even some liberals have become neoconservatives (Lieberman. Zell Miller, the Brookings institute douche-bags O'Hanlon and Pollock.)
Both of these columns show how many on the right are desperately trying to diffuse the damage they've wrought on this country. They can't ignore it or spin it away any more so they try to explain it, and their explanations are pathetic.
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