Continuing from my previous post, "What we’ve got here is failure to communicate … in the conservative movement," let's dig into the 2 main forms of conservative ideology - traditional (paleo) vs. neoconservative - so we can better determine what ideology the Gate Keepers™ are trying to protect.
I mean, hey, if we're gonna have a civil war ... let's make sure we know as individuals, which side we belong.
My perspective of what has gone on in this country since 1968 is that conservatism -- traditional values -- always give way to "progressivism." You ca see how it works right now: 'You mean, you would deny others the same health care you expect for yourself?' The assumption is, if there's no state solution, there is no solution at all. - Freedom's Call
First, what is a Neoconservative?
"The Neoconservative Persuasion," Revisited
In August 2003, I critiqued Irving Kristol's important and revelatory article, "The Neoconservative Persuasion." His most remarkable revelation was this:
Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.
Kristol thus admitted what critics of neoconservative had been saying all along, that neoconservatism is at variance with conservatism as traditionally understood, and that the neoconservatives have been changing conservatism from within, changing it into something more "modern," i.e., into something more liberal, secular, statist, egalitarian, multiculturalist, and internationalist.
Which raises an interesting question: Has Kristol's astounding admission ever been acknowledged by his fellow neocons? The answer, as far as I can tell from a search of the Web, is no. Virtually all the commentary on Kristol's article came from paleo and traditionalist conservatives who were delighted at Kristol's confession. I have not found a single discussion of Kristol's article at any neoconservative website, even to disagree with it. In other words, even when the truth about themselves is dramatically announced by the founder of their movement, the neocons are not willing to admit it or to dispute it, perhaps because they know that credibly disputing it would be impossible. The neoconservatives are thus revealed as leftists who, if their campaign to move conservatism to the left is to succeed, must, in the familiar manner of leftists, conceal what they're really about.
It's a key distinction between liberals and leftists. Liberals attempt to move their society to the left through a process of fair and open debate; they believe in the goodness and acceptability of what they are proposing and have nothing to hide. By contrast, leftists attempt to move their society to the left through subterfuge, coercion, or force, because they know that their objectives are radically at odds with the existing society and would be rejected if stated openly. In Irving Kristol's unintentionally brutal phrase, they can only change society in the way they want to change it by doing so against its will.
Who are traditional conservatives?
Libertarianism Is Real Conservatism
Probably the most popular and cited history of American conservatism, George H. Nash’s book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America begins in 1945 — and it begins with libertarianism. Titled “The Revolt of the Libertarians,” the second paragraph of Nash’s first chapter states “For those who believed in the creed of old-fashioned, classical, nineteenth-century liberal individualism, 1945 was especially lonely, unpromising, and bleak. Free markets, private property, limited government, self reliance, laissez faire — it had been a long time since principles like these guided government and persuaded peoples.”Chronicling the intellectuals who tried to rectify this bleakness, Nash begins his history with two men — economists F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises — and explains how these two libertarian heroes kick-started the American conservative movement. Few actually used the word “conservatism” in 1945, a term that began to gain popularity when Russell Kirk’s book “The Conservative Mind” was published in 1953 and with the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955. Nash notes that even Kirk, who later had his own squabbles with fellow National Review writer and libertarian Frank Meyer, was first inspired by both Hayek and Mises, writing to a friend that these men represented a “great school of economists of a much sounder and different mind.”
After Hayek and Mises, Nash then cites Albert Jay Nock, publisher of the unabashedly libertarian magazine “The Freeman,” in the 1920’s. Writes Nash “Nock came to exert a significant amount of influence on the postwar Right,” yet was so libertarian that “Nock verged on anarchism in his denunciations of the inherently aggrandizing State.” Noting the impression Nock made on a young Buckley, Nash explained that “It was Nockian libertarianism in fact, which exercised the first conservative influence on the future editor of National Review.”
Nash’s entire book is a grand history of the mixture of conservatism and libertarianism, with the two often being indistinguishable. The American Spectator says of this work “Nash’s seminal book will remind today’s hotheads that the modern conservative movement was made possible by a coalition of traditionalists and libertarians…” Says president of the Heritage Foundation, Edwin J. Feulner, Jr. “Nash’s work is one of the very few books that must be read for a full understanding of the conservative movement in America.”
Dismissing libertarianism as not real conservatism is like dismissing filet mignon as not real steak — an attempt to marginalize a particular aspect of something that many have believed to be, as Reagan did, the meat of the matter. Indeed, advocating for “limited government” without employing some degree of libertarianism would be logistically impossible.
Which is exactly why so many of today’s so-called “conservatives” are so quick to dismiss it.
The difference between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives, is the difference between Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
So who's a conservative? That's for you to decide ... But I think it's obvious which version the Gate Keepers™ hope to protect, and which one they demand to PURGE.
