Does Neo-Conservatism make more sense when you read this?
The most articulate analysis of the obsession with power and violence was actually written by [Norman] Podhoretz himself, in 1963, in his famous essay “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Despite what the title might suggest, it is actually an argument against racism and in favor of miscegenation. When Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, the common assumption was that Jews were rich and Negroes were persecuted. This was not how things looked to Podhoretz on the playground of his local public school, where poor Jewish boys like him were regularly being beaten up by Negroes: “There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first experience of cowardice.” Negroes, he goes on, “made one feel inadequate. But most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything…. This is what I envied and feared in the Negro….” And then there were the effete snobs, “the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them,” and “all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment….”
The key to Podhoretz’s politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards.
It’d be easy to go too far with the ‘negroes stole their lunch money’ line of explanation, but it seems a common feature of these right-wing nut jobs that they were picked on as children. Now they want revenge.
perfect example of surplus powerlessness
not to mention emasculation
i got my puppy
l’ve always found John Kenneth Galbraith’s definition to be succinct:
“The modern [neo] conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
works for me.
lTMF’sA
It’s a justification for the Jewish Defense League, and you know how far that shit went…
Galbraith was probably talking of Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr. type conservatives, circa the 1950s and 60s. The neocons are a different kettle of fish altogether. (Goldwater and Buckley were not Zionists.)
Also neocons can be liberal domestically. The contemporary ideology for which justifying selfishness is central is neoliberalism, not neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is about “projection” of US power, not selfishness (the US being selfish with respect to the rest of the world, yes).
could be counted as a neo-con Democrat, and he advised Nixon to be hands-off (or practice “benign neglect”) in regards to black people.
Two points.
To be honest, I don’t know why you call Moynihan a neocon. Is it because he was an especially strong supporter of Israel? I don’t know if he was or not, but I can conjecture that he was, since he was a senator from New York. But you don’t have to be a neocon to be a strong supporter of Israel if you represent New York. Hillary certainly panders to AIPAC, for example, but she isn’t a neocon.
Did I say anything about Israel?
I said in regards to black people, and their relation to poverty, and his past embrace of Nixon.
See here and here.
I was picked on as a child and it made me liberal.
Yes, but you were not “emasculated” as a child, and therein lies the difference. You can only get angry about being treated like a girl if you’re not one (despite the fact that we do get angry – but usually not angry enough to become obsessed our whole lives with payback).
Neo-conservatism is all about the phallus. It’s the resurgence of the heirarchy that founded this country, with the Great White Father at the top, landed men as the only real citizens, and everyone else to be treated “firmly, but fairly” (both terms being defined by the needs of the elite white males, of course).
“The modern [neo] conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
edit: “…; that is, the search for a plausible moral justification for selfishness.”
just sayin…
You’re going in the right direction but you stopped too soon…
edit: “…; that is, the search for a salable public rationalization for selfishness.”
This parallels something someone else said in recent years when commenting on the Neocon mindset, (I forget who said it but I’m pretty sure it was a blogger).
He/She said; “Wherever the neocons are it is Weimar Germany”, making the point that, for the neocons, it was the liberal mindset and Democratic process in Germany that were the primary enabler of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.
This observation about the Neocons and their patently flawed perspective was, for me, right on the money, and it also explained how and why the Neocons, born out of a leftist Marxist/Leninist heritage, came to be such such obsessive authoritarians who so vehemently oppose both the essence and the mechanisms of true democracy. While the leap from “leftist Communist” authoritarianism to “rightwing pseudo-Democratic” authoritarianism is an easy one to undertake, the ‘pre-Nazi’ Weimar schtick gave them ‘cover’ (in their own minds), for making the transition to Democracy without ever embracing the core principles of that Democracy.
With this in mind, is it any wonder little NoPod, bullied about as a tyke, would build an entire dysfunctional pathology along these authoritarian lines? (And, I wonder what Irving Kristol, (co-godfather of the neocon dogma), had to endure as a child at the hands of his peers.)
I don’t understand this at all. The situation in Weimar Germany was that you had two anti-democratic movements: the Nazis and the Communists. (The Nazis finished off the Communists of course, saying, ironically when you think of Marx’s views, that communism wasn’t right for the German people, unlike the case for the Russians, with their Slavic collectivist mentality.) In the US, the only two domestic threats to democracy are the neocons and their allies the Christianists: and neither was a noticeable threat as far as most people were concerned until Bush 2 came to power.
The neocons are concerned with external threats to the US (and Israel, of course). They can point to no domestic threat. The Dems are a threat as they see it not because Dems would subvert democracy the way the Nazis did, but because Dems are allegedly soft on defense. I don’t think the interpretation of the neocons you propose works at all, but I could be missing something.
There was quite a bit of instability and upheaval at both ends of the time period known as the Weimar Republic, but there was a period from after Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch until the rise of the Nazis again as the economy crumbled and the democratically constituted, elected, secular, national government lost control and with it all credibility. And it is in this period that the Neocons, in their delusional crackpot minds, fix the responsibility for Hitler’s ascendancy by blaming this fledgling attempt at liberal democracy for failing. The Neocons would have far preferred that the leftist totalitarianism of the Communists had crushed that emerging and imperfect democracy, but of course now that they’re ‘rightwing authoritarians’ rather than ‘leftwing authoritarians’, they can’t express this preference openly now, as Communism is so thoroughly discredited.
And so, to legitimize their current position as advocates for another failed ideology, (now that they dumped the Commies), they have to blame that poor and imperfect fledgling democracy back then in Germany for preventing their former authoritarian brethren in the Communist party from [putatively] stopping the rise of the Nazis in their tracks.
And they ignore, of course, the simple fact that the Communists would not have been able to reverse the damages caused by hyper-inflation and massive war reparations, nor create more employment or industry, any more that the fledgling parliamentarians were able to do, and it was these poor conditions and the nationwide discontent that Hitler keyed upon and rode into power.
One other small thing I would say in response to your post. The Neocons do in fact identify plenty of domestic threats, chief among them being any democratically arrived at or constitutionally enshrined measure or mechanism that restrains or diminishes in any way the absolute authority of their creature in the White House. And because of this pure authoritarian posture, they also freely demonize any and all who may even inadvertently speak out against this dictatorial enthusiasm, whether it be Congress, and independent judiciary, or a press rooted in the principle of free speech.
Thanks for your very interesting remarks.
I had seen the neocons described as “ex-Trotskyites”, and I could never figure that out. (Not that I looked into it.) Now I have a better sense of where they come from. If they actually side, in hindsight, with the Communists over the Nazis in the period of the Weimar Republic, then they go utterly against mainstream, establishment thought both in Britain and America during that period. That shows that their thought is completely alien to Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-American, if you prefer) political thought. I might be wrong about this, but I would guess that even British socialists of the Fabian type would have preferred running the risk of keeping the democratically elected Weimar government, despite the Nazi threat, to the Communists forcibly taking over the government and then eliminating the Nazis (instead of the Nazis eliminating them, which is what happened).
One thing I remember reading about the neocons (although I don’t remember which one or where), is that when one was told something about the American Civil War, he said, “We are not interested in the Civil War”, which is of course crazy, because what can be more central to an American in American history than the Civil War?
They really are a completely alien influence, completely outside of the two main political traditions influential on America, those of Britain and France, as well as the American tradition itself.
Yep, everything one needs to know is learned in kindergarten.
Is it just my warped thinking or did this country actually start accepting the equality issue in regards to the blacks prompting them to import Hispanics to fill the void in the racial conflict category.
Don’t all jump on me at once, it was only an evil thought.
This is another attempt at nature vs nurture. Cowards are born, not made. Most bullies are cowards, which is why they prey on the weak.
The thing that the neo-cons have in common is that they are all cowards. Everyone of them has espoused the “lets you and him fight” policy. It’s quite a long list: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Brooks, Friedman, Bolton, Kristol, Limbaugh…
When you examine this list you will see that they all share lots of characteristics in common. It seems to give more credence to the nature part of the argument.
I think there’s more to it than simply being picked on by bullies at school — as noted above, bullies are inherently cowards, who are building up their own self-image and strength by “proving” themselves tougher than a kid who was weaker to start with.
But not all kids who are picked on in school become bullies themselves. Some actually internalize the experience and become more compassionate towards others, and grow up to be liberals who are passionate about justice — instead of revenge.
I think it has more to do with one’s own self-image and sense of self-worth — and the internal criteria used to determine that worth. And that internal criteria is established in the psyche very early on. It’s also a question of developing empathy for the pain of others.
Revenge is a selfish reaction — it’s putting one’s own pain at a higher value than the pain of anyone else. It tries to assage internal pain by inflicting pain on someone else — and yet it never really satisfies, or makes the original pain go away.
Small wonder that the neocon focus in justice is on punishment, rather than addressing the underlying social/economic/etc. issues that encouraged or made possible the original crime.
neo-con thought may be treatable!!!
The LA Times is reporting that recent research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience indicates that liberals and conservatives have different cognitive styles.
Here’s a quote:
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
Apparently, this research shows that conservatives have a cognitive style that is error prone when dealing with conflict.
(credit: A Tiny Revolution)
maybe we can start building treatment centers!
heh, that’s on the front-page right now.