Fake 'Conservatives'
Scott
"A commentary published by Daniel McCarthy made the perceptive
point that what is now officially viewed as "conservatism" bears
no resemblance to the historical right in the US or anywhere
else."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The political right in the U.S. has been largely preempted by neocons,
who are actually imposters - leftists in drag.
Here is a comment describing the neo-cons:
"When a group of Jewish Trotskyites decided to take over the
conservative movement, they met in a coffee shop in New York and
schemed. They decided they would launch a number of intellectual
journals, and begin debating their Jewish ex-comrades on the Left who
owned major daily newspapers. The end result would be that the daily
newspapers would give them recognition as "the" conservative
movement, would ignore the original conservatives, and thus allow
their Trotskyite doctrines to supplant traditional conservative ways
of thinking. By adopting Trotsky's tactical doctrines on infiltrating
the vanguard of the movements, the neo-conservatives came to power."
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Horowitz&Conservatives&Libert
arians&CIA-michael.html
----------------------------------------------
McCarthy Was Right
by Paul Gottfried
A commentary published by Daniel McCarthy on this website (January 7)
made the perceptive point that what is now officially viewed as
"conservatism" bears no resemblance to the historical right in the US
or anywhere else. This bogus Right is not only in no way
conservative, but has little connection to the nineteenth and early
twentieth-century liberalism to which it is often likened. That
liberal worldview once mandated constitutional and ethical restraints
on what government administration might do to social institutions and
stressed the need for property qualifications on voting. (Under the
old liberal dispensation, the franchise was a privilege and certainly
not a "human right.") McCarthy is correct to observe that Franklin
Roosevelt and the New Deal are now the models of contemporary
"conservative" leadership. "Conservative" journalists and pols heap
extravagant praise on both, when they're not doing the same for
Lincoln as the grandfather of the civil rights movement or for Martin
Luther King as its father.
Despite this drifting conservative identity, it seems that
contemporary mislabeled conservatives have been able to keep their
ill-fitting label through a combination of favorable circumstances.
Certainly their gaggle of liberal media friends do not begrudge them
the use of false packaging, particularly when the alternative is to
have to face those farther to the right. It is nice for leftists be
able to hold debates with their own kind, that is, with those one can
schmooze with over the size of a tax cut or over whether Hillary
Clinton or Rick Lazio will be the more caring Senator from New York.
And another factor contributes to the problem of misidentity: the
funding, apparently without strings, that has come from Rupert
Murdoch and from other press barons has permitted the
neoconservatives to build a vast communications empire.
Such a position has allowed them to market themselves as
"conservative," by virtue of their access to tens of millions of
viewers and readers. It matters little what people actually are,
providing they and their well-placed friends keep ascribing to them a
particular identity. Those who differ from this judgment can always
be accused of antiquarian definitions. In this case dissenters will
likely be accused of much more, such as insensitivity, anti-Semitism,
and fascist isolationism. When all is said and done, nothing beats
having power to get one's frame of reference accepted.
But there is more to the story of how non-conservatives can bestow on
themselves a conservative identity without being laughed at as
clownish impostors. "Conservative" journalists have perfected certain
tricks to get away with semantic nonsense. Thus Jonah Goldberg, in
the latest issue of National Review, expresses the pious hope that
the "Pope will come closer to the West." What in Heaven's name is
this West that Goldberg has set out to defend and which John Paul ll
is being urged to join?
Readers of NR who are dumb as stumps (and I must assume that most
are) will leap to the conclusion that Goldberg is upholding
traditional Western civilization, on which the bishop of Rome has
mysteriously turned his back. But the "West" that NR's editors have
in mind is a post-Christian, postliberal, and postconservative
phenomenon, run by retread Communists and supranational social
engineering bureaucracies. The only thing Western about this West is
that its population is still (in spite of NR) predominantly Euro-
American and its sprawling administrative governments occupy a region
in which Western civilization once existed and thrived as a
distinctive religious-cultural entity.
As far as I can make out, this is not the West that Goldberg talks
about online or in his magazine. That West is a neoconservative
creation, based on global democratic imperialism, inclusion of Israel
as a prototypical American-style democracy, and calibrated versions
of certain progressive movements, like feminism, that triumphed in
the second half of the twentieth century. The Pope, who leads the
ancient Western church, is allegedly anti-Western because he has
failed to rally to the neoconservative position on bombing. Since
being for the West means being a neoconservative, the Pope's real
failing is not following the Commentary-National Review line.
Another neoconservative game for legitimating claims to being the
true conservative side is identifying those who are on the genuine
right with the unacceptable left. This of course takes as a given the
social democratic platitude that "the two extremes touch," which they
sometimes do but more often don't. To illustrate my point: the
authoritarian right may be arbitrary in trying to restore order but
does not create totalitarian societies; by contrast, the left, if
given enough time and control, will bring about such societies as a
matter of course. Total social control is the telos of leftist
politics, the end toward which it inevitably moves because of its
unswerving dedication to social planning.
Yet the neoconservatives keep rejecting conservative critics of the
modern world, ostensibly because they are crypto-leftists who are
mistakenly identified with the conservative side. For those who
recall my comments on Goldberg's attack on Joseph de Maistre, made
last June, it simply blew my mind that one could treat a French
counterrevolutionary as a leftwing radical, because he questioned the
notion of "universal right." Maistre was in fact an ultra-
conservative, in the early nineteenth-century sense. As a man of the
old European right, he did not hold the leftist view on human rights
that Goldberg presents as the quintessential conservative doctrine.
Without necessarily agreeing with all of Maistre's opinions, it seems
to me inexcusably dishonest to treat him as a leftist precisely for
not sounding like one.
Equally illustrative of neocon duplicity is a response that a young
friend of mine, H. Lee Cheek, received from the book editor of
National Review. Cheek had politely asked (and he does everything
with conspicuous courtesy) whether the inscrutable Ramesh Ponnuru
intended to send out for review his recently published work Calhoun
and Popular Rule (University of Missouri, 2001); whereupon he learned
that Calhoun was not a fit subject for discussion because he had
presented more or less the same theory of government as "the leftist
Lani Guinier."
This response is breathtakingly untrue. Only a low-grade moron, which
I shall generously assume Ponnuru is not, can believe Guinier's
critique of the democratic majority, based on her views of racial and
gender "fairness," is the same as Calhoun's understanding of
"concurrent majorities." One can oppose either or both theories but
the two are not remotely similar.
Nor would Cheek, a conservative political theorist and devout
Christian minister, have been sent so cynically on his way if he were
a famous leftist like Guinier. NR would have slobbered over his
personage, the way it does with all the leftists it happily publishes
and whose books it obligingly reviews. By pretending that those on
their right are really on their left, the pseudo-right can continue
to do what it does best, attack the real right as the hidden left
while fawning on the liberal establishment.
January 10, 2002
Paul Gottfried is professor of history at
Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly
recommended After Liberalism.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried21.html
spitz
left. Conservatives are in the middle, they are now called moderates, and
have no loyalty to either party.
Scott <Use-Author-Supplied-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote in message
news:BDEAB1UW37411.5792824074@anonymous.poster...
Guy Necologist
>The definition has changed. You have the radical right, and the radical
>left. Conservatives are in the middle, they are now called moderates, and
>have no loyalty to either party.
>
Nicely put.
Some of us feel strongly about this, and call ourselves "radical moderates."
number six
Guy Necologist wrote:
i come from the other end.
maybe i am a Right wing liberal?
A conservatized Leftist?
Guy Necologist
> Guy Necologist wrote:
>
>> spitz wrote:
>>
>>> The definition has changed. You have the radical right, and the
>>> radical left. Conservatives are in the middle, they are now called
>>> moderates, andhave no loyalty to either party.
>>
>> Nicely put.
>> Some of us feel strongly about this, and call ourselves "radical
>> moderates."
>
> i come from the other end.
> maybe i am a Right wing liberal?
> A conservatized Leftist?
They do exist...