Neo-Con

Bene writes:

I've read the label 'neo-conservatist' on pundit blogs and in op-eds and I'm wondering what it means to US writers. Can someone give me a definition?

Bene called me out personally to comment.

To start, the word is a lot like "fundamentalist," which morphed from a descriptive term describing a particular breed of conservative Protestant thought to being a pejorative for anyone who takes his faith "too" seriously. To a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative, neocons are people who are recklessly interventionist in world affairs and worship the false god of free trade and also are mushy on the size of government and on traditional moral values. To anti-Bush-foreign-policy liberals, neocons are people who support the president's foreign policies.

The original users of the term were a block of ex-liberals who left the left when they saw "progressive" politics bringing things other than progress, where attacks on the core components of American well-being were taking things in the wrong direction. The old construct from Irving Kristol was that neocons were liberals who'd been mugged by reality; they realized that knee-jerk attacks on American tradition and dynamism were counter-productive.

I tried making a stab at what made up neocon thought here last year. The core of neoconservative thought is what I called "Optimistic, Other-Centered, Dynamist."

Optimistic-Neocons tend to be positive about the future of America and the country's robustness; that differentiates them from many liberals and paleocons who tend to be pessimistic about the future and the robustness of the system.

Other-centered-Neocons tend to be looking out for the general well-being of the country and the world; that gets them in conflict in people who are either self-centered or have small groups that they concern themselves with. This will tend to make them more interventionist in foreign policy and a bit less anti-government than unprefixed conservatives.

Dynamist-Neocons are progressive in the true sense of the word, looking to create positive change. That may disrupt both conservative and liberal status quos. That positive change may come from inventive businesses, creative non-profits or good government programs; yes, neocons do have a goo-goo streak that ticks off other conservatives. That may differ a bit from the Postrellian dynamist/statist paradigm, but it describes the conflict between neocons and both paleocons and liberals better.

One of the areas that makes neocons different from liberals is a general respect for religious tradition as a bulwark of civility and stability. They aren't generally theocons, but reject the anti-clerical and anti-traditional-morality bent of the modern left. In that sense, neocons are like the old Churchill line of being a buttress to the Church rather than a pillar, since they support the Church from the outside. Many of the early self-proclaimed neocons, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were Jewish, giving them a bit of theological distance from the evangelicals and conservative Catholics around them; that distance fueled distrust among the more devout (or merely bigoted) Gentiles in the conservative camp.

The early neocons were also intellectuals, willing to bring modern social science to bear on the problems of the day. There's a bit of an anti-intellectual streak to conservative thought, so these eggheads didn't (and still don't) go over well in many quarters of the right.

In the last quarter-century, the conservative movement as a whole has absorbed a lot of neoconservative principals, as Reagan and his ideological successors have adopted that optimistic, other-centered dynamism, albeit with a bit more skepticism about the role of government. Reagan was a recovering liberal as well, having his bout with the hard left while being SAG president, so he might have well be labeled a proto-neocon, although his move to the right preceded the Kristol-Podhoretz moves of the 60s.

The pessimistic, localist conservatism of Pat Buchanan doesn't sell well and has been isolated as a distinctly minority position on the right. Most of the modern GOP would loosely fit my three defining neocon features.

But not everybody. Many Fundamentalist (the old dispensational definition) conservatives would be pessimistic about the country, looking for the End Times and the Antichrist just around the corner, and will be uneasy with the Pollyanna of the neocons; some of those folks will be in the Buchanan camp, but other will be with the broader conservative consensus but be uneasy with the neocons. Others are conservative as is status-quoian, and will not like change much.

The successful face of modern conservatism winds up being minor tweaks from my proposed three-fold neocon mind set. Give them a devout faith and they become modern theocons. Give them an extra dose of skepticism about the role of government and they become unprefixed conservatives. Give them a disrespect for modern custom and morality and they become neolibertarians.

For example: is Dick Cheney a neo-conservative?

By the definition I just gave, no; I'll skip the cherry-picking of his 80s Congressional record for now. However, he's one of the key architects of the Bush foreign policy, so if you use neocon=Bush foreign policy, he becomes an arch-neocon.

How did the old definition of neocon morph into the new one? Many advocates of an aggressive foreign policy to extend American values abroad came from the neocon camp. Irving Kristol's son Bill is one of the more vocal advocates of "National Greatness" conservatism, that takes pride on American exceptionalism and wants to spread those values around the world. It's less cautious and less status-quoian that classic conservative foreign policy, looking to do more than just contain our foes.

Thus, when unprefixed conservatives started to adopt an aggressive foreign policy that looked like the National Greatness camp, critics on the right labeled the concept a neocon one, then critics on the left joined in.

Comments

[49erDweet]

Since I have yet to begin blogging - and may never 'get-around-to-it' if my retirement life doesn't settle down a bit, my thoughts about the use of the term "neocon" may not carry much weight.

Never letting that stop me before, I plunge on. Googling "neoconservatism" brought "An intellectual and political movement in favor of political, economic, and social conservatism that arose in opposition to the perceived liberalism of the 1960s: “The neo-conservatism of the 1980s is a replay of the New Conservatism of the 1950s, which was itself a replay of the New Era philosophy of the 1920s” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.).

Seems a bit circular, but gives the completed term some needed perspective. The recently coined abreviated term "neocon" seems like it is sometimes applied to whoever's ox is currently being gored [no pun intended], or in need of a good goring. Sort of an 'in the eye of the beholder' thing, I suspect.

But after watching my nation fritter away two national conflicts by trying to 'tickle to death' the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese when we attempted to conduct war by means of congressional committee, many of us believe the thing to do - once we have chosen to battle someone - is to do it hard, do it fast, do it right. And at the same time ignore as irrelevent the demlibs who really prefer to 'talk it out'.

I suspect the ignoring aspect [considering them to be irrelevent] triggers such anger and frustration among the demlibs [and MsM] that they do what they do in every situation, and that's talk, talk, talk. Hence new angry words and terms. "Neocon" seems most often used as a perjorative.

I have no problem with seeing my Lord taking a similar view, but am open to counter-persuasion.