Considering that anti-communist pro-containment advocate James Burnham was a Marxist…
…and considering that Irving Kristol came from the far left…
There is ample reason to consider the possibility of it being a revolutionary socialist movement in disguise.
Socialism goes against both the welfare state and private property, but Socialists need some platform, so once the pro-welfare Labour Parties ended up failing, because Socialists had a much harder time convincing them of true Revolution, maybe they had an easier time convincing a younger generation to adopt Revolution by appealing to conservatism.
What a horrible accusation…against Marxists, that is. I have a few problems with your thesis, though. For one, Marxism is not far left, and for another, the roots of neoconservatism seem to lie more with Trotsky than Marx.
In it, Burnham says that although true socialism and revolution will not guarantee any of the things the workers in the Labour Party demand, they only know that the worker’s demands for welfare state will end in failure and the welfare state doing little for them. Thus, they would find the workers flocking back to what the revolutionaries suggest, so that the actual revolution can take place. A Revolutionary Socialist party must address the demands of people to get their support, but only as a means of replacing it with what they eventually intend to do.
Now, Burnham may well have decided that the fake Labour Party approach didn’t give much results, so he must have moved on to using the Conservative Party approach. Thus, Burnham started making himself look like a sympathiser of the Right, but then suddenly turned against the values of the Right by preaching containment and anti-communism - a means to internationalist Marxist order. It ended up working. Burnham found sympathisers in the CIA, for whom he also worked, and eventually CIA agent Bill Buckley was pushing for the neoconservative agenda in western nations. They thus were now able to fight the Stalinist communists who had thrown Marxists out of Russia and destroyed their hopes of revolution.
Therefore, a neoconservative like Burnham is doing the exact same thing with conservatism what previous revolutionaries were doing with the Labour Party. And he’d kill two birds with one stone - fight communist Russia, and push for international socialism.
No, I think the Neoconservatives like the progressives are just Fascists (National Socialists). If you look at what Mussolini did and what these groups recommend doing, I can not find much difference. Both do not want to prohibit private property and eliminate private property rights despite their desire to further limit private control of property. Both believe that expanding the state in any direction is good and despite rhetoric they intend to use violence as the means to expand the state.
Influenced, more or less, but not it’s directly a “marxist movement”. Neo-conservative’s primary source came from Marxist origins in the infamous James Burnham, whose career is chronicled with a gradual but paced shift from Marxism to a syncretic Marxist conservatism to eventually the more official neo-conservatism.
Most of the initial figures of neo-conservatism came from an ideological fallout from Marxism of a few specific individuals, & memetically infiltrated the political culture gradually until it’s height with Bush II, wherein Neo-conservatism was assumed to be the only conservatism, by many.
Neoconservatism is not Marxism. Marxism is a very, very specific ideology/philosophy. Neoconservatism lacks many of the qualities it needs in order to qualify as Marxist (e.g. historical materialism, dialectic materialism, etc.).
Is it a variation of Marxist thought? I mean, in the wider class of socialism I don’t think there is a doubt. Manifest Destiny in which the U.S. gov’t, especially explicit in the neo-con circle, it’s Imperial expansion abroad self-interprets a nationalism that is more superior and it’s supposed values of freedom are to be nation-built all over the place. And the neo-cons have a firm interest in socialist means of production in militarism.
Neoconservatism is a moderately reactionary splinter of the World Democratic Movement (excuse the caps). Marxist Communism is also a splinter of the WDM. Thus, the two share various traits. However, Communism is (ostenstibly) part of the Left-Socialist splinter (Maoism being the most leftist), whereas NeoConservatism has more in common with what used to be called the ‘Socialist Right’ (not to be confused with Right-Wing Socialism, ala Hindenberg and National Socialism). The influence of Marxist ideas on all of Progressivism can not be discounted but, strictly speaking, NeoCons are not Marxists and are actually further from Marxist Communism than mainstream Progressives.
From my experience, neo-cons tend to be nationalist whereas Marxists tend to be internationalist. The two hate each other but are ironically two sides of the same coin of statism.
No, it’s more like an aggressive, nationalistic form of Progressivism. Technocrats, regulated markets for the ‘social good’, reverence to the state as the retainer of collective social values. It adds a hegemonic foreign policy and a sense of American exceptionalism.
I guess that is right. If pressed into a corner I would say it is like a ghoulish version of Wilsonianism. But at the same time it can be a red herring to try to pin it down like this. Because at its core neoconservatism is about neoconservatism. They have come a long way since Trotsky, but the only thing they still have from him is the only thing they really believe in - transformation of the globe. Everything after this is of secondary importance. The point of their ideology is that it needs to cast a shadow over the world. But unlike with Internationalist Communism what exactly is it that should be spread around the world is not really the issue. Neoconservatism is really an empty vessel. They want to transform societies they do not like into societies they like. What are the societies they like? The societies that will go along with their plans of international revolution. What are the societies they do not like? The societies that will not go along with them. Most fundamentally they are not about spreading democracy or secularism or any value you can possibly think of. They are about spreading neoconservatism, whose only real value is conquest. They are like cancer. They are pointless but crazy for spreading and self-replicating.
Neoconservatism is a jewish dominated movement, with their main goal being to use American power to support Israel and destroy its enemies e.g. Iraq/Iran.
These jews were marxists when they thought Soviet Communism was good for the jews. When they realised the bitter truth that the totalitarian machine they created were eventually used by Stalin against their fellow jews, they ceased being marxists and became instead Cold War Hawks and supporters of Zionism.