what makes a person a Neo Conservative?

Economics Political Theory
1

What makes a person like G.W Bush a Neo-con?

Thanks,

Michael

2

http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/?p=episode&name=2008-08-26_028_what_is_neoconservatism.mp3

Typically a view of American exceptionalism expressed through full spectrum Empire building. The military and aggressively diplomatic promotion of a certain (in this case, Pro-American interest) world view.

Jingoistic American Trotskyism

3

Basically, a neo-con is a social democrat who believes in spreading social democracy through wars of occupation. They can be a lot of other things, but they have to be those two first.

4

I think alot of it has to do with Academic tradition in America. It is no coincidence that Neo Conservatives now often refer to themselves as “Hard Wilsonians” and before Wilson became president he was the President of Princeton and a renowned Political Scientist and Historian of Easten Progressives. Wilson believed and advocated the Calvinist idea of a “calling” with the Progressive ideal of everyone benifiting from the rule and guidance of a learned elite…naturally his calling was to organise this learned elite to everyones benifit.

Wilson also was a fan of destroying the old European order in favor of ethnic borders in the territory formally ruled by Austria Hungary, which helped lead to the second World War.

In short, everything Wilson advocated was a failure. He was a moderate failure at home and a spectacular failure abroad and academics loved him for his ideas, even though they failed. The best quote I read (just today actually) on Wilson was that Yugoslavia failed so badly that the only peace in the last century came from a Communist dictator…which was not a Wilsonian ideal.

The other academic influence was another collossal failure in the idea of permanent revolution advocated by Leon Trotsky. Asside from massacreing anarchists in Kronstad, his only real influence was on New York Marxist intellectuals like Max Schachtman and Irving Kristol. Trotsky was such a failure that he had zero influence among any communists in power except in Academia in the US and maybe Paris. The only plus to Trotsky was that he was not Stalin but then he never had a chance to be in power to see if perpetual revolution could actually be more successful than State Paranoia and purges…I suspect it could have been much worse.

The next influence was the teachings of Leo Strauss who advocated an odd combination of traditional German style learning blended with Talmudic type scholarship of a specific work by a master (see Alan Bloom and his Closing of the American Mind for an example of academic Straussianism). He also advocated the Wilsonian progressive idea that an elite should influence the government to the benifit of civilisation…but he advocated they do this in secret where the Progressive advocated that they do this in the open. His view was that the simple people of the world could not understand the superiority of the elite and in fact they might retaliate against them if they worked in the open.

Then add the Claremont Institute’s official love of Lincoln and Churchill with all of the above and you have a Neocon.

The ideas flow down from official publications like Anarcho Syndicalist ideas come from Bakhunin through punk rock music where the fans of both these ideas cannot identify their origins nor do they care to do so.

Bush is like a teenage punk rock fan in his adopting of this philosophy and world view but the teenage punk rock fan is mostly harmless.

(Oh, some great quotes in a book I am reading called Inventing The Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor…which I was very suprised to find it as entertaining as it is)

5

Are they neo-cons because they are drawn to violence and get a buzz over the spectacle of war, and they can’t help rationalising this buzz with neo-con foreign policy. I know a great deal of libertarians who take an interest in military history and are neo-cons in the arena of foriegn policy.

6

Neoconservatism is essentially an ideology trying to establish an aggressive social welfare state. This is opposed to the two other conservative ideologies:

  1. American Conservatism or the “New Right:” A free market but with an interventionist foreign policy (i.e. containment).

  2. Paleoconservatism or the “Old Right:” A free market ideology combined with a noninterventionist foreign policy.