89 replies to this topic

[Call Me Robin]

Shalamar, on Feb 18 2006, 09:28 PM, said:

Ya know not all conservatives are ...tense...just as not all conservatives are Republicans. Don't paint with so broad a brush. Ogami did specify Democrats and Democrat does not necessarily = liberal.

True.  There are plenty of moderate Democrats.  John Murtha and Mark Warner (ex-VA governor) come to mind.  There also used to be lots of moderates in the GOP, but they've died off for the most part.

[waterpanther]

There also used to be liberal Republicans--John Lindsey, Nelson Rockefeller, Lowell Weicker come to mind.  There even used to be a few liberal Republicans in Texas, but Dick Cheney winged the last one.

[Call Me Robin]

Don't forget John Chafee of Rhode Island, one of the most honorable senators in recent history and a classic example of a liberal Republican.  He was a major environmentalist and is an iconic figure in his home state.

There also used to be quite a few conservative Democrats.  These days, conservative Dems are few and far between, but there are still a lot of centrist Dems.  In the GOP, being a centrist gets you tagged as a RINO.

G1223, on Feb 19 2006, 03:30 AM, said:

This is another example of how the DNC cannot get the middle of road votes.

Actually, there are some surprising places where Democrats have managed to get into office and stay there, by appealing to--surprise!--middle of the road voters.  Virginia's former governor Mark Warner comes to mind.  And Montana's current Dem governor, Brian Schweitzer, won by appealing to his state's outdoorsmen and conservationists.

[CJ AEGIS]

As I've said in other threads the neocons are not the spawn of the right, of the conservatives, or of the Republican Party.  They are mostly the spawn of the Democrats and further left liberal groups from the past several decades.  They are effectively the surviving element of the dissatisfaction that some liberals felt with the liberal organizations of that time.  This split with the larger left created the neocons.  They were then drawn to the Republican Party when Reagan threatened to confront the Soviet Union one of their big gripes against the larger left.  Their bond to Reagan was more practical than ideological with many of them disliking Reagan.  Since then they have infiltrated the Republican Party and taken over the upper levels of it.  You can see the liberal roots of the neocons in their love for big goverment and big spending.      

If I was going to call the neocons anything I would call them the Anti-Left rather than a conservative group.  Mixing the neocons and the left together gets a combination as explosive as matter and anti-matter.  I also fully expect the two to wipe each other out as effective political ideologies.  

Quote

WP: There also used to be liberal Republicans--John Lindsey, Nelson Rockefeller, Lowell Weicker come to mind.

Mitt Romney and George Pataki are not neo-cons by any stretch of the imagination.  They may not be considered centrist by Democrats because they don't march with the ideology of the Democrats but they aren't neocons.  Contrary to the you can't disagree without being disagreeable political enviroment that exists today the Rockefeller Northeast wing of the Republican Party is still alive in the Northeast.  It just isn't in power and really hasn't been since Rockefeller lost his bid for the White House to Nixon.

Edited by CJ AEGIS, 19 February 2006 - 07:23 PM.

[Delvo]

Here's an interesting take on this "what is the Bush supporters' ideology" question... it makes sense to wonder that since they're supposed to be conservatives and he isn't one... but then what's the ideology of Bush's opponents? They were liberals and would normally normally target conservatives for their attacks, so now attacking Bush instead of real conservatives is just as much of a reversal for them as the one the first post in this thread talks about on the other side.

[Rhea]

CJ AEGIS, on Feb 19 2006, 04:23 PM, said:

If I was going to call the neocons anything I would call them the Anti-Left rather than a conservative group.

Makes sense.

[Spectacles]

Quote

Delvo: but then what's the ideology of Bush's opponents? They were liberals and would normally normally target conservatives for their attacks, so now attacking Bush instead of real conservatives is just as much of a reversal for them as the one the first post in this thread talks about on the other side.

Not all Bush critics are liberals. Some are moderates. Some are conservatives. He's an equal opportunity alienator. Perhaps one thing that unites all is the sense that this administration is not really competent and is prone to reckless overreaching--into civil liberties (ticking off liberals and conservatives and moderates), into fiscal discipline (again ticking most people off across the spectrum), and into
foreign policy, most notably by implementing the longtime neocon dream of overthrowing Saddam and setting up a U.S.-friendly democracy in Iraq where we can have military bases--and we can see how well that worked.

Personally, I'm old enough to know that I'm not ever going to agree with a politician about everything--and if I do, chances are he's lying. But I really, really think that we need competent people to be in charge. Right now, it's apparent to most people--right, left, and center--that we don't have competent leadership. There are competent people, I'm sure, in both parties. Unfortunately, right now the professional campaign managers who are running the show think that they have to keep the country in an ideological war to win elections.

[waterpanther]

Quote

Mitt Romney and George Pataki are not neo-cons by any stretch of the imagination.

Who said they were?  They're certainly not liberals, either, though Pataki's closer to the middle.  

CJ, it doesn't matter where the neocons came from.  They're Republicans now and presumably subscribe sufficiently to Republican principles not to be booted out.  By your logic, we could claim that some of the more notorious conservative Republicans are really Democrats because they went over the side when their white-supremacist sensibilities were offended by the 1965 Civil Rights Act.  Trent Lott, for example.  John Connally.  The late Strom Thurmond and others of less-than-blessed memory.

[CJ AEGIS]

Quote

Waterpanther: CJ, it doesn't matter where the neocons came from.

Spectacles asked,"So if Bush loyalists aren't traditional conservatives, then what are they?"  I explained what they are by stating that they are effectively old liberals who got fed up by what they perceived as the hypocrisy of the left.  Their goal was to challenge the left by being different from them but not be traditional small government low spending conservatives.  Everything about the neocons and their behavior in power has something to do with their history of being from the left.  As I've said they are effectively the anti-left.  The sooner the Democratic Party in this country get around the mental block that they aren't conservatives but rather their own ugly step child they might have some success against them.  Rather than alienate real conservatives into the arms of neocons by tossing the two together in their rhetoric.

That said as I've said before I'm perfectly content to see the neocons and Democrats fight it out until they alienate the entire country.  If anything that may well be the motivation of the neocons.

Quote

WP: They're Republicans now and presumably subscribe sufficiently to Republican principles not to be booted out.

Or more likely they've hijacked enough of the top of the party to prevent them from easily being tossed out.

[Call Me Robin]

CJ AEGIS, on Feb 20 2006, 01:56 PM, said:

Spectacles asked,"So if Bush loyalists aren't traditional conservatives, then what are they?"  I explained what they are by stating that they are effectively old liberals who got fed up by what they perceived as the hypocrisy of the left.  Their goal was to challenge the left by being different from them but not be traditional small government low spending conservatives.  Everything about the neocons and their behavior in power has something to do with their history of being from the left.  As I've said they are effectively the anti-left.  The sooner the Democratic Party in this country get around the mental block that they aren't conservatives but rather their own ugly step child they might have some success against them.  Rather than alienate real conservatives into the arms of neocons by tossing the two together in their rhetoric.

That said as I've said before I'm perfectly content to see the neocons and Democrats fight it out until they alienate the entire country.  If anything that may well be the motivation of the neocons.

Question, CJ: do you have examples of old liberals turned neocons?  Because I wouldn't place Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz in that camp.  And it's no secret that many of today's conservative pundits were groomed by right-wing think tanks and sugar-daddy conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife.  (David Brock discusses this in his book, Blinded by the Right.)  The younger generation of "conservatives" are not old liberals; they're right-wing foot soldiers and always have been.  And, as Greenwald argues, they have nothing in common with Goldwater and his ilk.

You're also equating Democrat with liberal, and this isn't always the case.  

I think that most Americans want practical, fair, pragmatic solutions to this country's problems.  Bushco seems to be testing out all sorts of ideas hatched in conservative think tanks like the PNAC instead of, you know, actually running the country.  Hopefully, the next president will realize that this country's people are not guinea pigs for right-wing idealogues.

[waterpanther]

Quote

Or more likely they've hijacked enough of the top of the party to prevent them from easily being tossed out.

In other words, they are the party.

CJ, I'm delighted that you don't seem to like the neocons any better than I do.  But you're following a typical conservative line of argument here, namely that anything you don't like isn't really conservative--it's liberal.  So Daniel Perle & Co. aren't really conservatives, Hitler was a leftist, etc., etc..  I've seen this argument elsewhere, and it's at best disingenuous.

Face it:  these guys haven't just taken control of the "top of the party."  If the Republican Party had a substantial moderate element these days, or even a substantial Goldwater-conservative element, the neo-con yahoos would never have gotten in the door.  Instead they've forged an alliance with the fundamentalist/Dominionist/Christian Zionist religious element in the party, and they're in charge.  

The good thing is that the American people seem to be waking up to the awful mess they've made.  This  year's elections are going to be definitive, I think.

[Rhea]

Call Me Robin, on Feb 20 2006, 06:55 AM, said:

<snippage> Because I wouldn't place Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz in that camp. .

Me neither. All of the above list are either Texas conservatives or their friends and cronies. They are NOT liberals nor were they ever liberals. The people who voted for them are not liberals (although some moderates in both parties voted for Bush). I don't know where the myth arose that the neocons are disillusioned liberals, but it doesn't compute.

The Neocons may have opposed what they saw as radical lefties in the 60's, but that far from explains how the Neocons could ever have been considered liberal nor how the Repubican Party went down the tubes and became the religious "family values" party.

Here's a better article on neocons from the Washinton Post:

http://www.washingto...-2005Apr15.html

Quote

Writing in the current issue of the National Interest, Rich Lowry, a conservative of the non-neo variety, defines a neocon as someone with a "messianic vision" of using American power to spread democracy, an indifference to the crucial distinction between what would be nice and what is essential to national security, and excessive optimism that we can arrange things according to our own values in strange and faraway lands. Wow. It was not always thus.

<snip>

Quote

Somewhere I still have a souvenir of neoconservatism's previous high point. It's a baseball cap from the 1988 Republican convention that says, "Jeane Kirkpatrick for vice president." This was serious. Kirkpatrick, an austere academic with a crooked scowl, was about as unlikely a politician as you can imagine. But give the Republican Party credit: It does sometimes swoon over ideas. When was the last time the Democrats did that? Ronald Reagan had swooned over a 1979 article by Kirkpatrick in Commentary, the neocon house organ, and he made her his U.N. ambassador when he became president. She gave the big speech at the 1984 GOP convention, leading the massed Republicans in a chant of "they always blame America first."

Kirkpatrick's article, "Dictatorship and Double Standards," was a ferocious attack on President Jimmy Carter for trying to "impose liberalization and democratization" on other countries. She mocked "the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Democracy, she said, depends "on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions." It takes "decades, if not centuries."

Kirkpatrick thought that U.S. power should be used to shore up tottering but friendly dictators, such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and the shah of Iran. Carter sat on his hands, she complained. Now we have an administration that -- wisely or foolishly, sincerely or cynically -- claims to have the aggressive pursuit of democracy everywhere as the focal point of its foreign policy. And the Bush Doctrine is said to have the fingerprints of neoconservatives all over it.

There's a great irony in the fact that Kirkpatrick, the neocon darling, accused Carter of doing the very thing that Bush has made a career out of.
<snip>

Quote

Plenty of explanations are available. The collapse of the Soviet Union (which the neocons did not predict -- their theme had been that the Soviet Union was getting stronger and stronger while the United States diddled) surely changed the calculus. The seemingly easy spread of democracy over the past couple of decades may have disproved Kirkpatrick's pessimism.

But all these explanations require an admission of error, something the neocons are not very good at. They are selling certainty.

My theory is that somebody used the "disillusioned liberal" explanation once and it has been quoted endlessly all over the Internet until it has been taken for fact. In fact, you can tell from googling "neocons" +"disillusioned liberals" that most of them have cribbed from th e same article because the wording is always the same:

Quote

The neocons were for The most part disillusioned liberals (or radicals) who broke with their former allies over what they considered The febrile, ...

I must have counted that quote at least thirty times on thirty different sites, mostly blogs, before I gave up.

Edited by Rhea, 20 February 2006 - 11:46 AM.

[Lin731]

Neo Cons are disgruntled ex Liberals??? Who knew?   How (or more importantly WHY) would one go from one extreme to the other? I'm SO disappointed that liberal goals were not acheived that I'm gonna become the opposite of all I stood for? What purpose exactly would that serve????

[Rhea]

Lin731, on Feb 20 2006, 10:06 AM, said:

Neo Cons are disgruntled ex Liberals??? Who knew? How (or more importantly WHY) would one go from one extreme to the other? I'm SO disappointed that liberal goals were not acheived that I'm gonna become the opposite of all I stood for? What purpose exactly would that serve????

That's exactly why the oft-quoted ex-liberal thing makes absolutely no sense at all.

[Spectacles]

Quote

CJ: Spectacles asked,"So if Bush loyalists aren't traditional conservatives, then what are they?"

I had to look back at the thread to see if I had said something I'd forgotten, but nope. 'Twarn't me. That was Robin.

Quote

I explained what they are by stating that they are effectively old liberals who got fed up by what they perceived as the hypocrisy of the left.

That's true of some of the original neocons, like Wolfowitz, who, I think used to work on Dem. Scoop Jackson's staff. They were liberals on civil rights, but they were hawks when it came to the use of military might.

I think, though, that there are some conservatives today, especially those who became politically aware during the last decade or so, who are actually neoconservatives--or who have a philosophy not far removed from that of the original neoconservatives.

It seems to me that the labels conservative and liberal really miss more than they catch....

Edited by Spectacles, 20 February 2006 - 03:42 PM.

[waterpanther]

And, of course, you can add any number of persons who are powers in the Republican Party who were never liberals:  Condi Rice, John "Crisco Kid" Ashcroft, Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzalez, Karl Rove, Trent Lott, Tom "Bugman" DeLay, Ralph Reed, Pat "the Jackal" Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Phil Gramm, Antonin Scalia, John Bolton, Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, Robert "Catkiller" Frist, John "Man on Box Turtle" Cornyn, et nauseam cetera. No ex-liberals there.

[tennyson]

So are those you personal nicknames or are you quoting someone?

[Zwolf]

I don't think neo-cons are or ever were liberals.  They certainly do a lot of things that they've accused "liberals" of doing - expanding the government, creating deficits, meddling in personal lives, etc. - but I don't think they were ever actually liberals.

One thing I learned off the Yahoo board slaughterhouses is that a lot of conservatives took offense to the tern "neo-con," as if it were an insult (it's not ), and some of them thought that it meant liberals-who-had-converted-to-conservativism... which it doesn't.   I think a few of 'em took it as an insult because they thought it meant "neo-Nazi" or something... which it definitely does not.  It just means a new breed of conservatives who don't practice a lot of things that the old-school, Goldwater-type traditionalists (now sometimes called "paleo-cons") practiced.   The "neo" doesn't have anything to do with people being new converts... it has to do with a new take on what conservativism means.   Bush claims to be conservative, but a lot of old-school conservatives (Pat Buchanan, Andrew Sullivan, etc.) differ with him on almost every point... so, if he's a conservative (and that's a hard point to make on anything except social issues), he'd definitely need something to differentiate his brand of "conservativism" from the real kind.  Hence, the "neo."

That's one thing that's causing a lot of internal strife in the Republican party at the moment - an inability to fit the two extremely-different approaches to conservativism into the same party.   It's likely to cause even bigger schisms down the line.  Unfortunately, Democrats have schisms of their own to deal with and may not be able to capitalize on that.

Cheers,

Zwolf

[waterpanther]

The nicknames have all been around for a while.  "Bugman" goes back at least a decade, while PR's dates from his first suggestion that Chavez should be assassinated.  Gonzo's, of course, refers to his memos blessing the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

[BklnScott]

HubcapDave, on Feb 16 2006, 05:54 PM, said:

This was discussed recently in another thread.  And I'll repeat what I said then: it's an interesting article, but it's a bit on the polemic side. It'sa tries to paint conservsatives with a wide brush.

Well, you'll have to forgive people for doing that, because when "paleocons" rally so closely to a leader whose policies they abhor, it's hard not to lose sight of their divisions.  For example, how does a belief in keeping government off our backs and out of our lives as much as possible compute to sticking the government in our bedrooms and doctor's offices?  

I, personally, believe in quite a few of the principles more traditional Republicans espouse, but it's been a good long time since their party has actually stood for those goals.        

Kosh, on Feb 17 2006, 12:39 PM, said:

W isn't even a conservative in his own father's mode.

In fact, there's a lot of speculation that the two--who apparently never enjoyed a particularly close relationship--don't even talk anymore.  It's hard not to give credence to that theory when the father's surrogates (Marlin Fitzwater, James Bakker) regularly come out and critize the son's administration.  

Ogami, on Feb 18 2006, 03:15 PM, said:

Bill Clinton had a personality cult. That cult's central premise was that if your wife won't give you oral sex, it's okay to get it elsewhere.

Whereas the Bush Personality Cult merely believes in responding to an attack on our soil by invading a country that had nothing to do with it and posed us no threat.  But, hey, at least we survived the far more serious and costly bl0wj0b era.  *Whew*  

Shalamar, on Feb 18 2006, 04:28 PM, said:

Two broad brushes may not make a right but they can sure make for guideline violations if they keep on painting.

  I knew I liked you, Shalamar!  

And, Ogami: you're smarter than that, you're better than that, (and gosh darnit... people LIKE you!)

Rhea, on Feb 18 2006, 04:48 PM, said:

And Ogami, Democrats don't hold abortion rallies. Where DO you get this stuff? <shakes head>

I envision a frenzied crowd of rabid ACLUers snatching up random pregnant women off the streets while Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton look on approvingly from the former's personal Krispy Kreme-mobile.    

Lin731, on Feb 20 2006, 01:06 PM, said:

Neo Cons are disgruntled ex Liberals??? Who knew?   How (or more importantly WHY) would one go from one extreme to the other?

Two words: Jimmy.  Carter.  The suburban NYC county I grew up in--which had gone for Carter in 76--went heavily for Regan in 80 and has remained overwhelmingly Republican since then.  IIRC, this was repeated across the country in 80 and 84, and represents a major political realignment.  I'm sure our resident historians will correct me on that if need be.