[
reposted yet again]
Re: What is Neo-Conservative?
Neoconservatism is primarily concerned w/ foreign policy. Conservatism is concerned w/ every aspect of America. W/ neoconservatism, one can gets the oxymoronic "big-government-conservative."
When it comes to neocons, I consider them liberal entryists. Some of them were communists, Trotskyites, and socialists. Also, they tend to think that the problems caused by govt intervention will be fixed w/ even more govt intervention. This sort of things shows in their conviction that they can socially engineer places on the other side of the globe.
I'll provide some words from the horses' ... mouths (what else?):
From the Godfather of NeoConservatism:
The Neoconservative Persuasion
From the August 25, 2003 issue: What it was, and what it is.
by Irving Kristol
...the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.
...an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives.
Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state... seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his "The Man Versus the State," was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.
The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists.
Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.
And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal.
No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
Irving Kristol is author of "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea."
And from William Kristol
From Benador Associates:
What the Heck Is a Neocon?
by Max Boot
Wall Street Journal
The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.
... support for Israel -- a key tenet of neoconservatism...
So is "neoconservatism" worthless as a political label? Not entirely. In social policy, it stands for a broad sympathy with a traditionalist agenda and a rejection of extreme libertarianism.
On economic matters, neocons...embrace a laissez-faire line, though they are not as troubled by the size of the welfare state as libertarians are.
But it is not really domestic policy that defines neoconservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neoconservatism carries the greatest meaning...
One group of conservatives believes that we should use armed force only to defend our vital national interests, narrowly defined. They believe that we should remove, or at least disarm, Saddam Hussein, but not occupy Iraq for any substantial period afterward. The idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East they denounce as a mad, hubristic dream likely to backfire with tragic consequences. This view, which goes under the somewhat self-congratulatory moniker of "realism," is championed by foreign-policy mandarins like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III.
[Neocons] ...think, however, that "realism" presents far too crabbed a view of American power and responsibility.
On one hand, it refers to a specific, historical set of folks who were "newly conservative," and on the other hand it refers to folks who have adopted the ideals of these folks.
