{"id":1016,"date":"2014-01-22T14:40:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T19:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1016"},"modified":"2014-01-22T14:40:46","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T19:40:46","slug":"neoconservatives-libertarians-and-mlk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2014\/01\/neoconservatives-libertarians-and-mlk.html","title":{"rendered":"Neoconservatives, Libertarians, and MLK"},"content":{"rendered":"

From at least the time of the 1980\u2019s, the Republican Party and the \u201cconservative movement\u201d have been dominated by, not conservatives, but neo<\/i>conservatives.\u00a0 The so-called \u201clibertarian\u201d influence in the party is growing\u2014and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Libertarians, neoconservatives assert, are \u201cisolationists,\u201d \u201cna\u00efve,\u201d even sophomoric, idealists whose detachment from reality borders on being \u201cunpatriotic,\u201d for libertarians threaten to compromise national security, making citizen and soldier alike unsafe. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After all, when his own country is in the midst of a protracted, bloody war, a person who uses his considerable influence to convince large numbers of Americans that their country is \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today\u201d must surely be deemed a threat of a sort to national security. <\/span><\/p>\n

A person who cautions people against being fooled into thinking that \u201cGod chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world,\u201d who claims to \u201chear God saying to America, \u2018You\u2019re too arrogant!\u2019\u201d and promising to \u201cbreak the backbone of your power,\u201d must be an \u201cisolationist,\u201d an opponent of \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

How can libertarians not be said to weaken America\u2019s resolve during times of war, how can they not be said to, in effect, provide \u201caid and comfort\u201d to the enemy, when they use their public platform to decry the war as \u201cunjust, evil, and futile,\u201d a \u201cdemonic, destructive suction tube\u201d and \u201cenemy of the poor?\u201d\u00a0 Do not libertarians exhibit, at best, an astonishing degree of naivety, and, at worst, something bordering on anti-Americanism, when they accuse America of being self-delusional, of indulging \u201crationalizations\u201d and embarking on an \u201cincessant search for scapegoats\u201d that \u201cblind\u201d her to her own \u201csins\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

David Frum, writing for National Review,<\/i> must\u2019ve been on to something when he accused those on the right that opposed the Iraq War of being \u201cunpatriotic.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0After all, can an American who refers to the enemy in terms of \u201cthe hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,\u201d and who claims to speak for the \u201clittle brown\u2026children\u201d who now \u201clanguish under our bombs\u201d be anything but unpatriotic?\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No one who charges America at any time, but particularly when she is at war, with suffering from a \u201cdeadly arrogance that has poisoned the international situation for years\u201d and that has actually \u201csought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord,\u201d can be good for either the Republican Party or, more importantly, national security.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No one who says of the children of America\u2019s enemy that they have been \u201cdegraded by our soldiers as they beg for food,\u201d or, in order to survive, they\u2019ve had to busy themselves with \u201cselling their sisters\u201d and \u201csoliciting for their mothers\u201d to our soldiers can ever be thought to support the troops. No one who describes the \u201cbusiness\u201d of our troops as \u201cburning human beings\u201d and \u201cof filling our nation\u2019s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane,\u201d can possibly be said to be supporting them, right?<\/span><\/p>\n

Now for the punch line: None of the foregoing quotations from high profile libertarians are actually from any <\/i>libertarian.\u00a0 They derive, rather, from a single speech\u2014\u201cWhy I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam\u201d\u2014delivered on April 30, 1967, from none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/span><\/p>\n

Was King an \u201cisolationist,\u201d na\u00efve, unpatriotic, and unconscionably nonchalant regarding matters of national security?\u00a0 Was he the \u201ctraitor\u201d that neoconservatives accuse Edward Snowden of being?\u00a0 Did he provide \u201caid and comfort\u201d to America\u2019s enemies?\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe he was or wasn\u2019t any of these things.\u00a0 The point, though, is that consistency demands of neoconservatives that they answer these questions in the affirmative, for not only did King use his tremendous influence on the world scene\u2014an influence not a fraction of which any libertarian today can claim to have\u2014to call for an end to the Vietnam War; this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize made the harshest of charges, certainly harsher than any that Ron Paul ever would\u2019ve considered making, against his own country. <\/span><\/p>\n

Yet this MLK Day, like every other, neoconservatives on talk radio, Fox News, and beyond lavished unadulterated praise upon this man of the hard left, a man, mind you, who was upset, not that America was expending astronomical resources in Vietnam, but that it wasn\u2019t spending these resources waging \u201cwar\u201d on poverty at home.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, libertarians who, rightly or wrongly, really do stand for the \u201climited government\u201d that neoconservatives claim to prize as well, continue to arouse the ire of the latter. <\/span><\/p>\n

It is time for those of us in \u201cthe conservative movement\u201d to take seriously the identity issues of our party. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From at least the time of the 1980\u2019s, the Republican Party and the \u201cconservative movement\u201d have been dominated by, not conservatives, but neoconservatives.\u00a0 The so-called \u201clibertarian\u201d influence in the party is growing\u2014and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it. Libertarians, neoconservatives assert, are \u201cisolationists,\u201d \u201cna\u00efve,\u201d even sophomoric, idealists whose detachment from reality borders on being…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNeoconservatives, Libertarians, and MLK<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2014\/01\/neoconservatives-libertarians-and-mlk.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Neoconservatives, Libertarians, and MLK\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From at least the time of the 1980\u2019s, the Republican Party and the \u201cconservative movement\u201d have been dominated by, not conservatives, but neoconservatives.\u00a0 The so-called \u201clibertarian\u201d influence in the party is growing\u2014and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it. 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