If the Democratic Party\u2019s control of the presidency and the Senate can succeed in provoking the base of the GOP to reevaluate its collective political identity, then it all may just have been worth it.<\/p>\n
Maybe\u2014maybe<\/i>\u2014the internecine conflict currently on display in the GOP indicates a breakdown of that political philosophy that has dominated Republican Party politics, as well as the so-called \u201cconservative movement,\u201d for decades.<\/p>\n
The name of this philosophy is neoconservatism, <\/i>and it isn\u2019t a version of conservatism at all.<\/i><\/p>\n
Like their \u201cliberal\u201d or \u201cleftist\u201d counterparts who\u2019d rather die than identify themselves as liberal or leftist, neoconservatives almost always eschew the label \u201cneoconservative.\u201d Some have even gone so far as to refer to the latter as an \u201canti-Semitic\u201d slur.\u00a0 All of this is as curious as it is preposterous when it is considered that Irving Kristol,<\/i> a Jew andthe father of Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, <\/i>unabashedly embraced it nearly 40 years ago.<\/p>\n
Neoconservatism, Kristol noted, endorse, among other things, a \u201climited\u201d welfare state of the FDR variety and an activist military that pursues nation-building enterprises abroad.<\/p>\n
Neoconservatives, you see, not only haven\u2019t any objections to Big Government; they desire<\/i> it, for only a large, centralized government can fulfill the domestic and foreign policy objectives that they want served.<\/p>\n
George W. Bush was a neoconservative president. In his second term, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard <\/i>had written a book in which he lavished praise upon Bush II for using Big Government for what Barnes described as \u201cconservative\u201d purposes. This, at bottom, is what \u201ccompassionate conservatism\u201d was all about.<\/p>\n
Traditional conservatives, i.e., real conservatives, like, say, Russell Kirk\u2014a man, mind you, in whose absence, according to Bill Buckley, the conservative movement in America would\u2019ve been \u201cinconceivable\u201d\u2014could never so much as imagine that anyone, much less self-avowed \u201cconservatives,\u201d could think to speak of a \u201cconservative purpose\u201d of Big Government.<\/p>\n
But a traditional conservative is about as unlike a neoconservative as he is unlike a leftist of any other type.<\/p>\n
Conservatives have always known that individual liberty is meaningless unless authority is decentralized and power widely disseminated.\u00a0 It is precisely in the nooks and crannies of our Constitution\u2019s numerous \u201cchecks and balances\u201d that the liberty of the citizen is to be found.\u00a0 A so-called \u201cfederal\u201d government that reigns supreme over the states is not, truly, a federal<\/i> government at all; it is just that sort of national <\/i>or centralized <\/i>government that our Framers dreaded, the sort of government that promised to eclipse liberty.<\/p>\n
But that is the government we have now.\u00a0 And it is the government that domestically, as well as and especially, internationally, neoconservatives have helped to create.<\/p>\n
Conservatives attach a premium to tradition\u2014<\/i>slow as a snail but blind as a bat tradition.\u00a0 Traditionis nothing but the repository of the wisdom of our ancestors.\u00a0 Political institutions are not chunks of machinery that can be exported anywhere around the globe, but the evolved traditions, the habits, the mores, of a people over centuries and millennia.<\/p>\n
Thus, from the conservative\u2019s perspective, the neoconservative\u2019s crusade, initiated by Bush II, to essentially remake the Islamic world in the image of an abstract ideology\u2014\u201cDemocracy\u201d\u2014is beyond foolish.\u00a0 It is reckless.\u00a0 And it is doomed to fail.<\/p>\n
Neoconservatives charge conservatives with being \u201cisolationists\u201d\u2014a term that is as baseless as it is meaningless.\u00a0 Conservatives believe in the necessity of a powerful military, but one that is deployed only for the purposes of prosecuting unavoidable wars and securing its own country\u2019s borders.\u00a0 In other words, conservatives insist that the military is never to be used as an agent in a global cause of one sort or another.<\/p>\n
Neoconservatives, in glaring contrast, are no different from any other leftist ideologue inasmuch as they have abundant confidence in the power of government to design and implement blueprints (what Fred Barnes and company would call \u201cconservative purposes\u201d) for any society anywhere in the world<\/i>.\u00a0 This in turn also explains why the military can never be big enough for the neoconservative, why any talk at all of trimming military spending is invariably met with the charge that his opponents want to \u201cgut the military.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet Big Militaryis <\/i>Big Government.<\/p>\n
Notice, just those Republicans who are now being lambasted as \u201cRINO sell outs\u201d\u2014John McCain, Pete King, Lindsay Graham, etc.\u2014for voting to fund Obamacare and raise the debt ceiling are the most hawkish members of American society.\u00a0 This is a long-standing pattern: the most vocal enthusiasts of Big Military abroad are always enthusiasts of Big Government at home.<\/p>\n
These Republican enthusiasts are not \u201cRINOs.\u201d\u00a0 They\u2019re not even \u201csell outs.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are neoconservatives.<\/p>\n
Perhaps one good thing to come out of Obama\u2019s presidency is that it provides the GOP\u2019s traditional base with an opportunity to start discussing who they are\u2014and who they want to be.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If the Democratic Party\u2019s control of the presidency and the Senate can succeed in provoking the base of the GOP to reevaluate its collective political identity, then it all may just have been worth it. Maybe\u2014maybe\u2014the internecine conflict currently on display in the GOP indicates a breakdown of that political philosophy that has dominated Republican…<\/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-951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n