The End of Neoconservatism: Part Two

Add in, thirdly, the influence of neo-orthodoxy, a mid-twentieth century movement to salvage the traditional vocabulary of Protestant theology even while surrendering to every liberal, secularising assault. As among Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, and as in the Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and historic Nonconformist bodies in Britain, so also in the related "mainline" churches in the United States, neo-orthodoxy successfully sold itself as a vindication of popular orthodoxy. But it is actually ruinous of such faith, as is evident from, among much else, "mainline" churchgoers’ support for neoconservatives.

And add in, fourthly, one of the two de facto schismatic Americanist bodies within the Catholic Church. For American Catholics now divide almost entirely between those who agree with the Pope about sex but not about economics, and those who agree with him about economics but not about sex. The latter are termed "liberals" and excoriated by the former, termed "conservatives". But, in fact, they are equally far removed from the Church’s position, which includes a huge amount of almost unutterably important work on how all these things are connected.

The "liberals" just happen to fail to give the Papacy any credit when they are heavily dependent on its work. By contrast, the "conservatives" lionised the old Pope, lionise the new one, and simply ignore the vast amount of Papal Teaching with which they happen to disagree. Thus, the "conservatives" are able to present themselves as more loyal to Rome than are the "liberals". In reality, both bodies believe at some level that the American Church is autonomous, and both behave exactly as if such were the case.

Those who follow the "conservative" schism are key figures in neoconservatism. They attached themselves to the radical-revisionist misappropriation of the name of Vatican II. This brought them into the same counter-cultural circles out of which neoconservatism was to emerge. It should be noted that one of the most powerful neoconservatives grew up as an ultraconservative Lutheran, became a liberal Lutheran pastor, and converted to Catholicism only when he became a neoconservative!

But do not add in Evangelical Protestantism, to which neoconservatism relates much as Irish Republicanism relates to Catholicism. In principle, they have nothing to do with each other beyond being mutually antagonistic. The upper echelons of each hold the views and persons of the other in horrified contempt.

Yet large numbers of devout Catholics have been cajoled or deceived into supporting Irish Republicanism despite its Jacobin and Marxist roots and character. And large numbers of Evangelical Protestants have been cajoled or deceived into supporting neoconservatism despite its Trotskyism, its Straussianism, its Randianism, its Zionism (serious Evangelical scholars are not "Christian Zionists"), its hatred of WASPs and Ulster Scots, its neo-orthodoxy, its Americanist pseudo-Catholicism, and its roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Such is the ideology of those who have sold themselves as the defenders of Western civilisation while actively seeking to destroy all memory of that civilisation’s roots in the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is Christianity. They have sold themselves as the West’s guardians against "militant Islam" (the only kind that there can ever be, as they pointedly refuse to admit). Yet theirs was active support for that cause in 1980s Afghanistan, in Bosnia (against Europe’s real age-old bulwark against Islam) and in Kosovo (likewise). It remains so in Chechnya, in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistan.

That cause has been done no end of good by the removal of one of the Arab world’s two principal bulwarks against it, in Iraq. And now the neoconservatives are planning to remove the other such bulwark, in Syria. All this while actively encouraging, through the unlimited immigration without which their capitalist system cannot function, the Islamisation of the West. This whole is with a view to their re-establishment of the privileged dhimmitude that existed in Moorish Spain.

And they have sold themselves as the champions of English-speaking unity while seeking to purge America of what they see as British influence, before seeking to remake the Anglosphere (defined in racist terms) in the image of America thus purged. In so doing, they have sought to destroy the English-speaking world’s single most unifying institution. But, of course, that institution, at the head of or otherwise constitutionally related to nearly forty states and territories, is one of the world’s two principal institutional expressions of Christianity. The other such expression is its historic antagonist, but that is a small and all-but-forgotten matter now, and in any case the neoconservatives have done at least as much to subvert that, too.