Thursday 13 April 2006

Neoconservatism

What is "neoconservatism"?

Tony Blair and George Bush are both surrounded by utterly unrepentant old Communists and (especially) Trotskyists, with enormous power wielded by those who venerate the memory of the American Trotskyist godfather Max Shachtman. (Leo Strauss is almost red herring: his influence is almost minimal.)
Their "neoconservativism", of which "New Labour" is a textbook case, is in fact a Marxism which has merely changed its ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins, but which retains intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard elitism, its Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported (including by force of arms) thoughout the world while vanguard elites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countiries. Such treasonable vanguard elites include the New Labour Project, the Tory Notting Hill set, the Liberal Democrat 'Orange Book' tendency, Likud, Forza Italia, the Partido Popolar, the Irish Progressive Democrats, the new governing faction in Canada, and the renaissance of the Australian Liberal Party under John Howard, to name but a few.
The present President of the European Commission was just such a figure when he was Prime Minister of Portugal: a rabidly free-marketeering supporter of Bush foreign policy who had previously been a Maoist (yes, a Maoist!). Indeed, he is still just such a figure today.
But such figures have not come any closer to any conservative tradition, properly so called, in the US or elsewhere. On the contrary, the Whig, Jacobin and Marxist fallacy of human perfectabilty by its own efforts and in this life alone (explicitly denied by, in and as the foundation of at least the two largest political traditions in Britain) reaches in "neoconservatism" the nightmare point at which people believe that that perfection has actually come to pass, with, in this case, the bell-curve of American wealth distribution (and of wealth distribution in other countries in so far as it conforms to that in the US) corresponding exactly to intelligence, talent, "merit", human worth. So, for example, no aristocratic social conscience for them.
The charge that "neocon" is just an acceptable way of saying "Jew" in a derogatory way is widely heard, but stands up to no analysis, especially since this latter-day N-word is so often directed towards people who are not Jewish, including those (such as Condoleeza Rice, and indeed George Bush) to whom it does not properly apply. However, it is worth asking why Jews, such as several leading "neoconservatives" are, are ostensibly so nostalgic for a society in America (or indeed in Britain, among other places) of which they could not have been fully part.

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