Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Justin Raimondo: Confronting NeoCons from true conservatism

August 28, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken was considered a man of the Left due to his opposition to Prohibition and the cultural know-nothingism of what he mockingly called “the booboisie.” By the 1930s, however, he was being derided as a right-wing extremist by the New Dealers on account of his contempt for Franklin Roosevelt and his refusal to jump on the bandwagon for war. The same was true of Albert Jay Nock.

The idea of Left and Right is today being transformed: wars always do this, and the Iraq War (and whatever comes next, perhaps Iran) is no different. I am always astonished by references in the ostensibly “right-wing” media to my alleged “leftism.” For example, one Candace de Russy, writing in National Review Online, avers:

The extremist anti-war left is beside itself with rage against [Wall Street Journal columnist John] Fund and others who dare to challenge its domination of the academy, and in particular Middle East studies. See, for example, Justin Raimondo’s diatribe against Fund, whom he labels ‘Yale’s very own Torquemada,’ as well as against what he calls ‘the Fund-amentalist hate campaign’ against the Taliban Man. For good measure Raimondo goes on to attack the entire neo-con movement as a ‘perpetual motion machine of hate’ and David Horowitz as a ‘professional witch-hunter.’

To Candace and her confreres at NRO, anyone who opposes the neocon agenda is, by definition, part of “the left.” She probably doesn’t know I’m a contributing editor of The American Conservative and author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, but her abysmal ignorance is not limited to these easily missed facts: it is exemplified by the knee-jerk response of someone who doesn’t care about facts at all and simply registers “for” or “against” on a number of litmus-test issues, of which the politics of the Middle East is perhaps the most important (from the neocon point of view). Are you against the war? Then you’re a “leftist.” Do you breathe a word of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people? Then you’re a terrorist-supporting “leftist”! End of discussion.

One big difference between the neocon “Right” and the Old Right of yore is that, in the former, there is no allowable dissent from the party line—and especially not in the realm of foreign policy. The doctrine of global interventionism is the central dogma in the neoconservative worldview, and anyone who crosses over into even vaguely ambiguous territory—e.g., Francis Fukuyama—is subjected to a withering volley of relentless attacks. There is a Soviet quality to these vituperations, perhaps a vestigial remnant of the neocons’ leftist origins: recall that David Frum, the neocons’ commissar of political correctness, in penning his long screed in National Review against Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and other antiwar conservatives and libertarians, including myself, ended his peroration with this:

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

There is to be no discussion, no debate, no opportunity for paleocon deviationists to make our case to the conservative public: the Frum-cons will close their ears and shield their eyes from the sight of our heresy. These people hold a Truth so pure that it cannot risk contamination—or endure examination.

Yes, war is a great clarifier. As the Bush administration sinks deeper into the Iraqi quagmire and the neocons plot another foray, this time into Iran, the geopolitical, financial, and domestic political consequences of our war-crazed foreign policy are all too apparent and whatever else one may say about them, what one cannot say—with a straight face—is that they are conducive to conservatism in any way, shape, or form. As, one by one, the pillars of our old Republic fall away—or are hacked to pieces—and the bloated grandiosity of an Empire rises above the ruins, real conservatives (and libertarians, such as myself) look on in horror—and are labeled “extreme leftists” for our trouble.

The neoconservative claim to the legacy of the American Right is tenuous, and one could easily imagine these consummate opportunists attaching themselves to yet another unlucky host—say, the Democratic Party—if that is where their eternal quest for power draws them. As for us, we have our own legacy, the tradition of the Old Right, and our sense of history, which the revolutionary Jacobins of neoconservatism reject as a matter of principle. In the end, the season of flux will come to a close, the old polarities will return, and we will all be wiser, having learned the lesson that labels mean nothing and principles are everything. 

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on 20 August, 2006 by in Iraq, Peace and Justice, Political ideologies, Race, US Foreign Policy, USA.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


Categories