Raymond > The American Right Wing has zero, nada, zilch interest in democracy. To them, democracy is an impediment to their accession to ultimate power
I'm not a socialist and never have been. I can't even say I'm a liberal (English variety, not American) but I have to dispute that the Bush clique is representative of the American right. As far as I am concerned they represent a Mafia-like political conspiracy group best known as the neocons, together with representatives of big business particularly oil, banking, armaments and the media.
I cannot believe that any American political organization, even a group of right wing elites, would hold the interests of a foreign power above those of the US, as the Bush clique does --- unless a gun had been placed at its head, as I believe 9-11 was.
Although I am not American, I consider the criticism of the present administration by know conservatives such as Pat Buchanan exposes the myth that they are "right wingers".
amconmag.com
For what it's worth, just as Justin Raimondo does, I would regard them as Trotskyites, or ex-Trotskyites.
antiwar.com
>>>While Shadia B. Drury's 1999 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, provided a critique of Strauss's influence from the left, paleoconservatives such as Paul Gottfried were among the first to raise the alarm. But I'll leave it to my old friend Burt Blumert to capture the essence of the antagonism that has long existed between the followers of Strauss and the Old Right gang centered around LewRockwell.com:
"Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state."<<<
slate.msn.com
>>>The assumption that events will conform to a preconceived model is a failing to which neoconservatives are notably vulnerable. Part of this may be Marxist residue that never quite washed off. The intellectual descendants of Trotskyists, the neocons find the idea of revolution from above, in which intellectuals and ideas play the crucial role, instinctively appealing. Many neocons also tend to buy into overly deterministic, Hegelian theories of history (see Fukuyama, Frank). In this sense, the assumption that Iraq was destined to become a liberal democracy with just a nudge from the United States is an error akin to Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick's Hannah Arendt-inspired view that Communist totalitarian societies could never reform from within. There was nothing wrong with that theory either, except that it happened to be completely wrong.
Another reason the neocons go for grand theories may be that their primary experience tends to come from the classroom, rather than the real world. <<<
lewrockwell.com
>>>While the neo-cons’ thesis says nothing about reality, it says a great deal about the neo-cons themselves. First, it tells us that they are ideologues. All ideologies posit that certain things must be true, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. That evidence is to be suppressed, along with the people who insist on pointing to it. Sadly, the neo-cons have been able to do exactly that within the Bush Administration, and the mess in Iraq is the price.
Second, it reveals the nature of the neo-con ideology, which has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism (as Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is the negation of ideology). The neo-cons in fact are Jacobins, les ultras of the French Revolution who also tried to export "human rights" (which are very different from the concrete, specific rights of Englishmen) on bayonets. Then, the effort eventually united all of Europe against France. Today, it is uniting the rest of the world against America.
Finally it reveals the neo-cons as fools, lightweights who can dismiss history and culture because they know nothing of history or culture. The first generation of neo-cons were serious intellectuals, Trotskyites but serious Trotskyites. The generation now in power in Washington is made up of poseurs who happen to have the infighting skills of the Sopranos. If you don’t believe me, look at Mr. Wolfowitz’s book. Or, more precisely, look for Mr. Wolfowitz’s book (hint: he never wrote one).<<<
You are correct to suggest that democracy is abhorrent to the traditional right but the concern of the present administration with democracy, albeit a perverted version of it, belies its leftist roots. |
