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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (60759)	12/9/2002 3:57:24 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I just got back to this, so excuse the delay. For a long time, Horowitz and Collier were self- conscious about being considered "neoconservative", and resisted the appellation. The considered themselves to have become somewhat conventional liberals, making the exodus from the Democratic Party that Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and others had made. In other words, they had "deradicalized", but were faced with a Democratic Party that been overtaken by the McGovernites. What to do? Well, Ronald Reagan offered a rather broad coalition, and was serious about giving former Democrats a place in it, to the consternation of the so- called "paleocons". Remember, this is the period when almost everyone in the Democratic empyrean had bought into anti- anti- communism, so that a Democrat President of the United States could not only speak derisively of "an inordinate fear of Communism", but profess himself shocked that the Soviet Union would engage in adventurism in Afghanistan, and talk about reevaluating his views. It was also a period where even Communists realized that socialist economics was in crisis. Not only did Deng Xou Peng introduce marketization in China, the pages of Dissent became filled with brooding about "market socialism". The Europeans were talking about cutting back on their welfare states. Meanwhile, the only party that seemed to be moving Left in its dotage was the Democratic Party, and Carter mainly retained the nomination by giving the NEA a new department. Reagan represented a willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union, and to counter the drift in foreign policy that Carter represented. He also made sense as an antidote to stagflation: clearly, we needed some pro- capitalist juice in Washington, to get the wheels moving again. In any case, Carter was a failure, and Anderson a non- entity. Reagan actually had the air of a leader, someone who could rouse America out of its "malaise" and give it confidence once again........