REVOLT AGAINST THE NEOCONS -- Justin Raimundo riffs 'right'eously about the latest klezmer katatstrophe 'frum' the kleptomaniac krowd.
"Frum & friends have so alienated the rest of the Right with their pretentious posturings as moral and ideological guardians of the Faith, that they have achieved in the conservative movement what the U.S. military has accomplished in Iraq: provoked a general rebellion against the occupying forces."
[[BTW, David Frum is regularly caught lying at this venue:
kcrw.com ]]
antiwar.com
REVOLT AGAINST THE NEOCONS
Backlash on the right: mainstream conservatives reject Frum purge, oppose neo-imperialism -- Opinion by Justin Raimundo
When David "Axis of Evil" Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, turned his rhetorical guns on antiwar conservatives and libertarians, this writer included, he ended his peroration
nationalreview.com
against "unpatriotic conservatives" with the declaration that all good right-wingers must now "turn their backs" on the heretics. But what has happened is quite the opposite: mainstream conservatives are asking who appointed Frum the Commissar
antiwar.com
in charge of political correctness on the right – and are coming to the defense of ideological diversity.
David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union (ACU) and a veteran activist, had earlier dissented with a ringing defense of calumniated columnist Robert Novak – smeared by Frum as an "anti-Semite" – and now Donald Devine, his colleague at the ACU, has come out with a stinging memo
conservative.org
challenging not only Frum but also neocon orthodoxy on every point – including foreign policy.
The sheer gall of Frum's interdict clearly has Devine's dander up. Frum & friends have so alienated the rest of the Right with their pretentious posturings as moral and ideological guardians of the Faith, that they have achieved in the conservative movement what the U.S. military has accomplished in Iraq: provoked a general rebellion against the occupying forces.
Devine calls for nothing less than "a general discussion on the future on conservatism." He laments that the official conservative movement has become an appendage of the Republican Party, and is reduced to cheerleading for the White House. Worse yet:
"Conservatives are fighting each other on the front pages of their own magazines. National Review writer David Frum made the argument public with a banner denunciation of any conservative with reservations about the invasion of Iraq. Those conservative intellectuals and activists opposed or even those critical of it before the fighting or even those who mentioned that protecting Israel's interests could complicate matters were all labeled paleo-conservatives and pushed off to the nutty fringe. The only good guys remaining on the right were neo-conservatives. Frum named names, some of who differed on principle, but most simply saw the facts differently. He was so obsessed with his own righteousness in anathematizing heretics he was heedless of how the split would further weaken the forces of the right."
The War Party has no loyalty, either partisan or ideological, except to the worship of Ares (not Zeus). The entire program of the neoconservatives has been reduced to a call for World War IV, and the need to create – or, rather, recreate – an overseas empire on which the sun never sets. "The forces of the right"? To a neocon, there ain't no such thing: there is only the War Party, and their opponents, whom neocon wildman David Horowitz routinely describes as "fifth columnists."
salon.com
Devine notes that "even those who mentioned that protecting Israel's interests could complicate matters" were "pushed off to the nutty fringe." But that is what the neocon Iago's polemic is all about.
When the interests of the U.S. and Israel clash, those who take the side of the former are, by definition, "anti-Semites" – this is the neocon view of "patriotism." To point out that this is Israeli patriotism, and not the American variety, is to stand accused of ethnic and religious "bigotry," and this is the one unifying theme of Frum's polemic. All the individuals mentioned are smeared as "anti-Semites." With the neocons – from the three Bills (Kristol, Bennett, and Safire) to the P.J. O'Rourke clones over at National Review – it's always the same old song: there is no other issue.
Frum represents an organized grouping on the Right that will brook no criticism of a foreign country that is even now challenging their President on his latest Middle East initiative.
The critique of Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and others on the right who opposed this war was that it did not pass the test of serving uniquely American interests, but only furthered Israeli ambitions in the region. In a sane world, it is the neocons who would be consigned to the "nutty fringe," rather than those who question their alien agenda.
Devine's refreshingly bold call for open debate on foreign policy – as opposed to smearing and back-turning – is accompanied by a discussion of the "invisibility" of mainstream conservatism on this question. The neocons are getting all the publicity, he complains, and have become "the public face of the movement." Everybody now confuses mainstream conservatism with National Review's proposal in favor of a "revival of colonialism under U.S. auspices and the building of an American empire."
Devine fondly recalls the good old days when National Review was pushing Frank S. Meyer's "fusionist" brand of conservatism. But Meyer's ecumenical coalition, which consisted of traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-Communists, always existed in an uneasy alliance. Nor was Meyer all that ecumenical: when libertarians began questioning the Vietnam war, they were promptly and personally excommunicated by Meyer.
It is more accurate to ascribe an air of relative tolerance for doctrinal differences to the conservative-libertarian alliance of the New Deal and postwar eras. This was the Old Right of the America First generation, where conservatives such as businessman William H. Regnery and General Robert E. Wood, and libertarians such as Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, existed side-by-side in a peaceable kingdom.
Next to the neocon-dominated movement of today, however, the conservative movement of the 1960s was a model of ecumenism. Devine notes bitterly that even William F Buckley, Jr., in criticizing his own magazine's endorsement of British-style colonialism, was forced to resort to the pages of Human Events (sorry, it's not online): National Review apparently would not give even so distinguished a dissenter a forum.
In any case, the "fusionism" that tried to reconcile traditionalists with libertarians, and simultaneously accommodate the fervent anti-Communism of the ex-commies within its ranks (such as Meyer, a former Communist Party theoretician), was a product of the cold war. The sudden implosion of the Communist empire relegated "fusionism" to irrelevance, sent the neocons on a quest for new enemies to conquer, and opened up the neo-paleo divide.
Devine rejects the paleoconservative label, but on the defining issue of foreign policy he seems to fit the bill, asking "Empire, or National Interest?" To any authentic conservative – or, indeed, any American worthy of the name – the answer to that one is easy, and Devine is unequivocal:
"Global empire is an important issue for conservatism. If the U.S. government has the ability to bring peace and democracy to the world, big government can obviously also run America's economy and plan its social life – and limited government becomes irrelevant. … Government keeps growing and journalistic conservatism is silent that this growth, especially fueled by dreams of empire."
This is precisely the critique of the paleoconservatives, grouped around The American Conservative and Chronicles – both of which Devine deems insufficiently devoted to the cause of limited government. Yet an identical theme is apparent in the very title of Pat Buchanan's book, A Republic, Not an Empire. It was in Chronicles magazine, under editor Tom Fleming, that the Old Right's opposition to what Murray N. Rothbard called the "Welfare-Warfare State" was first revived, and this same tradition of conservative anti-imperialism is invoked by Antiwar.com on a daily basis. These disparate tendencies – libertarians, American nationalists, and cultural conservatives – are all asking the same question: What good is it if we win an overseas empire, and lose our old republic? The current crisis on the Right is due to the lack of a good answer to this question, and Devine clearly sees this:
"For a movement that began uniquely united in opposition to communism, it is strange that the conservative split would become most profound on foreign policy. From its founding document, The Sharon (Connecticut) Statement, conservatives had agreed that all foreign policy had to be justified on the criterion – was it in "the just interests of the United States"? Communism was the "greatest threat" to those interests, so it had to be opposed. Iraq was not so simple for the question was empirical, not principled – was that war in the U.S. interest or not? Was it necessary to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and control terrorism or was Iraq not a threat unless the U.S. invaded and stirred up Mideast terrorism?"
It is not at all strange that the split on the Right is over foreign policy, the key issue of the post-cold war era. What united conservatives for so long – what allowed them to forget about their devotion to the Constitution and the cause of limited government – was the alleged necessity of fighting a global war against a militant Communist movement that seemed poised, at several points, to overtake and overwhelm the West. That this was largely an illusion – and a self-created one at that – is nothing new to libertarians, who opposed a policy of global intervention and for that reason opted out of "fusionism" sometime in the late 1960s. Ludwig von Mises had confidently predicted the implosion of socialism as early as 1920: it was doomed from the start, due to its economic impossibility. As Rothbard and other libertarians pointed out during the cold war, the main threat to liberty was not in Moscow, but was situated in a capital city closer to home.
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