OT OT OT
Koan, my regrets for not replying sooner.
>>Take Norman Podhoretz for example whom you felt was not a neo conservative as I remember.
No, Norman Podhoretz is definitely a neoconservative. But a lot of other people (such as Buckley) on the right disagree with him, so he is not representative of all conservatives. Just as Buckley is not representative of everyone on the right.
>>There is a HUGE difference between the conservative and
>>liberal thinking and mind set. Rush Limbaughs and Bill Moyers
>>contrast the two types of thinking pretty well.
This is a good example to use. Limbaugh and Moyers are unofficial spokesmen for the right and left, respectively, but just because Moyers has a particular opinion, it doesn't mean that everyone on the left would fall in line with him. Is it fair to say that Moyers agrees with everything that Jeremiah Wright says, just because a handful of good lefties go to Wright's church? I would say no, no more fair than to make Podhoretz an exemplar of all conservatives.
>>We can rise above a "stupid formula" which is what the neo cons have been selling. And an ugly formula at that!
A lot of conservatives and libertarians would agree with you. They only reason they might vote for McCain or a third party instead of a Dem is that they consider the Dem alternative to be worse. This is rational behavior:
rangevoting.org
>>And the NEO cons do subscribe to the the Ayn Rand / Milton Friedman theory of economics...
Rand and Friedman were very different. Rand thought that certain exceptional humans could rise to the point where they were capable of objective reason, for whom policy became "fact" instead of a matter of informed opinion. The protagonists in her novels were able to remake the whole world through heroic action. And even the most dominant female characters in her works had an unquenchable desire to be sexually ravished, "taken" (nb, Rand had liaisons with all the men in her circle, such as Alan Greenspan and Nathaniel Branden).
So, there was a strong fascistic element to Rand's novels, an oversimplification of reality and a worship of power.
Contrast this with virtually any other libertarian. Friedman, for example, was trained as an economist. He spent the last 40 years of his life, however, explaining classical liberal ideas to laymen. Rand was a cantankerous and difficult person, one who threw people out of her intellectual circle for disagreement, but Friedman was affable, even comic at times. Friedman didn't think that business people were heroes, unlike Rand, and he didn’t expect heroic action out of them. He argued that the standard of living is highest when, in Robert Nozick’s words, capital is distributed “from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen”, as opposed to the Marxist formulation.
OTOH, Friedman is representative of only the Chicago school of economics. There are several other libertarian political and economic schools that are distinct from the Chicago school (more on this in a moment).
The neoconservatives were undoubtedly influenced by the Chicago school (as has been every social critic from the late 50s on), but they were influenced to a much greater extent by Nathan Glazer, Sen. Daniel Moynihan, and James Q. Wilson in terms of domestic policy, and Scoop Jackson and Jeane Kirkpatrick in foreign policy. The neoconservatives are voluptuaries of both the New Deal and the FDR-style geopolitical chess game. They revel in large-scale, bold Hamiltonian/Wilsonian political gestures rather than the localized, small-scale conservative ideal of government.
The neocons are not libertarians, in either the Friedmanian or the Randian sense. Consider this book for example (and I don't just mean the title, but the contents):
amazon.com
They reject capitalism as not having moral ends. Again, this is a stark contrast with libertarian thought.
I think it is most accurate to say that the neocons arose as a result of a disenchantment with the postwar direction of the New Deal provider state, and a reaction to the transnational progressivism of McGovern, Carter, and Mondale.
>>Maybe the question I should ask you is: "who do you think has
>>figured out economic and social theory best?
There is a long list of writers whom I admire, some of whom are on the left. But to answer your question directly, I prefer the economics of (Austrian school economists) Hayek, Schumpeter, Mises, and Rothbard. In terms of social theory, my favorites are Robert Nisbet, Gaetano Mosca, Edward Banfield, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Christopher Lasch. But my thinking has also been greatly influenced by periodic doses of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who proposed what Belloc called distributism (note, I am not Catholic). If I had to classify myself, it would be as a communitarian conservative liberal.
Nisbet:
aps-pub.com
I believe that (despite what many Austrian school liberals would say) distributism can be complementary to liberal economics. Someday, I'd like to show how libertarians can maximize freedom by rejecting antinomianism, and why distributists should abandon "third way" nostrums. But that set of masterworks is probably a few years off. <ggg> |
