the wrong side of history

when historians look back on the bush jr. era, they will undoubtedly see that bush’s arrogance, anti-intellectualism, and messianic delusion that he is somehow the world’s greatest defender of freedom had a lot to do with his public and foreign policy shortcomings. but, while it is easy for any detail-oriented policy wonk to discuss at length how bush is a massive failure in just about every aspect of policy, he does have his defenders. in fact, there are certain intellectuals who formed the intellectual basis for many of his policies, most notably, the neoconservatives who have many of their kind holding prominent posts in his administration. and the main magazine that publishes pure neoconservative intellectually masturbatory nonsense is the weekly standard. when reading the weekly standard, it is often difficult for a rational, well-informed person to avoid feeling like they are going to puke, or wondering whether the people who write the articles actually have brains or are complete dipshits. but when we talk about a neoconservative or a neoliberal, we have to remember: a neoconservative is completely different from a real conservative, and a neoliberal is completely different from a real liberal. neoconservative intellectuals like the people who write articles at the weekly standard are not conservatives, nor are they liberals. they are a different beast entirely, one far more dangerous and far less rational. here i will try to summarize their ridiculous worldview and why they are on the wrong side of history.

the neoconservative movement was originally started by followers of max shactman, who was an american communist thinker and a follower of leon trotsky. other early neoconservatives were irving kristol (the father of weekly standard editor william "bill" kristol), university of chicago economist leo strauss, and james burnham, a founding editor of the national review. max shactman and his followers originally believed in communism and trotsky, but at some point, shactman became disillusioned with communism and trotsky, and he ended up being staunchly anti-communist. they replaced the communist doctrines of worldwide proletarian revolution with their own doctrines of worldwide democratic revolution against dictatorships and communist regimes. they became firm believers that “people everywhere just want to be free”, and that one-size-fits-all western-style multi-party democracy should be the form of government in every country in the entire world, regardless of that country’s specific circumstances, culture, or history.

the neoconservatives, or “neocons” for short, also are strong believers in capitalism, and they oppose socialism, left-wing movements, and communism with equal fervor. they have particular disdain for anyone who sympathizes with or proclaims their support for anyone they consider to be too left-wing. just as important to them as their belief in democracy is their belief in free-market capitalism, and they do not support democracies in which socialist leaders get elected and then nationalize industries. they view any socialist leader who acts in such a way as an undemocratic tyrant, even if such a leader has the support of the vast majority of their country’s people. neoconservatives view everything from the point of view of the united states’s ruling class and its interests, and as such, they have a very skewed view of things, especially things that happen in other countries whose class structure is different from in the united states. they cannot understand why anyone would support a socialist, even though their movement started out with former socialists, because they think that history has proven that capitalism is correct and all other forms of economic organization are fundamentally flawed. moreover, they assume that working-class people in third-world countries ought to understand the supposed benefits of free-market capitalism, and that if they vote for socialists, they are voting against their own best interests and are being coerced by propaganda which, in the neocons’ view, must be untrue.

the neocons believe in a highly interventionist foreign policy for the united states, and they believe in having military spending be as high as possible. they think the united states should be the world’s only superpower, and should keep its military spending many times higher than any other nation, and use its great military might to promote the great causes of capitalism and democracy. they also believe that capitalism and democracy can be forced on other people by the barrel of a gun. and, they are willing to compromise on the democracy front; instead of supporting a “temporary dictatorship of the proletariat”, they support a “temporary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. they are very elitist and do not take in consideration the views of average people; neocons believe that they are smarter than everyone else and that they have a monopoly on the truth. as such, they refuse to believe anything that offends their sensibilities, instead dismissing it as lies and propaganda. they believe that the united states is the greatest force for good in the world, and in their eyes, the united states can do no wrong. they think united states foreign policy is always righteous and good; the only thing they criticize about united states foreign policy is when it is too weak or diplomatic, when we do not flex our muscles and bend others to our will. they think that people such as noam chomsky who criticize u.s. foreign policy are crazy cranks who are completely out of touch with reality, and that anybody who even considers that the united states has less than noble intentions with regard to the rest of the world ought to be confined to the loony bin.

so, the neocons, these aggressive defenders of the united states ruling class, are at best useful idiots for the large corporations, defense contractors, and other elements of the ruling class. the people who really understand what is going on do not have this same black-and-white view of everything being either totally right or totally wrong, and no shades of gray in between. the people in the ruling class who really understand things have a much more nuanced, shades-of-gray view of reality that can account for the true nature of things, and because they are able to perceive reality in a more-or-less reasonable manner, they are much better situated to act effectively and be successful. but neocon intellectuals are not really that smart. they are tribal, us versus them type thinkers, unable to ever see the bigger picture of any given situation. neoconservatives view every conflict as a zero sum game, they never question whether they are right, and their sole purpose is to win at any cost. as such, they are very out of touch with reality and unable to deal with changing circumstances or with the consequences of their own actions. they are like little children, going around making messes, and then blaming it on other people and saying they were right.

so, president bush is surrounded by neocons, and they have brainwashed him into their ridiculous ideology, because it appeals to him. besides their magazine the weekly standard, the neocons also have their own special little think tank, the project for a new american century. they have considerable appeal and influence inside the larger conservative think-tanks, the american enterprise institute and the heritage foundation. but, they are not conservatives. a conservative is someone who values, first and foremost, tradition, who likes stability and the rule of law, who tends to think society is in a state of moral decay and that religion should play a more prominent role in restoring traditional morality. conservatives instinctually oppose all change, except change that makes things more like the way they used to be, back in the “good ole days” that all conservatives look back on so wistfully. conservatives believe in moral absolutes, and they do not think that any society could have its moral absolutes get better over time, since absolutes are set in stone. the only way a society can become more moral, in the conservative view, is if it increasingly embraces tradition and if new ideas that conflict with tradition become less and less common and less and less popular. a neoconservative is not a conservative, not by any means whatsoever. they are incompatible viewpoints, and the neoconservatives have only temporarily allied themselves with the conservatives to support george w. bush. in the past, neoconservatives have sometimes allied themselves with liberals when it was convenient for them to do so.

and what are liberals? a liberal is someone whose primary concern is making the world a better place, and helping out those who need help the most. the liberal thought framework is one of oppression-liberation. liberals identify many groups of people, or sometimes causes such as the environment, that they see as being oppressed, and then they set out to liberate whoever is being oppressed from that oppression. the notion of political correctness was invented by liberals to castigate conservatives that the liberals viewed as being the oppressors of various minority groups. the purpose of political correctness is to ostracize from polite society anyone who makes uninformed remarks insulting an entire category of people, i.e., someone who makes illegitimate overgeneralizations about large groups of people in order to make those groups look bad. there has always been plenty of backlash against political correctness, because sometimes there are certain advocacy groups that accuse innocent people of making uninformed overgeneralizations, when in fact the people accused of this thought crime were simply pointing out an undeniable truth. for a perfect example of this, you can look at the reaction various jewish/pro-israel/zionist advocacy groups had to the paper by john mearsheimer and stephen walt about the pro-israel lobby in the united states. however, in many cases, people actually do say ridiculous, unfounded, hurtful things about large groups of people that are unjustified. for example, many leading conservatives, even today, denounce homosexuality as immoral and an abomination that should be outlawed. it is this type of “hate speech” that is unacceptable to most liberals, but liberals have assisted and helped each of the minority (or in the case of women, majority) groups they see as oppressed in forming their own advocacy groups, and it is these advocacy groups who sometimes try to cross the line in terms of making certain kinds of free speech impermissable. however, since liberal thought can sometimes lead people to have a dogmatic view of viewing one side as the oppressor and the other as the victim (for example, feminists who view men as oppressors and women as victims, or civil rights activists who view white people as oppressors and black people as victims), oftentimes many liberals support advocacy groups for groups of people they are not a member of, even if this is against their own self-interests. this is because the liberal is someone who views the interests of oppressed people as more important than their own interests. liberalism is a very useful and good frame of reference for thinking about things, as long as people do not get too dogmatic about which groups are oppressors and oppressed, or about accusing everyone of hate speech without considering the merits of the arguments other people make.

so, what exactly is “neoliberalism” then? neoliberalism is usually used to refer to something completely different from liberalism. neoliberalism refers to a certain set of economic policies, namely, global free trade without restrictions, and free-market capitalism. now, this does not fit well with modern liberalism and its oppression-liberation ideological framework, but neoliberalism is more rooted in what is known as “classical liberalism”, which is distinct from today’s liberalism. classical liberalism developed in the 1800s among those who wanted to achieve positive change, but it has an entirely different thought-framework. in the classical liberal framework, there is an eternal struggle going on in every country, between tyranny and freedom. the more power the government has, the more tyrannical it is. the less power the government has, the more freedom there is. classical liberals also oppose forms of systematic inequality such as slavery, because they think everyone is entitled to freedom, and nobody should have the authority to deprive others of their freedom without consent. however, classical liberalism is resolutely capitalist in its economic outlook, viewing excessive taxation as a form of tyranny. a classical liberal would uphold the right of any person to act in whatever manner they please as long as they do not do anything illegal; moreover, they would want the government to have as little intrusion into people’s lives as possible, except when intrusion is needed to fight non-governmental tyranny such as slavery. classical liberalism eventually split in the 1930s into franklin delano roosevelt’s modern liberalism and the resolutely capitalist libertarianism. ayn rand was a prominent figure in early libertarianism, establishing a philosophical ideology called “objectivism”, and promoting the autonomy of the individual, opposing all forms of governmental tyranny, and upholding free-market unregulated capitalism as the best economic system. however, the vast majority of liberals have gone in a different direction since then, embracing the idea of a “mixed economy”, where the government plays an activist role in the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, in order to combat the tyranny of the wealthy. neoliberalism, on the other hand, is an outgrowth of classical liberalism, not modern liberalism, and neoliberalism has much more to do with libertarianism than with modern liberalism. neoliberalism is basically just the economic philosophy of libertarians, which is much more popular among the ruling class than the social philosophy of libertarians, which the ruling class views as subversive and dangerous. essentially, neoliberalism is just an economic philosophy, and it does not address any viewpoints except economic ones. and the few viewpoints it does express are: free-market capitalism is good, free trade is good, tariffs and trade barriers are bad, labor unions are bad, and socialism is bad. so, ironically, neoliberalism is more popular today among republican politicians than democratic ones. in fact, the neoliberal ideology is a subset of the neoconservative ideology; neoconservatives believe in all of the neoliberal ideology, but they also have more ideology that they add to it, with regard to foreign policy, militarism, and the best form of government. so, with that in mind, it should not come as much of a shock that neoconservatives have allied with liberals in the past, at times when the liberals were supportive of the same types of foreign policy that neoconservatives advocated. in fact, they were a key part of bill clinton’s constituency, supporting his military adventurism abroad and his free-trade agenda with other nations. but, in the 2000 election, the neoconservatives backed george w. bush overwhelmingly, and since that time, they have tied their fortunes to his. the reasons for them backing bush rather than gore are straightforward: they thought al gore had some dangerous leftist rhetoric sometimes, and wanted to support someone they could reliably count on to support free-market capitalism and the u.s. military.

so, what have the neoconservatives actually done? well, they were the principal architects of the decision to invade iraq, having been arguing in favor of invading that country for years. they are very hawkish about military matters and anything relating to national security. the neoconservatives trust the bush administration, so they are willing to trust giving it virtually unlimited authority, not realizing that future administrations might misuse it. neoconservatives are quite an arrogant bunch, and refuse to admit to being wrong about anything; instead, they nitpick the arguments of others for flaws, rely on straw man arguments and guilt by association, and try to portray themselves as natural allies of the conservative cause. neoconservatives are very strong advocates of a close u.s.-israel alliance; this probably has more to do with the fact that many prominent neoconservatives are jewish than the fact that israel is a capitalist democracy. what this shows, more than anything, is how neoconservatives are a small, elitist group, and they have no broad-based backing by anyone. they do not have grassroots support or appeal, nor do they care about that. they care about working behind the scenes to get power, not as politicians, but as advisers to politicians. their current prominence is largely a function of their institutional backing by the corporate power structure, to which they are useful idiots that are helpful in promoting the ruling class’s interests. but, more and more signs are showing that the neoconservatives have outlived their usefulness to the ruling class, because the ruling class has realized that the neoconservative zeal for endless war is ridiculous and runs counter to their interests of having enough stability to keep making money and not turn the public against them. so, they will probably be thrown out like yesterday’s garbage, done in by their own stubbornness and refusal to acknowledge reality. thus neoconservatives are, more than anyone else, on the wrong side of history, and the current debate over iran shows how their power is dwindling. soon they will be nothing more than a footnote in history, while conservatism and liberalism will continue to flourish.