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Title: Buchanan: Behind The Crack-Up Of The Right
Source:
Human Events
URL Source: http://www.humanevents.com/2012/06/ ... ind-the-crack-up-of-the-right/
Published: Jun 22, 2012
Author: Patrick J Buchanan
Post Date: 2012-06-22 11:51:15 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 5457
Comments: 12
In introducing his new book, "Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America," Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America? Straussians, writes Gottfried, "wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the Enlightenment, once properly instructed, should be able to carry out this ... task." For traditional conservatives, before the nation is born, "ethnic and cultural preconditions" must exist. All "successful constitutional orders," he writes, "are the expressions of already formed nations and cultures." To the old right, America as a nation and a people already existed by 1789. The Constitution was the birth certificate the nation wrote for itself, the charter by which it chose to govern itself. The real America had been born in men's hearts by the time of Lexington and Concord in 1775. In a recent issue of Modern Age, Jack Kerwick deals with this divide. Irving Kristol, he writes, and quotes that founding father of modern neoconservatism, saw America as "a 'creedal' nation, a nation to which anyone can belong irrespective of 'ethnicity or blood ties of any kind, or lineage, or length of residence even.'" "For Kristol and his ilk," Kerwick goes on, "one's identity as an American is established by nothing more than an intellectual exercise whereby one rationally assents to the propositions encapsulated in the Declaration." "Given this unqualified quasi-religious commitment to 'the Rights of Man,' (for a neoconservative) America must be future-oriented, for as long as human rights are threatened, and regardless of where they are imperiled, her work in the world will never be complete." Here one arrives at a root cause of the conflict between neocons and the right -- a conflict that did not mature until the end of the Cold War. Given their belief in America as an ideological nation and their fear that the party of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter was failing to wage the Cold War effectively against our ideological foe, communism, it was natural that the neocons would defect from their party to align with the party of Ronald Reagan. By the 1980s, they were allies of the Old Right for the last decade of the Cold War. It was when that Cold War ended that the chasm came into full view. Some conservatives began to argue that now that the Soviet Union was history and Mao's China had given up on world revolution, our war was over and we should bring our troops home and become again "a normal country in a normal time." Neoconservatives cried that this was "isolationism," and backed U.S. interventions in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait and Iraq. While a Republican House opposed war on Serbia, neocons cheered Bill Clinton's 78 days of bombing that tore Kosovo from the mother country. When some on the right opposed the invasion of Iraq as an unwise and unnecessary war, National Review denounced them as "unpatriotic." On reflection, the neoconservative rage made sense. If one believes America is not a normal nation with definable interests, but a creedal nation dedicated to democracy, equality and human rights, one has converted to what Kristol called a "civic religion." And the mission of that faith is to advance the work begun in 1776, to make America -- then the entire world -- free, democratic and egalitarian. Either our ideology triumphs or another shall, neocons believe. We are in a world historic struggle for the hearts and souls of mankind. This ideology, this political religion, causes neocons, as Gottfried and Russell Kirk observed -- the latter in his 1988 Heritage Foundation lecture on the species -- to see opponents on the right as heretics and enemies of the true faith. Yet, in the final analysis, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol, writes Kerwick, future-oriented and utopian, "is not ... a form of conservatism at all." Decades ago, when Irving called for a "Republican ideology," the scholar Gerhart Niemeyer upbraided him: "All modern ideologies have the same irrational root: the permeation of politics with millenarian ideas of pseudo-religious character. The result is a dream world." Like 19th-century Marxists, neocons envision a future that is utopian -- i.e., it is unattainable. For in the real world, history, faith and culture shape peoples, and peoples shape countries to reflect who and what they are. Nations constructed from ideological blueprints like the Soviet Union of Vladimir Lenin and the China of Mao Zedong eventually collapse when their ruling ideas collide fatally with reality and human nature. The one great success of the neocons came about by accident. In the shock of 9/11, George W. Bush was converted to global democratic revolution "to end tyranny in our world." And off we marched. And after decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we reaped the harvest: 6,500 dead, 40,000 wounded, trillions in debt, a nation divided and pandemic hatred of America across the Islamic world. Perhaps the new wars for which our neocons clamor in Syria and Iran will prove at last the great leap forward into the brave new world of their dreams.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Great article by Pat Buchanan. Sums it up pretty good. He should have been president.
For in the real world, history, faith and culture shape peoples, and peoples shape countries to reflect who and what they are. Buchanan. Nail. Head. RIGHT HERE. "Diversity is our strength" was the biggest crock of crop ever perpetrated...effectively undermining American nationalism, unique culture and identity. There MUST be a common stream in the course of national identity. With everyone required to wear PC beer-goggles, who knows WHAT "American" is anymore?
But...but....howz zat? He's a "Nazi", isn't he? /s On another note... I believe this whole Utopian ideal the neos and Marxists have tried selling is NOT about any such Utopia of "fairness" at all, but just a ruse by the elites to keep the Middle Class from getting too uppity. Working pretty good, ain't it? Paddy knows far more than he ever lets on...
pantload - yellow stain buchanan the brave new world of their wet - lumpy dreams. Communist conditioned cowards certainly don't have the guts - brains to fight jihad ! relentlessly crying - faulting others is the extent of their diaper rashabilities !
If you ... don't use exclamation points --- you should't be typeing ! Commas - semicolons - question marks are for girlie boys !
Here's some quotes of his on the subject of Yukon's type: The poor
homosexuals (such as Yukon)-- they have declared war upon nature, and now
nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS). Homosexuality
involves sexual acts (the type that Yukon posted links to several times)
most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely
say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots'
by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and
experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle. I don't
expect that the sodomite in the Section 8 single wide to be a big Buchanan fan
after all the things Pat has written about his lifestyle. GAY stands for Got
AIDS Yukon.
Ping.
self ping
I completely agree. I supported him in 1992 in the Republican primary. I should have voted for him in 2000.
Me too.
It was his '96 run that woke me up to the neocon inflitration of the GOP. It still took me until 2003 to dump the GOP in total.
Never swear "allegiance" to anything other than the 'right to change your mind'!
I was about a year behind you Brian - 2004 is when I finally figured out the rigged system some call the Two Party system. Those neocons really got most of what they wanted too - to the detriment of this formerly fine country.
Thanks for the ping. Good article and I had indeed missed it.
"If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave." Samuel Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772
#2. To: ALL (#0)
Like 19th-century Marxists, neocons envision a future that is utopian -- i.e., it is unattainable.
#3. To: A K A Stone (#1)
He should have been president.
#4. To: Brian S (#0)
(Edited)
the brave new world of their dreams.
#5. To: Liberator (#3)
Paddy knows far more than he ever lets on...
#6. To: We The People (#0)
#7. To: Stoner (#0)
#8. To: A K A Stone (#1)
Great article by Pat Buchanan. Sums it up pretty good. He should have been president.
we must as a species go into a period of shrinkage that we have not experienced since the Dark Ages and the Black Plague -- lucysmom (A.K.A. minnigold)
#9. To: jwpegler (#8)
I should have voted for him in 2000.
#10. To: jwpegler (#8)
I supported him in 1992 in the Republican primary.
#11. To: Brian S (#10)
It was his '96 run that woke me up to the neocon inflitration of the GOP. It still took me until 2003 to dump the GOP in total.
#12. To: A K A Stone (#6)
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