Neocon, Neocon, Who Art Thou, Neocon?

on May 09, 2005

No, neoconservative is not another word for conservative, Reagan conservative, Reagan Republican, or any other kind of Republican. They are the small groups who only believe in the liberal-goal-through-conservervative-means policy of invading countries to spread democracy. (Not everyone who believes that, but the few who only believe in that and will support the positions on other issues of the party that will adopt the neocon policy)

Here is the letter I mentioned in my last post.

http://newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

To then-President Clinton, signed by:

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

(these ones are neocons)

(No, adding "neo" to the beginning of a political attitude does not make it more extreme; a neoconservative is not a right-winger or reactionary, and a neoliberal is not a left-winger or radical)

Most people do not know what a neoconservative is. Many liberals and democrats throw it around as just some negative word for a conservative and are usually wrong when applying the label. Many conservatives don't know what it is either, but are sure it must be an attack on their glorious and courageous policies

17

ParaTed2k

on May 09, 2005

We'll leave it to Good Ol' Dexter of "The Offspring" to describe a "neocon".

"Neocon"

we are strong
we are right
we won't be pushed aside
we'll go on
we will fight
we will not compromise
we will never lose to you
we will never lose to you
we will never lose to you
we will never lose to you Link

;~D

18

Moderateman

on May 09, 2005

and here I thought that was what you called the charactar from matrix after he was imprisoned, then set free.

ha!

19

Reiki-House

on May 09, 2005

Leave it to the uninformed to say my answer has no answer. If you could read it again you'd see what a neocon is. They don't have a neocon badge on their vests or signs on their office doors. Hence your ignorance about them. Neocons have great connections to Israel and Israels' foreign policy. So while I know this elementary information, you all can play word games while trying to figure out what a neocon is. Your uninformed minds help them greatly. To understand what a neocon is, you have to look at individual's past histories, free of blatant one-side-promoting bias. When a powerful politician bends to appease Israel while ignoring any contrary laws they can be labelled a neocon. A neocon will muddle the truth about events and make a sanitized version of events where it's ok for Israel to assasinate leaders of other groups with the best US helicopters and fighter jets in the world. Israel has more sophisticated US weaponry than NATO. If you take a hard unbiased look at American politics, you can see the neocon stamp in many places. And the dead US GI's are left to dust in the desert sand. And it works.

20

Eastern Diamondback

on May 09, 2005

Leave it to the uninformed to say my answer has no answer. If you could read it again you'd see what a neocon is. They don't have a neocon badge on their vests or signs on their office doors. Hence your ignorance about them. Neocons have great connections to Israel and Israels' foreign policy. So while I know this elementary information, you all can play word games while trying to figure out what a neocon is. Your uninformed minds help them greatly. To understand what a neocon is, you have to look at individual's past histories, free of blatant one-side-promoting bias. When a powerful politician bends to appease Israel while ignoring any contrary laws they can be labelled a neocon. A neocon will muddle the truth about events and make a sanitized version of events where it's ok for Israel to assasinate leaders of other groups with the best US helicopters and fighter jets in the world. Israel has more sophisticated US weaponry than NATO. If you take a hard unbiased look at American politics, you can see the neocon stamp in many places. And the dead US GI's are left to dust in the desert sand. And it works.

Reiki, you sorry soul, you don't get it.

Give a functioning definition of what a neocon is. Save your political grandstanding and advocacy for someplace else. Read what Jim Rove wrote. Give origins, philosophy, movements, dates, events, names--stuff like that. And do it in a intelligent manner. What makes a neocon a neocon as opposed to a paleocon, or a member of the new-left.

21

Lee1776

on May 09, 2005

The neoconseratives sprang from the very heart of Democratic America. Most of them lived in New York or Boston and most made their living in academia. But these were not traditional Harvard men, lantern-jawed and blue-blooded. Most of them were Jewish, virtually all of them the children of immigrants; some grew up in homes where Yiddish was spoken as much as English. The key members of the group - Irving Kristol, Danial Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer - all attended City College of New York together in the 1930s at a time when college provided a first-rate education for New Yorkers who were too poor and too Jewish to attend the Ivy League. The neocons were modernists to a fault. They didn’t go around expressing nostalgia for lost glories of medieval Christendom, nineteenth-century capitalism of the Old South. Most of them had been Marxists of one sort or another in their youth. But as they grew older they embraced old-fashioned liberalism - the liberalism of meritocratic values, reverence for high culture and vigorous mixed economy. It was betrayal of this liberalism (as they saw it) by the Left that then turned them into neocons.

The neocons hated what was happening to America’s universities, the institutions that had lifted them out of the ghetto. How could the high priests of America’s temples of reason stand idly by while students trashed university property? How could people who were supposed to care about intellectual standards agree to the introduction of quotes? Criticizing the war in Vietnam was all very well, but how could these over privileged brats burn the American flag? How could they argue that America was always wrong and its critics always right? Knee-jerk anti-Americanism was particularly offensive to people whose families escaped the Holocaust only because they emigrated to America.

These thinkers provided an enormous boost to the Right...... Crucially, the neocons spoke the language of social science. Conservatives had long insisted that government programs weakened the natural bonds of society, without ever being about to prove it. The neocons showed the social problems were much harder to understand then they appeared - and that social engineering of the Great Society sort was plagued by perverse consequences. Welfare payments can reinforce dependency. Preferential treatment may harm its supposed beneficiaries by shielding them from competition. Overzealous egalitarianism can undermine educational institutions such as New York’s City College and reduce social mobility. The neocons were muckrakers of the Right, discrediting government just as the original muckrakers had discredited the robber barons.

The neocons also dwelt on the importance of the sort of informal institutions that other social scientist ignored. In 1965, a young official in the Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caused a sensation with a paper-immediately dubbed the Moynihan Report, though his name did not appear on the original document-that suggested that the problems of the urban black poor stemmed, in large measure, from the collapse of the black family. Other neocons showed that a society’s “little platoons” - its voluntary institutions- are much more vital to its health then ambitious government programs. And they warned that disorder was a much bigger threat to social well-being then permissive liberals might imagine. In other works, they dressed traditional conservative insights in the language of social science.

The neocons did not need to win every argument. Merely by raising dissenting voices the punched a hole in the liberal establishment’s claim to possess a monopoly on expertise. Hitherto liberals had enjoyed perhaps the most valuable resource policy makers can possess: the impression that they represented objective scientific wisdom. This isn’t just our opinion, they could argue; this scientific orthodoxy. The neocons ended this convenient fiction.

The neocons also added a cutting edge to the Right’s criticism of liberal foreign policy. One spur was the United Nations’ growing hostility to Israel (which increased after Israel occupied Palestinian territory in the wake of the 1967 war). They also became increasingly convinced that the United States was losing the Cold War. Arms control was mutating into appeasement. The Soviet Union was building on communism’s victory in Vietnam. The American establishment was paralyzed by “Vietnam syndrome.” If the National Review broke the isolationist’ grip on the Right, the neocons helped push the bulk of the movement far more firmly into the internationalist camp.
________________________________________________________
This was an excerpt to the book “The Right Nation” written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It is a very good book and has a very balanced view. I would subject anybody that is interested in the modern Right movement to read it (critic or supporter of the right).

In short, neocons are the think tanks and brains. At one time most worked for the Democrats, but changed sides, as described above. If a President (Democrat i.e. Clinton used them or most likely a Republican) wants info, ideas, or needs to create a nicely packaged policy, they go to the neocons located at the think tank called AEI (American Enterprise Institute). The AEI will do all the leg work and will change it to fit the politician. They are privately funded through donations and their services are free of charge to those that will listen.

If I have time this evening, I’ll type some more on the subject.

22

Lee1776

on May 09, 2005

They don't have a neocon badge on their vests or signs on their office doors.

Yes they do, it is called the AEI. Read my post above.

23

Eastern Diamondback

on May 09, 2005

Yes they do, it is called the AEI. Read my post above.

I wasn't aware that AEI was universally neo-conservative, although I think it's pretty obvious many in it were.

24

bakerstreet

on May 09, 2005

A neo-con is a Conservative that a Liberal doesn't agree with. Calling someone a nazi wasn't working out, and they didn't have "pinko commie" to fall back on like we do.

(yes, I know it has "meaning", but come on, since when has meaning ever mattered to people who use words as weapons?)

25

Eastern Diamondback

on May 09, 2005

A neo-con is a Conservative that a Liberal doesn't agree with. Calling someone a nazi wasn't working out, and they didn't have "pinko commie" to fall back on like we do.

(yes, I know it has "meaning", but come on, since when has meaning ever mattered to people who use words as weapons?)

That's why I'm looking for people, especially liberals and other leftists, to give their personal definition for the word.

26

Gene Nash

on May 09, 2005

James Rove is correct in his definition -- that is the technical definition of a neocon, and would be number one in a dictionary.

Unfortunately there would also be a number two, because in common practice the word has devolved into what LW and BakerStreet indicate, mainly due to ignorant misuse by the undereducated-but-passionate wing of liberalism.

And number two is an excellent label for that lazy epithet.

best described by my history teacher as "liberal goal through conservative means"

That's good. I like that.

(The concise def., not the enacting of said def. )

27

-----

on May 09, 2005

Well, Eastern Diamondback, after sorting through all of the s Definitions of a Necon, have you found one that seems logical/reasonable?

28

Eastern Diamondback

on May 09, 2005

Well, Eastern Diamondback, after sorting through all of the s Definitions of a Necon, have you found one that seems logical/reasonable?

I was already aware of what the technical definition of a neo-conservative was. I just hear it thrown around so much, but rarely ever defined. People use it to define contradictory ideals, such as Wilsonian Utopianism and Isolationism. I just laugh when people label as neocons others who are obviously not neo-conservatives. It's indicative of their lack of knowledge on the subject.

29

-----

on May 09, 2005

I just laugh when people label as neocons others who are obviously not neo-conservatives. It's indicative of their lack of knowledge on the subject.

--Yep, it is humorous...

30

James Rove

on May 09, 2005

It's been said a lot here how "neoconservative" is misused. Maybe, instead of just accepting the fact that it's misused, we should all correct people when they misuse it and other words from politics. (Conservatives have done a good job at giving "liberal" a negative conotation, just as "neocon" is used as a knee-jerk word by liberals)