Why Isn't the Whole Left Neoconservative?
I consider myself more of a neoconservative than a mere conservative, even though neocons have a target pasted to their brains these days. The fact of the matter is I was a Slanted Left kind-of-guy in my youth with a huge belief in the Collective solving the ills of global poverty and human rights.
My slow transference toward the Right was the result of a few things, viz. that the Collective tended to be authoritarian and despotic rather than possessing Liberty, Freedom and Prosperity. I don’t know, I may have a bit of the Collective in my blood, however definitely not the vision of Marx, Lenin and Mao.
If there is ever a valid Collective it will under the auspices of the Liberty, Freedom and Morality that finds a foundation in Christianity.
Saying that, here is a wonderful essay about neocons from James Lewis:
JRH
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Why Isn't the Whole Left Neoconservative?
By James Lewis
December 21, 2006
American Thinker
Now that neocons are being slow-roasted in effigy all over the world, this may be the right time to ask the question: Why isn't the whole Left neoconservative? Remember that neocons like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel P. Moynihan were former left-wingers who saw the light --- which only seems like common sense, after witnessing Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims (Dad and Junior), and the whole mass-murdering gang of cutthroats.
After the Soviet Union crashed and no one could possibly ignore the bloody mess the Left kept making over seventy long years. So why didn't all the decent Leftists just read their Milton Friedman and grow up?
That's what the so-called neocons did, and more power to them. I take it as obvious that they were correct and morally decent, in learning to see how wrong they had been. They grew up. My question is: What happened to all the others?
Or to ask it a different way: Why is it that in Britain, of all countries, a BBC4 survey showed that the greatest philosopher of all time is considered to be ... Karl Marx? A hate-filled parasitical scribbler who spent his life in the British Museum, stoking the fires that killed 100 million people in the 20th century? What is wrong with British education that the plain facts do not shout out for themselves?
The fact that the Left never, ever learns gives the lie to all its high-falutin' claims of "idealism," "progressivism," and superior morality. There is one and only one reason the Left isn't blamed for its misdeeds: It still controls the organs of propaganda, following der Übermenschlicher Karl. Thus some 90 percent of our media functionairies are left wingers. A predominant percentage of professors and teachers are, too.
To hold on to their beliefs leftists must shut down any competing ideas, which is precisely what they do. Just take your favorite leftist friends, and tell them some obvious fact they don't want to hear. You can see it working right in front of your eyes: They just won't hear it. Like the stone idols of the Bible, they have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear. (Ps. 115) As long as they control the dominant media, our society will keep teetering at the brink of destruction.
All this is relevant today, because the Western world has just realized (again!) that multiculturalism, the latest mass delusion from the elites, comes down to societal suicide. Ooops! In exchange for the Multiculti Cult we get the Twin Towers on 9/11, carnage in London, Madrid, Mumbai, Bali and Baghdad, nightly riots in the banlieus of France, hateful anti-Americanism throughout Europe and America, and yes, the rise of yet another version of Left Fascism, this time marked by loudly voiced race hatred and anti-Semitism. Who could be surprised? Yet nobody blames the snake-oil peddlers for those deadly toxins.
Europe is still suffering from the intellectual monopoly of socialism. "Sophisticated" Europe doesn't see any respectable alternative to the Left, since conservatism is constantly and deliberately confounded with fascism. The American Left tries to ape the Euromyth that any decent and moral person must be a Leftist --- but so far only American professors believe it. Since in the tunnel-vision of the anointed there is no alternative to themselves, if one fairy-tale of Earthly Paradise is seen to crash, another one must instantly take its place. That is why the commissars of Post-Modernism and Multiculturalism suddenly rose to power all over the West in the 1970s and 80s. The faithful had to find a new way to justify their idee fixe.
Such mental fixedness is utterly irrational. A psychiatrist would have to ask whether the people who keep peddling the same toxins over and over again are themselves deeply malevolent and destructive: Whether unconsciously they really want to murder their societies. Why else would they keep pushing toward chaos?
So I ask again: Why isn't everybody on the Left a neocon? Why isn't Hillary? Chomsky? John Kerry? All those Sixties leftovers who never learned --- why are they so intellectually stuck? Have they no decency?
So hurray for the Neocons, say I, and long may they bug the Left.
James Lewis blogs at Dangerous Times.
© American Thinker 2006
Hat tip to Dissecting the Left.
