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bobbyw24
04-03-2010, 07:30 AM
Saturday, April 03, 2010 - by Nelson Hultberg

Nelson Hultberg

The late William Simon, former Secretary of Treasury in the Ford Administration, was not your normal government functionary. As evidence, his 1978 memoirs titled, A Time For Truth, became one of the most influential books of the past 50 years, for it clarified in vigorous prose the disease of governmentalism afflicting America.

Simon loved Adam Smith's "system of natural liberty" that built the culture of freedom we knew as a nation prior to 1913. As eloquent as his tome was, however, it contained a profound error. It was an error that was to grievously injure the Reagan administration, the Republican Party, and the capitalist renaissance launched by post-war libertarian intellectuals.

William Simon bought into the notion that the rising neoconservative movement in the 1970s headed by the late Irving Kristol could become a valuable ally in the fight to restore liberty and constitutional government to America. Simon was brilliant, but on this issue he failed to see the "wolves in sheep's clothing" personas of Kristol and the collectivist gang of scholars he had gathered around him -- such as Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, etc. (with the likes of Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, William Bennett, and George Will to soon follow).

As Simon put it, these distinguished intellectuals "are still interventionists to a degree that I myself do not endorse, but they have grasped the importance of capitalism, are battling some of the despotic aspects of egalitarianism, and can be counted as allies on certain crucial fronts of the struggle for individual liberty." 1

On all three of these points, Simon could not have been more wrong. Neoconservatives have never grasped the importance of capitalism's requisites: a free market and a system of "objective law." They and their acolytes are not battling the despotic aspects of egalitarianism (its racial and sexual quotas) with anything substantive, only with lip service. And they certainly have not become "allies in the struggle for individual liberty." On the contrary, they have proven in the last three decades to be precisely the opposite.

Neocons' Ideological Roots

Irving Kristol and his neocon intellectuals were radical socialists in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, and as adults they continue to support massive collectivism for America. Their goal is not to dismantle the welfare state, but to increase it, and make it work better by being more ruthlessly efficient. In Kristol's words, the laissez-faire vision of the Founders was a "doctrinaire fantasy" and "inadequate for a political community." 2 To adhere to it now is anachronistic foolishness; it must be phased out of our collective conscience. Neoconservatives think that the moral principles undergirding the Founders' political vision are an impediment to a stable society. Adherence to such moral principles must be discarded in favor of amoral pragmatism.

In other words, neocons believe that Machiavelli and Plato had the better idea. People need to be manipulatively led by statist elites -- via open dialogue and democracy if possible, but by deception, coercion and expediency when necessary. For example, Kristol spoke very favorably about the Prohibition era of the 1920s, and he enthusiastically endorsed censorship. "If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship," he proclaimed. 3

By the mid-1950s in reaction to the Stalinism that took over Russia, Kristol and his followers had abandoned the heavy Marxism of their youth and had mellowed into a powerful corps of "cold-war liberal" thinkers who were steadily assuming influential positions throughout the major think tanks and universities of America. Their goals were to promote a more gradualist collectivism for the country while staunchly opposing Moscow's brutal expansionism.

But the 1960s unfolded with a rude awakening for the neocons. The New Left revolt exploded their Fabian dream of collectivising America via liberalism and the Democratic Party. The post-war left's ideological children had grown into nihilistic vulgarians rising up to kill their donkey parents. In face of George McGovern's takeover of the Democratic Party in 1972 and the party's increasing "softness on communism," Kristol's collectivists began to migrate to the Republican Party in search of a new power base. They adopted the name of neo-conservative to distance themselves from what they perceived as failed liberalism, but more importantly to steer clear of the libertarian-conservatism of Jefferson and the Founders that animated the political right. They presented themselves as what they hoped would become a new middle ground in which the statism bequeathed to us by FDR and LBJ would be accepted as the proper way to govern among Republicans also.

Conservatives Rush to Power

http://www.thedailybell.com/938/Nelson-Hultberg-Jeffersonian-Conservatism-Versus-the-Neocons.html

CharlesTX
04-03-2010, 07:58 AM
Excellent read. I've bookmarked. Thanks for this.

John Taylor
04-03-2010, 09:38 AM
Saturday, April 03, 2010 - by Nelson Hultberg

Nelson Hultberg


http://www.thedailybell.com/938/Nelson-Hultberg-Jeffersonian-Conservatism-Versus-the-Neocons.html

Indeed, a relatively useful book.