Book Learning

In a fascinating and challenging interview with C. Bradley Thompson, political science professor and author of Neoconservativism; An Obituary for an Idea, I was struck by several things he says about neo-conservatives and their particular -ism. These, the guys who got us into Iraq:

The single greatest threat to America, according to many neocons, is not communism or radical Islam but nihilism, and they see nihilism as the inevitable outcome of Enlightenment liberalism and America’s founding principles. The real problem with liberal-capitalist society for Strauss, Kristol, and Brooks is that individuals do not sacrifice themselves to anything higher than themselves and their petty self-interest. What America needs, therefore, is a two-step antidote for its cultural malaise: the inculcation of public virtue and the promotion of nationalism. The neocons seek to restore a public philosophy that promotes sacrifice as the great moral ideal and patriotism as the great political ideal.

The American people need something greater than themselves to live for. They need to learn the virtue of sacrifice, which means war. War–perpetual war–is the ultimate means by which the neocons can fight creeping nihilism and promote sacrifice and nationalistic patriotism. An aggressive, proactive foreign policy therefore serves a greater purpose–to raise ordinary Americans above their daily, selfish concerns. Nation building also provides neoconservative statesmen with a grand theatre on which to practice their statesmanlike virtues.

War as sacrifice by society. Not paying for the things we need, not actually serving, as in a draft. Just perpetual war, as if it raises our moral consciousness. How strange. How contrary to what we can observe in the ashes of Bush's and his neocon advisers' two wars.

And from the book itself:

The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church on Sunday, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtues, sacrifice themselves to the “common good,” obey the commands of the government, fight wars, and die for the State. . . . In summary, the neoconservatives are the advocates of a new managerial State—a State controlled and regulated by a new mandarin class of conservative virtucrats who think the American people are incapable of governing themselves without the help of the neocons’ special, a priori wisdom.

And:

....the neocons share important core values with the principles of fascism. They make us feel comfortable with certain fascist principles by Americanizing them. . . ...They have seduced the American people into believing that a free and virtuous society is somehow compatible with government controls over all aspects of man’s economic and spiritual endeavors. This is not the fascism of Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, but instead something rather different. It points toward what we might call fascism-lite—a fascism that is moderate, defanged, and well-suited to the smiley-face optimism of America’s Ronald McDonald culture

Rings true. The long-time reader of this blog will be familiar with the concept that it's they who are fascists, with their constant propaganda stream, lying, distractions, corporatism; not Obama -- not by any stretch of the imagination. It's a more erudite and studied form of what I've been saying. Getting all misty-eyed about war as patriotism is easy, especially for the neocons, essentially none of whom ever served. It's a smokescreen, a diversion, a substitute for the real sacrifices required of a democratic and pluralistic society, were it actually to focus on its own. How easy it makes it to ignore the hard stuff. How convenient to use war as a hammer to nail down their selfish aims, while calling it country-love.

That they see liberalism as leading to unwillingness to sacrifice for the common good is quite remarkable, given who is arguing for what nowadays. I'd laugh out loud, were I not sobbing into my soup. The neocon definition of sacrifice, evidently, is expecting someone else to fight their wars, someone else to address the life-long effects on those who come home, someone else to pay for them, someone else to suffer the effects of their failed economic policies. Who, and what, exactly, is being sacrificed?

My only tiny teeny quibble: I don't see the death of the idea at all. I see it renaming itself as teabaggerism, and becoming even more dishonest and pervasive, even more thoughtless and self-centered.