#neoconservatism

[senseofright]

To Conservatives who play apologetics for Donald Trump here is a list of people and things he doesn’t respect:

Our troops

Our veterans

Liberals

Conservatives who don’t make conservatism about him

NATO

The international community

Immigrants

Bureaucrats and civil servants

Rule of law and fair courts

Budget austerity and economic stability

YOU

While I absolutely and whole heartedly disagree with Biden on many, many, issues, it is for the health of our party, our international reputation, and of the country that conservatives do not back Donald Trump.

#RINO #politics #donald trump #trump #trump 2024 #election 2024 #neoconservatism #republicans #Republican #please vote #republican voters #fuck donald trump #conservatism #conservatives #conservative #never trump #nevertrump

[allthecanadianpolitics]

[...] Canada would support "humanitarian pauses" in the Israel-Hamas war to allow foreign nationals to leave Gaza and permit aid for civilians to enter the territory, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.

"Our priority throughout this needs to be the continued protection of innocent civilians. That's why we're engaged closely with our allies, trying to build humanitarian corridors," Trudeau told reporters. [...]

Trudeau has faced pressure from some members of his own caucus to call for a full ceasefire.

More than 30 MPs — most of them Liberals — wrote a letter to Trudeau last week calling on him to advocate for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. [...]

Earlier Tuesday, Defence Minister Bill Blair was asked why the government won't advocate for a ceasefire. He said Hamas, which the government lists as a terrorist organization, likely would ignore calls for a ceasefire. [...]

Continue Reading.

Note from poster @el-shab-hussein : Justin Trudeau thinks genocide should continue as long as you give its victims a water break. Apparently. One settler colony will always support another. Anyways, historically it has always been Israel that uses the PR cover of a ceasefire to continue bombing Ghazzah and to continue massacring Palestinians wherever they are within Palestine.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #Justin Trudeau #Liberals #neoconservatism #western imperialism #Foreign Policy #zionist occupation of Palestine

[liskantope]

I just watched V For Vendetta in honor of Guy Fawkes Day. I saw it back when it came out in theaters and don't know how many years it had been since I'd seen it last, but it was quite a few, certainly since pre-pandemic times.

On this viewing, it really struck me how well it seemed to encapsulate the political tenor of the time when it came out, at least from the point of view of my anti-neoconservative college student self. The establishing status quo denouncing godlessness, yelling about terrorists, quashing skepticism, and demanding unity reminds me sharply of how I viewed the spirit of Bush-support back then and almost makes me nostalgic for that ideological playing field (even though my more rational self knows better).

It also struck me how out of step it feels with the main political divides in the US in recent years. Neither side of today's political spectrum is really about quashing skepticism (at least certainly the Right isn't about this; it's closer to celebrating a sort of hyper-skepticism instead), and the whole god-vs.-no-god thing is an old battle that was fought and largely set aside quite a while ago. There is a sort of political hopelessness bordering on nihilism that overpowers either side's earnest goal of promoting unity; within each major political party there are divides starker than I remember being aware of the decade before last. Someone might make the point that a rising politician who treats constitutional checks on power with disdain reminds them of Trump or that we (like the Vendetta universe) have recently had to wrestle with a scary virus that shook the political scene up, but I find these analogies rather superficial.

#v for vendetta #fifth of november #neoconservatism #covid pandemic #our last president #culture wars #theism vs. atheism

[whereserpentswalk]

I think my dad is neoconservative in a way that makes him talk like a parody of other neocons. His reaction to Paul's arc in Dune Messiah was literally just "why is he so upset about committing genocide, he should learn to accept that that's part of being an empire."

#196 #my thougts #neoliberalism #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #imperialism #neocons #neoconservatism #leftist #leftism #anti imperialism #colonialism #us imperialism #dune #dune messiah #paul atreides

[sandinmybed]

#sorry i HAD to repost this one because ive seen too many people who avtually sound like this #with more buzzwords and air of superiority tho #shipping is fun let people do what they want #text #tweet #anti purity culture #neoconservatism #puriteens #idk what to tag this as #shipping discourse #ao3 #shipping

[azspot]

Neoconservatism and its crusader elements became something like a ghost rarely spoken of and even less remembered. George W. Bush was then remade in the liberal world as an affable grandpa who got along with Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, and was, by default, so much more acceptable than Trump that we needed to forget that he and his Neoconservative cronies launched a world war that violated a slew of international laws and killed upwards of four million people.

The Next Chapter: Trump, Haley, and the Radicalization Cycle

#gop #election2016 #bush #neoconservatism

[supernulperfection]

well

that's funny

@friendshapedhole

#*saddam to rumsfeld* “how did you learn this son” “i learned this from watching you” #politics #neoconservatism #war cw #history side of tumblr

[marsiansweeney]

Human Rights in the Time of Palestinian Genocide

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the staffers at USAID, who seem to have finally noticed that they work for the PR arm of the CIA and not a mosquito net NGO; and all it took was the US government’s explicit (and in no way unprecedented) support and endorsement of a genocide for them to see it! At least, that is, the ones working for Samantha Power have noticed, to which all I can say is that they should probably stop taking their bosses’ vanity publications at face value; let’s just say Debbie from HR isn’t posting about the food bank on Linkedin because she cares about homeless people.

“Human rights” get a lot of play in academia and media, and if you dig past the pious mumblings of elite liberals and the Military Industrial Complex, they could be read as the core theological assumption of the West’s covert religious perspective, a perspective baked into the international institutions to which all nations are subjected. In a country where such apostles of Humanism as neuroscientist and socially-acceptable demagogue Sam Harris advocate first-strike nuclear attacks on Muslim civilians to protect those very civilians human “rights”, it should surprise us little that human rights only exist in an ideal realm where there are no actual human beings to whom those rights could apply. Somehow, however, people like Power and her minions continue to be well received when they peddle the idea that the single largest global exporter of military coups is actually the greatest defender of human rights and the only obstacle to new Holocausts. This, despite the fact that the period of US global dominance has seen dozens of genocides, some under the direct supervision and support of the “civilized” Western world and its regime of human rights. The key to this paradox lies in the method of genocide prevention and human rights protection advocated by such soulless characters: geopolitical power projection and direct military intervention.

From Russia’s “holy war” against fascism in Ukraine to George W. Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism in whichever country he decides invented terrorism, the justification of human rights atrocities with the concept of human rights is a recurring theme of contemporary global politics. Such justification is actually the primary instrumental purpose of this rhetoric, with political power balancing being the only real motivating factor for states and their puppeteers. The USSR loved communism, until they noticed anti-Soviet Trotskyists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War; America loves democracy, until they notice pro-Soviet Marxists have been democratically elected in Chile; the Russian Federation is the bulwark against fascism, until some fascist paramilitaries offer up their services in invading Ukraine. The real question is one of power for states and political blocs, the ideological element is only a useful justification in the event that it supports the advancement of power politics.

In the case of the Palestinian people, one need only remember the moralizing about the Uyghur genocide that took the internet-based “discourse” by storm a few years ago. The Chinese detainment, ethnic cleansing, and cultural genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs, always justified with the logic of counter-terrorism and “self-defense”, directly paralleled the Palestinian genocide in many ways, until the Palestinians’ suffering escalated following October 7th. All the human rights crusaders who wanted “stand up to China” on the Uyghur question have changed their tune now. They aren’t just silent on the Palestinian question, most of the defenders of the Uyghurs are now vocally defending Israel’s genocide. This time, rather than cultural genocide in the form of forced reeducation and the destruction of Uyghurs’ culture and religious heritage, the Israelis are truly and explicitly committing a physical genocide of the people of Gaza. Now, over 30,000 people into an open act of genocide, the reactions of humanitarians like Power and Harris range from gentle critiques and calls for dropping crates on people’s heads, to condemnation of Islam itself as the real cause of the conflict, furthering the narrative of a clash between the “human rights” oriented civilization of the West, and the Islamic civilization of the faceless oriental Other. I hope that maybe as more innocent people are fed into the gears of the Israeli military machine, more beltway ghouls and mindless media consumers will notice that they are the very goosestepping fascists they so desire to see bombed, couped, and invaded out of existence.

#foreign policy #geopolitics #israel #palestine #human rights #USAID #neoconservatism #genocide

[thenamesofthings]

Bombing Iraq Is Not Enough

Reprinted with permission of the New York Times, January 30, 1998

Saddam Hussein must go. This imperative may seem too simple for some experts and too daunting for the Clinton Administration. But if the United States is committed, as the President said in his State of the Union Message, to insuring that the Iraqi leader never again uses weapons of mass destruction, the only way to achieve that goal is to remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from power. Any policy short of that will fail.

The good news is this: The Administration has abandoned efforts to win over the Iraqi leader with various carrots. It is clear that Mr. Hussein wants his weapons of mass destruction more than he wants oil revenue or relief for hungry Iraqi children. Now the Administration is reportedly planning military action - a three- or four-day bombing campaign against Iraqi weapons sites and other strategic targets. But the bad news is that this too will fail. In fact, when the dust settles, we may be in worse shape than we are today.

Think about what the world will look like the day after the bombing ends. Mr. Hussein will still be in power - if five weeks of heavy bombing in 1991 failed to knock him out, five days of bombing won’t either. Can the air attacks insure that he will never be able to use weapons of mass destruction again? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Even our smart bombs cannot reliably hit and destroy every weapons and storage site in Iraq, for the simple reason that we do not know where all the sites are. After the bombing stops, Mr. Hussein will still be able to manufacture weapons of mass destruction…

—Robert Kagan

Mr. Kagan is the son of Neocon movement founder Donald Fagan, an academic known for realpolitik analyses of the ancient Greek world with strong implications for American policy. He is also the husband of Under Secretary of State Vicky Nuland.

#these people need to go #neoconservatism #WMD #American foreign policy

[unimatrix-420]

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Edward Abbey

#quotes #conservatives #conservatism #politics #right wing extremists #neoconservatism #babylon #hell #lol #funny #anarchy #anarchist #anarchism #socialism #communism #capitalism #anticapitalism #edward abbey #evil

[machiavelli-official]

if boys could choose they would all be low restosterone. why would any one choose to be a straight guy?? wish i wasnt, otherwise...

#neoconservatism #afganistan

[zwischenstadt]

But what did neoconservatives mean by 'counterculture'? The historian of neoconservatism, Justin Vaisse, describes the New Left counterculture as primarily a phenomenon of the white, educated, middle class who had 'time and money to spare.' This new class of militants, composed for the most part of college students and antiwar protestors, reacted against the reformism of the civil rights movement and defined itself in opposition to both the blue-collar trade union movement and the lower-middle class whites who represented the core constituency of the Democratic Party. Yet Vaisse's characterization of the countercultural left relies heavily on neoconservatism's own denunciations of the 'new class' and conflicts with other accounts of the shifting power relations within the left during the 1960s. Far from being confined to the white, college-educated middle class, the anti-authoritarianism of the counterculture reached far into the blue-collar labor movement during this period, provoking the president of the United Automobile Workers' Walter Reuther to remark that official trade unionism would need to adapt itself to a very different kind of worker. The irruption of extralegal, wildcat militancy within the ranks of the labor movement was particularly disturbing to the neoconservative Samuel Huntington. As Huntington recognized, the antireformist spirit of the 'counterculture' extended well beyond the white middle class to embrace blue-collar labor activism, black liberation, and the welfare rights movement, where it found expression in a newfound willingness to question the authority of the family as an instrument of social discipline. This perhaps explains why neoconservative denunciations of the counterculture tend to begin with general fulminations against the white, educated, and privileged student class - the 'new class' - but just as insistently conclude with the figure of the black welfare recipient. In text after text, neoconservative critique of the counterculture somehow transmutes into a critique of the AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), the welfare program that they perceived, no doubt correctly, as the linchpin of the Fordist social order, and a virulent attack on the activists whom they saw as most responsible for disturbing this order.

AFDC recipients could hardly be characterized as the most privileged of social subjects, and yet the neoconservatives consistently describe welfare mothers as a nonproductive rentier class - a lumpenproletariat that has taken on the qualities of the idle aristocracy by virtue of its dependence on the 'unearned income' of welfare benefits. Neoconservative rhetoric caters to the resentment of Fordism's most protected workers by reversing the order of actual social hierarchy amongst the poor, presenting itself as the defender of the white blue-collar working class against the demands of an unproductive rentier class of welfare queens, a move that is characteristic of reactionary populism on both left and right. If inflation had come to be associated in the popular imagination with the problem of sumptuary speculation - since everyday consumers had learnt that it was in their interests to buy on credit - the moral denunciations that accompanied this observation fell disproportionately on the shoulders of the nonworking poor.

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

#neoconservatism #melinda cooper #welfare state #feminism #feminist critique #1970s #politics #united states #justin vaisse

[liskantope]

Looking back at the culture war battles of 2022, one development that particularly sticks out to me is the American Republican/anti-woke side latching on to the idea of everything social progressives call for that involves minors being a form of "grooming" and/or adjacent to pedophilia. This welled up during the 2022 midterm campaign season and I doubt it reached its final boil during the elections; it probably isn't dying down anytime just yet.

My first reaction, around mid-2022, to seeing this new-ish trend was that it was once again an example of the Right looking at a rhetorical tactic of the Left (in this case, finding a near-universally despised personal trait and relentlessly tarring as many opinions as possible from the opposing side as coming from that trait) and deciding that hey, two can play at this game. The main name that the Left has taken to using against as many opposing opinions as possible is "racist"/"racism", and what's arguably the one label even worse to have attached to you than "racist"? Probably "pedophile" or (more mildly) "groomer".

From that point of view, I can see where this Republican/anti-woke strategy comes from, to the extent that it's been consciously employed and regardless of how blatantly hypocritical it is. But it still caught me by surprise and feels strange, I think because of my impression of being anti-grooming as more of a liberal progressive cause. Now mind you, I know that anything adjacent to pedophilia is reviled by pretty much all parts of the political spectrum, and I also know that the conservative Right (at least in America) has a history of tarring gay people as secretly pedophiles, insinuating that open homosexuality (and other forms of queerness) corrupts and endangers children, and so on. But over the 5-10 years or so previous to the rise of "groomer" accusations from the conservative side, I had come to firmly code raising the alarm about grooming behavior as more of a progressive SJ-ish thing, naturally occurring as a part of the Me Too movement. I had been exposed to a lot of talk in progressive circles about the power differentials that come with age differentials and so on. The whole Josh Duggar scandal some years back seemed split roughly along political lines, with only conservatives (most infamously Mike Huckabee) being willing to come to his defense. And I had a vague notion that liberal people took child molestation and terrible behavior adjacent to it as a sort of higher-priority societal crisis than conservatives did, much as this was clearly the case with rape in general.

So I had thought of cries of "Groomer!" and "Pedophile!" as similar to cries of "Racist!" in that they involve a name that absolutely nobody wants to be branded with, which refers to a type of person that almost everyone looks down upon and is determined not to be but which the Right has a stricter definition of, doesn't see in as many places, and tends to think the Left is overly paranoid about. And yet, for the time being at least, the Right seems to have gotten hold of "Groomer!" and "Pedophile!".

I found this a sort of bemusing (and also of course disturbing) irony, given the extent to which so many socially progressive people around me see grooming / pedophilia / child abuse as a very serious problem and are very sincere in their concerns about it. And to be honest, one of the things I couldn't help saying to myself was, "Let's see how this goes and how people feel when 'Groomer!' is used against them, when the other side stretches at every possible opportunity to compare our side to something we truly find despicable whenever we stand for something they don't like. Maybe this will give some people a new insight about how ineffective it is to blast everything they don't like on the other side as "racist" or other -ists or otherwise coming from something purely evil. It's going to be interesting to see how this changes the dynamic."

(It's worth mentioning as a qualification that the American Right did do something like this as recently as the mid-00's with comparing everyone less hawkish than them with terrorist-sympathizers, but that was a little less direct and seems to have already faded from many people's memories. A closer example would be some decades earlier when an awful lot of Americans seemed determined to brand anyone to the left of them as a Communist sympathizer, but of course this is even further removed from the present.)

It's interesting to look back on this half a year later, because I definitely intended to write a more sharply pointed post expressing most of my paragraphs above sometime around last summer, but it got lost in the shuffle as many of my potential blog posts do. And now it seems like it sort of came to an anticlimax. Anti-woke conservatives did quite well in the midterms as long as they weren't too Trumpy, but Democrats put in a better-than-expected performance. My liberal colleagues and acquaintances mostly seem to have ignored conservative rhetoric about groomers or just dismissed it as idiotic (which, to be fair, it basically is) rather than let it bother them beyond that, either on a direct, immediate level or in terms of making them rethink messaging or persuasive rhetoric from their/our own side. All of this seems to be fizzling over, relative to what I imagined back around July.

#culture war #midterms #grooming #me too campaign #josh duggar #child molestation #neoconservatism #anti-communism hysteria

[mckitterick]

"Neoliberalism"

the term has always bothered me, because it's the opposite of what we in the USA call "liberalism" -

"Neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free-market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare-state social democracies, for being in favor of or against increased immigration, for favoring trade and globalization or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term."

- Phillip W Magness

that's kinda the problem with the term: it means everything and, thus, nothing

I've always cringed whenever I see or hear it, unsure if the person using the term is a free-market capitalist or libertarian or authoritarian or progressive or any of a thousand other political alignments and trying to confuse matters, because the general understanding of politics among most of the world seems to be:

liberal vs conservative / socialist vs capitalist / democratic vs authoritarian / diplomatic vs hawkish / etc

those of us who stay away from the right-wingnut internet and news realm tend to only hear the term as derogatory for "fascist capitalist war-mongers," while right-wingers tend to only hear the term as derogatory for "fascist communist peaceniks" (because they also intentionally misunderstand what "fascism" means)

I hate that "neoconservative" and "neoliberal" mean the same thing nowadays

I mean, does anyone actually use "fiscally liberal" to mean "unregulated capitalist"?

I think Phillip W Magness might be onto something when he says the term essentially exists to demonize any "set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term" - and the right-wing always appropriates language to muddy the waters for everyone (because they require their base to be ignorant and their opponents to be confused)

petition to resume linguistic clarity for socio-economic and political terms

#language #neoliberalism #neoconservatism #clarity #terminology #uncredited image from China Daily

[grandhotelabyss]

Lorentzen on Hitchens in Harper’s. I agree with all the substantive judgments. His late-life politics were wrong—not morally wrong, but disjunct from reality. And his style of atheism was puerile and confused—if there is no God, then whence human rights?—a lapse in taste to which the English Protestant character seems prone. 

Now if he’d been a Nietzschean atheist, a kind of 21st-century Marinetti—! If he’d have said, “We must create new values through violence! We must bomb those fuckers because we’re stronger!” instead of, “We have to help the long-suffering Kurds”—then I, who never claimed not be a sentimentalist, would still have opposed the policy, because it proved pointlessly destructive to others and degraded our own nation too; but at least his literary performance would have been something aesthetically.

As for the present’s shifting political ground, how do those of us trying to stay on our feet compare to Hitch? Like him, I don’t actually think I have changed most of my positions, only that the situation has altered. Possibly a delusion in both cases, of course. I appreciate that Lorentzen doesn’t entertain the “Hitchens would have supported Trump” brainwave of the middlebrow Twitterati. With his Mencken strain, he had no national-populism in his repertoire; and with his Orwellian allegiance, he would have disdained the leader’s campy grandiosity. Only at his most Wildean might this witty and class-climbing divo have spotted his reflection in Trump’s gilded commode, and even then he would have recoiled from too much self-knowledge.

Lorentzen’s occasion is a new collection of Hitchens’s writings from the London Review of Books. I read all the LRB pieces, mostly book reviews, collected in Unacknowledged Legislation. I will quote, in conclusion and on the topic of neoconservatisms old and new, Hitchens on Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom from his review of Ravelstein:

Thin though this novel may be, and perfunctory in keeping its commitment as the unwritten memoir that Bellow promised to Bloom in a moment of weakness, it does exemplify some of the stoicism of the neo-conservative mentality. ‘Ravelstein’ doesn’t whine as the end approaches. We don’t actually see him die (Bellow’s own near-death experience follows, perhaps, too hard upon) but we witness him in the humiliating shipwreck of his last illness and he remains a wise-cracking atheist and materialist. ‘Chick’ chooses to see this as a pose, and to take literally Ravelstein’s expiring gags about a reunion beyond the grave, which strikes me in the light of a slight but significant breach of faith. Say what you will about the Straussians, they aren’t hypocrites or weaklings and they don’t burble about heavenly rewards to make up for when the mind has gone. Indeed, they have made rather a pointed study of the dignified hemlockian terminus. Bloom should have been allowed this last nobility.

#christopher hitchens #christian lorentzen #neoconservatism #allan bloom #saul bellow #literary criticism

[matthewclan]

“After Election Day [1976], neoconservatism scored its major victory behind the scenes.

“The formerly Marxist immigrant Jews [who were] at the forefront of the movement had trained rigorously for political warfare in the hothouse ideological environment of the Depression, most famously in furious debates in the alcoves of the cafeteria of the City University of New York. They came of age in the passionate belief that Communism was the inevitable wave of the future. They still suspected this—only now they dedicated their lives to vanquishing it, for the survival of the West in the ongoing war for the world. Détente, they believed, was a fatal delusion. The ever-expanding cadres of quisling liberals within both parties, who refused to grasp that Communism was determined to conquer the world, were the Kremlin’s objective allies.

“They also still believed, as the had in their Marxist youth, that the most effective way to change history was to organize in subterranean cells, vanguardists guiding the hand of history by deploying the power of ideas. Thus did they burrow within the establishment to tutor Republican and Democratic politicians in these dire imperatives before it was too late.

“Washington conventional wisdom had not been kind to them: it held that the world was ‘multipolar,’ and ‘interdependent,’ rivalry between the Communist and capitalist worlds no longer the central concern, that after the debacle in Vietnam the United States could no longer act as the world’s policeman.”

–Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 42-43.

#quote #Eric Perlstein #Reaganland #politics #neoconservatism