Good piece, Mr. Auster. A sad state of affairs. Remember when neoconservative meant funny, whimsical things like: “A liberal who’s been mugged by reality”?

Scott McConnell’s article in the American Conservative is usefully read together with Gottfried’s. The stunning part is when he talks about his churchgoing giving him sympathy for the Palestinians: certainly the “ordinary” Palestinian deserves a measure of sympathy, but to single them out when, say, Sudanese Muslims slay and enslave literally millions of people, makes one ask, why? Oh yes, they are being “oppressed” by Israel. (In one of his church services, Mary is referred to as “a Palestinian”.)
The one thing that has made me question the National Review/WSJ type of conservatism is their stance on mass immigration, clearly the greatest folly to come down the pike since Diocletian initiated wage and price controls. But the paleos penchant for saying anti-Semitic things, whether in code or not, is very off-putting.
And if conservatives can still be self-deprecating, a counter to Paul Cella’s quote: “A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.”

Mr. Auster makes an excellent point. The Buchananites have opposed the war out of sheer anger. Even if one takes the position that the war is not justified through a national security interest, it’s a minor battle in comparison to the immigration issue. Instead of focusing their criticism of the neocons on the issues where they have genuine vulnerability (social issues like the gay agenda and immigration), some Paleos have in effect ceded the battle by foolishly allying themselves with the anti-America left, which is a guarantee for marginalization. As I recall, Matt also predicted this outcome.

“The brutal fact is that the antiwar right has been using “neoconservative” as a stand-in for “Jew” and in a manner that closely parallels classic anti-Semitic expressions.”

The only people who keep insisting this is so are the neocons. The paleos I’ve seen use it to mean neocon, i.e., George Will every bit as much as Bill Kristol.

This nonsense is just victimology: “A lot of us neocons are Jewish, so if you don’t buy into our agenda, you must be anti-Semitic!”

Gracian wrote: “The stunning part is when [McConnell] talks about his churchgoing giving him sympathy for the Palestinians.”

What motivates McConnell in my view is a blind, emotional reactivism. Whatever is opposed to the neocons and Israel, McConnell will find common cause with. He talks about going to church and suddenly discovering within himself a deep sympathy for the Palestinians. Yet so blind is he, so caught up in his animus against Israel which he won’t admit to himself, that he can’t see that his spiritual epiphany about the Palestinians is on exactly the same level as the liberal Christians’ endless sympathy with all the victims of American “racism,” and their view of America as a guilty country permanently obligated to atone for its sins against the nonwhite world, even to the point of committing national suicide.

As we’ve seen over and over, when it comes to Israel, the antiwar paleos turn into leftists.

Nick,

Don’t bother. Larry Auster long ago lost his ability to read anything by the paleo right without frothing at the mouth. In his fevered mind (and, unfortunately, not his alone), paleo writing is full of code-words disguising a secret bigotry against Jews and Israel. Nothing means what is seems to mean but must be interpreted as instantiations of the hatred he knows lurks in the hearts of the paleos.

You’d think he’d know better than to propagate the hermeneutics of hatred. After all, Auster’s own writings on race and immigration are certainly open to similarly fantastic readings. But he doesn’t know better, and he continues to diminish himself by siding with David Frum over Paul Gottfried on the question of the paleos.

Paul Gottfried wrote:
“It is increasingly useless to depend on out-group surrogates to repackage a movement so clearly rooted in a particular ethnicity—and even subethnicity (Eastern European Jews). Better to seek cover by changing a culturally-specific label into something more generic.”

This strikes me as an odd statement, revealing to some extent the antinomy underlying the paleo tendency to identify neoconservatism with Jewry. If neoconservatism and Jewry are more or less the same thing then why bother with the word “neoconservative” at all? Once again paleos snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in this case discursively. “Neoconservative” is — or was — a perfectly servicable word referring to a certain ideological orientation (or as I would normally say it, referring to a certain class of liberal). Seemingly out of wishful thinking, paleos have convinced themselves that neoconservatism is primarily a Jewish phenomenon (which it is, I suppose, to the same extent that, for example, modern medicine is primarily a Jewish phenomenon).

Neoconservatism is of course a much larger and much more dangerous ideological phenomenon than the paleo overemphasis on identification with Jewry implies. Part of liberalism’s genius is its tendency to disallow labeling; if you can’t name the enemy it is far more difficult to fight against him. By taking a discursively narrow, integrist, and yes at times anti-Semitic approach to neoconservatism paleos have allowed the actual Beast to slip its label. Fighting the Nameless is a dangerous and difficult game; granting the power of Namelessness to a known enemy as a freely given gift is inexcusable.

This line of reasoning - the term “Neocon” is anti-semitic - seems to rest on an implicit appeal to an idea that neocons explicitly deny. Namely the neoconservative ideology is dominated by Jews.

The term neocon is not at all anti-Semitic, or should not be. Mr. Eubanks sees a contradiction in the (neocon) argument that it is where there isn’t one, though. The neocon position has now become an assertion that there is no such thing as neoconservatism: that only anti-Semites use the term at all, and then only as an intellectually illegitimate slur. That latest neocon argument — the denial that neoconservatism exists at all as something distinct from the set of all possible legitimate conservative thought — was a gift given to the neocons by paleos.

Readers might wish to take note that Mr. Gottfried is Jewish himself, and made a rather pointed remark about both of his parents being Jewish in another VDARE piece (last week) in which he took issue with Jonah Goldberg and David Frum. I think that Matt is correct about neoconservatism being a particular type of liberalism.

The point raised about an irrational, anger-driven animus is a legitimate one. How on earth could Scott McConnell sympathize with the idea that the Virgin Mary is somehow “Palestinian”? She was as Jewish as it is possible to be - from the Jewish royal family. This is the kind of statement one could expect from the likes of Joan Brown Campbell of the NCC - but from a conservative? Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has been quite ruthless in its persecution of the Arab Christian minority, so there is no possible justification for supporting them even from a narrow Christian partisan point of view. The only explanation for the stance taken by certain Paleos is some sort of all-consuming rage directed against Israel and Jews. As Matt pointed out, this behavior is self-defeating - allowing another form of liberalism to shed its name and slip away without a serious challenge.

“How on earth could Scott McConnell sympathize with the idea that the Virgin Mary is somehow “Palestinian”? She was as Jewish as it is possible to be - from the Jewish royal family. This is the kind of statement one could expect from the likes of Joan Brown Campbell of the NCC - but from a conservative?”

Exactly. Yet more evidence of how many (though not all ) paleocons increasingly sound like the liberal left, and increasingly seem to be adopting the liberal left’s ideology on foreign policy, war and Israel. And they accuse neocon’s of being liberal?

Mary a Palestinian? How are we supposed to take paleocons seriously if this is the kind of drivel they are spouting?

“Mary a Palestinian? How are we supposed to take paleocons seriously if this is the kind of drivel they are spouting?”

McConnell’s Mary the Palestinian is like Jesse Jackson’s Mary the Single Mother and Mary and Joseph the Homeless Couple. These are the kinds of things people say when they’re driven by some false emotion or ideology and want to bend reality to their wishes.

“Yet more evidence of how many (though not all) paleocons increasingly sound like the liberal left, and increasingly seem to be adopting the liberal left’s ideology on foreign policy, war and Israel. And they accuse neocons of being liberal?”

Great line!

Nick Danger, Third Eye. I have not heard that name in centuries. For the unfamiliar, Nick Danger is a character protrayed in the 1970’s on stereo LP’s by a comedy group, Firesign Theatre.

Paleos and Vdare writers (the latter make me wince the most, as 90% of their agenda is on the mark) would be more convincing if they would drop the infantile and revealing epithet “Goldberg Review” to refer to NR. Anti-Semitism? Not here folks!

There is an interesting trend afoot.

A year ago you could have mentioned the term “neoconservative” to nearly anyone and gotten a blank stare. It was a term only a handful of the greater population had every heard let alone might understand. Lately, not only is it common currency, but it’s meaning is being co-opted. It seems to have become synonymous with “nefarious” to many. It fact that usage seems to becoming so widespread that I’m beginning to suspect that it might an orchestrated manipulation.

There’s no secret about it at all. For the last year and a half, “neocon” has been used by many on the antiwar right to mean wicked, sneaky, nefarious. It has not been used primarily as a word intended to convey meaning. It has been used primarily as a word intended to produce strong negative feelings. In short, “neocon” has been made into a hate word, or at least a quasi-hate word.

And let’s be clear about this. The people on the antiwar right who were doing this knew exactly what they were doing.

Well, Mr. Auster, you are partly correct. The antiwar right recognized the threat posed by the Jewish-Episcopalian (with some Catholic turncoats, probably Vatican II fans) conspiracy to take over the right by moving it to the left.

The neocons claim to trace their roots to the anti-segregation, anticommunist, strong national defense, secularly-biased (anti-blue law, against legislated morality) group of feathers on the right wing of the old Democrat party. Remember, some of the older ones did support labor unions. Sure, they claim that that was when some labor leaders were patriots who were after fairness, and that when the patriots died, so did the neocon affinity for what’s left of unions, or so they say. But who kept Solidarity alive?

It’s no secret that this group does not believe in creationism, but accepts science (and its spawn, technology) a whole lot more than right-thinking folks ought to. What’s almost worse, these folks are pro-immigration because they are for free markets, that insidious libertarian counter to the mercantilist tradition that served the Empire so well.

These neocon clowns don’t realize that the American Experiment is based on Western European genes and religion, not on a readily assimilated intellectual and cultural foundation with roots in those complex notions of personal liberty and responsibility. Hah, they even believe that Orientals can live these dreams in their lands when we all know that that these pagans are suited for no more than running restaurants and laundries.

Neocons probably support fluoridation too. Need I write more?

Lawrence Auster,

I agree that the anti-war intellectually retarded right started the usage… but that would have kept it amongst the wonkish. It’s the fact that the term has caught on so strongly with the Democrat party actives that is what I was thinking about.

Fortress Neocon itself seems to be somewhat more self-aware than paleoconservatism. Since “neoconservative” has become an emotional rather than intellectual designator, in large part due to the recent activities of paleos, the neocons are looking for a new label. That is a more honest approach than Limbaugh’s “the only authentic conservatism is me” approach.

http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire050803.asp

Of course I would be happier if Mr. Derbyshire stated the forthright truth of the matter: his “metropolitan conservative” is just a form of liberal. In fact the “metropolitan conservative” is what used to be called a liberal, and what is now called a liberal is a leftist. As observed elsewhere on VFR the fundamental loyalties of leftists and liberals (of which the “metropolitan conservative” is a form) are the same — they disagree on tactics and timing; but freedom, equality, and democracy are their political bedrock.

Part of the problem, also observed elsewhere on VFR, is that politics has been irrevocably radicalized. There is no longer room for a “conservative” of any sort. There is traditionalism, and there is liberalism; there are various forms of each. Every individual person has his own loyalties to these ideological possibilities, and the loyalties of many are conflicted. But the possibility of a “conservative” (of any sort) has been precluded by the fact that liberalism now utterly dominates all respectable ideology everywhere in the civilized world. “Conserve liberalism!” is as self-contradictory as liberalism itself.

Mr. Derbyshire’s new book _Prime Obsession_ is quite good, by the way, for anyone who has math-geek tendencies like me.