Richard Perle, scourge of Communists, welcomer of Muslims

Ten years ago Norman Podhoretz deceptively announced the demise of neoconservatism, which he described as the merging of neoconservatism into conservatism, but by which he really meant the takeover of conservatism by neoconservatism. But now there is a case to be made that neoconservatism really has ceased to exist, not by merging with conservatism, but by merging with liberalism. How else to account for the fact that Richard Perle, once the unswerving soul of the Reagan administration’s Cold War efforts against the Soviet Union, is now campaigning for the admission into the EU of the Islamic nation of Turkey? It is becoming more and more clear that any distinct mission that neoconservatism may once have had, as a corrective to the domestic and foreign follies of liberalism, is gone. Notwithstanding the neoconservatives’ aggressive “spread democracy” ideology for which liberals loathe them, the neocons are champions of civilizational suicide, just as the liberals are.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 05, 2005 11:48 AM | Send