The neocons’ quasi-Marxist mindset

A reader reports on an interview Fred Barnes gave last week on Catherine Crier’s program on Court TV discussing his new book on President Bush:

Barnes said that economic conservatives have lost the argument over big government. Of conservatives who oppose Bush, he said, “They’re isolationists, nativists, and want a government William McKinley would have had. They are living in another century and don’t accept the world as it really is.” Barnes didn’t mention, and Crier didn’t ask him, about Bush’s amnesty proposals.

Barnes is a lightweight who goes along with the prevailing fashion. Calling those who favor restrictions on the border “nativists” is standard neocon-Beltway boilerplate. To these people, the issue is not even to be debated. This helps explain Barnes’s refusal to write about the subject.

I wonder how it could be said that the small government side “lost the argument”? True, the big government side has won politically. But how did they win any argument?

Barnes’s comment shows the liberal progressivist assumptions. Whatever is materially ascendant at this moment is simply assumed to be the “winner” of history and everything must bow to it and shape itself around it. The notion of resisting a momentarilly or apparently victorious force doesn’t occur to such people. Their thinking is of the deterministic, “dialectical materialism” variety, as a recent article in The American Conservative argued.

By coincidence, just as I was typing the above remark about the materialist-determinist mindset of neoconservatives, a friend called to tell me about a debate he heard today on CSPAN-2 between William Kristol and Bernard-Henri Levi. Though Levi himself has sometimes been described as a neoconservative, he said that the neocons have adopted aspects of Communism, with their push for democracy evidencing the utopianism of Communism, and that he is very disturbed by this. My informant also reports that Levi had his chest hair covered for once. Could there be a counterrevolution in the works?

According to Powerline’s summary of the debate, while Levi praised the neocons for their support of democracy (though not for their belief that quasi-Hegelian-Marxist belief that democratization is inevitable, he criticized them for supporting religion, supporting the death penalty, and opposing abortion. Sounds as though Levi is still a man of the left.
A reader writes:

Fred Barnes is pretty much echoing what George Will wrote nearly four years ago (April 25, 2002):

The conservatism that defined itself in reaction against the New Deal—minimal government conservatism—is dead…. But some conservatives, addicted to disgruntlement, still have the oppositional mentality…. Habits, especially intellectual ones, die hard.

In other words the big government elitists have hijacked the conservative movement from the small government conservatives who put the Republican party in power and the thanks they (the voters) receive from the elites is a huge dose of contempt. This Will column even upset Sean Hannity, but not long enough to knock him off the Bush big government bandwagon.

I agree with the reader’s point, but dislike the term “hijacked,” which is used far too often on the right, as in “Those people [usually the neocons] hijacked conservatism.” “Hijacked” suggests that something illegitimate or sneaky took place, when, in fact, the leading neoconservatives, while they are certainly not above misdirection, have repeatedly and openly stated that their aim is to “modernize,” i.e., liberalize, conservatism. To complain about conservatism being hijacked by neoconservatives makes traditionalist conservatives see themselves as victims rather than as people who have lost a political battle—and who, if they want to stop being losers, must take up the battle again. There is, in any case, no choice but to do so. Either we allow the movement to continue toward a more and more bureaucratically managed society and the destruction of our culture and our humanity that is promised by such a society, or we seek to resist and reverse that movement. George Will-style “sophistication” leaves us with no option but surrender.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2006 05:06 PM | Send