What America needs: de-neoconification

I have a question. But before I ask it, please look at this excerpt from an article of mine that I have often linked, “National Defense or Global Empire?” published at FrontPage Magazine on October 21, 2002:

In a talk published in the September 2002 Imprimis, Midge Decter says that if we defeat Hussein and stay in the Mideast for the long haul, we can succeed in transforming the entire region in a more free and democratic direction: “That, after all, is what happened in Germany. We stayed there. We took the Germans through the ritual of de-Nazification. And then came Konrad Adenauer [who] with the strength of our friendship and commitment behind him … brought the Germans from darkness to light.”

The obvious problem with the idea of America re-ordering the Arab Mideast just as it did post-Nazi Germany is that Arabs are not like Germans. As a friend put it to me recently, Germans do what they are told and Arabs do not; Germans are governable and Arabs are not—a view supported by the complete absence of consensual government anywhere in the Arab world. There is simply no basis for assuming that West Germany’s political and moral reformation following World War II proves that the same sort of thing can happen in any Arab country, let alone in all Arab countries. Remember also that parliamentary democracy had existed in Germany prior to Hitler under the Weimar Republic, and that, even before Weimar, Germany had many of the prerequisites of democracy that today’s Arab states have never possessed, such as the rule of law, an impartial judiciary, an educated populace, a mostly free press, and a government dedicated to the public interest.

Decter nevertheless believes that a democratic transformation of Arab society is entirely achievable, and here is her reason: “[T]he world is everywhere full of ordinary people who want exactly what we want, though they may not even dare to dream of it. [Emphasis added.] Whether they are Asians or Africans or Middle Easterners or Latin Americans, what they want is a decent place to live, decent food to eat, to be able to stick around long enough to watch their children grow and prosper, and perhaps above all, not to get pushed around by people with guns in their hands.”

As silly as it sounds, what Decter is telling us is that all human beings are identical in the attributes that matter politically, and that the attributes that matter politically are simply the universal human instincts for food, shelter, and physical survival. Because Muslims have the same physical needs as ourselves, the same desire to raise children, and the same preference not to be cruelly mistreated, that, according to Decter, means that we can successfully transplant American-style democracy into their countries, and that they will have the ability and will to nurture and preserve it!

Here’s my question. Why should anyone who has uttered the idiotic tripe that Midge Decter and her fellow neoconservatives have been spreading about for the past several years, and that was the basis for our absurd and doomed attempt to democratize of Iraq, have any legitimacy in our national politics? In a sane society, they would have no credibility. They would be discredited, they would be finished—unless they de-neoconified themselves by publicly renouncing and apologizing for the false and ruinous ideas they had promoted.

But the neocons, like President Bush, are always saved by one thing: that compared to the insane and anti-American left, they seem rational, responsible, and patriotic.

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Cindy writes:

“[T]he world is everywhere full of ordinary people who want exactly what we want, though they may not even dare to dream of it. [Emphasis added.] Whether they are Asians or Africans or Middle Easterners or Latin Americans, what they want is a decent place to live, decent food to eat, to be able to stick around long enough to watch their children grow and prosper, and perhaps above all, not to get pushed around by people with guns in their hands.”

This is exactly, almost word-for-word, what my most Left-leaning friend used to tell me…a person who believed in one-world government and an international court system, who talked endlessly about the evils of the military-industrial complex and Clear channel, how the U.S. is the world’s bully, and how Howard Dean is a straight-up great guy. And this is coming from a so-called conservative?!? As John Derbyshire has written, both liberals and neocons think that even the wildest, most backwards people on earth are potential middle-class Americans if we only we bring the light of reason to them.

No doubt a good many people of the world living under horrible conditions crave a decent place to live, decent food, and to be able to watch their children grow and prosper, but I think a key difference between the conservative and liberal outlook is that conservatives believe that culture can and does warp some of the most basic, natural instincts of humans to such an extent that that culture or person is unredeemable, while liberals do not. To conservatives, this explains why Palestinian mothers are happy and proud of the fact that their sons are blowing themselves up and taking as many infidels with them as possible. Does this not go against one of the strongest desires of what we in the West consider to be mentally healthy human beings—for parents to want their children to thrive and live a better life than they did?

Randy writes:

Your explanation further clarifies the reason the neocons see no problem with massive third world immigration and all that goes with it. Whether we go there or they come here, it is all the same. We will convert them to our ways and then we will all join hands in a world wide, borderless, democratic, globalist free market, multicultural paradise. The US is the prototype-a mini, borderless universal nation. The Tower of Babel all over again. It is one thing when the loony, Marxist left talks this way, but now neocon Republicans? The first thing a traditionalist president should do is get us out of the UN and get it off of American soil (or maybe second after sealing the borders).

A reader writes:

Subject: “we’re all the same”

When I hear this as a rationale for a foreign policy, I turn it around—if we’re all the same, aren’t the Muslims justified in thinking that we’d convert to their way of life, that we’d welcome Allah the merciful if we just opened our minds and hearts?

Hey, if we’re “all the same”, why aren’t we ALL THE SAME??

I’m afraid Midge is a bread-alone conservative. “We’re all the same” is socialism without the chains of equality. I recall the essay in which Orwell mentioned that Hitler understood that man did not live by bread alone.

LA replies:

Neocons can’t recognize your point because both Islam and neoconservatism have universal claims. A universalistic system can not fully recognize an opposing universalistic system. Instead, it characterizes it as “dead-enders,” “extremists,” “infidels,” and so on.

> “We’re all the same” is socialism without the chains of equality.

That’s really good.

Paul K. writes:

Midge Decter’s inane observation reminds me of something a old liberal friend said to me years ago: “Deep down, you and I both want the same thing—a better world for our children.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and the differences between what you and I think would make for a better world are what wars are fought over.”

LA replies:

Of course it’s an inane observation. But please recognize that it’s not just a silly comment made by one person. What Decter said in 2002 became the leading argument and slogan of the promoters of Muslim democratization.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 24, 2006 12:27 AM | Send