The neocons consummate their unresisted rape of conservatism

In today’s New York Post the two-legged creature known as Jonah Goldberg endorses the homosexualization of the U.S. military. In doing so, he adopts the argument first used by the neoconservatives’ paramount leader Norman Podhoretz in 1996 with regard to homosexual “marriage”: that the demand for homosexual “marriage”—like the demand for homosexuals in the military—is proof that homosexuals are no longer revolutionary or threatening to society, but want to become part of society’s bourgeois and patriotic institutions. Therefore such demands are actually a victory for conservatism and should be welcomed by conservatives.

To repeat the point, which almost redefines the word chutzpah: Podhoretz, and now Goldberg, define the total subversion of America’s moral values and institutions—they define the most radical social innovation in human history—as a victory for conservatism.

Goldberg also says: “Personally, I’ve always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability…” In other words, he always supported it. No one ever says that a revolutionary step is “inevitable,” unless he supports it.

Of course, for the last many years Goldberg’s frequently repeated position has been that he supports civil unions, not homosexual marriage. Which is further proof of a point I’ve made many times (and I made it recently about President Obama): when people say they support homosexual civil unions but not homosexual marriage, what they really mean is that they support homosexual marriage, but just aren’t ready to say so yet.

In any case, we keep seeing with more and more clarity—though the clarity is far from pleasant—the real role of the neocons, midi-cons, micro-cons, NRO-cons, and teeny-cons in modern American politics. As was stated plainly by Irving Kristol in 2003, it is to turn American conservatism into a form of liberalism. The neocons have carried out that traitorous task with a total absence of intellectual conscience, and with an almost total absence of intellectual opposition. Yes, there were the paleocons; but the paleocons had so many sins on their heads that they lost all credibility as critics of the neocons.

The upshot is that at present there is no real conservative movement in America—despite the fact that the whole world bizarrely believes that American conservatives, especially the shrieking feminist Sarah Palin and her supporters, are the most right wing people on the planet. If there is to be a real conservative movement, it has to be created.

Gays: Too mainstream for liberals?
By JONAH GOLDBERG
December 29, 2010

So now openly gay soldiers get to fight and die in neocon-imperialist wars, too?

David Brooks saw such ironic progressive victories coming. In his book “Bobos in Paradise,” he wrote that everything “transgressive” gets “digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons that once were used to undermine middle-class morality … are drained of their subversive content.”

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love” and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, which had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray-flannel suits.

As a sexual-lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it’s the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values—monogamy, hard work, etc.—are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Of course, the lunacy of the bohemian free-love shtick should have been obvious from the get-go. For instance, when Michael Lerner, a member of the anti-Vietnam War “Seattle Seven,” did marry, in 1971, the couple exchanged rings made from the fuselage of a US aircraft downed over Vietnam and cut into a cake inscribed in icing with a Weatherman catchphrase, “Smash Monogamy.”

Today, Lerner is a (divorced and remarried) somewhat preposterous, prosperous progressive rabbi who officiates at all kinds of marriages—gay and straight—and, like pretty much the entire left, loves the idea of open gays becoming cogs in the military-industrial complex.

The gay experiment with open bohemianism was arguably shorter. Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

Nowhere is this more evident than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s “Modern Family.” The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. You can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch “Modern Family’s” hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What’s being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity politics fantasy of homosexuality?

By the way, according to a recent study, “Modern Family” is the No. 1 sitcom among Republicans (and the third show overall behind Glenn Beck and “The Amazing Race”) but not even in the top 15 among Democrats, who prefer darker shows like Showtime’s “Dexter,” about a serial killer trying to balance work and family between murders.

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by The Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used “don’t ask, don’t tell” as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

Personally, I’ve always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I don’t think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate, too.

Many of my conservative friends—who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity—often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t. Given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos—the homosexual bourgeoisie—strikes me as good news.

JonahsColumn@aol.com

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 29, 2010 05:30 PM | Send