Red-blooded American Conservatives for American Democratic Empire

A reader writes:

I was really distressed when a New York Post editorial said that no one except Hugo Chavez and Louis Farrakhan could regret the bloody end Kaddafi received. I didn’t feel that way. It was an act of savagery and bodes ill for the future of Libya. I was amazed at the coarseness of the Post editorial, assuming everyone on the good side would take satisfaction in seeing him wounded, beaten, and bloody.

LA replies:

But the attitude you’re describing is not just that of the vulgar Murdoch neocons at the New York Post. It’s the standard attitude of many conservatives, meaning people who proudly see themselves not as neocons, not as RINOs, but as real conservatives. These self-described real conservatives think that what America is about is going around the world overthrowing tyrants who haven’t threatened us.

Take J.R. Dunn’s piece today at American Thinker:

The overthrow of a tyrant should be a moment of pride for the West, and the U.S. in particular. We’ve done it a lot over the past seventy years, and we should be getting good at it. But if we are to continue—and we should (as the standard-bearer for democracy we can do no less)—we need to avoid the example of people who turn everything they touch into a circus.

It’s an extremely odd article. Dunn boasts that the West overthrew Kaddafi, and he argues that the West had very little to do with overthrowing Kaddafi—that it was the rebels who made it happen. The contradiction stems from Dunn’s two contradictory agendas, which are (1) to celebrate the destruction of Kaddafi, and (2) to denigrate the American president who carried out that destruction. So—and this is Dunn’s main point—he puts Obama down for being insufficiently aggressive in the military campaign against Kaddafi. Indeed, Dunn is so crazily anti-Obama that he denies the key role played by the U.S. in the defeat and death of Kaddafi that he celebrates.

But here is my main point. Dunn sees himself as a real, heartland, Sarah Palin conservative. Thus in 2008 he attacked sinister “Northeast Corridor conservatives,” i.e., neocons, for being elitist, hostile to Palin, and out of touch with the real America. Yet this heartland conservative is 100 percent in favor of America going around the world overthrowing tyrants who haven’t done anything to us (and who, in the case of Kaddafi, made peace with us and had become friendly to us). He places so much value on militarily attacking and killing tyrants wherever they may be that he insanely denies the hated Obama any credit for making it happen.

And here’s my final point. The neocons have won. Their purpose, as Irving Kristol plainly stated in 2003, was to take over conservatism, and they’ve done it. Their success has been so profound and sweeping that even conservatives who sincerely think of themselves as anti-neoconservative are in reality unhinged neocons who want to impose “democracy” on the entire world and liquidate anyone who stands in the way.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 24, 2011 10:05 AM | Send