#Neoconservatism

[senseofright]

To Conservatives who play apologetics for Donald Trump here is a list of people and things he doesn’t respect:

Our troops

Our veterans

Liberals

Conservatives who don’t make conservatism about him

NATO

The international community

Immigrants

Bureaucrats and civil servants

Rule of law and fair courts

Budget austerity and economic stability

YOU

While I absolutely and whole heartedly disagree with Biden on many, many, issues, it is for the health of our party, our international reputation, and of the country that conservatives do not back Donald Trump.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

[...] Canada would support "humanitarian pauses" in the Israel-Hamas war to allow foreign nationals to leave Gaza and permit aid for civilians to enter the territory, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.

"Our priority throughout this needs to be the continued protection of innocent civilians. That's why we're engaged closely with our allies, trying to build humanitarian corridors," Trudeau told reporters. [...]

Trudeau has faced pressure from some members of his own caucus to call for a full ceasefire.

More than 30 MPs — most of them Liberals — wrote a letter to Trudeau last week calling on him to advocate for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. [...]

Earlier Tuesday, Defence Minister Bill Blair was asked why the government won't advocate for a ceasefire. He said Hamas, which the government lists as a terrorist organization, likely would ignore calls for a ceasefire. [...]

Continue Reading.

Note from poster @el-shab-hussein : Justin Trudeau thinks genocide should continue as long as you give its victims a water break. Apparently. One settler colony will always support another. Anyways, historically it has always been Israel that uses the PR cover of a ceasefire to continue bombing Ghazzah and to continue massacring Palestinians wherever they are within Palestine.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[liskantope]

I just watched V For Vendetta in honor of Guy Fawkes Day. I saw it back when it came out in theaters and don't know how many years it had been since I'd seen it last, but it was quite a few, certainly since pre-pandemic times.

On this viewing, it really struck me how well it seemed to encapsulate the political tenor of the time when it came out, at least from the point of view of my anti-neoconservative college student self. The establishing status quo denouncing godlessness, yelling about terrorists, quashing skepticism, and demanding unity reminds me sharply of how I viewed the spirit of Bush-support back then and almost makes me nostalgic for that ideological playing field (even though my more rational self knows better).

It also struck me how out of step it feels with the main political divides in the US in recent years. Neither side of today's political spectrum is really about quashing skepticism (at least certainly the Right isn't about this; it's closer to celebrating a sort of hyper-skepticism instead), and the whole god-vs.-no-god thing is an old battle that was fought and largely set aside quite a while ago. There is a sort of political hopelessness bordering on nihilism that overpowers either side's earnest goal of promoting unity; within each major political party there are divides starker than I remember being aware of the decade before last. Someone might make the point that a rising politician who treats constitutional checks on power with disdain reminds them of Trump or that we (like the Vendetta universe) have recently had to wrestle with a scary virus that shook the political scene up, but I find these analogies rather superficial.

[whereserpentswalk]

I think my dad is neoconservative in a way that makes him talk like a parody of other neocons. His reaction to Paul's arc in Dune Messiah was literally just "why is he so upset about committing genocide, he should learn to accept that that's part of being an empire."

[sandinmybed]

[azspot]

Neoconservatism and its crusader elements became something like a ghost rarely spoken of and even less remembered. George W. Bush was then remade in the liberal world as an affable grandpa who got along with Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, and was, by default, so much more acceptable than Trump that we needed to forget that he and his Neoconservative cronies launched a world war that violated a slew of international laws and killed upwards of four million people.

The Next Chapter: Trump, Haley, and the Radicalization Cycle

[supernulperfection]

well

that's funny

@friendshapedhole

[unimatrix-420]

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Edward Abbey

[zwischenstadt]

But what did neoconservatives mean by 'counterculture'? The historian of neoconservatism, Justin Vaisse, describes the New Left counterculture as primarily a phenomenon of the white, educated, middle class who had 'time and money to spare.' This new class of militants, composed for the most part of college students and antiwar protestors, reacted against the reformism of the civil rights movement and defined itself in opposition to both the blue-collar trade union movement and the lower-middle class whites who represented the core constituency of the Democratic Party. Yet Vaisse's characterization of the countercultural left relies heavily on neoconservatism's own denunciations of the 'new class' and conflicts with other accounts of the shifting power relations within the left during the 1960s. Far from being confined to the white, college-educated middle class, the anti-authoritarianism of the counterculture reached far into the blue-collar labor movement during this period, provoking the president of the United Automobile Workers' Walter Reuther to remark that official trade unionism would need to adapt itself to a very different kind of worker. The irruption of extralegal, wildcat militancy within the ranks of the labor movement was particularly disturbing to the neoconservative Samuel Huntington. As Huntington recognized, the antireformist spirit of the 'counterculture' extended well beyond the white middle class to embrace blue-collar labor activism, black liberation, and the welfare rights movement, where it found expression in a newfound willingness to question the authority of the family as an instrument of social discipline. This perhaps explains why neoconservative denunciations of the counterculture tend to begin with general fulminations against the white, educated, and privileged student class - the 'new class' - but just as insistently conclude with the figure of the black welfare recipient. In text after text, neoconservative critique of the counterculture somehow transmutes into a critique of the AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), the welfare program that they perceived, no doubt correctly, as the linchpin of the Fordist social order, and a virulent attack on the activists whom they saw as most responsible for disturbing this order.

AFDC recipients could hardly be characterized as the most privileged of social subjects, and yet the neoconservatives consistently describe welfare mothers as a nonproductive rentier class - a lumpenproletariat that has taken on the qualities of the idle aristocracy by virtue of its dependence on the 'unearned income' of welfare benefits. Neoconservative rhetoric caters to the resentment of Fordism's most protected workers by reversing the order of actual social hierarchy amongst the poor, presenting itself as the defender of the white blue-collar working class against the demands of an unproductive rentier class of welfare queens, a move that is characteristic of reactionary populism on both left and right. If inflation had come to be associated in the popular imagination with the problem of sumptuary speculation - since everyday consumers had learnt that it was in their interests to buy on credit - the moral denunciations that accompanied this observation fell disproportionately on the shoulders of the nonworking poor.

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

[immaculatasknight]

Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism, and perhaps even caused it

[senseofright]

The fact that libs want to dump the failing trust in intervention on Bush and neoconservatives now that there’s something in Ukraine they wanna do is hilarious. They spent decades signal boosting conspiracies that Bush was an oil puppet and promoting toxicly dovish policy during the Obama era is hilarious. They literally had it out for Bush and spent decades trying to erode trust in our troops and intervention and now want to dump the shit in someone else’s lap.

[drdamiang]

AFTER THE RAINS

after the rains

the grass grew high everywhere

swamped the farm gate so

you can barely see it from the road

which is

frankly reassuring

helps me to feel

I am adequately camouflaged

as I coil up on the bed

communing with my snake self

at peace and in contempt

of all those

evil men of the North

desperately insecure in

their hemisphere of rage, fundamental

scheme of violence

with their drones and devices

submarine delivered nukes and

uranium depleted

ammunition

at the core

of their true being

oh good seed bad seed

such vagaries in our condition

spread thoughout the cosmos

I might believe

zero

to infinity

yes and now your hear me

how could not find me out, search

hard

for me

feeling that the rains the mounting grass

will hide me, save me

in the lack of all basic state

of the art

otherworldly surveillance

and, of course, deterrence

secret

serpent can sleep

at least

[liskantope]

Looking back at the culture war battles of 2022, one development that particularly sticks out to me is the American Republican/anti-woke side latching on to the idea of everything social progressives call for that involves minors being a form of "grooming" and/or adjacent to pedophilia. This welled up during the 2022 midterm campaign season and I doubt it reached its final boil during the elections; it probably isn't dying down anytime just yet.

My first reaction, around mid-2022, to seeing this new-ish trend was that it was once again an example of the Right looking at a rhetorical tactic of the Left (in this case, finding a near-universally despised personal trait and relentlessly tarring as many opinions as possible from the opposing side as coming from that trait) and deciding that hey, two can play at this game. The main name that the Left has taken to using against as many opposing opinions as possible is "racist"/"racism", and what's arguably the one label even worse to have attached to you than "racist"? Probably "pedophile" or (more mildly) "groomer".

From that point of view, I can see where this Republican/anti-woke strategy comes from, to the extent that it's been consciously employed and regardless of how blatantly hypocritical it is. But it still caught me by surprise and feels strange, I think because of my impression of being anti-grooming as more of a liberal progressive cause. Now mind you, I know that anything adjacent to pedophilia is reviled by pretty much all parts of the political spectrum, and I also know that the conservative Right (at least in America) has a history of tarring gay people as secretly pedophiles, insinuating that open homosexuality (and other forms of queerness) corrupts and endangers children, and so on. But over the 5-10 years or so previous to the rise of "groomer" accusations from the conservative side, I had come to firmly code raising the alarm about grooming behavior as more of a progressive SJ-ish thing, naturally occurring as a part of the Me Too movement. I had been exposed to a lot of talk in progressive circles about the power differentials that come with age differentials and so on. The whole Josh Duggar scandal some years back seemed split roughly along political lines, with only conservatives (most infamously Mike Huckabee) being willing to come to his defense. And I had a vague notion that liberal people took child molestation and terrible behavior adjacent to it as a sort of higher-priority societal crisis than conservatives did, much as this was clearly the case with rape in general.

So I had thought of cries of "Groomer!" and "Pedophile!" as similar to cries of "Racist!" in that they involve a name that absolutely nobody wants to be branded with, which refers to a type of person that almost everyone looks down upon and is determined not to be but which the Right has a stricter definition of, doesn't see in as many places, and tends to think the Left is overly paranoid about. And yet, for the time being at least, the Right seems to have gotten hold of "Groomer!" and "Pedophile!".

I found this a sort of bemusing (and also of course disturbing) irony, given the extent to which so many socially progressive people around me see grooming / pedophilia / child abuse as a very serious problem and are very sincere in their concerns about it. And to be honest, one of the things I couldn't help saying to myself was, "Let's see how this goes and how people feel when 'Groomer!' is used against them, when the other side stretches at every possible opportunity to compare our side to something we truly find despicable whenever we stand for something they don't like. Maybe this will give some people a new insight about how ineffective it is to blast everything they don't like on the other side as "racist" or other -ists or otherwise coming from something purely evil. It's going to be interesting to see how this changes the dynamic."

(It's worth mentioning as a qualification that the American Right did do something like this as recently as the mid-00's with comparing everyone less hawkish than them with terrorist-sympathizers, but that was a little less direct and seems to have already faded from many people's memories. A closer example would be some decades earlier when an awful lot of Americans seemed determined to brand anyone to the left of them as a Communist sympathizer, but of course this is even further removed from the present.)

It's interesting to look back on this half a year later, because I definitely intended to write a more sharply pointed post expressing most of my paragraphs above sometime around last summer, but it got lost in the shuffle as many of my potential blog posts do. And now it seems like it sort of came to an anticlimax. Anti-woke conservatives did quite well in the midterms as long as they weren't too Trumpy, but Democrats put in a better-than-expected performance. My liberal colleagues and acquaintances mostly seem to have ignored conservative rhetoric about groomers or just dismissed it as idiotic (which, to be fair, it basically is) rather than let it bother them beyond that, either on a direct, immediate level or in terms of making them rethink messaging or persuasive rhetoric from their/our own side. All of this seems to be fizzling over, relative to what I imagined back around July.

[jtoddring]

Further Reflections On Nationalism

I would emphasize there are better and worse forms of nationalism, but stress that nationalist political-economic policies can be highly beneficial for the people, as opposed to neoliberalism, globalism or neoconservatism, so long as they are combined with robust democracy, human rights and freedom, and a spirit of friendliness and peace towards all people, everywhere. Nationalism, furthmore,…

[machiavelli-official]

i love talking politics at thanksgiving bc its a good time to educate my family on foreign policy

[hezigler]

Why "Neither Left Nor Right" Just Means Right Wing | Bonapartism

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Louis D. Brandeis