quoms:

wowthatstrash:

wowthatstrash:

quoms:

always worth remembering that the true origin and essence of neoconservatism is: war abroad is the most effective means of social control at home

would you please elaborate on this i really truly am excited to read more about what you mean

hi again would still LOVE to learn more about this anything at all would be great literally anything at all like a title of a book or a youtube link or a name of an author literally anything

of course! i’m going to paraphrase in part here the last couple chapters of alexander bloom’s prodigal sons: the new york intellectuals and their world (which chronicles the broader group of jewish second generation immigrant intellectuals which included the neoconservatives-to-be, up to the point at which they actually made the shift to neoconservatism) and then some of this is out of my butt

the essence of it is that the original neocons, like all the new york intellectuals, were a bunch of former trotskyists and pinkos - anti-stalinist leftists, basically - who shifted gears into centrist, pragmatic liberalism after ww2 as all hope for anything but either an american or a soviet future disappeared and they refused to renounce their opposition to the soviet union

and up through the ‘60s they identified as liberals and were regarded as such. they supported the new deal welfare state, they generally approved of the civil rights movement as long as it was being articulated in the ‘respectable’ terms of middle-class aspiration, etc.

but in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s they started to feel like people were taking things Just A Little Bit Too Far. there were a few trends in particular to which they objected

• the movement of the struggle for racial equality away from nonviolence and toward militant radicalism
• the increasing scale and militancy of antiwar protests, especially on university campuses
• the emergence of the youth-driven, anti-authoritarian ‘new left’, associated with avant-garde, radical positions on social issues

these things were intensely, existentially threatening to intellectuals who had helped to define the postwar ideological center and at that time were occupying it. even more so because of their sentimental attachment to the radicalism of their own youth, which was being undermined by the fact that young radicals were identifying and attacking them as ‘the establishment’

responses varied. a few intellectuals swung left again. many faded into obscurity. others - the neoconservatives - decided to stake out a hardline position against left-wing radicalism and in particular against the main issue of the young campus radicals, which was opposition to the vietnam war

bloom makes the case that the neoconservatives’ supposedly conservative positions were actually just their old liberal positions from the ‘50s recontextualised by a changing social and political environment. and that is to some extent true. but the support for a militaristic, interventionist foreign policy marked at least a shift in emphasis, and would come to define neoconservatism especially as the soviet threat receded but they kept beating the drums for american intervention abroad

the understanding they came to, from looking at vietnam, was that opposition to the military was unacceptable because it threatened the national narrative and therefore the cohesiveness and stability of american society as a whole. conversely, they also came to the understanding that successful war (not a quagmire like vietnam) would serve those things positively. they married the characteristic cold warrior emphasis on an ‘existential threat to our way of life’ with an understanding of the possibility of armed conflict as spectacle for consumption by the masses

they had other policy positions of course. they were conservative on race, by the developing standards of the 1970s. they viewed student campus activism as threatening to free speech (their intellectual descendants, and others, are still making that argument as i type this out). but they became distinguishable from others with similar positions by their foreign policy - their notion that america needed an Enemy to fight, and their advocacy of war for war’s sake

but the basic reasons they were doing that were all domestic. they were doing it because they knew war makes everyone rally around the flag and gives you a chance to clamp down on the handful of dissenters. they knew presidential approval ratings go up when an invasion’s announced. they thought the fundamental problem of american society post-vietnam was that america had lost and thereby discredited itself, so they said let’s go to grenada and win. and then let’s go to iraq and win. and then let’s to afghanistan and - fuck it, iraq again, and - okay these ones are going a little less well but whatever it’ll fix itself if we just go to iran! and so on

but the reasons for this have little to do with the states they advocate invading, which is clear from the fact that their justifications are totally incoherent except for some handwaving at totalitarianism (the fact that they managed to save their agenda from the smoldering wreckage of the cold war is a miracle in itself) or threats to american hegemony, which are immensely overblown. and they’re not about oil, since the neoconservatives are intellectuals rather than businessmen, though they have very durable alliances with the businessmen who do stand to profit. it really comes back to this idea of how do we keep america whole, how do we foster nationalism, how do we keep the center strong

I think this successful-reactionary take (David Brooks quite literally wrote the book on what the 90s settlement became) should more incorporate figures like 70s-80s New York Times editor A. M. “He Kept The Paper Straight” Rosenthal who whle not identifying with the neoconservative current per se, after Ford and Carter decided civic institutions had been too weakened by upstart critical discourse reined the young'uns in, preventing a counterculture takeover and instead yielding the 90s “bourgeois bohemian” synthesis