Neo-Conservatism: A disease plaguing the soul of America

[greekspeak]

I have decided that the best way to describe Neo-Conservatism is as a mental disease from which all of America is suffering. Some symptoms

-Delusions that rich corporations are people, and poor people are less than human

-Delusions of grandeur. America is entitled to rape, pilliage, and steal because this is a great nation whose manifest destiny from God is to bring the light of Americanism to the world.

-Hatred--masked as religion, family values, patriotism, etc.--of individualism, free thought, minority groups ad inf.

-An almost pandemic apathy toward anything that does not result in more stuff/money/prestige/power.

-A hatred of the public education system to the point of dismantling it.

-A "pravda-zation" of media, which on a good day is as reliable as a tabloid, and on a bad one unabashedly lies to keep its hands on power, and to keep those who give it power in power.

I honestly beleive that it is going to take a national disaster, like another Great Depression, to cure enough people of neo-conservatism. People are going to have to suffer to be cured. Am I off base here?

[necso]

1. The "true believers"

are not, perhaps, as many as some would have you believe. (Nor as small as some others would have you think!)

Republicans are "followers", and the neos have seized control of the Party mechanisms. (Generally, and no matter how little they may like it, Republicans vote the ticket.)

Moreover, this takes mostly money since primaries don't get huge turnout. If you can also recruit a base of loyal followers large enough to influence (but not necessarily dominate) the primaries, you are set.

This is the neo plan, and it works.

But strip away the deluded who are following with good hearts but bad "vision", and I think that you are looking at a relatively small percentage of Republicans, and an even smaller percent of the country as a whole, that are "true believers".

But, of course, this is just one man's opinion. And I wouldn't call the neo phenomenon a disease, it is carefully crafted (if abysmally ignorant, narrow minded, unenlightened and grasping) to serve their interests and is quite deliberate. Greed, however, is infectious.

[marano]

2. Man, you are right on.

I know that sounds a little 70's, but your right on target. People are already suffering. They are gonna have to suffer more evidently to catch on. At least I hope that suffering will make them catch on, but for now they seem content to suffer and blame it on people who think as you and I obviously do instead of the people who are making them suffer. There is a class war going on. A great stategy of the rich is to make the middle class hate the poor, because it takes the focus away from them. They keep telling the middle that they can be the upper class and that the reason they are not is because they have to support the poor, when in reality its because they are stealing the rug out from under both of them and getting thier support by telling they are morally right because they believe as they do. It's all fucked up but thats the way it is. Armed Rebellion? Is that the only way. Thats what it took in Russia, and in Cuba. Hope not.

[dumpster_baby]

3. You are describing Neoliberalism, not neoconservativism

Neocons are just the mideast-obsessed members of the current administration.

Neoliberalism is what you are describing. JMHO.....

[pretzel4gore]

4. read 'up from conservativism'

mike lind lays out the methods to the neocon's madness, the 'big lies' they forcefully push and the discipline that says 'no matter what, you never OPENLY disagree with the cause' etc....
for a society that is so damn consumed with interest in itself, and gives its collective self image an individuality easy to study, the US somehow manages to avoid serious looking at mortal dangers inherent in organized and coerced dishonesty....(??) as noted long ago, for example, in Sinclair Lewis' 'Babbitt'

[yowzayowzayowza]

6. He updated that material a bit...

in Feb: http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040223&s=lind

A long but comprehensive read.... The end of which is deadly:


The cynical way in which the Bush Administration lied to Congress and the American people to justify an invasion of Iraq planned years before September 11, 2001, by Wolfowitz and many of his PNAC allies came as no surprise to me, a former neocon. In an anthology titled The Fettered Presidency published by the American Enterprise Institute in 1989, Irving Kristol wrote that "if the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win.... The American people had never heard of Grenada. There was no reason why they should have. The reason we gave for the intervention--the risk to American medical students there--was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on, but they backed the president. They always will."

But too much can be made of the mendacity of the neocons. The influence of Leo Strauss's teachings about the need for the "philosophers" to conceal the truth from the masses can be exaggerated. The conviction on the part of neocons of their own rectitude may be sufficient, in their minds, to justify deception of the public in matters like Iraq's nonexistent threat to the United States. After all, they are waging World War IV against--well, against whomever--a revived Russia this year, China the next, and the next year a vague "Islamist" threat that somehow contains anti-Islamist Baathists and secular Palestinians along with Osama bin Laden. In their own minds, the neocons are Churchillian figures, a heroic minority who, as they battle a generic "totalitarianism" of which radical Islam is the latest manifestation, are handicapped by cowardly establishment "appeasers" and purveyors of a decadent "adversary culture" among the "new class" in the academy and the media. I don't doubt that many leading neocons sincerely wanted to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Iraqi masses would embrace Ahmad Chalabi as their de Gaulle, that there would be a democratic domino effect in the Middle East, bringing pro-Israel and pro-American secularists to power. Now that they have been proven wrong, at enormous cost in American and Iraqi life, they are disoriented. Instead of acknowledging and taking responsibility for their catastrophic failure, they are desperately trying to avoid blame.

Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame them, can you?

[pretzel4gore]

8. a proven thinker like Lind should be hosting hardball

or something.....what a disgrace the newsmedia is! how utterly childish it is...shameless!

[catbert836]

5. Definitely

That should be a documented mental disorder, complete with neoconologists, doctors who specialize in its treatment and a state-sponsored medical insurance plan to cure people of it.

[silvershadow]

7. you might be right about one thing...

I am not sure if it will cure the country of neo-conservatism, but I am convinced we are on the verge of another great depression.