Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Neoconservatives vs. Conservatives: Who Are the Real "Extremists"?

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Republican Party establishment—I refer to both politicians as well as the punditry class constituting the so-called “new” or “alternative media”—is not conservative. It is neoconservative.

Although this is not something of which readers of this site need to be informed, it is a point worth repeating nonetheless.

Few and far between are those neoconservatives who refer to themselves as such. Usually, neoconservatives identify themselves as “conservative.” But because the neoconservative’s is the face and voice of one of our two national political parties, his refusal to come to terms with his true identity means that in the popular American consciousness, the neoconservative ideology is confused with conservatism proper. However, traditional or classical conservatism, the conservatism of which Edmund Burke is among the most notable and impassioned representatives, is not only distinct from neoconservatism; it is diametrically opposed to it.

Neoconservatism is but the most recent species of what most students of political philosophy now call “Enlightenment liberal rationalism.” That this is so is easily gotten from the causes that the neoconservative is disposed to support, especially the cause of “Global Democracy” — the enterprise of toppling regimes throughout the Middle East and beyond for the sake of establishing “democratic” governments in their wake.

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