‘The Dispatch’ is Warmed-Over Neoconservative News

Significantly, older neocons like Bill Bennett, Roger Kimball, Michael Ledeen, and Norman Podhoretz all declared unambiguously for Trump in 2016, while the younger generation, exemplified by John Podhoretz, Steve Hayes, and Bill Kristol, went into opposition. Like the Weekly Standard, The Dispatch speaks for those neocon epigones who have remained hostile to Trump but who wish to pursue more of the same in foreign policy. One suspects that they would attach themselves to political candidates of either party so long as they could obtain the kind of supervisory role over the chief executive that they enjoyed during the George W. Bush presidency.  

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Neocons and Liberals Join Forces to Fight Populism

For several months, an alliance has been forming between the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP). It’s the sort of kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a decade ago.

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Yes, We Should Call Them Imperialists

Neoconservatives like Max Boot are fooling themselves if they think imposing 'values' on the rest of the world isn't a matter of empire.

Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the provocative title The Virtue of Nationalism, I encountered a distinction drawn by the late Charles Krauthammer between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the editors of the Weekly Standard, for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the U.S. actively spread its own form of government throughout the world, as “imperialism.” After all, Krauthammer said, he and those who think like him “do not hunger for new territory,” which makes it wrong to accuse them of “imperialism.”

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A Neoconservative of Conviction

Since Charles Krauthammer’s death two days ago at age 68, friends have been asking for my reaction to the seemingly endless tributes that have been playing, most conspicuously on Fox News. On June 21, the day of his death, Fox, the channel with which he was long associated as a regular and honored news commentator, devoted hours to eulogizing Krauthammer. The man who died after spending most of his productive life as a paraplegic was personally heroic and managed to be cheerful in the company of his friends and disciples until the end of his earthly existence. Even when he knew he was dying of a cancerous tumor, he sent out life-affirming messages to his companions; he remained so much of a presence among his followers and fans that his very predictable death caught many by surprise.

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Remaking the World in the Neoconservative Image

New York Post star columnist Benny Avni has raised alarms that President Trump may be getting too friendly with President Xi of China. This could cause serious international complication if it prevents us from limiting Chinese influence in the world: “A domineering China is bad for America and for the world, as it presents a dictatorial model of governance aiming to compete with Western democracy.”

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An Old Paleocon Sets the Record Straight

In a recent television interview, leading neoconservative never-Trumper Bill Kristolscolded his erstwhile Weekly Standard employee Tucker Carlson for advocating for a reduced, merit-based immigration system. Kristol accused Tucker of being a full-blown ethnic nationalist, an identity that Kristol suggests was long latent in his acquaintance. “He always had a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleoconservatism,” sniffed Kristol from his guest perch on CNBC.

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Why the Hush on Neoconservative Links to Trump Dossier?

A brouhaha erupted this week over the creation of a highly questionable and lurid dossier on Donald Trump. That document is of the utmost importance—it may have been cited to authorize wiretaps of Trump Tower—but the controversy over it has unfolded without the true affiliations of some key players being named. We’re not talking about the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign or their lawyers—all of whom are reportedly behind hiring the opposition research firm that delivered the dossier. This is about the Washington Free Beacon, the neoconservative news site that’s admitted to retaining Fusion GPS before the Democrats did.

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McCain’s Anti-Trump Broadside a Half-Baked Brief For Empire

Senator John McCain, never one to play it close to the vest, has amped up his criticism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, calling it a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”

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Neocons Are Upset With Me

A Polish friend, who reads this website regularly, sent me recently this characterization of my personality and worldview:

“He’s a sniffy traditionalist, a self-described ‘Robert Taft Republican,’ with a classical liberal bent, and a Nietzschean American nationalist who goes out of his way to exaggerate his European affect. He opposes both the Civil Rights Act and white nationalism. He’s a bone-deep elitist and the oracle of what’s billed as a populist revolt.”

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Paul Gottfried’s “Encounters” explain how neocons hacked the American right

There is no holding back his opinions about the flavor of today’s American right. Insofar as Dr. Gottfried is concerned, neocon ideology is a repackaged form of lefty dogma. Considering this school of thought’s emphasis on open borders, foreign interventionism, an expansionist — let alone expanded — social welfare state, and at times open support of multiculturalism, one can understand why this is.

What most probably would not know, however, is how vicious political thinkers can be toward one another. The Doctor learned this all too well, and the outcome of his hard-knock schooling explains why the conservative establishment treats him as a perennial persona non grata.

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JFK : neocon ahead of his time

Let me express my agreement with Wall Street Journal favorite, Ira Stoll, who in "JFK, Conservative" has written a polemic showing that if Kennedy were alive today and pursuing the policies he did during his presidency, we would consider him a conservative.

What Stoll means is that Kennedy was a neoconservative before his time. He was a liberal internationalist in foreign affairs, who affirmed America's mission to bring "human rights" to everyone on the planet. Moreover, while Kennedy contributed to the incremental growth of the federal welfare state, he also enacted with congressional approval a reduction of marginal tax rates for the wealthy. He practiced supply side economics before Reagan, the purpose of which is to increase the government's intake of taxes by allowing more money to be invested in the private sector.

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Straussians Talk Amongst Themselves—in the NYT

Although Straussians and their neoconservative allies no longer have to deal with serious Old Right opposition, they may run into problems from libertarians, particularly if Rand Paul’s supporters become a powerful force in the Republican Party. The libertarians represent what the Straussians fear and detest, a very restrained foreign policy and a more limited government, in which their adherents will find fewer and fewer opportunities for their well-paid services. If anyone thinks the followers of Leo Strauss will go back to being what they were circa 1960, namely an academic circle, then dream on. They’ve already tasted power and love it.

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Claes Ryn, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, And Me

The conventional view is that Strauss and his disciples worked mightily to renew interest in the “ancients” as an alternative to modern political conceptions. This may not be the case, however. Straussians were really interested in enlisting ancient and early modern European political writers for their own crusade for American democracy—and that in a very contemporary form.

Also not surprisingly, given their contemporary focus and ambitions, Straussians over the decades have turned increasingly to political journalism. Pure scholarship seems to count less and less significantly in their putative field of study. And the reason is not primarily that they’re battling the “America-hating” Left—it’s that their interpretations are methodologically eccentric and brimful of their own ideological prejudices. They represent neoconservative politics packaged in academic jargon and allied to a peculiar hermeneutic that I earnestly try to make sense of in my work.

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The Neocons Get More Outrageous

Listening to FOXnews on Sunday evening, January 6, I was impressed by the oceans of venom that greeted the nomination of Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense. At 6:30 PM, the usually sober Brit Hume remarked for the umpteenth time that this "nominee was a strange choice" and one who was clearly unsuited for the position he sought. I then listened to Bill Kristol tell us how shocked he was by Obama’s appointment. According to Kristol, the President should have nominated "someone else," including a Democratic feminist who Kristol deemed to be good on "defense needs" (read bending to the will of the Likud coalition in Israel). The other panelists in a discussion group on FOX that followed the evening news deferred to the smirking Weekly Standard editor, who spent about ten minutes dumping on the nominee, without ever taking the grin off his face.

After this display of animosity, we got to see several Israeli dignitaries rage against Hagel as an enemy of the Jewish state. We then beheld the "conservative" Senator from South Carolina Lindsay Graham, indicating that he would never vote for this odious nominee. (John Podhoretz in the New York Post actually referred to the same person as an "ugly choice.") Although, unlike Graham, Hagel was a decorated warrior during the Vietnam War, it seems that Chuck could not meet Graham’s exacting patriotic standards. We know that Graham is a special kind of patriot because he predictably supports John McCain, every time that Arizona senator calls for military action somewhere in the Solar System. Like McCain, Graham slams other politicians who, in his judgment, do not back the Israeli government unconditionally at all times.

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League of Acceptable Nations

In his recent syndicated column “A U.N. for the good guys,” Jonah Goldberg evokes the mindset of seventeenth-century puritanism. This is entirely understandable. Much of what the American left teaches, including its neoconservative element, resembles American Calvinism – albeit in a warmed-over form. In Puritan New England, Congregationalists – the only authorized communicants – were deeply troubled that unredeemed polluted their assemblies. Those who considered themselves visible saints were forced to break bread with those who could not properly prove their divine election. This led to a sectarian split that resulted in Rhode Island’s settlement by breakaway Calvinists disgusted by the toleration of impure religious assemblies in Massachusetts. This determined group of dissenters formed a purified congregation of the saints

In a similar way Jonah is looking for pure souls. He is agitated that Russia and China would not vote for “a fairly toothless U.N. resolution condemning the regime in Syria and calling for President Bashar Assad, the lipless murderer who runs the place, to step down.” Jonah points to a terrible spiritual defect in the governments that opposed the resolution. To him it is an outrage that the UN Security Council assigns seats to countries “because they are powerful, not because they are decent, wise or democratic.” This stems from what Jonah says is a “category error”: “There is nothing in the UN Charter…that says a government has to be democratic or even care for the welfare of its people.” The UN does something even more grievous from the neoconservative standpoint: It serves as a “counterweight to the United States” and allows morally reprehensible countries to thumb their noses at America..