Neo-conserativism
A good article by Paul Thomas in the NZ Herald on neo-conservatism – a balanced look.
American commentators Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz are usually credited with, or blamed for, creating neo-conservatism.
Like many who have since embraced the label or had it slapped on them, they entered the political landscape from the far left.
Kristol, a Trotskyite in his 20s, famously defined a neo-conservative as “a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”.
This yawning divide has become even less bridgeable since the publication of British journalist Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.
Cohen fits the neo-con profile of a lefty who has undergone a Damascene conversion and now stands shoulder to shoulder with people he would have shunned a few years ago. He was the first commentator to denounce Tony Blair from a left-wing perspective and opposed the invasion of Afghanistan.
Cohen argues that the British left’s opposition to the war on terror – driven, he says, by an obsessive, all-encompassing hatred of America – amounts to a betrayal of its principles, since al Qaeda and its affiliates want to eradicate what the left has long fought for: tolerance, secularism, multiculturalism, women’s rights, and sexual freedom.
Similar views have been expressed by a handful of prominent writers, including Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Hitchens.
Like them, Cohen has been herded into the neo-con holding pen.
There’s a faint echo here of the Russian dissident writer and Gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his American exile.
He was amazed by the unwillingness of sections of the western intelligentsia to face up to the fundamental nature of the Soviet Union, particularly its remorseless assault on the freedoms they enjoyed and supposedly held dear.