Irving Kristol on "The Neoconservative Persuasion"
Published by BG on Monday, May 07, 2007 at 10:01 AM.Interesting how schizophrenic Irving Kristol can get when he's talking about domestic/economic policy. I read the following excerpts and analysis as some combination of:
a) garden variety disingenuousness
-and-
b) defining a movement that's almost entirely based on foreign policy objectives with a "damn the torpedos" attitude about making that unilateral militarism work when it comes to domestic objectives.
Granted, I'm just scratching the surface of The Neocon Reader, but it's easy to see how disingenuous it is to advocate persistent warmongering as a foreign policy objective, while speaking of domestic tax cuts and the theoretical ascendence of middle and lower class Americans to a position of relative affluence. Then again, Kristol and others advocate carrying a deficit, because it's a necessary evil to enable the behemoth government to accomplish what it needs to. What they don't mention are the economic consequences for this spending behavior. Their theories of domestic economic policy seem to be based on keeping the American populace fat and happy.
Basically, Neocons want "tax cuts to stimulate economic growth" because growth is good for everyone, right? To wit:
"It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning."
We're all going to be RICH! Affluence won't be concentrated! It'll be spread out! However, the VERY NEXT SENTENCES read:
"This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services."
Which, in a vacuum, is fine. Who doesn't like reform for the sake of efficiency? We just want government to help us when we need it, and leave us alone otherwise. Isn't that a basic principle of conservatism? Kristol seems to agree:
"People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government."
Which is all well and good, except that when they say "overly intrusive government" is bad, they really mean that once they get the ill out of society, those among us who are righteous will not be concerned about governmental intrusion:
"[Neocons and religious traditionalists] are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention."
Neocons don't like governmental intrusion, unless they agree with the purpose of the intrusion themselves. Irwin Stelzer's introduction to "The Neocon Reader," in which the above linked essay is chapter one, shines a little more light on what they mean about welfare reform, intrusive government, and aligning with the religious traditionalists in this area:
"...[Welfare reform ideas] were quickly made part of the neocon canon, as Irving Kristol advocates, but eliminating incentives to 'bad' behavior such as out-of-wedlock births, and reserving the resources of the State to ease the plight of what the Victorians call 'the deserving poor.'"
Or, in other words, the poor that agrees with us. The poor who behave like civilized members of society, i.e., legislating morality to disincentivize "disagreeable" behavior.
By the way, I posted this quote from that Stelzer introduction a couple days ago:
"These (policy triumphs), attributable in part to the scalding impact of September 11, are also in part due to the formidable intellectual firepower behind neoconservative foreign policy. A group with the intelligence and rigor of Wolfowitz, Kagan, Kristol, Rice, Perle, and Cheney has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America's response to the threat of Soviet expansion."
Chapter two of the same book is an essay by David Brooks that attempts to debunk the idea that there's a neocon cabal. In that essay, Brooks writes:
"[N]eocons have no representatives in the administration's top tier. ...Bush,... Cheney... Powell... Rumsfeld... Rice; not a neocon among them."
Uh, which is it guys? You want to step up and take credit for this stuff or not?
a) garden variety disingenuousness
-and-
b) defining a movement that's almost entirely based on foreign policy objectives with a "damn the torpedos" attitude about making that unilateral militarism work when it comes to domestic objectives.
Granted, I'm just scratching the surface of The Neocon Reader, but it's easy to see how disingenuous it is to advocate persistent warmongering as a foreign policy objective, while speaking of domestic tax cuts and the theoretical ascendence of middle and lower class Americans to a position of relative affluence. Then again, Kristol and others advocate carrying a deficit, because it's a necessary evil to enable the behemoth government to accomplish what it needs to. What they don't mention are the economic consequences for this spending behavior. Their theories of domestic economic policy seem to be based on keeping the American populace fat and happy.
Basically, Neocons want "tax cuts to stimulate economic growth" because growth is good for everyone, right? To wit:
"It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning."
We're all going to be RICH! Affluence won't be concentrated! It'll be spread out! However, the VERY NEXT SENTENCES read:
"This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services."
Which, in a vacuum, is fine. Who doesn't like reform for the sake of efficiency? We just want government to help us when we need it, and leave us alone otherwise. Isn't that a basic principle of conservatism? Kristol seems to agree:
"People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government."
Which is all well and good, except that when they say "overly intrusive government" is bad, they really mean that once they get the ill out of society, those among us who are righteous will not be concerned about governmental intrusion:
"[Neocons and religious traditionalists] are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention."
Neocons don't like governmental intrusion, unless they agree with the purpose of the intrusion themselves. Irwin Stelzer's introduction to "The Neocon Reader," in which the above linked essay is chapter one, shines a little more light on what they mean about welfare reform, intrusive government, and aligning with the religious traditionalists in this area:
"...[Welfare reform ideas] were quickly made part of the neocon canon, as Irving Kristol advocates, but eliminating incentives to 'bad' behavior such as out-of-wedlock births, and reserving the resources of the State to ease the plight of what the Victorians call 'the deserving poor.'"
Or, in other words, the poor that agrees with us. The poor who behave like civilized members of society, i.e., legislating morality to disincentivize "disagreeable" behavior.
By the way, I posted this quote from that Stelzer introduction a couple days ago:
"These (policy triumphs), attributable in part to the scalding impact of September 11, are also in part due to the formidable intellectual firepower behind neoconservative foreign policy. A group with the intelligence and rigor of Wolfowitz, Kagan, Kristol, Rice, Perle, and Cheney has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America's response to the threat of Soviet expansion."
Chapter two of the same book is an essay by David Brooks that attempts to debunk the idea that there's a neocon cabal. In that essay, Brooks writes:
"[N]eocons have no representatives in the administration's top tier. ...Bush,... Cheney... Powell... Rumsfeld... Rice; not a neocon among them."
Uh, which is it guys? You want to step up and take credit for this stuff or not?
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