[Peace-discuss] Conservative ideology…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Carl, would you comment on this piece?

The neocons are now the vanguard of the left?
A critique of the Bush administration from the Cato guys.

A More Expansive Treason

July 14, 2005
The Politics of 'Creative Destruction'
by Chris Moore

International Herald Tribune columnist William
Pfaff recently reported that the Bush
administration's new Bureau of Reconstruction and
Stabilization, a State Department subgroup, has
been tasked to prepare for a frighteningly
expansive future of warfare.

"The bureau has 25 countries under surveillance as
possible candidates for Defense Department
deconstruction and State Department
reconstruction," writes Pfaff. "The bureau's
director is recruiting 'rapid-reaction forces' of
official, nongovernmental, and corporate business
specialists. He hopes to develop the capacity for
three full-scale, simultaneous reconstruction
operations in different countries."

Pfaff notes that this ambitious undertaking
"occurs at the same time American military forces
still are unable to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan,
agricultural societies of less than 25 million
people each, both largely in ruins."

By the September end of the federal government's
fiscal year, the U.S. will have spent some $350
billion on the wars in those countries and on
other "anti-terrorist" activities around the globe
since 9/11. But the massive spending hasn't ended
there.

According to the Cato Institute's Veronique de
Rugy (2004):

"Total federal outlays will rise 29 percent
between fiscal years 2001 and 2005 according to
the president's fiscal year 2005 budget released
in February. Real discretionary spending increases
in fiscal years 2002, 2003, and 2004 are three of
the five biggest annual increases in the last 40
years. Large spending increases have been the
principal cause of the government's return to
massive budget deficits.

"Although defense spending has increased in
response to the war on terrorism, President Bush
has made little attempt to restrain nondefense
spending to offset the higher Pentagon budget. …
Congress has failed to contain the
administration's overspending and has added new
spending of its own."

And this at a time when America is already
burdened with a national debt of $7.8 trillion.

In March, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan
took a look at the government's spending habits in
conjunction with its current and future financial
obligations and warned that the "large deficits
[will] result in rising interest rates and
ever-growing interest payments that augment
deficits in future years." His startling
conclusion? "These projections make clear that the
federal budget is on an unsustainable path…."

U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas puts it
another way:

"Debt destroys U.S. sovereignty, because the
American economy now depends on the actions of
foreign governments. While we brag about our role
as world superpower in international affairs, we
are in truth the world's greatest debtor. …
Ultimately, debt is slavery."

When it comes to an appetite for demolishing the
existing order, whether militarily or
economically, the Bush administration is clearly
entering uncharted territory. But most Americans
have thus far assumed that the decimation is to be
wrought entirely abroad. They may, however, want
to rethink those assumptions.

In his 2002 book The War Against the Terror
Masters, in a rare moment of unguarded
intellectual honesty, neocon guru Michael Ledeen
unwittingly let slip what is probably the best
two-word description of the underlying agenda that
has been pursued by the neocons over the last
several years and is ongoing today: "Creative
destruction."

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both
within our own society and abroad. We tear down
the old order every day, from business to science,
literature, art, architecture, and cinema to
politics and the law. Our enemies have always
hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity,
which menaces their traditions (whatever they may
be) and shames them for their inability to keep
pace. … They must attack us in order to survive,
just as we must destroy them to advance our
historic mission."

Given the Bush administration's astoundingly
reckless spending habits, the retrospective
knowledge of its eagerness to lie the country into
the Iraq quagmire, and the neocons' enthusiasm for
tearing down the old order – "both within our own
society and abroad" – is it possible that our
current bind is the deliberate result of a policy
of destruction?

Is it possible that it is not just the Middle East
that the Bush administration, Ledeen, and the
other neocons want to destroy in order to
reconstruct, but America as well? But why? Why
would our own leadership want to deliberately put
our country into a position of vulnerability?

In an article for popular libertarian Web site
LewRockwell.com, Christopher Manion offers a clue.
And as so often in the past, it looks like it may
be crackpot socialist theory that is the driving
force behind the neocons' harebrained, post-9/11
scheme to remake America and the world.

"In the view of the leftist conservatives, the
free world – Christendom – conjured up its
historical contradiction (its negation),
revolutionary totalitarianism culminating in the
Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has now
disintegrated. To the neocon leftist conservative,
this is not sufficient. The 'thesis' – our America
of limited government, a thriving free market, and
a virtuous, free people, respectful of others in
the world – must also be negated, destroyed, just
as the Soviet Union was, so that history can move
forward – and inexorably upward. …

"[F]or Hegel and his Trotskyite progeny – the
materialist secular leftists who constitute the
neocon leadership – history is 'the movement of
the concept.' The concept matures, conjures up its
negation, and both are then annihilated (the
'negation of the negation') by what Hegel called
the 'Aufhebung,' which means both destruction and
lifting up."

Like many Americans, Manion entertains doubts
about Bush's intellectual capacity to comprehend
the trap into which we are being led, let alone
the inclination to derail the neocon Master Plan:

"George Bush might be sitting at the table, but it
is fair to say he is not theoretically engaged in
this enterprise. His habits of mind do not include
the independent prudential powers and analytical
tools necessary to descry the 'second reality'
that his chosen circle of ideologues have created,
into which they want to drag America and,
eventually, the rest of the world, kicking and
screaming (and dying), if necessary."

The "second reality" Manion mentions is a
historical reference to the delusional fantasy
often created by ideologues that their destructive
ambitions actually have transcendental qualities.
They construct this fantasy so that they can
"settle in comfortably (to their) web of lies and
never have to live in, or even look at, reality
again. This serves the purpose both of
self-deception and of mass deception and
manipulation," says Manion.

The acceptance of reality has long been a staple
of conservatism. Remember Ronald Reagan's famous
quote: "Facts are stubborn things." But not for
the Bush administration.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind
found out as much in a meeting with a senior
adviser to Bush. Recalling the incident in the
Oct. 17, 2004, issue of The New York Times
magazine, Suskind wrote:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we
call the reality-based community,' which he
defined as people who "believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.' I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me
off. "That's not the way the world really works
any more,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you
will – we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how
things will sort out. We're history's actors … and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what
we do.'"

In effect, the neocons are saying to their duped
supporters and anyone else foolish enough to
listen: Don't worry about the reckless spending,
the bloody wars, the imperial overreach and the
mounting burden on Americans. It's all part of the
plan. We create history. We create reality. And we
can create a new historical reality where none of
that matters.

Back to Manion: "Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao
made it clear that bloodthirsty, violent
revolutionary conquest could alter the truth
whenever the 'correlation of forces' required."
But "the construction of an 'alternate reality'
with a different logic and different content is
required for the successful ideology. Why? Because
reality poses a problem for the power-hungry
politician."

The idea that the Bush administration can "create
its own reality" should thus be seen for what it
is: pseudo-intellectual cover for what is
obviously a naked power grab in the service of a
deeply anti-conservative cause – the advancement
of a "historical imperative" wherein the country
and the world are decimated in order to fulfill
socialist theory and "advance history."

In his article on America's vast new bureaucracies
and huge warfare ambitions, William Pfaff noted:

"One of the most significant aspects of the
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century was that
they 'made reality' out of fictions. They were
based on ideological fantasies that were false,
but these fantasies were made into the reality
upon which national policy was based. They thus
came catastrophically true – until their inner
falsehood brought disaster."

Those who believe it is a stretch to link neocons
with Marx-inspired revolutionary ambitions should
read Michael Lind's excellent assessment of
neoconservatism that appeared in the Feb. 23, 2004
issue of The Nation – a magazine that, given its
deep liberal roots, recognizes leftist thought
patterns when it sees them:

"The idea that the United States and similar
societies are dominated by a decadent,
postbourgeois 'new class' was developed by
thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James
Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an
older generation of neocons," says Lind.

"The concept of the 'global democratic revolution'
has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth
International's vision of permanent revolution.
The economic determinist idea that liberal
democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism,
promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply
Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for
proletarians as the heroic subjects of history."

Paul Gottfried, professor of humanities at
Elizabethtown College, recognizes the overlapping
interests as well. In an article examining those
who most regularly hurl the epithet
"Islamofascist," Gottfried notes that in addition
to the neocon Right, some of the most prosaic
offenders reside on the Left.

"Clearly, some who rail against Islamofascism,
like (Christopher) Hitchens and Peter Beinart and
Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic, have domestic
fish to fry. They all see the possibility of tying
together the war against Islamic theocratic
fascists abroad with one against the hated
Religious Right at home," wrote Gottfried in the
July 4, 2005, issue of The American Conservative.

"[P]lunging one's country into foreign crusades
has often been a means for changing things at
home," Gottfried adds. "The enemies of
Islamofascism are not the first to play this
game."

No wonder so many in the Democrat establishment
continue to support the internationalist
"democracy" project being undertaken hand-in-hand
with (or under the guise of) the "War on Terror"
long after the Iraq war has been exposed as having
been built on a foundation of half-truths and
outright lies.

Envisioning a future in which the Republican
machine collapses under its own weight (and the
weight of the Bush administration's incompetence),
they understand they will be the heirs to the
shiny new police state the administration has
constructed. This explains why they go along with
so many foreign and domestic neocon initiatives,
feign opposition to a few others, and only dig in
their heels when the ability of the state to
exercise power is independently threatened – for
instance, over the confirmation of potentially
conservative federal judges who might be inclined
to limit the power and prerogative of the federal
government in the future.

In retrospect, doesn't it make perfect sense that
those inclined toward totalitarianism would seek
to infiltrate the opposition conservative/
libertarian Right in order to co-opt its weak
inks (the half-baked conservatives) and
destroy the rest?

After all, when highly centralized, big-government
policies designed for purposes of
social-engineering (both at home and abroad) are
instigated by unreconstructed leftists, they can
be easily identified by traditionalists for what
they are through linkage alone – and summarily
rejected. But when they are advocated from the
right, and ushered in through a Trojan horse like
the "War on Terror," they can be passed off as
essential to national security and even
"conservative." Many of those who would normally
be opposed are thus enlisted; the rest are
dismissed as paranoid or "unpatriotic." And
instead of burning the seeds of socialism, former
skeptics become enthusiastic Johnny Appleseeds and
go about spreading them to the winds with a naive
gaiety.

And so we have come full circle. The sacrifices
made by millions of Americans in both blood and
treasure over the course of generations to defeat
messianic totalitarian ideologies may well have
been in vain. "History's actors" – who are in
reality hyper-ambitious, totalitarian-minded
ideologues – couldn't destroy America from
without, and so they have found a way to worm
themselves into the American leadership to do it
from within – and for our own good, no less.

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