Liberal Talk Radio

Liberals love to misuse the word Neocon. I hear it all the time here in Seattle: “Well, you know, Bush and all the neocons just want to drill for oil in Alaska and ruin our environment!” But the truth is that neo-conservatives have little, if any, domestic policy agenda (in fact, many folks who could be reasonably called neocons are, if anything, pro-energy-conservation). Neo-conservatism is a foreign policy that says, very simply, that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy abroad. Most neocons are former liberals who became disenchanted with the party’s peacenik turn after Vietnam. In fact, many got their start working for the proto-neocon, Senator Scoop Jackson, a Democrat from right here in Washington (UW’s Jackson School of International Studies is named after him). See this wonderful CS Monitor report for a neocon primer.

Bottom line? “Neocon,” properly defined, refers to like twelve guys in the world, who are all esoteric foreign policy intellectuals and academics. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush, are not really “neocons,” but politicians. Billmon has a great post from a couple years back on this very topic:

Personally, I would not describe Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld as neocons. Certainly not on the first count (personal biography). And not on the second (ideological affinity), either. At the end of the day, Cheney and Rumsfeld are politicians and bureaucrats. They are not intellectuals — not by a long shot. They are consumers of ideology, not producers.

To me, the neocons and the realists are rival schools of foreign policy intellectuals, competing for the patronage of political leaders such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Delay, etc. With a few exceptions, they are servants of power — not holders of power.

The reason I bring this up is that I caught this misuse of “neocon” show up in the New York Times the other day. I wish I had the article handy, but it surprised me, because they were definitely referring to generalized Republicans, but they chose to use the word “neocon.” I thought it was an interesting slip. And then the other night, I was having drinks with a friend and she reminded me of Tom DeLay’s domestic strategy of pushing through votes with the slimmest possible margin (the logic being that every vote over 218 costs you something, so why bother?). And it occurred to me that maybe there is a grand neocon theory behind republican politics. The neocons shun international institutions like the U.N. because they make it difficult to act. You’ve got to appease a lot of different parties, make concessions, and water down your goals. It’s what drove them nuts about the way Wes Clark ran the NATO campaign in the Balkans. He’d have to get approval from 19 different countries for every target he wanted to bomb. DeLay’s domestic agenda is the same thing: why bother trying to get 300 votes for a bill when all you need are 218?

So maybe there’s method to their madness after all. Is it just arrogance, or something deeper? Now, if someone will just explain to me why most of the Social Darwinists in the GOP don’t actually believe in Darwinism, we’d be all set!