>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >I'm not sure that anyone knows what it means or rather, that there's any >common agreement on what it means. It seems to have started out referring >to >a group of Sixties liberals in America who decided that Big Government >wasn't >an effective way of pursuing the goals of reducing poverty et al, and thus >became conservatives by the late 1970s. Many prominent ones like Irving >Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb (husband and wife, columnist and historian) >and their son Bill Kristol (former chief of staff of veep Dan Quayle and >now >editor[?] of The Weekly Standard) are Jews, and Patrick Buchanan began to >use >the term "neoconservative" as a term of derision in order to covertly >signal >to the anti-Semitic right that he was one of them (although according to >personal accounts supposedly he's not) without alerting good conservative >Christians to his Jew-baiting (it actually plays quite poorly in Iowa).
I'm not sure when the term "neoconservative" was first used, but I think it predates Buchanan's prominence by a good bit. And a major contingent of the New Deal (not sixties) liberals who formed it were non-Jews, like Moynihan, Jackson and Kirkpatrick. They were essentially Cold War liberals who supported both Truman's national security state and FDR's New Deal, but thought LBJ had gone too far in the direction of the welfare state. And McGovern's retreat from anti-communist engagement was the final straw. In many ways, the neocon movement was prefigured by Art Schlesinger's "vital center." And the issue of Jewishness and anti-semitism is raised more by neocons themselves than by their detractors. Neoconservatism is characterized by a fanatical defense of Israel; and many neocons like David Horowitz reflexively categorize any critic of Israel as either an antisemite or a "self-hating Jew." The constant exhortations to help "defend Israel" on Horowitz's FrontPage site sound a lot like the U.S. Communist Party's calls to rally behind the "socialist motherland" after the invasion of Russia. And Horowitz plays the "antisemitism" card so much, he sounds like Jerry Seinfeld's Uncle Leo, who accused a cook of being an antisemite for overcooking his hamburger. One neocon recently argued that anyone who does not support Isreael is, by definition, an antisemite, because Israel is the Jewish national homeland. Some Old Rightists (Buchanan especially, although as a Cold Warrior he is more like a convert to the faith of Bob Taft) are pretty careless about excluding antisemites. But there is nothing antisemitic about the neoconservative label, as such. And David Horowitz himself has been pretty uncritical about the unsavory types he attracts. _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
