I don't buy the 'Trotskyite' theories of their origins, but I do get that they were clustered around warhawk Demoncrat Scoop Jackson in the 1970s. Also, I don't necessarily agree with all of this analysis cited below, which cites Lind, who is cited all over the internet. Zbigniew Brezinzski would be the other nexus of human waste in the 1970s and early 80s here, and we have already seen how he has arisen from the dead, like Volker, with Barrage Obushwa as prez.
Still yet another factor would be just how close Israel came to causing a nuclear war because they were set to lose a conventional war to Egypt in 1973. First, the US intervened massively to shore up the depleted IDF, actually causing supply shortages in their logistical chains to NATO Europe and SE Asia. Second, the US intervened to make sure the Soviet Union didn't get involved. Third, Israeli leadership would have unleashed their nukes if they were going to lose the conventional war against Egypt. And they even further threatened to try and destroy as much of the world as possible with their nukes before they would ever accept defeat. For some secular Jewish intellectuals who found they could not believe in much of anything that the US was offering at the time, embrace of Israel became their religion. Under Reagan this actually filtered down to third and fourth generation 'Jewish Americans' outside of elite intelligentsia (typically of Ashkenazic descent, meaning E. European-Slavic cultures), making them still yet another white, mostly male group of 'ethnics' who having lost their ethnic identity embraced militarism, conservatism, and pro-zionism as their religion. Alan Dershowitz and his popular appeal come to mind. Some of this makes its way into popular culture now, with loads of stories about how Israel and the Mossad and the IDF are such good guys and gals. It goes way beyond the pointy-eggy-head perceptions of guys like Alan Greenspan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism Drift away from New Left and Great Society Neoconservatives came to dislike the counterculture of the 1960s baby boomers, and what they saw as anti-Americanism in the non-interventionism of the movement against the Vietnam War.[citation needed] As the policies of the New Left pushed these intellectuals farther to the right, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism, while becoming disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs. Academics in these circles, many still Democrats, rejected the Democratic Party's foreign policy in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of anti-war candidate George McGovern for president in 1972. The influential 1970 bestseller The Real Majority by future television commentator and neoconservative Ben Wattenberg expressed that the "real majority" of the electorate supported economic liberalism but social conservatism, and warned Democrats it could be disastrous to take liberal stances on certain social and crime issues.[21] Many supported Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, derisively known as the Senator from Boeing, during his 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were future neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. In the late 1970s neoconservative support moved to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. Michael Lind, a self-described former neoconservative, explained:[22] Neoconservatism... originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' [After the end of the Cold War]... many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center... Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists. In his semi-autobiographical book, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol cited a number of influences on his own thought, including not only Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss but also the skeptical liberal literary critic Lionel Trilling. The influence of Leo Strauss and his disciples on neoconservatism has generated some controversy, with Lind asserting:[23] For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a noble lie. It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical elite in order to ensure social order... In being a kind of secretive elitist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it. William Kristol defends his father by noting that the criticism of an instrumental view of politics misses the point. When the context is a discussion of religion in the public sphere in a secular nation, religion is inevitably dealt with instrumentally. Apart from that, it should be born in mind that the majority of neoconservatives believe in the truth, as well as the utility, of religion.[24] _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
