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Greetings,
Thanks for the feedback on my question. As a historian of 18th century
North America, I'm always looking for connections between my bailiwick and
the present -- there are plenty -- the NeoCons seem to be a particularly
rabid form of George Berkeley and "the course of Empire takes its way,"
Manifest Destiny, and TR / WW as others have mentioned, etc.
By way of my approach to history, I'm an anti-imperialist and supporter of
indigenous autonomy; indebted to a Beardian interpretation of the U.S.
founding; currently working on a book that, in brief, compares conflicts of
the 1760s-'90s to the last thirty years or so. I am a socialist in the most
general sense of the term (i.e., not to be confused with what is now called
"Socialist" in France), trying to sort out the histories and factionalisms
on the left of the last hundred years or so. This vagueness is a result of
growing up in a very "libertarian" environment infused with a lot of magical
thinking about "free-market" capitalism and in relative isolation from the
modern urban world -- a kind of mental childhood polio, I surmise. (Still,
it had its upside.)
Anyway, I'm no authority on Trotsky or the socialist movements of the
1920s-30s, but it seems like the NeoCons could be seen as long-term
"blowback" from the factionalism on the left of this period in the U.S.
Louis's earlier blog post on the "Trotskyist postmortems of a dead party"
[SWP] as well as the group's feedback influences my conjecture.
I'm relatively new to this material, so I'm curious to know now how far "at
sea" I am with this statement -- and I by no means seek to offend anyone. I
know who the "enemy" is. :o)
Thanks for your indulgence --
Doug
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Douglas S. Harvey, Ph.D.
http://www.pickeringchatto.com/monographs/theatre_of_empire_the
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric events;
and the things that are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,
is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest
in unvisited tombs." George Eliot
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