Reflections of a former neoconservative

Wednesday, 23rd September 2009

A must-read piece in Salon by Michael Lind, a figure who's made a long and thoughtful journey from Right to Left. As he says, the N-word really doesn't deserve all the opprobrium heaped on it since the end of the Bush era:

The early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual... Like today's right, the '70s left favoured theatrical protest over discussion and debate. Boomer nostalgia to the contrary, in the case of practically every domestic issue disputed by the counterculture and the original neoconservatives the mainstream progressive position today is that of the neoconservatives of the '70s. While the neoconservatives of the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s exaggerated Soviet power, the kind of muscular liberal internationalism that Pat Moynihan defended against the left in the 1970s and against Reaganite unilateralism in the 1980s is today's progressive grand strategy.
Neoconservatives like Moynihan were denounced as racists in the 1970s for saying the same things about the importance of law and order and functioning families that Clinton and Obama have been able to say without controversy. The original neoconservatives like Moynihan and Glazer sought to help the black and Latino poor by means of universal, race-neutral programmes instead of race-based affirmative action, which, they warned, would spark a white backlash to the benefit of conservatives. They were right about the political potency and longevity of that backlash, too, even though today's progressives still refuse to admit it...
The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital centre that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s.

As for the current state of American conservatism and the cult of Palin and the Plumber, Lind couldn't be more damning.

[Via Rod Dreher, who's on a roll at the moment]