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Alan Bloom: A neocon founding father |
As the first part of this survey on the American rightwing observed, the neoconservatives did not emerge out of an intellectual vacuum. The “neocons” have had mentors and schooling, and despite strenuous denial to the contrary, historical continuity with Europe. In that regard, the University of Chicago played a central role, as did Leo Strauss, the German Jewish political philosopher, one of its star professors.
All of these factors mean that the neocon movement spells victory for a militant conservative wing among American Jews over the leftist, progressive wing of German Jewish émigrés, whom the late University of Chicago scholar Allan Bloom blamed for the “closing of the American mind.” 1 This rightwing turn in the American Jewish intellectual community has also aligned American foreign policy with the Likud’s expansionist vision for gaining complete control over Palestinian territory, gradually ridding it of its native inhabitants and barring their right to return.
Bloom himself was a student of Strauss, whose work is complex and covers vast historical and cultural stretches. 2 Suffice it to say that his thought was marked by a deep concern, verging on the paranoiac, that those who most threaten democracy are the militant citizens of democracies themselves. None other than Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism and father of William, editor of The Weekly Standard, has attested to the closed-society, self-righteous cultish element of the selected guardians of democracy lying beneath this profoundly elitist thought. It is this thought that now provides the US with a full-fledged militant ideology. 3
As Strauss’ story goes, a veil of secrecy became necessary for the apostles of democracy to adopt in order to maintain the system’s persistence. This growing belief system was bolstered by proto neo-con adepts’ self-imposed sense of exclusion from the community, namely the university community. The university’s interdisciplinary norms of peer evaluation of ideas and arguments had proved to be too restrictive for them. This is something they regularly attribute to the “leftwing” takeover of political science faculties across the nation. University of Toronto professor Shadia Drury, a leading Straussian scholar, locates this exclusiveness in the esoteric style of Strauss’s writings, confirming that the neoconservatives are not well regarded within the academy. But she also stresses that “it is not entirely their fault. They are poorly trained, because Strauss's philosophy is ill suited for academic life. It aspires to action. Its goal is not to understand the world, but to change it.”4
A Religious Commitment to Plutocracy
Wealth and Democracy, A Political History of the American Rich, was arguably the most important mainstream book published in the United States in 2002. Its author, Kevin Phillips, an old-school Grand Old Party ideologue, is not your typical Republican. Through charts and statistics, his economic analyses relentlessly portray the transformation of American capitalism away from a confluence with the democratic ideals of the founding fathers, to one of “plutocratic” aims, i.e. “government by the rich for the rich.”5
| “Strauss's philosophy is ill suited for academic life… Its goal is not to understand the world, but to change it.” |
What differs in the foreground between the intellectual commitments of Phillips from that of neocons like the Kristols is the former’s willingness to debate and discuss issues of political depth in otherwise hostile media settings (issues such as history, American foreign policy, the expectations, construction and hypocrisies of American capitalism, its class structure, structural corruption and internal repression).
The neocons are almost single-handedly responsible for this segregation of political debate in the US. Through Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television network, they have made a mockery of political thought to the point where many Americans, steeped in confusion regarding media aims and strategies, no longer feel comfortable about debating politics at all. Worse, viewers of this station now entertain disinformation as factual data about the Middle East and American foreign policy.
Phillips’ work explores the whole economic background protected and disfigured by the Fox way of telling the news. Matching historical analysis of the rise and fall of post-Renaissance powers like Holland, Spain and Britain with America’s so-called Gilded Age, he shows that corruption is far from being an exception to the rule of American capitalism. And were anyone still confused about what corruption means in the USA, Philips draws out how public wealth has been shrunk to extreme forms of concentration in the hands of the very few ever since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, his work has been savagely attacked by the Republican rightwing.
In the background to these condemnations lies the neocons’ typically obscure relation to the “facts.” The only thing they seem to have picked up from German philosophy is how we tend to “interpret” and perennially reinterpret the facts until they end up defining what we think is real — or what we want to think is real. In other words, outside of an interpretation, a fact simply falls short of existing. As far as forging public opinion, television does the rest. That’s because the best way to undermine rival facts is to claim them to be “merely subjective” opinions of those holding them. Everyone has a “right” to their own opinions, provided, of course, that none of them dominate the way the elite wants us to think. Who can still claim that philosophy is devoid of purpose in modern day America?
When pushed to the extreme, this crafting or “manufacturing” of consent allows us to make sense of the smooth merger of the proto-neoconservative ideology with the rising Christian fundamentalism that first occurred during Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office (1980-1988). What allowed them to join forces, despite the often-incongruous spiritual content of their visions, was the approach shared by advocates on either side of the restructured Republican Party to the canonical texts of their respective traditions.
One can find a deep intertwining between the way Christian fundamentalists follow the Scriptures literally and the Straussian conception of fact; two formally similar prophetic needs to code the world through a cabal-like kaleidoscope. When it comes to reinterpreting this densely ciphered world, however, the big difference is that for Christian fundamentalists interpreting the sacred text can never be too complex, nor can the world’s truth be the result of empirical evaluation reached through deliberation. At the end point, the method matches up with neo-con doctrine, with the fundamentalists remaining banned from debate.
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| John Ashcroft: Fundamentalist of the hour |
For years now, the emergence of born-again Christians in government has encroached on the Enlightenment principles from which the early American republic was born. The Constitution called not only for a separation of governing powers, it also laid the first brick in the separation of State and Church, a clause that has also played a legislative role. As a result, no entity from within the State could claim to be higher, or receive the claims to being such, than the deliberative nature of the American judicial system, the law of the American people. The trick the fundamentalists had to turn was to make that law identical to God’s will.
But in the background to the rise of the religious right, you could hear the economic engines churning again. A sense of revenge lubricated the spindles and cogs and the whoosh of a disk drive winding. It doesn’t take a genius to notice how the shifts in wealth and power within the United States have led to, at least geographically speaking, the taking back of power from the North and drawing it to the Old South and its extensions. There’s some long overdue vengeance going on for having lost the Civil War.
Unlike Canada and many Western European nations, American voters rarely vote along urban or rural lines. The electorate cracks between regions. Those advocating the honor-based principles of the Old South are often the very same states that make up the so-called Bible Belt, the font of Christian fundamentalism.
The sociologist of religion, Jose Casanova, has argued for the significance of 1979 as a crucial date in a recent, planet-wide, avatar of religious fundamentalism. 6 In the American version of this unfolding, 1979 is the year when the Moral Majority managed to propel its candidate, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency. Reagan was not the first openly avowed religious candidate. After all, then out-going President Jimmy Carter was a Methodist. A greater harbinger of things to come had occurred a decade and a half earlier when the late Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate against Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, ushered in Christian fundamentalism’s political ambitions during the height of the Cold War. In his infamous 1964 Republican Convention speech, he pleaded for the moral right of “extremism,” so long as it complied with political and religious ideals, i.e. “liberty.”
Both Goldwater and Carter left a prophetic dent in the liberal tradition of American democratic capitalism, but even Reagan fell short of the current administration’s fanatical messianism. Still, few, very few, were the political allies in these two former camps who justified policy decisions in the name of God, as did Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, and Jesse Helms, the notorious, now retired conservative senator from North Carolina. That would only come during the great boom of the 1990s.
The Republican “Revolution”
| The emergence of born-again Christians in government has encroached on the principles from which the American republic was born. |
In the eyes and minds of most of the world, including the American population’s, from 1992 to 2000 the United States was managed by the Democratic Party. Yet the historical fact lies in the fine print. From 1994, the victory date of Georgian representative Newt Gingrinch’s “Republican Revolution,” President Bill Clinton had to share power with a Republican-held Congress. The new Born-Again rightwing came to the Hill armed with a futurist ideology that celebrated cyberspace as an acceleration of Judgment Day sunk deep in their “Commonsense Revolution.” This belief also explained their nearly fanatical affiliation with belligerent Israelis, who the Christians believe will provoke Armageddon and open the gates to paradise for the faithful, i.e. Christians and converted Jews. During Clinton’s two terms in office, the “pragmatism” of the fundamentalists on the House floor was bent on bringing the federal executive to a halt. Only the Democratically-controlled Senate could fend off the right’s stalling and diversion tactics, used to defuse the meager social policies put forward by Clinton.
Gingrich’s high flying rhetorical skills swept the Republicans to power in the lower House, where they had remained a minority even during Ronald Reagan’s terms. His media savvy histrionics also made him many enemies. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before his enraged denunciation of Clinton’s sins would turn around to undermine his leadership. In 1998, amidst an ethics scandal involving alleged tax-law violations, Gingrich resigned as House Majority Leader and left his seat.
From Delaying Tactics to Tom Delay
As an extremist, Tom Delay, Gingrich’s successor as Republican Party fundraising director and current House leader, is as discreet as they come. He appears little on television, save for Sunday mornings. But despite the denials of skeptical Northeastern academics, Tom Delay really does exist. The power he wields makes it the world’s priority to get to know someone formerly referred to as Mr. De-Reg. The story has it that his fervent commitment to fighting government regulation on corporate activities stems from losing his small-time business in Texas due to the fed’s heavy hand. For the electorate, he’s an everyman fighting the “big” government machine.
Since assuming the House leadership, DeLay has allowed his religious fundamentalism to start speaking. In a continual process of severance from Europe, this Christian doctrine squarely rejects the Enlightenment and its consequences, most notably Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the basis for species’ evolution. g the peculiarly feverish commitment of male fundamentalists to keeping abortion banned. It is also interventionist in the most literal sense, going as far as auto-da-fe book and CD burning, censoring literature and preventing public libraries from carrying books deemed as sinful.
In a legal extension, they now have Patriot Act section 215 to force librarians to reveal the identity of those borrowing suspect books. Their man of the hour is the Attorney General who crafted the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, another devotee fundamentalist.
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| Lt. Gen. William Boykin: Foot-in-mouth crusader |
The State of Kansas has even gone as far as prohibiting Darwinism and its neurophilosophical derivations from being taught in public schools. None of this means that born-again Christians reject science. In fact, they solidly favor science with a capital “S,” big Science, Science as economy and ideology — Science that guarantees American hegemony over the planet. The science they refuse, or rather know little if anything about, is the type of science that Sigmund Freud once described as wounding mankind’s narcissism, to say nothing of Americans’. This is the science of invention, creation, criticism and above all, demonstration, proof and refutation. It’s the method behind the scientific research whose evolution and progress are at risk in the US as conservative watchdogs hound professors over what they say and write on government, economics and religions.
As advocates of capital punishment, the Christian rightwing’s moral ethics teaches the right of retribution. This is something John Lennon had to learn in the flesh after he was gunned down by a born-again Christian.
Now the born again Christians have one of their messianic disciples in the Whitehouse, instead of simply promoting the candidate they deem most adequate. Typically, his fanaticism is of the same ilk that sends an organism into drug addiction. And nobody sees ideas as being more threatening than a repressed drug addict. Nor is it only in the Executive where Christians have spread their wings. The army’s top-secret Delta Force is headed by a General of Manichean vision. The Los Angeles Times and other American liberal media sources have been quick to pick up the public statements made by Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, reportedly assigned to track down Osama bin Laden. 7
At Church group talks, Boykin in military dress would paint the “war on terror” in religious terms. Officially, he has spoken in contradiction to the President. Bush lost no time in making amends for using the term “crusade” to refer to his war on Islamist terrorism. The Executive has tried to minimize the damage caused by Boykin’s ideas and his characterization of Allah as an “idol” by reminding Americans that the military is usually not granted freedom of expression, whereas this time it was, so we should be forgiving — like good Christians, I guess. The mainstream risibly took the statement as justified. When the Executive speaks, the corporate media blindly follows — with full knowledge of what is really going on, but by now this is a dying assumption.
| Barry Goldwater ushered in Christian fundamentalism’s political ambitions when he pleaded for the moral right of “extremism,” so long as it complied with political and religious ideals. |
Boykin and his views may be an exception only due to his rank. But the religious-war paradigm he uses to read the world is what American ideology has increasingly grown to become, especially since 9/11. Through this survey on the rightwing turn in the US Republican party, it becomes very hard to advocate its politics as being healthy for the world at large, whether for its livelihood or for its thought.
What’s clearer to observe is how a far-right turn in American politics has achieved legitimacy through the American bi-party system thanks, in large part, to the past progressive accomplishments with which American history overflows. At times, but they have been few, Americans as a whole have been devoted to wealth redistribution on a broad scale. Those were times when citizens overwhelmingly respected the world as a complex organism.
As in other countries worldwide, however, the rise of political and religious fundamentalism has heralded the most violent of times. You only need to speak to a foreigner who has lived under dictatorial regimes to understand what the current American smell implies. It’s the foreigner to whom we must turn to understand that being rightwing in America today, i.e. being Republican, equates with being far-right in any other G7 country. Needless to say, the seriousness of this “drama” stands firmly next to the “tragedy” of what happened on 9/11. It is high time the American public awoke.
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