Hutton: Blair and the US hard right

[Jeet Heer]

The whole neo-con versus paleo-con battle is very intersting to me. It first
errupted in the late 1980s over Joseph Sobran's anti-Zionism, which
eventually got him expelled from National Review and then, on a much bigger
scale, when Buchanan criticized Israel's "amen corner" in 1990/91 at the
cusp of the first Gulf War. At that time, as now, Frum denounced Buchanan
and his allies as anti-Semites, etc. During that debate, I was much more
sympathetic to the neo-cons than the paleo-cons. I saw the neo-cons as
revisionists liberals, and therefore part of the enlightenment project.
Whatever their retrogressive views on gender, race and secual orientation,
they still partook of rationality, while the paleo-cons seemed like the
party of pure bigotry. Yet, over the last decade, as it became increasingly
evident neo-cons are as irrational as the paleo-cons, only in a different
way. The neo-cons are fellow-travellers of Likud and therefore eager to have
the United States "re-make" the Middle East to be more amenable to both
Israel and the United States. To me, this project seems like simply folly
and madness -- the point being that it was a mistake to believe that any one
faction of the conservative movement is more "rational" than another.

----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2003 1:10 PM
Subject: Re: Hutton: Blair and the US hard right


>    Doi! Forgot to mention that David Frum has a long cover piece,
> "Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War On America, " in the latest National
> Review, cover date,  bashing the paleo-cons over the war.<URL:
> http://www.nationalreview.com/preview/preview040703.asp >
>
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese
>
>
>