"Like their predecessors—from Edmund Burke to T.S. Eliot, Samuel Coleridge to Martin Heidegger, Henry Adams to Michael Oakeshott—today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality and are uncomfortable with rationalism and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are uneasy about the market but friendly to politics, particularly at moments when politics is consumed with questions of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons, enthralled by the epic grandeur of Rome, the ethos of the pagan warrior rather than the comfortable bourgeois, would take up the call of empire with a vengeance, seeking to create a world that is about something more than money and markets."
"Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed a discomfort with the murky world of power and violent conflict, of tragedy and rupture. 'The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist,' complained Brooks, 'was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore. Conservatives thrive on a world of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred, where good is always on the defensive and time is a precious commodity in the race against corruption and decline. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtù, qualities conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. It is no accident that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Allan Bloom (in fact, Wolfowitz makes a cameo appearance in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's novel about Bloom); Bloom, like many other influential neoconservatives, was a follower of the political theorist Leo Strauss, whose quiet odes to classical virtue and harmonious order veiled his Nietzschean vision of torturous conflict and violent struggle."
How does this vision of human authenticity differ from the vision set out in the passages from Zizek I recently quoted or from the identification of Marxian politics with "struggle" disconnected from any consideration of what struggle is for, from any consideration of "cookbooks for the future"?
Ted