[lbo-talk] Tea Partiers: A paleocon perspective

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Thu Apr 29 11:31:00 PDT 2010


I quote my friend Jack Ross of the American Conservative (from a Facebook thread):

"If I had the time and/or opportunity I would write about how the Tea Party doctrine is in fact as hardcore Trotskyite-Shachtmanite-Neocon as ever. Peter Viereck's description of anti-McCarthyism, '...a hysteria about a hysteria', has never rung more true.

"Yes, I'll spell it out right here: The Tea Parties are about neither race nor the federal debt, but about the militant defense of 'American exceptionalism', that is, the empire. The apocalyptic association of this with the health care bill reflects a deep internalization of the fundamental epiphany behind neoconservatism, as recalled by Irving Kristol himself and deriving entirely from Trotskyite-Shachtmanite principles: http://www.aei.org/article/25267

"[I]t [the whole problem with the government] began in Philadelphia when they adopted the Virginia Plan when there was a fine improvement on the Articles of Confederation in the New Jersey Plan:

http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Founder-Drunken-Prophet-Founders/dp/1933859733

"I've no love lost for the Lost Cause, but the morality tale of the virtuous North is indispensable to the perpetuation of the American Empire. With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln cynically transformed his war into a war against slavery no differently than Bush transformed the Iraq War in mid-course into a war to spread democracy. And if you believe that conscription is slavery, you must acknowledge that the heroic New York Draft Riots (really New York's War of Independence) was a greater revolt against slavery than any that took place in the South during the war."

Curiously, this makes more sense than 95% of the commentary emanating from the left.

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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