slightly edited July 18 2003
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reviewed by an ex-neo-conservative What is a neo-conservative? From reading the Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, I have learned that I was one of the early wave of neo-conservatives in the united $tates, as soon as the term came out in 1973. In response to Norman Podhoretz's autobiography of life as a young student, I will offer my political qualifications as follows: I was pro-life, pro-I$rael and pro-Vietnam War for years till Vietnam's final "fall" or unification in 1975. I will add that one of my most highly regarded peers said I was an authority-lover, one who was "so straight." It crushed me to hear that, but I knew it to be true. For example, I wanted pre-marital sex and dating like everyone else my age that I knew, but I was too much of an authority-lover to actually do what I wanted. So I did no drugs, no smoking and I didn't even date, so much was my fear of not achieving everything that authorities set out for me to achieve. In retrospect none of that is too important, though I'm still against drugs and smoking for good reasons, but for neo-conservatism these subjects are right up there with the Holocaust, even higher judging from how often the Holocaust appears in this book (written disproportionately by Zionist extremists) compared with the subject of illegitimate births.
To listen to the neo-conservatives, what differentiates them from other reactionaries and conservatives (the "paleos") is that "neos" supported the Civil Rights movement at least in words in the 1960s. On this they say they have won over almost the entire "conservative" movement, except some old and dark corners of it, such as Trent Lott who who just so happens to be in power. For this reason the neo-cons say they now are the conservative movement and there is no need for "neo-" prefixes anymore. Specifically the neo-conservative movement wants to take credit for ridding the "Old Right" of anti-Semitism and racism.
The neo-conservatives opposed the Vietnam War, but on very narrow grounds that they did not want to generalize to the Third World as a whole, so as to leave open the possibility of other interventions. At first I flip-flopped on the Vietnam War, but then my support for it strengthened with age. Hence my political ideas as a young student were similar to neo-conservatism though more extreme and betraying some "paleo-" influence but also some more pure "neo-" influences than usual: though naturally conservative, I desired very much to get into a schoolyard fight against white racists at my school. I came to this idea relatively on my own, because teachers and parents opposed beating up racists, advised non-violence and used phrases from Martin Luther King without mentioning his name or explaining any ideas in much detail.
Without the benefit of a more thorough education, my desire to beat up white racists and my early admiration for Sweden's achievements was in no way ideological. My myriad of ideas were unconnected in any systematic way by me or the others I knew. I had liberal, radical and conservative teachers. When Mao's China got into the United Nations, my teacher came to school crying. When we asked her why she was crying--something we'd never seen before, she said that it was over China's admission to the UN to replace Taiwan. Another memory was one assignment to debate the Vietnam War. For once, it was the much overrated class jock who broke the ice in the debate as all the students looked at each other not knowing what to say. I did not expect the debate to be about U.S. soldiers, but he said, "how would you like to go to some jungle 9,000 miles away to die?" He added you would not even know where you were when you died. Having even that much to say put our jock above the rest of us in the class. I was very much in favor of I$rael. In fact, when assigned to a debate squad on the subject of I$rael, I refused to take the pro-Palestinian side. However, the teacher explained to me that no one in the class had volunteered for the Arab side. There couldn't be a debate unless he ordered me and some others to take the Arab side. He also decided to choose me he said, because he wanted some good students on the Arab side. (Translate: he knew I would follow orders and do my duty and we would have a real debate.) I had to admit to myself that I was surprised that no one volunteered for the Arab side. I figured that just by luck or ignorance there would have to be somebody, probably half the class, but no, everyone in the class wanted to take the I$raeli side or serve as a judge. Up until that time, I qualified as a neo-conservative would today--pro-I$rael with simplistic ideas about "terrorism." It turns out that after our long preparations we thrashed the pro-I$rael side of the debate on that fateful day and when the teams of debaters turned to the class, we picked up exactly half the votes--in a class where no one had been willing to take the Arab side. The amazing thing was that half the class voted for the pro-I$rael side so entirely humiliated by our pro-Arab team. Immediately afterwards, one of the pro-I$rael voters who happened to be one of my best friends and a Jew told me that we indeed did thrash the other side, but then pointing to his compatriot judges who voted for the pro-I$rael team in the audience, he said, "No, no, no. You won. You won. You see all those people. They're Jews. I agreed with you but. . ." He went on to explain how they just could not vote for us on the pro-Arab team. If he had not explained that much to me, I would not have figured it out, and I was grateful for the insight. Despite this experience, I did not connect it to any larger ideological view. I learned that history was not to be taken lightly and some things that might appear on the surface to be completely black-and-white might in fact be white-and-black. On any given day it was possible for the pro-Palestinian side to win a debate, so in the future, I was to be more careful with the issue (like many others I bumped up against) and I realized that I would no longer see the Middle East in terms of only the latest terrorist incident, a kind of distortion in itself. After my fateful school debate and switching of sides on the Middle East question, the neo-cons probably would no longer count me as one of theirs, but given my anti-communism I was still potential fodder for the paleo-conservatives for another few years. Neo-conservatism as the new racism Since this book is a collection of essays over decades, we should evaluate each one in its context. The first two articles on race by Podhoretz and Moynihan came out in the 1960s, when the authors who thought their work worth publishing should have been exposed to certain facts at that time but instead never mentioned them.
"Median Income by Color and Education of Head of Family in 1963"(Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States 1965, p. 345)
Neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz says in "My Negro Problem--And Ours," (1963) where he admits that he hates Blacks, that he experienced Black violence in his neighborhood and for him the issue of race left him admittedly twisted. He originally questioned why there was an issue anymore since slavery was over and that he had a hard time believing the more well-informed arguments that he heard that there is racism in Amerikkka. In contrast with Norman Podhoretz focusing on Blacks, I had a dim judgement of most of my peers at school, even as I desperately wanted to be popular and like everyone else. Why I was not like everyone else--and this is something I still get asked today--is something I think would be overly distracting to answer, and perhaps not illuminating either. Yes, I saw violent white racism in school. To me at the time, it was a tiny portion of what I did not like about how students treated each other. While Podhoretz doubted in general the idea of oppression, and saw only one-on-one interactions where Blacks seemed to do well, I saw students verbally pick on, throw things at, spit on and physically attack mentally retarded kids and those who were profoundly emotionally disturbed. True, at least no one was seriously hurt by knives or guns; however, if kids could do this to the defenseless there was no way that I was going to be unreceptive to the idea that there was racism out there. How kids picked on each other demonstrated a complete lack of decent judgment and if they could do what I saw, I reasoned they could do anything. I can't prove it, but I doubt that Podhoretz's school did not have white kids who picked on white kids who were "sissies" or too intellectual or even maybe just out of the mainstream like the children we called retarded or disturbed in my school. So in this regard, in contrast with paleo-conservatives, open reactionaries and fascists, who had a history of opposing the Civil Rights movement, I was more extreme in my "neo"-ness, because I was quite prepared to believe there was racism and a lot of other really hard to understand and shocking social problems. It's just that I had no notion that these were systematic problems, though I did think they were something like herd-behavior problems. At that point, I did not even know what a political or economic system was. Vietnam and anti-communism The other aspect in which I was probably more extreme in my conservatism than most was my anti-communism. I was so over the top that "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill was my favorite essay, but a book by the John Birch Society about the Vietnam War was my favorite book for a while. Not surprisingly, having learned that about me, my librarian steered me to a communist book and my teachers approved that I would learn something about a communist that I did not know was a communist: for those who say I was being manipulated again, it was easy: there were a lot of things I did not know and how they were connected. In any case, the Vietnam War came to disturb me--maybe not as much as mature adults fully involved in the issue, but enough to set my intellectual wheels turning. As an authority-lover, I originally supported one teacher of mine who opposed the Vietnam War. Peace sounded like a good thing. I definitely had exposure to McGovern liberalism too. As time went on though, my support for the Vietnam War firmed up, just as the rest of the country had already long ago decided against it. I did not like the answers I got about the Vietnam War when I asked. "Why do people want U.S. troops to leave?" It was a "mistake" and many young Amerikkkans had died already I was told. I said, "if many have died already shouldn't that mean we send more till we win to give meaning to their lives?" I didn't like the idea of quitters. Something I shared with other neo-conservatives at the time was that I did not like the answers I was getting to basic questions. I'm going to say--with most paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives not being able to process it because of their attachment to the ways of their families and churches--that conservatives of any stripe are there by default, an intellectual laziness giving rise to easy emotional answers--hence the ages-old and justified attack on conservatism as glorified parochialism. It's been proven again and again that the more "intelligent" the persyn, the less religious and the more radical. That's proven with high correlations by grades and the conservatives' beloved IQ tests. No less than arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. admitted that accomplished intellectual people are the most "left-wing," but he does not have a good answer to what that should mean to him and his ideology. The faculty of the land has succeeded in moving people politically he says and calls it "indoctrination": "Let the person who wants to wrestle with these statistics blurt forth his secret belief that there is a correlation between 'level of education' and 'political liberalism.'" (William F. Buckley, Jr., Up From Liberalism NY: Bantam Books, 1968, pp. 58-9) Buckley also mentioned the famous Adorno study of the "authoritarian personality" and conservatism. Another study was Charles Hampden-Turner's book Radical Man. Not surprisingly given the facts cascading down on him from all around, Buckley came up with the typical Amerikan anti-intellectualism labeling college "indoctrination" but advertising a good thing. With more advertising and church and less college, people would be more conservative, something sensible people would call cutting off your nose to spite your face. It's ironic that the same conservatives who spend so much time denouncing their brethren liberals' parasitic welfare state for giving a few tax break dollars to the poor that might encourage and make affordable a few more babies and economic laziness, they also condemn educational pursuit as "indoctrination." Could there be a more invidious way to destroy educational motivation as if it were not low enough already? Then these conservatives have the nerve to talk about building "character" and "virtue" and opposing laziness? Actually, we agree with Buckley that colleges "indoctrinate," as does advertising, which Buckley defends against Galbraith. (e.g., Ibid., p. 123) (It's quite a perversity how Buckley defends advertising but not college education. Maybe if he had paid more attention to Galbraith in school instead of Coca-Cola on the radio or TV he would have turned out brighter.) Churches also indoctrinate, but of advertising, churches and colleges, sensible people everywhere know that college indoctrination is the best. Maybe in the Taliban they can make up for a lack of college education by having more emphasis on the church. If that's what the conservatives want, they should pack up their pick-up trucks and SUVs and move to Afghanistan or Iraq where they will surely have a better chance of being obliged on the church question and find plentiful oil without having to go to war against another country for it. People with money as in the imperialist countries tend to want a thorough education a little more than that. Even worse for Buckley and other conservatives than the association between academics and "leftism", the relationship between atheism and intelligence as would be measured in terms accepted by Buckley is quite strong. (See the summary of evidence at: http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/L-thinkingchristians.htm ) The most accomplished people in most intellectual fields are disproportionately atheist. It's another social fact that conservatives must dodge. Where does that leave Mr. Buckley and his supposed support for "hard work" and "character"? In East Asia, Confucian-inspired conservatives have this figured out and supported an entire revolution in southern Korea in 1960 just because professors merely marched: Mr. Buckley does not have it figured out yet. If you want people to have motivation for education, you have to respect it. Even this much the Amerikkkan bourgeois does not have figured out and then wonders about "decline" and "decay" and the failure of Amerikkkan schools--instead advocating the introduction of television and advertising in schools along with school vouchers as some sort of "solution." What I noticed during the Vietnam War was no different from what Buckley noticed at the time in his book Up from Liberalism--that conservatives could be completely inarticulate, something the neo-cons wanted to change. The only question was why they could say nothing much in the Vietnam era--genuine stupidity or something else. The liberals said the Vietnam War was a "mistake" and won the day. Fighting conservatives or reactionaries seemed to be either non-existent or even less able to argue than the people saying it was a "mistake." It seemed to me at the time with Nixon pulling out troops and Congress increasingly leery of funding the war, pro-Vietnam War people were virtually non-existent in real life apart from some politicians on television or in the newspapers. It was difficult to figure out what was really at stake and how it could have all happened in the first place. Hopefully if I explain some of my own reasoning from the time, some paleo-cons and neo-cons will see a glimmer of recognition. For me the first problem even in reading the New York Times regarding the Vietnam War was "how can anyone fall for that totalitarian communist stuff?" It baffled me from the beginning. (I absorbed mostly conservative messages from the New York Times in connection to communism, totalitarianism and terrorism despite the reputation of that paper among conservatives. I simply did not read the other stories with as much interest.) "How can they support dictatorship?" I asked myself as I studied the New York Times. It made me speculate about the devil; even though I didn't think I had seen any devil up-close in my own life. I wondered to myself about the situation in Vietnam and at home. The first answer is "they" do not support dictatorship. Some people do, and assume a most devil-like evil, but they must be the minority I thought. Though I had been indoctrinated in George Washington for every year for eight years straight, it hadn't yet occurred to me that the more the Amerikkkans fought, the more the Vietnamese would fight back and I had no proper sense of how unpopular and corrupt the anti-communist side was in Vietnam. These things did not even occur to me to wonder about. Then again, I was left with the gnawing question of why Amerikkkans left the war and how the majority opinion became what it was. I went back and forth with these questions, but to my credit I did not get stuck in an endless circle. I decided that the failure of pro-Vietnam War activists was a question of "cat got your tongue?" With dictatorship in Vietnam and people dying, I just knew there had to be more thorough answers possible than what I was getting. On the playground I had already seen much earlier that mature adults could often look the other way as horrific things went on. I decided that maybe most of these mature adults did not have much to say for themselves and needed someone to put forward persuasive arguments about communism. Looking back, I might have mistaken adult condescension for a lack of anything to say on important questions. Though I was known to some of my peers as "so straight" in conformity, I hated being told something was true, "because I said so." With what I saw around me, I had a strong suspicion that adults had no moral fiber, but that maybe they could be reasoned with and improved and then work on their kids. In all of this of course I was a natural neo-con goody-goody. In fact, I decided that I would make it my goal to know communism inside-out and refute it point by point, because obviously to me at the time, someone had failed to do that and convince people. Of course, I had no real idea about the military situation on the ground in Vietnam or the popularity of communism, but I knew there was still fighting going on. I made it my mission that I absolutely had to contribute to the fight against communist-totalitarian-terrorism. I was so over the top in my hatred for communism that I did a lot of things that contributed to my education, including something that most anti-communists do not: I actually read Karl Marx and struggled with a dictionary and encyclopedia in hand to understand all the words and references Marx used, with the ambition of refuting Marx line-by-line and also understanding what these devil-like characters found so attractive in the first place. With some help from a teacher of political philosophy, I came to realize that Marxism was a nearly symmetric opposite to what we naturally imbibed in Amerikkkan schools. We were for freedom of the individual. Marx said groups were more important and we misunderstood freedom. For a long time I went around and around on that subject, because the perfect opposition of Marxism to what I had previously believed along with most Amerikkkans made it impossible to dismiss Marxism on a priori grounds. How such mirror opposite ideas could arise was indeed a thing of beauty paralyzing by its nature to me and probably most of the small portion of petty-bourgeois Amerikkka exposed to the same things. What is more, I knew I was not going to convince anyone just by saying individuals are more important than groups or that my idea of freedom was better than Marx's. As do many young people who go through a "relativist" phase, I knew I was stuck. How can you prove one idea better than another? If we said we had freedom in America, Marxists could say you have coercion of labor and brainwashing to go with it. Looking at the same thing, Marxists would say it was caused by one thing and Liberals following Mill would say another. This quandary held me up for a long time. My first successful crack at this problem surprised me and produced a tactical victory for Marxism in my mind. Do people say they are happy or free because they are coerced to do so or because they really are? How can I possibly win debate points and convince people on this point I wondered for a long time. I went around and around and just knew I had to study this more or I would turn out like those sputtering middle-aged people. Then regarding something Marx said about winter in England, I translated to what I knew to be true myself: if people are so happy with the system, then why is it when there is a snow emergency everyone rejoices not to work or go to school? Most school children are quite happy to have the snow day off. This proves that they really hate school (and need I add how we felt about summer vacation?) and are only forced to go through the motions by parents etc. So what kind of "freedom" is that? I did not know it at the time, but I had undertaken my first truly scientific thought as it applied to social issues. Prior to that I had to reason on strictly appearance bases of good and bad. On the surface, this was an intractable question, one prone to make people throw up their hands and say there is no way to prove something in social science, but the historical accident of snow outside of the control of Marxists or the Liberals did provide a fair test. I now had to concede that there was a way I could see to prove one point or the other correct or not correct and in fact Marxism had addressed something I had not thought of before. I have what might be considered bad news for other neo-cons. That bit about snow was my first scientific reasoning for social issues. It means I had been a neo-con for years without knowing how to reason scientifically or what some would call "logically." I did not grasp really basic historical reasoning acceptable to both bourgeois and Marxist historians until several years later. Then it was another several years before I had all reasoning skills regarding cause and effect under my belt and could understand how capitalism distorted knowledge production processes. Without these reasoning skills, living in imperialist countries, one can never get beyond moralistic and descriptive approaches that most conservatives are stuck in. For that level of reasoning, one need not have lived beyond the year 1600. The only quick way out would be to follow a leader who does have those reasoning skills, but the way Amerikkka is today, most people in suburban and rural areas will not have ready access to such leaders. In practice, before I learned all the reasoning skills I needed, it meant that I could follow individual facts in history and even patterns and broad trends. However, it was quite possible that someone could argue history with me and I would not perceive how someone was connecting facts to theory: I would miss the point and to my frustration, history would not stick in my brain very much relative to the effort I put into cramming it in there. The key to retaining history was actually learning historical reasoning processes connected to theory. I wrestled with Marxism for eight years before I took it up. I had to get there from a long way away. I read biographies of Lenin as a dictator at an early age and I liked John Birch Society stuff in addition to the standard propaganda in school such as "Animal Farm" that was required reading and required television watching. I also believed in the so-called theory of totalitarianism which was really a blur of emotions and cross-cultural bias without much of a statement of cause and effect. It took me three years to get to the point where I realized that Marxism was a perfect theoretical opposition to capitalism. Then it took me another five years to decide whether I would continue to stand with John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" or whether Marx was right. For a while before converting to Marxism I paused in a social-democratic or liberal-radical period in compromise. In general, I stayed with John Stuart Mill during those five years as my personal status quo, but I kept Marx's and other ideas in mind all the time, as a point of comparison. I now do this for any idea that comes to mind, just keep it mind for comparison purposes. In the year prior to taking up Marxism, I studied some things about the Vietnam War that were not available in the New York Times and papers to its right and I changed my mind about Vietnam. Over the many years, the New York Times had never persuaded me that the Vietnam War was a "mistake." I had to look to the anti-imperialist youth movement for literature on why the war was wrong. When I realized that the United $tates had been bombing and starving millions of people to death around the world, it was like a nail in the corner of the coffin for my belief in individualism and supporting counter-revolution. It also explained to me why there was a violent response to the United $tates. No longer would I moralize about the violence of revolutionaries in Vietnam as if Uncle $am were a pacifist. The narrowness of the neo-conservative agenda There would be other nails in other parts of the coffin for my belief in John Stuart Mill's brand of Liberalism that was the root of my neo-conservatism. My new task was to study global causes of premature death, and I thought war would be the number one cause, but I soon learned it was starvation and poverty in connection to basic health care. No where, absolutely no where do the neo-conservatives even attempt such an important agenda in this 467 page book. They concern themselves only with street crime, the welfare state and the ultimate cause of evil in their view--out-of-wedlock births in the united $tates: "Illegitimacy is therefore 'the single most important social problem of our time.'"(p. 441) (See also, Kristol, p. 285; James Q. Wilson, p. 297) Such a view is only possible with a general or simulated ignorance of the entire world and an over-emphasis on "values" of little relative power or global significance. I say "simulated ignorance" in the case of politicians who may want to appear like the "average Joe" to obtain votes or to escape responsibility should they be caught for sordid deeds: Reagan and Bush Jr. come to mind, but not Nixon and Bush Sr. The neo-conservative subjects of the welfare state, illegitimacy and street crime as opposed to war crimes and white collar crimes, make for an agenda on Blacks to replace the old blatant KKK agenda. Listening to these neo-cons like Kristol, one would have thought the welfare programs were the whole state: "The welfare state just keeps growing. And yet it has become discredited. Poll data, and the recent election results, show that the American people now have a deep distrust of the federal government."(p. 436) Readers should notice something about this spin-meister's language. There is no transition in neo-con language between welfare and the state: they are one and the same to them. In fact all the noise is about something less than 10% of the u.$. government budget. The real point of the neo-cons is to feed into white indignation about Black wimmin with babies on welfare. That's what this whole book is really about, a huge justification for moving to the suburbs, and then secondarily dissing the whites with babies on welfare too. Prior to reading this book, I believed most advocates of building "civil society" were misguided Liberals 1) afraid of "totalitarianism," 2) willing to put their intellectual/dissident lives at a value of 100 or 1000 times that of a toiler at risk for starvation and 3) just not very informed about the realities on the ground in communist countries. Governed by simplistic fear, they would not know basic things like what was and was not available to read in the Soviet Union, when and why, for instance. They caricaturized the life of common people with a stereotype from one of my John Birch pamphlets. However, in the hands of neo-cons, the whole sociological concept of "community" and "civil society" building becomes the modern version of "states rights," designed to protect racism in suburban and rural communities. Against the encroachments of the federal government, Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger recommend defense of community structures as mediating structures. Attacks on these structures for homophobia and racism would inevitably lead to totalitarianism and economic impoverishment, so it is best to let the conservative or reactionary, Christian rural and suburban areas alone to themselves the neo-cons say: let's translate that to mean oppose bussing, allow Christian mangers to go up in public squares and have religion in public schools. It's all an elaborate justification for moving to the suburbs, respecting mommy and daddy, not changing churches and not doing anything about racism and homophobia, never mind the worst oppression of all, that of the Third World by Uncle $am. It seems that these two neo-cons Neuhaus and Berger are behind Bush's push for federal funding for religion, including the openly discriminatory religions. Once I set out on my new task of looking at the biggest and broadest questions in the world, I was bound to leave neo-conservatism and all conservatism for good. In the process, I realized that conservative anti-communists had no sense of proportion, because they were generally factually uninformed or outright evil politicians and well-paid professionals. It took me seven years of piecing together my own experience starting with my speculations on the devil and Vietnam to realize that. Of course, conservatives have a vested interest in making the narrowest part of reality problematic and worthy of debate. They are after all trying to preserve reality, not draw attention to it. One of the greatest skills of any status quo politician is to focus people on a nit-pick in order to give them the misleading impression that they debated something fundamental so they do not attempt to understand anything more broadly. Contrary to what one might think, people called conservative and neo-conservative are in the open about this, that wide participation in politics is not necessary or even desirable. (e.g. Samuel Huntington or Jeanne Kirkpatrick) Conservatives believe in things like how good their country is, their family and their church, but in reality they know nothing about the facts regarding "freedom" or any other important social issue. In most cases they think the facts unimportant. For them, preaching and church values which they usually just call "values" or "virtue" are to be a replacement for all aspects of thought. The entire neo-con movement is largely motivated as a response to the progress of all types of science, not just the abortion pill and other reproduction-related sciences, but social sciences even moreso. Conservatives, myself included at the time, believe they have "values." Where they fail is in relating factual and theoretical knowledge to those values. If we take a wheel off a horse-and-buggy and try to put it on a Ford Taurus with a flat, it's not going to work and for the same reasons, values arrived at in some other time and place may not in fact be good for anything anymore at all. Someone who can repair a horse carriage could be a really good and helpful man in the 1800s, but take his same practices and ethics and apply them today and there will be evil that resembles psychosis. Someone who tries to drive a car with a horse-and-buggy wheel attached--if s/he succeeds in getting out of the driveway-- is likely to get himself killed along with the rest of the car's occupants and some innocent by-standers--and that is not morally good, even if it was once a sensible thing to repair transportation a certain way. So it is with conservatism including neo-conservatism. It's values are no substitute for knowing how things actually work today. In "'Affirmative Action': A Worldwide Disaster" sophist Thomas Sowell says that it is "normal," as in common, for ethnic groups to have inequality in the world. He says, "the abstract moral desirability of a goal cannot preempt the prior question of our capacity to achieve it."(p. 262) With this we scientific socialists agree. It's too bad that conservatives cannot consistently muster their intellectual energies along these lines. Like the majority of pre-scientific conservatives, Sowell appeals to what seems to have happened in most prior history as proof of his points. Thus he demonstrates his incompatibility with the Enlightenment and especially Voltaire. (See also Jeanne Kirkpatrick admit the "traumatized Western imaginations since the Enlightenment"(p. 175) and numerous favorable references to monarchist thought, an anti-American idea one would think if there is one.) Few conservatives have ever learned that a description of the past is not by itself a scientific statement where a statement regarding causation is necessary. Other neo-conservatives make it unnecessary to infer their inability to use a scientific method in their work: it's in the open in statements like that by Michael Novak which demonstrate no understanding of what theory is: "Inattention to theory weakens the life of the spirit and injures the capacity of the young to dream of noble purposes. Irving Kristol in Two Cheers for Capitalism describes a moral vision 'desperately needed by the spiritually impoverished civilization.'"(p. 123) In fact, Novak is speaking of a "moral theory."(p. 122) His solutions for the world's problems is to allow theologians to get involved in the "theory of democratic capitalism."(p. 125) This is one reason why it is impossible to argue with most conservatives and pre-scientific people. When they say "communism is good in theory," they mean that theory is a statement of ethical goals that they can see the merits in. Again, for these conservatives, it seems that the only thing needed in life is a church that spews out moral proclamations, not a study of patterns of cause and effect. For us scientists, theory is an attribution relating cause and effect. It can be proven or disproven with facts. Theory is not a moral statement. If we were to take up Sowell's method of going back into humyn history to see what humyns have done most of the time and call it "normal," we would have to conclude that humyns normally live in trees or caves without the use of farms or industrial equipment. The "capacity to achieve" equal opportunity by ethnic group is not a question of what has happened in most of history. In 99.9% of humyn history we did not have the ability to construct cars or land on the moon either. But we did prove to have the "capacity to achieve it." In most of recorded humyn history, slavery was an open and legal practice. That did not mean that in the last 0.1% of history we could not do better. We defenders of Stalin and Mao require our theory to be grounded in recent history, something demonstrated possible in this small but recent sliver of history and we oppose all those nihilists and other idealist absolutists who talk about things purely of fanciful construction--typically Trotskyists and anarchists--but we do not dismiss an historical experience as beyond humyn capability simply because cave-dwellers would not have understood it. That is what I refer to as Sowell's sophistry on scientific method. Then there are much more profound questions of scientific integrity. When confronted with the fact that the united $tates has the highest imprisonment rate in the world and England the highest in Europe, the typical conservative says we have to know what the crime rate is too. They do not stop to think that if the united $tates does have the highest crime rate, that too is a condemnation of the system the Amerikkkan conservative loves so much. So it is that to live life as a conservative one must continually dodge and dodge and dodge. Instead of letting go of emotionally held preconceptions about this "free country" and how "liberty" is better than equality, conservatives come up with excuses for every social fact. The unemployed have good excuses: there are only so many jobs under capitalism; the "help wanted" can never fill the need for jobs and much of "help wanted" is fake anyway, designed for sham legal purposes or to impress investors with a non-existent hiring atmosphere. The number seeking jobs and the number of jobs is measurable and as we speak, Bush has not just increased unemployment but has destroyed jobs for the first time of any president since Hoover. In contrast, what can we say about the intellectually lazy? Is there really any justification for not knowing the United $tates is the world's prison-state par excellence? Could there be any possible reason for continuing to refer to the united $tates as a "free country"? Is there any shred of honesty among "democratic capitalism" theorists linking the Amerikan institutional structure to "freedom"? Were they unaware that India is democratic and apartheid South Africa was capitalist? As it is with "freedom," so it is with the issue of discrimination. When confronted with aggregate statistics on Black versus white income and asset inequality, the conservatives come up with an excuse: Black education levels are inferior. By itself we cannot really accept this argument, but then liberals and neo-cons will chime in that it's wrong now, but it will change over time as Blacks get more educated now that they are allowed to get educated. There is no need to change the system they say: the conditions of oppressed nationalities will change. However, we can humor this evasion and present another fact. At the time the infamous essays on race relations came out in this book in the 1960s, the average Black college graduate made less money than the average white high-school drop-out. (Within a capitalist system, we can be pretty sure that sort of discrimination kills motivation for educational attainment.) For those of us with scientific integrity, government published statistical tables settled the question of whether or not "discrimination" existed. For every Bakke case that the neo-conservatives and conservatives spilled so much ink on there had to be many other cases on the other side more than offsetting it. The Bakke case sold a lot of magazines, but it was hardly representative of any important social reality. Addressing "reverse discrimination" would only make other problems even worse than they already were. The neo-conservatives' beloved law of "unintended consequences"(James Q. Wilson, p. viii) is actually dialectics and it applies to everyone, not just progressives seeking to change something in a certain direction. Yet to this fact regarding education, race and income, Sowell and other conservatives of the day come up with yet another evasion hard as it is to believe: "Thus, what is called the 'same' education in intergroup statistical comparisons is often not even approximately the same education in reality."(p. 243) While he did make a big deal out of a 1982 study, Sowell does not actually mention the government statistics available then showing that Black high school graduates had made less than whites with no high school at all, as he knows too well that conservative ignorance is the bliss that creates more conservatism. More importantly, none of the authors in this collection of essays starting from the 1960s pointed to the basic facts. We can rest assured that there is no data that Sowell would accept that proved there is systematic racial oppression. That is the nature of pre-scientific resistance to the modern era. It is natural for the pre-scientific to come up with yet another excuse for why the facts do not concur with their preconceptions. They will say, OK, neo-conservatives were wrong in the 1960s and 1970s, but surely things changed since then? This again is a question of scientific integrity. It was not our choice that the neo-cons republished these essays and redistributed them without correcting them anywhere or adducing more thorough knowledge of the facts. So things may have indeed changed, but then the question is whether the neo-cons contributed to that change or resisted that change. In any case, we can only evaluate what they said. In his 1989 article, Sowell was denying the existence of discrimination, what could be called affirmative action for white men. We won't hold him responsible for knowing what happened after he wrote the article. Yet he should have known by then the data that came out in 1987. That data showed that men who were high school-dropouts made more money than wimmin who finished high school. Not only that, the male high school drop-outs made more on average than wimmin with associate's degrees, vocational degrees and some college. Wimmin in all three of these more highly educated categories worked more hours on average than the male high school drop-outs but made less money.
Mean monthly income by gender and educational attainment for ages 18+"Current Population Reports: Household Economic Studies Series P-70 No 11" "What's It Worth?" Issued September 1987 U.S. Dept. of Commerce
We don't doubt that the status quo defenders have yet another excuse for that despite raising the question of educational attainment as it affects the income of oppressed nationalities and wimmin as in Sowell's article. The point for the conservatives is only to raise nihilist doubts about all scientific procedures in social issues, not actually to answer questions. If the data exists to answer a question the conservatives asked, the conservatives deny it and ask another question in order to defend their beloved system. This might be a good way to treat a husband or a wife or maintain faith in a child-molesting priest if god is so important, but it's no way to handle scientific questions. At some point the conservatives need to admit that equality is not readily apparent and that a system change would be necessary to make it so. Alternatively they can argue that inequality is good, that wimmin should be treated that way or like it that way or whatever, but the conservatives should cease with their whining on how discrimination does not exist. By the way, we Maoists actually believe most Blacks and wimmin are exploiters in the united $tates. It's just that unlike the conservatives, we are not going to lie and say there is no systematic discrimination. There is, even among exploiters. James Q. Wilson is another professional who obviously knows better than what he says, but simply cannot hew to his scientific profession over his beloved conservative principles. He shoots down several conservative shibboleths in a single paragraph, a rare paragraph of systematic data in the whole book: "Very little in the customary language of policy analysis helps us explain why Japan should have such abnormally low crime rates despite high population densities, a history that glorifies samurai violence, a rather permissive pattern of child-rearing, the absence of deep religious convictions, and the remarkably low ratio of police officers to citizens."(p. 301) In fact, Wilson put forward the boring old limited ideas about a limited problem and came up with the usual failure, only to push forward with greater than ever zeal: "The foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates."(p. 317) This did not stop Wilson from writing his chapter glorifying foot patrol anyway. He makes it about as clear as possible that the police are there for social control, not to reduce crime--just as we Marxists have said all along but as a matter of condemnation. Talk about fiscal irresponsibility and big government: Wilson favors expanding government services when the statistical proof for their efficacy is admittedly lacking but he is in favor of cutting when it comes to welfare programs. These are the two most common devices corrosive to scientific integrity that the conservatives use: 1) the most lazy simply question sources without actually reading the bibliographies and footnotes or the sources. It's ironic, because the neo-cons spend much of the book condemning parasitic liberal welfare programs that make people economically lazy, while most neo-con supporters are intellectually lazy. 2) in Sowell's case, we have the, "one more question" or "one more potato chip" syndrome. If the imprisonment rate is the highest, then the conservative wants another question about the crime rate. If the Blacks and wimmin make less than white men, then they want a question of how much education Blacks and wimmin have. If you show that by number of years the education is the same while averages still differ, then Sowell will say "Education varies not only in number of years, but also qualitatively, according to the caliber of the institution in which the education was received."(p. 242) Finally, when we learn that in Moynihan's and Podhoretz's day Black college graduates averaged less income than white high school drop-outs we learn that conservatism simply never had any scientific integrity and that it prefers to condemn all social data: "That will mean abandoning a whole vocabulary of political rhetoric which preempts factual questions by arbitrarily calling statistical disparities 'discrimination,' 'exclusion,' 'segregation,' and the like"(p. 271)--thereby justifying our accusation of conservatism's being pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment and religiously dogmatic. In place of social facts, conservatives want us to substitute their Sunday school Bible classes and newspaper anecdotes of which this book is full. Novak even references Catholic hymns. The only statistics that Sowell does present to prove there is no racial discrimination for the united $tates come from incomes of college faculties, (p. 243) which all throughout the book the essayists are condemning as bastions of quota-thinking. In other words, the evil liberals and liberal-radicals had actually implemented non-discrimination in some faculties. It's utterly astonishing that Sowell presents such a small segment of Amerikkkan life affecting only the academic elite as a substitute for the overall data on discrimination. Irving Kristol admitted as much that at least some conservatives are in fact relativists. He quoted reactionary conservative economist Friederich von Hayek: "'But if nobody's knowledge is sufficient to guide all human action, there is also no human being who is competent to reward all efforts according to merit.'"(p. 107) This was how von Hayek defended capitalism while admitting that capitalism does not reward merit. The inability to reward merit is a drawback, von Hayek said, but the plus side is supposedly some kind of freedom created by not having to determine the answer to the question of merit. It's quite strange how this sort of conservatism encourages outright nihilism and anarchism. Friederich von Hayek's idea boils down to saying there might be a science of everything else, and there might even be referees who determine who wins and loses by merit in sports, but when it comes to the economy, no such solution is possible--no science and no referees with agreed-upon rules. It's saying there is no social science in fact and it accuses Marxism of "elitism" to believe there is one. So it is that the conservative invokes democracy to preserve the rule of the existing elites. If no one's social ideas are any better than anyone else's thanks to a new-born egalitarian democratic impulse, it stands to reason that in the cross-fire of contending ideas, the existing elite will maintain its position unchallenged by a united social group led by any one line created by "elitists." Never mind that that's completely contrary to what happens in other fields of knowledge or even sports and beauty contests. The conservatives want an even lower standard of reasoning than that in order to get away with a system of exploitation and oppression. Michael Novak made this all explicit: "Marxism is a species of gnosticism, that is, a perfectionism ("the paradise of the proletariat") access to which depends upon a privileged form of knowledge (gnosis, in this case 'scientific socialism') that makes a certain elite superior to everybody else."(p. 140) With such statements conservatives have managed to tap into nihilism and make it serve the status quo, because they surely do not mean to say there is no elite now in capitalist society. We Marxists merely counter that it is better our elite than your elite to run society. While we are on the subject, when is the conservative movement going to take action and stop obeying all the elitists who tell them what drugs are fraudulent, how much alcohol is permissible in the bloodstream while driving, what foods are poisoned and what water not to drink? Should there not be free-enterprise? In early industrial capitalism and before there was a Marx and his movement, the "life expectancy in France in 1795 was 27.3 years for women 23.4 for men,"(p. 119) according to Novak himself, and we have every reason to believe it was even worse in Germany. As soon as we socialist elitists stop saving their lives by regulating capitalism and struggling against its effects, these conservatives will all die off the way everybody did before the socialist movement and we can move on to socialism much more easily. The populist conservative has taken up this rallying cry against elitism in a strange way these days. Again and again the conservative has a new-found anti-elitism. Do these populist conservatives mean to say a Marxist elite is already running the united $tates? No, except for the most extreme conspiracy-minded minority of "conservatives," who are actually extreme reactionaries. Do they mean that there is no elite now and the Marxists are trying to impose one? Again the answer is no. What von Hayek and today's often-heard anti-elitist conservative really mean is that they prefer the elites in power who do not believe there is a social science. This is basically an equation we Marxists have long known to exist: individualism is incompatible with science. Science leads to a study of patterns, thus of groups, not individuals. Individualist politics that cover for the elite of the status quo cannot afford scientific discovery. There is no better way to preserve a ruling class than to convince everyone that they are just individuals who are actually divided from each other and thus unable to fight in unity against the best one-on-one fighters--the bourgeoisie. Values cannot replace factual knowledge Of course what is worse is that throughout the book conservatives make precise statements that could be made with facts but which they replace with "values." Podhoretz asks how Blacks in his neighborhood could regard poor whites as "jailers."(p. 11) Yet this is a statistical question: who does Podhoretz think New York state prison guards were--Rockefellers? Of course they were "poor" whites without real jobs. In some rural white New York counties the prison is the leading or second employer. If he had any doubts he should have presented the statistics on income and race of jailers. Podhoretz talks about Black-on-white violence,(p. 20) again with no statistics; although the government collects and releases them every year. Once again, a close examination would prove that neo-conservatives focus their agenda on a small portion of reality, thus justifying the charges of racism against them. The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader is really a collection of essays from a period of decades starting in the 1960s. The editor had a full choice of what to include, but in more than 400 pages, there were hardly any statistical tables and what there was were not much relevant and very narrowly conceived. That's not to say I question the statistics presented in the book the way many immature conservatives do as a matter of course in response to anything unsettling. In addition to lacking scientific integrity on questions of race-related statistics, neo-cons published some of the most racist essays of public discourse in recent times in this book. It's typical that since neo-cons operate only at the level of "values," they state that they are non-racist in intent and believe they have settled the question. Moynihan was typical: "My God, I was not a racist, I was not a bigot, but all the good guys were calling me a racist."(p. 3) It hardly matters whether one intends racism or not. Nor does it matter if an oppressor group finds some lackeys among the oppressed to support their views. One is either contributing to group level dominance of one ethnic or racial group by another or one is not. Contrary to Moynihan in his UN speech on Zionism,(pp. 93-9) the fact that I$rael has some Arab ethnicity citizens does not mean I$rael cannot perpetrate racism anymore than saying that because the united $tates is multi-racial nothing it does in the world can be racist either. If that were true, obviously Jim Crow laws were not racist, because the united $tates had Black citizens when Jim Crow was in effect. Likewise, applauding apartheid in South Africa, sending it arms and loaning it money were not racist either by Moynihan's reasoning. Racism is not just a question of something one states in one's values. Saying one is for a moderate Civil Rights movement does not make one opposed to racism in action. This again is a confusion of preaching with something else. Moynihan took a slap at First Nation peoples this way: "That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary--a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have."(p. 32) Likewise, Nathan Glazer whitewashes genocide against ten million people of the First Nations of North America by saying Vietnam was the first time Amerikkkans had inflicted "one-sided devastation of an innocent civilian population and its land."(p. 43) He also has the nerve to mention the war with Spain in 1898 as proof while omitting the U.$. genocide against Filipinos at the same time, which has been admitted in countless U.S. military records. Moynihan couldn't help returning to the subject of First Nations without mentioning it directly. No less than four of the essayists(Moynihan mentioning James Q. Wilson, p. 367; Krauthammer, p. 372; Himmelfarb, p. 419) in the book cite as proof of the decline of Western civilization the outrage over a gang killing of seven people in 1929 compared with the relative lack of outrage over murder today. (In our opinion, the U$A was imperialist in 1929 as in 1999 and genocide was the foundation of Amerikkka going back even further. Amerikkkans did not consider murder an outrage but a cause of celebration in killings of indigenous people and lynchings of Blacks.) Moynihan pointing to Wilson uses a single press account from 1929 to prove this point then cited by others. While we accept that in this one case he used a logical method, he needed to do more than one to prove his point that Amerikkkans have become more murderous over time. For MIM, this would be a difficult point to prove. At best, Amerikkkans might be more efficiently murderous over time, killing more with AK-47s instead of muskets. What Moynihan leaves out is the killing of indigenous peoples and Blacks right up to the 1960s in lynchings. Somehow the killing of ten million First Nation people did not count to Moynihan at all in coming up with a moral decline argument regarding Amerikkka. And surely he is aware that lynchings also went on, not just the type of murders he alluded to. Counter to Moynihan's arguments about recent moral decline, we see a steady drum-beat of racial killings and war crimes. What goes around comes around. Amerikkkans never came to honest grips with the foundation of their country and the frontier violence that went with it and the children at Columbine pay the price. Amerikkkan culture glorifies the killing of millions of "Indians" in addition to "bandits." Yet somehow Moynihan fails to mention it at all while constructing an argument based on one sensational press account taking advantage of the public's fascination with rich and powerful criminals and alcohol. Then Moynihan wonders why he is being called a racist. Hypocrisy These neo-cons also should win a number of awards for hypocrisy. Listening to Nathan Glazer denounce student radicals in "The Campus Crucible: Student Politics and the University," one would have thought the U.S. Bill of Rights said that "students shall make no law abridging the rights of the government to free speech and assembly." Sorry Nathan Glazer and other blinded authority-lovers: the Bill of Rights says "Congress" will not be able to make ANY law for ANY government action against the people, not the other way around. If you want the government to have the right to free speech and association at the expense of students, you need to amend the Constitution. Instead, Glazer spoke of "freedom" and supported arresting students for protesting government (CIA, ROTC, other military) recruiting on campus. It's a perfect example of how spin-meisters can turn even bourgeois liberties upside down as it suits their needs. Then for another hypocrisy there is the ultra-Zionist essay by Ruth Wisse complaining about comparisons of Zionists to Nazis. Simultaneously in the same essay, at the expense of Zionist Hertzberg, she writes an extensive defense of Menachem Begin, who belonged to an organization explicitly working with neo-Nazis in South Africa and sloganeering on behalf of the Nazi movement in Europe in the 1930s. His organization even had dealings with Mussolini and the Nazis in the 1940s, namely to attack the British. (See e.g., http://www.megastories.com/mideast/glossary/stern.htm ; http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x15/xr1503.html ) This sort of thing further justifies the charge that neo-conservatism is a crypto-racism. It's unlikely that Wisse is unaware of Begin's past as a pro-Nazi sloganeer, but she tries to sneak in this image of Begin and Zionism anyway. In the only real essay on issues outside Zionism, Blacks, welfare, religious justifications for homophobia and against illegitimacy, Jeane Kirkpatrick says in her infamous essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" on page 171 that the American Revolution and processes for establishing democracy took hundreds of years including a "war for independence," which of course George Washington led through guerrilla struggle. Then to refute Jimmy Carter on how democracy comes about, she says on page 173 that democracy cannot come about "when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war." On one page she is oh-so realistic about the long struggles that it takes to establish the "democratic" system and then two pages later she discounts that the suffering of the Third World might also be protracted. So it is that George Washington could have guerrilla war and aid from the French but the Third World cannot have guerrilla war and aid from U.$. competitors. And it is precisely anti-Washington conservatives like Kirkpatrick beating their chests the most while chanting "USA!" Later in the essay Kirkpatrick charges Carter with hypocrisy for not saying the same things to South Africa and China; even though in China's case Uncle Sam was sending spy planes and dropping terrorist infiltrators to oppose China while in South Africa it was sending economic and military aid. Indeed, people do have a right to criticize their allies and an obligation when giving them aid. No such aid went to China; although there was some military cooperation under Carter that anti-communists such as Nixon did not oppose since it opposed the Soviet Union. After making favorable references to monarchists in Iran, Jeanne Kirkpatrick takes yet another slap at George Washington in-between the lines, this time in Nicaragua: "The Somoza regime had never rested on popular will. . and was not being ousted by it. It was instead succumbing to arms and soldiers."(p. 185) Lest anyone think Kirkpatrick was a pacifist while successfully angling for a job with the Reagan administration which she obtained as the ambassador to the UN, Kirkpatrick also called for Marines to invade countries to defend U.$. interests. Meanwhile the Sandinistas held an election in Nicaragua in 1984 which the Sandinistas won with a greater margin than Reagan did. Kirkpatrick was not done in putting forward the crypto-monarchist agenda. She ended with references to Nicaragua saying "authentic democratic revolutionaries" do not "postpone elections for three to five years."(p. 188) Once again this is a slap at George Washington and his generation or did Jeanne Kirkpatrick think that George Washington came to power in elections in 1776 or even 1783? Either Kirkpatrick was terribly petty and ignorant or she just knew how to get Reagan's attention and thus simulated stupidity on behalf of her own career as an oppressor. But the hypocrisy does not stop there when we contrast what they say on an international level with what they say on affirmative action. Both Kirkpatrick and Novak said that their beloved democratic capitalist system is not just natural for humyns, because it takes hundreds of years of cultural and moral development to achieve it, struggles that Kirkpatrick acknowledged would be horrific. On the other hand, when it comes to affirmative action, somehow Blacks have no damages from slavery in just the prior century, according to Sowell.(p. 265) These neo-cons should make up their minds: either the moral refinement necessary for their beloved system takes centuries and thus could have been diverted by 400 years of slavery or it comes quickly, easily and naturally--woops, the way that Enlightenment revolutionaries tended to argue strictly from universal humyn nature, but which the neo-cons opposed with monarchist counter-revolutionary thinkers like Burke throughout the book.(e.g. pp. 216-7) Conclusion To be a conservative in Amerikkka is one of two things: either to allow oneself to follow the political will of conservative leaders out of apathy or to be a long-term spin-meister/politician lacking scientific knowledge or if possessing scientific ability, then lacking scientific integrity. I know, because I came across the social facts of life year after year and had to abandon long-held precepts. The neo-cons in this book are rooted in the 1960s, but in more than 30 years, they never learned. Instead they got jobs in presidential administrations as spin-meisters. By the end of the book we realize that neo-conservatism is a huge bait-and-switch construction. First they toss out a few phrases about realizing that conservatives in the past had the wrong stance on race and maybe Vietnam. Then they proceed into a newly refocused agenda blaming the victim for racial oppression. At the very end of the book, the gay-bashing is in full swing. Then comes Irving Kristol, the godfather of it all to admit that he really is not a conservative at all, but what should properly be called a reactionary: "Today's task--and possibility--is radical rather than conservative, proactive rather than defensive: it is to foster a sociology of virtue rather than merely stemming further erosion of virtue's moral capital. That erosion has today gone too far for a merely 'conservative' approach."(p. 439) By this, we should be clear that Kristol is no communist though MIM might say something very similar: he means to go backward in a radical way. That's the switch --to start as a repenting conservative who realizes that some changes had to be made in race relations while conserving the rest--only to end up as someone trying to turn back the clock on gays, wimmin and social values in general.
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