Michael Lind: 'Intellectual Conservativism, RIP'

by Smitty

I was once a young neoconservative. The word meant something different then, before it was hijacked by extremists, goes the blurb for this Lind piece at Salon.

Is it anti-intellectual of me to offer a 'STFU' in reply?

Oh, we're bemoaning the loss of Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley Jr. in the last couple of years.

A neoconservative of the older, Democratic school, I broke with the right in the early 1990s and warned about where right-wing radicals were taking the country in my book "Up From Conservatism." The train wreck I predicted occurred during the Bush years, and the postmortems have begun.

Your article nowhere mentions the Federal Constitution of 1787, or the growing sense that the last century of US history has been about creating a neo-aristocracy. Populated by the likes of Lind, no doubt.

Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal and indeed the major programs of Johnson's Great Society ... Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the 'neo' before 'conservative.'"

Oh, that's interesting. Neo-conservative is just Progressive with some foreign policy muscle, then? Lind concludes:

The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s. A robust new liberalism, if there is to be one in the aftermath of the opportunistic triangulations of Clinton and Obama, cannot leapfrog back to the Progressives or New Dealers, but must begin closer to home, with the early neoconservatives, who had learned from the failures and mistakes as well as the successes of the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.

Successes?

• The country is flippin' bankrupt,
• the existing policies you glorify are unsustainable where not outright train wrecks,
• the proposed policies promise to exacerbate an ugly situation,
• the modern liberals can't tell the difference between winning an election and a leftist coup,

and you're boring us with this nostalgia trip?

Wake up and smell the Tea from the Party, Mr. Lind. You and the rest of the modern liberal idiots should be having your Yamamoto moment right about now.

Update:

Troglanch