/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Also, Hegel's philosophy was a major influence, apparently?

>>2829484
In practice maybe one of the most destructive bunch of tyrants to live since Genghis khan.

>>2829488
Elaborate

>>2829491
Start at 7:25 in this vid

>>2829499
Trump isn't a neocon.

>>2829484
>What exactly was Neoconservatism and how exactly did it originate?
Intellectually the original gang date to the 1950s and were more domestic policy oriented than foreign policy from what I understand. Now the popular definition is an interventionist and militarist foreign policy aimed at preserving American global hegemony, and there are reasons why that has become the definition, but a lot of the original guys were reacting to left-wing changes in American liberalism and were concerned about crime, welfare, multiculturalism and other assorted "sixties bullshit." A lot of them were former radicals as well and sociologists. Look up Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset (who was also Trotskyist):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Martin_Lipset

>Was it the philosophy of Leo Strauss?
Strauss apparently had a lot of influence, and there's a private college in California called Claremont that's obsessed with him and that's known as hub for "West Coast neocons" in right-wing discourse. He has a cult following in the U.S. among a subset of conservative intellectuals. They're intellectuals who read a lot of classical political philosophy from the Greeks so they're big into "civic virtue" and stuff like that. Anyways what I can tell is that Strauss' philosophy is that societies need an organizing principle. An example is how Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity (she's also married to the historian Niall Ferguson who is a very classic British neocon), and her reasons are kind of odd because it's like, ugh, I'm having some existential mid-life crisis but also Western civilization is too soft from so much moral relativism and it's being undermined from within by ~vague gesturing towards Islamo-Marxist college students~

That is very neoconservative but it raises an eyebrow from conservative Christians, because is that based on authentic faith? She would say yes. But it is faith with a political and thus essentially secular this-world goal in mind. Like you get these secular liberals (also some of whom are Jewish or in Ali's case an ex-Muslim) making peace with religion and becoming very eager to promote a patriotic mythology to shore up an endangered liberal democracy.

Then you have the paleoconservatives who are from the far right of American Catholicism. Pat Buchanan was their standard bearer for many years, and Nick Fuentes is heavily influenced by him. If you back further, you'll find these guys supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and they look at the neocons and they see, Jewishness of course (because a lot of neocons were Jews), but also secularism, cosmopolitanism, and a kind of cluster of views that make them uncomfortable. Even hostility to modern art is a big thing with trad Catholic people.

>Was it former Trotskyists like Irving Kristol? If so, why did these ex-Trots flip and become right-wingers?
Kristol was, yeah. I don't know why. The paleocons like to describe them as the bastard children of Trotskyism and also they're Straussians, so they want to have global democratic revolution by the U.S. military which is like proletarian warfare waged by Moscow which they transmuted when they became disillusioned by Stalinism. But this is a more polemical thing on the right, because Irving Kristol himself wasn't actually a hawk, he wanted to shrink or end NATO. To me it feels like that is more of a result of a fusion with Cold War liberals. The neocons have been influenced by anti-communist Democrats like Henry Jackson, who was a senator in the 60s, 70s. There's a branch of "Cold War Democrats." These are today's centrist / elite Democrats.

>Politically, it started in America with the Reagan presidency, so what exactly were Reagan's political influences?
I'd look up Jeanne Kirkpatrick, she was a neocon figure in the 80s in the Reagan administration, but her whole thing was that spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun wasn't a good idea and that the U.S. should instead double down on supporting authoritarian right-wing regimes against communists. She had a left-wing background too, but it was the old Socialist Party of Norman Thomas.

>Also, Straussian Neocons formed coalitions with the Religious Right and free market neoliberals despite all three groups having contradictory ideologies. Why?
Shared enemies, I guess.

>>2829485
Idk but Strauss came out of the early 20th century German education system.

>>2829501
No MAGA is an even weirder blend of neoconservatism, populist conspiracism and nakedly racist nativism.

FYI, Strauss' adopted daughter (who is his biological niece) has denied her father/uncle had anything to do with the rise of Neocon ideology:
https://archive.is/rkAve

>>2829519
>Among the received opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment, or relativism. Many young people were confused, without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the ancient Greeks.
Ehh yeah her dad was just a professor and she didn't like people blaming him when Bush invaded Iraq (which might not have even agreed with), but like I was saying:

<They're intellectuals who read a lot of classical political philosophy from the Greeks so they're big into "civic virtue" and stuff like that. Anyways what I can tell is that Strauss' philosophy is that societies need an organizing principle.

>>2829484
>Straussian Neocons formed coalitions with the Religious Right and free market neoliberals despite all three groups having contradictory ideologies.
They don't have contradictory ideologies. They all favor Bourgeois rule.

>>2829529
Yes but most Neocons were/are secular Jews who have zero interest in Christian morality.

>>2829531
Yeah, but many western secular Jews were and are still spooked (in the Stirnerian sense) by the feeling of belonging to a Judeo-Christian West.

>>2829531
So? The Religious Right has zero interest in Christian morality.

>>2829531
What they thought was that Christianity was useful for sustaining a stable political and social order. That's not a theological argument. But you'll hear Ben Shapiro say that what "made the West great" was a combination of "Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law." This is pretty normal for a neoconservative, that combination. What "Judeo-Christian values" are is, well, I dunno. Whatever is convenient in the moment for Ben Shapiro I guess, but which is elevated to the realm of "eternal truths," and it's important to teach your kids that so they can become warriors to fight for the West.

>>2829484
>was it the philosophy of Leo Strauss?
No. Strauss wasn't himself a neocon, although many of his students were. The neocons needed a famous name to to lend academic prestige to their ideas while leftist intellectuals wanted to find a way to denounce the necons as Nazis, and they did this by falsely portraying Strauss as a fascist Nazi. Both sides deliberately misinterpreted and cherry picked his work to suit their agendas.

Struass was a scholar of classical political philosophy (Plato, Aristotle etc) who believed that modern political theory (which began with Machiavelli, Hobbes etc and led to liberalism) undermined the classical tradition, where politics was about individual excellence and figuring out how to live the good life. Strauss wanted to revive these ideas to fix liberal democracy, which he thought was too fixated on individual freedom and rights in ways that lead to nihilism and moral relativism.

Neocons are typically extremist liberals who support a hawkish foreign policy to spread American liberalism abroad by force. Many of these people (Irving Kristol) were ex Trotskyists and their hawkish 'spread the revolution' attitude comes from their radical leftist days. Strauss wouldn't have liked these people. He hated liberalism, he hated ideological mass politics, he saw himself as a patient scholar above ignorant low brow pundits, and he didn't think you can Americanize the world.

>>2829491
Neoconservatism would encompass most of the Democratic Party and all of the Republican Party from Eisenhower until hopefully right now and the fracturing of MAGA politics. To say nothing of all their disenfranchisement of the poor and servility to the rich, they have been engaged in multiple genocides across the entire world.

Am I the only one who unironically misses the Neocons?

Don't get me wrong, they were insanely evil. But they were evil in a way where you knew they were evil, like Bond villains. They were conniving, sinister, saw regular people as little more than ants on the sidewalk to be stepped on.

Trump and his crew of right-wing populists, on the other hand, are sloppy evil. They're total fuckups. They're like the caveman who keeps hitting a tree with a stick thinking the more he hits it the more the tree will produce fruit. At least Neocons/Straussians were smart evil whose Evangelical followers were stupid. Now, you largely see the opposite: Trump and his right-wing populist buddies are stupid evil who, for some reason, have loads of TradCath and "muh Western Civilization" followers who are actually rather smart. It's fucking bizarre.

>>2830229
Dick cheney wouldve never let the iran war get this bad tbh

>>2830233
Because Dick Cheney was sinisterly evil but he wasn't a retard like Trump is.

>>2829710
idiot, neo-conservatism as an actual phenomena emerged in the 1990s, it doesn't just mean interventionism you dolt

>>2830252
>1990s
More like 1970s.

Maupin claims the Neocons originated with the TEAMSTERS of all things.

>>2830280
So what's the connection between the Teamsters and Leo Strauss?

I won't defend him, but Strauss wasn't evil. He was highly concerned about the decay of morality in the West, actually. He was a secular Jew but heavily criticized secularism because he didn't believe it could maintain social order and virtue.

Blaming Strauss for the Iraq War is bullshit.

>>2830256
it didn't really become "neoconservatism" as we know it until the collapse of the soviet union

>>2830343
Strauss was a good Jewish boy who had a Greek and Roman fetish. His central idea was that modernity had lost its sense of morality and virtue because it did away with the wisdom of the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. He said the intellectual elites needed to reimpose virtue on society through authoritarianism and deception. No idea how that plays into Neocon foreign interventionalist policy though.

I also think it’s interesting how TradCath right-populists basically go off on the same trajectory yet come to much different political conclusions.

>>2829501
that is not what is being said at 7:25 in that vid:


Chapter 8: Neocons and PNAC
The author of this shockingly honest article is none other than Robert Kagan. He is one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers in the US. He is a notorious neoconservative war hawk who was one of the original advocates for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Robert Kagan was one of the co-founders of one of the most influential think tanks in Washington called the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC.

Members of PNAC included top officials in the George W. Bush administration like Dick Cheney, who was Bush's vice president, and Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense under Bush and president of the World Bank. Other neocons included John Bolton, who was later brought back by Donald Trump in his first administration to be national security adviser. A look at the list of founding signatories of the Project for the New American Century shows it included nearly a dozen top members of the George W. Bush administration, some of whom later joined the Trump administration and became Trump supporters, like Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney.

Jeb Bush, the Florida politician from the Bush family who ran for president, was also one of the original PNAC signatories. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the infamous book The End of History and the Last Man after the overthrow of the Soviet Union in 1991, argued that US-style capitalist liberal democracy would be the final stage of human evolution and that every country would eventually adopt this kind of neoliberal capitalist system. The point is that these neoconservatives were extremely influential in shaping US foreign policy in the 1990s and 2000s.

Chapter 9: George W. Bush Administration
Neoconservatives filled top positions in the US government under George W. Bush. Many people argued that Dick Cheney, as vice president, was essentially the shadow president, with Bush serving more as a figurehead while Cheney worked behind the scenes to make key decisions, including the invasion of Iraq. It is notable that Cheney had previously been CEO of the oil corporation Halliburton, which profited immensely from the war in Iraq, earning billions of dollars.

Chapter 10: Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism portrays itself as a philosophy where the US acts as the global policeman, protecting freedom and democracy worldwide by spreading liberal democracy through regime change and military intervention. In reality, neocons are imperialists and neocolonialists who embrace the idea of a US-run global empire. They believe the US should act as a global emperor rather than a law-abiding policeman, overthrowing any government it dislikes. Their narrative of promoting freedom and democracy masks their true agenda, which serves the interests of large corporations and billionaire oligarchs. Think tanks in Washington are often funded by the military-industrial complex, and these neocons function as champions of capital, leveraging US military power to suppress governments that challenge global US dominance.

Chapter 11: Rise of Donald Trump
The neoconservative movement began to split in 2016 when Donald Trump became the Republican presidential candidate. The original neocons were all Republicans, many of them Reagan Republicans who idolized Ronald Reagan. However, in 2016, the neocons in the Project for the New American Century split: about half became Trump supporters, while the other half backed Hillary Clinton, who was seen as the right-wing candidate of the Democratic Party for that election.

Chapter 12: Hillary Clinton
Although Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, neocons like Robert Kagan supported her because she was a pro-war Democrat. She had supported the invasion of Iraq and oversaw US military involvement in Libya in 2011 while serving as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. She also played a role in US policy toward Syria. In 2016, some neocons, including lifelong Republican Robert Kagan, left the Republican Party and became independents, publicly supporting Hillary Clinton even though they did not formally join the Democratic Party.

>>2830919
I think a similar question could be: how does the Catholic Church not fulfill the same role as Straussian intellectuals do, if the whole idea is no impose virtue on the masses of people through authoritarian means? Do TradCaths honestly believe obedience to the Church is anti-authoritarian because people “freely” choose to follow it? Okay, so what if I “freely” choose to lick Straussian Neocon intellectual boot?

You think Strauss underwent metzitzah b’peh as a baby?

>>2830229
The leftover Neocons are now all Democrats, surprise surprise.

I just fucked a neocon bitch
Gotta intervene in that pussy