Thursday, June 18, 2009

Neo-Con Con

Smitty, at The Other McCain, admirably deconstructs an absurd article written by one Gary Kamiya at Salon, which mixes historical metaphors with the whirling frenzy of a KitchenAid 5-quart blender in a confused attempt at dealing with neo-conservatism.

Personally, though, I think I’d rather like to be known as a Visigothic Rasputin (with Victorian overtones).

6 comments:

bruce said...

How about we start calling the lefties NeoLiberals?

True liberals like JS Mill believed in individualism and free enterprise, not the collectivist and statist refeudalisation the left is pushing.

bruce said...

Name-droppy bragging:

My great great great grandfather Joseph Hume went to school with James Mill father of JS. And was one of the original liberals himself:

http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=30&item=biography

Only found this out recently and am very chuffed.

Paco said...

Bruce: Dude, that is some righteous name dropping!

RebeccaH said...

Neoliberals. I like it.

Yojimbo said...

Oh Yeah! Well Quantrill's Raiders dumped a bunch of people down the well on the grandparents' farm in Lawrence Ks, it's even in a book! So there, just..so..there.

I'm also a distant relative of Ted Kennedy, sorry about that one.:( Seems a lot of Irish folk took the wagon to the dry flats. Probably had something to do with coming over in steerage!:)

Mill? The head of the Phil Department at Duke was asked why there were no conservatives in his department. He quoted Mill in explaining that conservatives were just too stupid to attain university teaching status. Maybe he should have written; "On Liberty After Eugenics".

bruce said...

The 'stupid (British) conservatives' JS Mill opposed were paternalistic elites who imposed rule on the masses 'for their own good' (as they had previously on the American 'colonies'!). See this statement of Mill's doctrine:

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

American Conservatives find the above statement clear and unproblematic. Lefties have to argue around it, that 'he also favoured mass education and public utilities (true) so... he would accept nationalised healthcare and finance, socialism, mass indoctrination, political correctness'...and pigs might fly.

NeoLiberals broke away from Liberalism a long time ago, if they ever were truly in it at all.

But I reckon it's becoming obvious NeoLiberals have argued their way round to a new feudal aristocratic rule - Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' is not just a metaphor. So NeoLiberals are 'stupid conservatives' in JS Mill's world.