I am not sure who you mean by original neo-Conservatives. I think of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Most of them were New York leftists some being communists and others being socialists. Over time they migrated to support Henry "Scoop" Jackson and move increasingly to the right over both the issue of opposing the Soviet Union and the urban riots.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

This seems like an unnecessarily hysterical reaction to what is in fact a rather banal point. That is, that applying empiricism and modesty to public policy, rather than blind ideology and revolutionary fervor, is one thing that 1960s-era neoconservatives and today's liberals have in common. I would have thought that claiming the mantle of empiricism and rationality would be desirable.

The fact is that although, as Greg Anrig says, liberals have ambitious goals both domestically and internationally, they usually do not wish to achieve those goals through revolutionary change.  This is especially apparent in the international area.  If there's one thing that characterizes almost all liberal opinion about international affairs, it's the need for consensus and diplomacy.  This almost guarantees that change, if and when it comes, will be slow.  It was precisely the slowness of change that the (modern) neoconservatives thought they were upending after 9/11.  They argued that the times called for revolutionary, radical change achieved through unilateral force to meet the new threats.  That's what liberals, and now nearly everybody, thinks is nuts.

It is also apparent that Greg Anrig did not understand the point Beinart was making about the 1960's era neoconservatives and their skepticism about domestic programs.  The point was that the original neocons objected to the hubris that Great Society types operated with.  They really did think that society was going to be transformed, and the neocons said wait, let's go slow.  Thus the key characteristic linking today's liberals and yesterday's neocons is modesty, especially modesty of means, if not of ends.  Who are the liberals preaching a radical makeover of our society?  They are hard to find.  With the possible exception of the healthcare issue, liberal goals and proposals are mostly rather small bore compared to early liberalism.  Why is this?  Wouldn't liberals really like to put in place big programs to achieve big goals if they thought they could?  Perhaps, but they know that (a) the American people don't want radical change and (b) the incremental approach is probably better in terms of getting the policy right over the long term.

It's really not fair to make the assertion that "[i]t's all about Israel" unless you actually have evidence for it. They also supported intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo, which didn't help Israel so far as I know. They're overenthusiastic about war, as the headlines have shown for years now, but I don't know that Israel is necessarily relevant to their motivation or to an effective critique of neocon thinking.

What is interesting is that George Will'S and George Fukyama's attack from the American right is part of Beinart's point too. They believe the neo-Cons should never have so much confidence in government's ability to transform any society. They should have known in advance that no government can succeed at such a project.

One intriguing aspect of many posters at TPMCafe is they will support grand governmental policies but at the same time reject such ideas for Iraq. When and who will benefit from governments reformative powers?

Beinart is much more like Paul Berman. I am not sure about the neo-Cons, who I think were much more formed by the Cold-War, not Israel, but Beinart and Berman view the world through a post WWI lens. Collectivist movements Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Trans-national Islam arose to threaten liberal democracies. Beinart states often liberal democrats from Wilson to Kennedy, if not Johnson, were the leaders in the fight against totalitarianism.

It is interesting at the Cafe the number of people who use their hatred of the fool Bush to dismiss the two sides of this argument. That there is a totalitarian threat to the West from Islamists and only the U.S. leading the fight, not alone, can win this fight.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

They believe the neo-Cons should never have so much confidence in government's ability to transform any society.

There is a crucial difference between ANY society and the particular society in which you are a member of the social contract and freely choose a government to represent yourself. 

There are a lot of not very nice names for transforming someone else's society without their consent. 

I'd like to sign Beinart up for about 20 years in the Iowa National Guard.

One intriguing aspect of many posters at TPMCafe is they will support grand governmental policies but at the same time reject such ideas for Iraq.

And this is precisely what distinguishes the "young, reality-based, liberals" Beinart resents from the early neoconservatives with whom he feigns a close comparison.

Those budding neocons of the 60's combined a skeptical and increasingly conservative attitude toward domestic policy and domestic transformation with a bold and aggressive, pro-war foreign policy dedicated to confrontation and forceful transformation abroad, rooted in a kind of born again patriotic faith in the goodness and rightness of American intentions and foreign policies.

Yet the new movement Beinart is criticizing is exactly the opposite: they combine a skeptical and cautious attitude toward foreign intervention, and a realistic wariness about US government ambitions and strategy abroad, with an increasingly assertive, left-oriented commitment to social transformation at home, and a turning away from the neoliberal free market faith of the Clinton years.

It is interesting at the Cafe the number of people who use their hatred of the fool Bush to dismiss the two sides of this argument. That there is a totalitarian threat to the West from Islamists and only the U.S. leading the fight, not alone, can win this fight.

Many of us don't dismiss the argument. We just reject it. We think the Islamist totalitarian threat is overhyped, and that while there certainly are a number of dangerous Islamists out there who must be dealt with, the threat is not nearly on the order that Berman and Beinart (sometimes) imagine it to be.

I'm puzzled. Where did you get the idea that 1960s-1970s neoconservatives cared or had anything much to say about domestic policies (Some of them objected to leftist Marat-St. Just rhetoric, but that was a matter of style).

Nor did neoconservatives have any grand strategies. They came out of the post-1967 War situation, a situation when Israel, abandoned by its regular supplier, de Gaulle, was looking around for a great power to sell it arms and back it up. To a man neoconservatives were either pro-Israel intellectuals or defense contractor beholden politicians.

Other than support for Israel (for Zionism?), I fail to see that they held any particular foreign policy doctrines, at all.

Ellen, neoconservatives were deeply involved in domestic and foreign politics in the 1960-70s.

Domestic When neocons refer to themselves as "liberals who have been mugged by reality", the reality they are referring to are the social movements such as the women's and gay liberation organizations, and the lack of "ordered liberty" as characterized by the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 60s and 70s. Neocons believed a modern democracy should be based on a Tocquevillian type of philosophy, the belief that religion, objective (absolute) truth and the acceptance of transcendence or superiority should be applied towards constitutional limits, self-government and business enterprises. They saw welfare as social engineering that threatened individual liberty and public schools teaching moral values as social constructions rather than deeply held common traditions from a Judeo- Christian heritage.

Foreign Most of the neocons now see foreign policy as their main strength. (They think they lost the culture war, except for bringing in more religion. Whatever.) There are four main tenets to their foreign policy beliefs: 1. Patriotism is good and necessary, 2. World government leads to tyranny and should always be regarded with suspicion, 3. Always know the difference between enemies and friends. The fUSSR and the current terrorists were/are absolute enemies, and 4. Because of ideological and national interests, the US should always defend another democracy. We defended Britain and France in WWII and defend Israel today for those very reasons.

These are the articles I used as references for this neocon nutshell:

The Neoconservative Persuasion by Irving Kristol
The Voice of Neoconservatism by Ronald Bailey
Why There Is A Culture War by John Fonte

He [Bush] has perfected the alchemical process of turning milestones into headstones and millstones. Ges's Blog 12/31/06

Let's not forget that the big ideas of "paleo" liberals were about peace, the big ideas of neoconservatives about war. It's not just the nature of the idea but the content that matters.

It's not accurate to label Kerry as a "war supporter." There are two ways to interpret his vote for the AUMF. The first is to take him at his word--that he believed the president needed to have all options, including military options, available when dealing with the UN, Iraq and other countries in the region. You could likewise take the president at his word that war was the last resort and that no decisions had been made.

Alternatively, you could interpret the vote as an unwillingness to risk having the "liberal wuss" label attached to his presidential campaign--that just as the president was lying when he said all options were open, Kerry was well aware that this was a vote for war, and that he was just too gutless to take a stand against it.

As for Lieberman, his unwavering support for continuing the war in the face of catastrophic failure is clearly related to his unwavering support for Israel. It is also the case that Israel would clearly be very unhappy if the US were to leave, given the prospect of an Islamic Shiite government, friendly to Iran.

Kristol, and the PNAC, are all on record as identifying Israel's security as a central goal of an invasion of Iraq.

It's also the case that the neo-cons infrequently make the argument out loud that the war is all about Israel's security. Israel is not high on the priority list of most American voters. But when they are in venues, as with the PNAC document of 1998 that are not generally widely reported, there is little doubt that a primary neo-con motivation is Israel's security.

You could put it this way--there is a very high correlation between people who are strongly pro-Israel and are strongly in favor of an indefinite occupation.

Having unfettered access, if I may quote Beinarts summation here:

Which is why, in an Alice in Wonderland twist, neocon-hating liberals have become neoconservatism's true heirs. It is young "reality-based" liberals, having watched the Bush administration's theological denial of global warming and its theological approach to the Iraq war, who today champion empiricism over ideology. In foreign policy, they prefer liberal democracy to dictatorship but doubt America's capacity to remake societies we don't understand. In domestic policy, they want a larger government role but don't share the easy optimism of Great Society liberals, who witnessed the extraordinary government-led progress of the postwar decades. Those earlier liberals shared the faith of their time, in the transformative capacity of government. Today's liberals have come of age doubting the faith of theirs, in the transformative capacity of capitalism. From deregulation to free trade, they are more skeptical of the unfettered market than the Clintonites of the '90s. But their skepticism stems less from ideological antipathy than from empirical observation--a suspicion that the free-marketers prefer the visions in their head to the facts on the ground. Like the founders of The Public Interest, they have spent more time tearing down icons than building them up.

One day, if they are lucky, that will change. Today's liberals will find success and erect icons of their own. Then they will be true neocons no more.

Peter Beinart is editor-at-large at The New Republic and the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (HarperCollins).

I agree that there is a tone of derision here, but I'm not quite sure that the target is today's liberals. Perhaps it is more of a warning.

What I took away from this piece was the utter radicalization of neoconservatism, that led to it's obvious delusional "now," as presently constituted. Whereas, I don't agree with Beinart's characterizations of either today's liberals or yesterdays neconservatives, from his perspective, he isn't deriding liberals. It's more like a warning to today's liberals of the cost of hubris. A warning that is particularly relevant in today's atmosphere of imperial "King-George" neoconservatism.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I think Beinart's real error is that he gives far too much credit to the early neocons, and gets their basic philosophy wrong. If they were who he makes them out to be back in the 1960s, they bear little or no relationship to the party we now know as "neoconservatives." That is hardly surprising. Conservatives today are hardly "conservative," and the only group that continues to be somewhat consistent over time is the "liberals."

Perhaps he is correct in that they appear to be a bit more skeptical, but who is to say that there weren't always plenty of skeptics in the democratic left? Indeed any comparison to groups from 40 years ago is bound to be fraught with seeming inaccuracies and contradictions. Democrats did indeed block civil rights legislation.

As someone that grew up in a "conservative republican household" in the 1960s, I do understand, without ANY doubt, that today's political parties bear little or no resemblance to my father's. I think Beinart needed to make that clear, and he is merely trying to poke up some controversy by putting liberals and neo-conservatives in the same sentence.

That's what pundits do. Not one of his better or more thoughtful attempts.

Those of us without access to that rag thank you, workerbee.

And I do think Beinart's argument is perceptive. I know I myself oppose "liberal internationalism" and "international liberalism" and all the other left-leaning "isms" out there -- all of which I'm suspicious of. But currently, I don't have a philosophy or ideology to put in their place.

The 1970s neocons were, even as iconoclasts, better positioned than we, because what remained after they "tore down the icons" -- undermined convential wisdom -- was what they wanted -- less domestic governing, less international compacts, less of everything.

We, on the other hand, have to build up something in the place of that which we tear down.

. . . Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld all . . . sense that Islamic radicalism is the biggest threat to world peace and must be fought, not appeased.

Really? Relying on pillow talk, are we?

In your rejection of Transnational Islam it seems to be you are incredibly naive and potentially dangerous. Then there were Americans would thought Hitler was going to make the world better and what did John Reed say "he saw the future and its works" on seeing the Soviet Union?

There is nothing overhyped about it except that at this time neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have the tools at their dispossal that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had to them.

However, from the late 1960s hijackings, to the Munich Olmpics to Leon Kliinghoffer to the U.S.Embassies in Beirut, and Africa these Islamists have been the main source of political murder in the world. Their goal stated by themselves are either nations within nations or a transnational Islamic nations. There goal is the ouster of goverments from Algeria to Afghanistan.

They already killed 3,000 Americans on one day, which except for it not being Anitetiem by accident, how many more Americas will make it not a hype? This country thought the Germans and the Japanese were not its problem. It was Europe's, It was Asia's then came Pearl Harbor.

We don't need to use the military to confront this dire threat. But it does need to be faced and fought. It is comforting that Beinart and Berman are significant spokesmen for liberals if not the left.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

BradTheDad, As for the charge that it is "all about Israel", I challenge you to find anyone, even among the dead-ender neocons of today, who argues that continued American presence and excalation of the war is good for Israel. The whole notion that "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" has been thoroughly discredited and no one mentions it any more.

The road may be toast, but the original reasoning, that Israel was/is a threatened democracy, still applies. Saddams payments to the families of Palestinian suicide attackers, is one example of the threat. Now it's Iran, Hizbollah, etc. As requested, here are the words of the "godfather of neoconservativism", Irving Kristol:

Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary. [emphasis mine]

He [Bush] has perfected the alchemical process of turning milestones into headstones and millstones. Ges's Blog 12/31/06

>> > In your rejection of Transnational Islam it seems to be you are incredibly naive and potentially dangerous. Then there were Americans would thought Hitler was going to make the world better

Daniel, this is a disgraceful slur although entirely on a par with your previous smear-jobs. How dare you liken Dan K to a Nazi-sympathiser, just because he, unlike you, hasn't been terrified into moronism by 9/11?

>> >>There is nothing overhyped about it except that at this time neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have the tools at their dispossal that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had to them.

Well done. There's nothing overhyped about The Islamist Threat - apart from the fact that they don't have millions of well-armed soldiers, tens of thousands of the most modern tanks and aircraft, large navies, nuclear weapons...apart from all that, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are JUST AS DANGEROUS as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

There is nothing overhyped about it except that at this time neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have the tools at their disposal that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had to them.

Um ... duh! That is why it is overhyped.

The malevolent desires or goals of individuals and groups are a threat only in proportion to their potential to achieve their desires and goals. As you say, most of these groups do not have the tools to accomplish their grandest plans.

Of course there is such a thing as a transnational Islamist movement. Who could deny that? And of course that movement contains a fringe of very violent fanatics determined to attack westerners and their interests. Who could deny that either?

But not every violent overseas threat is named "Hitler" and not every decision node is named "Munich". Yet this is the kind of hyperbole we get from the neoconservatives, from Berman and others in Great Islamofascist Threat camp. For them, it seems, there is only one problem appearing over and over: Munich/Hitler, Munich/Hitler, Munic/Hitler ....

What happened to Leon Klinghoffer was evil. But the fanatics who did it are not ready to conquer the west one Klinghoffer at a time.

We don't need to use the military to confront this dire threat. But it does need to be faced and fought.

Well, then we mostly agree. As I said in the previous post, there are a number of dangerous Islamists out there who must be dealt with. I do think there is room for an important military component. If reliable intelligence reveals that some group of Salafist terrorists is making a bomb or assembling the chemicals for a chemical weapon in their garage somewhere in Yemen or Pakistan, with plans to use it against US targets, then by all means send some special ops team, or an unmanned drone, or whatever other sneaky stuff we have, and blow them up or shoot them up. These guys are making war against us, and so I have no compunctions about that.

It would be better to apprehend them, because we learn more from that, and it denies them the ability to turn themselves into martyrs - which is what happens when we kill them. Surely if they are building the bomb in Canada, or the US, or Australia, or Germany or England, then arrest them and send them to jail, just as you would any other violent criminal.

But this is really a much more specific and lower level threat than it is often portrayed as being. The military, intelligence and law enforcement efforts are specific and targeted. Dealing with the threat does not require, nor is it enhanced by, the invasion and occupation of large Middle Eastern countries. That's like attacking the problem of murder by Mafia hit men by invading Sicily. (And in the case of Iraq, the analogy isn't even that close, since Iraq was not one of the hotbeads of Islamist terrorism.)

Obviously, we would like the most militant Islamist ideologies to wane and dwindle away. And they will - just as all such movements have their day in the sun and then burn themselves out. In my estimation, it does not help hurry this process along when Americans invade the militants' countries, and try to persuade them, to the accompaniment of dropping bombs, to convert to democratic liberalism.

I know guys like Berman and Beinart think we need to get at the root causes of terrorism by "draining the swamps". But the global counter-Islamic transformation approach is a kind of root cause mania gone wild. I prefer a different zoological analogy: if there are too many dangerous bears in the woods, and they are attacking humans, you go out and shoot some bears. If you shoot enough bears, you can keep the bear attack problem at an acceptable minimum. You don't try to take over the entire woods and convert the bears into sheep.

And there is also the option of moving away from the woods. Someday, I hope, we will have discovered a different way of providing energy for our society that doesn't require the fossil fuels buried under the Middle Eastern lands. Then we can move away from the woods.

Great start, KJ. I'd like to add (for now):

--National Weather Service
--Medicare (Pre-Bush)
--U.S. Coast Guard (Extra *** for them)
--National Guard (state disaster relief)

He [Bush] has perfected the alchemical process of turning milestones into headstones and millstones. Ges's Blog 12/31/06

DanielGree asked:

Is there really any proof that grand governmental programs in any society really work as planned?

Daniel:

I see no small amount irony in the fact that you are posting that question to the internet, which originated as a project to connect Defense Department computers and was made accessable to the public by act of Congress...

-Dave Adams-

"That there is a totalitarian threat to the West from Islamists and only the U.S. leading the fight, not alone, can win this fight."

The problem with this argument, which you parrot almost daily, is that the threat from the "Islamists" is miniscule compared to the threat posed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which had not only the desire but also the means to achieve military domination of America and Western Europe.

Since the neoconservatives, and you, have profoundly misunderstood the nature of the threat, your grandiose strategies for combating it are also profoundly wrong. This is simply not a conflict that we can win through military means, and in fact, military action serves only to heighten the rather limited threat the "Islamsts" do pose.

I can understand the wanting of a historical struggle in order to give your life meaning. I just wish people who thought like you didn't have enough influence over our government to involve so much the world in the death and destruction that their self-absorbed quest for glory entails.

Oh, ho, ho, irony! As Cyrano said to Roxanne (in the Steve Martin version), "We haven't had any irony here since about, oh, '83."

You have an impressive list of programs and many have done great work.

Regarding the post about government programs "working as planned", I'm afraid that many self promoters have claimed to be the "inventor of the internet" and others have claimed that it was invented by the US government, and the concept of inventing the internet in and of itself is not really a valid notion. It is the equivalent of saying that Eisenhower invented Interstate Highways.

Furthermore following the above point regarding "working as planned", most people refer to the funding of ARPA as the invention of the internet with a program that initially was intended to link radar systems to detect soviet bombers, which was made obsolete by the time it was implemented when ICBMs became the primary mode of delivery of payloads.

Most of the innovations and influences that made the internet what it is today were not part of the ARPA program. There were Pre-ARPA systems that were capable of communicating with each other and one could even argue that Telegraph and Ticker tape systems were early digital networks.

The one of the first shared Internet applications was designed to share a football pool between techs at distant labs. Like the Interstate Highway system, the internet was an organic development that would have inevitably come into existence with or without government planning. Nuclear power also would have come about without government funding. The fact that nearly all Universities accept some form of Federal funding unfortunately means that one could stretch and say the Feds invent everything that comes out of almost any American University.

Part of the problem is even defining what the Internet is and when it started.

We have received many benefits from the Military Industrial complex, but I don't think the Government can be considered the "Inventor of the Internet". Good list.

I have looked up Fascisim before as you have requested we do. It is an ideology that believes in the supremacy of the State and the denial of the significance of the individual. Individualism as was passed down from the Greeks and the ideas of Inalienable rights of the individual are foreign concepts to fascism. The state is an ever growing entity that opposes democracy, Liberty, Personal Freedom and Free Market liberalism. Mussolini called it a Collectivist ideology, but did not seek to attain the Marxist model of total state ownership of the means of production, although it always assumed that corporations functioned to serve the state. Nazism differed in the fact that its version of Socialism opposed the concept of class and social mobility.

Where as the Soviets owned the factory, the Fascists commanded the company and threatened them with what is basically "Regulation". The company serves the state or they put you out of business or worse.

The Islamists with their plans for a worldwide Caliphate propose this type of System under the additional proviso that the State is setup under "their" interpretation of Sharia. Same thing though, no freedom, no democracy, no Rights, no individual. They don't just neglect to allow these concepts of western culture by lack of interest, they despise them as the enemy of the Caliphate.

You said Liberals export ideologies...by peaceful application. The Fascist of Al Qaeda and Ahmedinijad's Hojjatieh group are fully aware about our beliefs and ideology and although it is hard to believe, They are not interested. Not only are they not interested, they believe the most sacred tenets of Liberalism are the works of Satan and you are a tool of Satan for wanting to "peacefully persuade" them. For this reason they want to kill you. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that their desire to kill you for that reason will not stop if unopposed.

The Conservative movement in America is not interested in an expanding state. They believe that Freedom from State control in the form of pervasive over regulation will free the individual to live up to his or her full potential. Adam Smith would be considered totally wrong by Fascists. The Constitution spells out our shared ideology of the importance of the individual and the toleration of the concept of a state that exists by the "consent of the governed". Defending that way of life by the use of force is the highest responsibility of our government. Yes, the islamist Fascist threat is a greater threat than the Statist threats of the 20th Century and defeating it now in the most vigorous ways possible are Morally right.

The Islamic Fascists do have the means to win, if unopposed at the earliest possible opportunity. That time is now.