evolution-devolution or neocons?

I sure hope it goes to hell in a handcart, Dys.

Not clear about who wrote this, but I would take serious issue with: "a clique of masterminds who have stolen democracy from the people." If we don't get over that notion, we're screwed for at least another generation. Why? Because "the people" have, in many respects, given it away, turned blind eyes.

Until we come to our senses and take our power back, the other side will win. As time goes on, it is more and more difficult to override corporate power, media venality, and a bureaucracy which is more and more willing to cloak the corruption of elected leaders. We're up against manipulated voting machines and inaccurate, incomplete information. And a huge majority of us behave as though it doesn't matter (or it isn't really happening).

So it comes down to us. We still have the means. If we don't use them, we will put our grandchildren in the position of having to rescue democracy from tyrants.

I think a lot of this is a misguided sense of nostalgia for the cold war. The lack of a clearly defined adversary is very difficult for those who need a manichaean dualism to align their thought ptoceses with. Our evil Archon is now "terror," which is impossible to define,and therefore impossible to defeat. The perfect enemy for a group that considers war to be humanity's natural state.

Hobit -- Many of these guys and I are in the same generation and, because I was at Harvard (working) at the same time quite a few of them were there as grad students etc., I knew a bunch of them and have a strong sense of where they're coming from.

I could be wrong, but I feel much of this was born of a struggle between center and right liberals -- idealists and pragmatists -- and above all, a social struggle of the latter(s) to be heard above the din of idealism, internationalism, and of the (shabby, uncontrolled, as they saw it) peace movement. They were pick of the litter and incredibly ambitious.

There was a visible social/intellectual struggle among some of the really bright guys for honors, for association with power. So they kind of grew up, intellectually, in a situation which fostered dualism, albeit with palliative intellectual frills.

I remember how easy it was (or seemed to be) for people to "invent" themselves, create a self and a (derivative --of UChi -- often) ideology which got hired by think tanks, Senators, major universities, the War College, etc. etc.

They were increasingly embarrassed by earnest colleagues and friends carrying banners at a protest (though they were intelligent and perceptive about the war and often on the same side intellectually). When I came back to the US once for a visit, I ran into one of two of them at a "festschrift" at Harvard for a famous professor we were all associated with. These were old friends, once upon a time cosy friends, who had turned into (it seemed to me) hacks. Brilliant, increasingly well known, but hacks. I had the same impression when I returned to the US to stay. I spent some time with another of them, a permanent fixture by then at Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson School, and was staggered by the narrowness and dualism of his thinking. All the details were carefully thought through, but always in the service of policy in which both US and personal power were keys.

The most impressive academies of the fifties and sixties created them, as I see it, and together with their competitiveness and arrogance, turned them into our nemeses.

All of which is to say, You're right!

(no time to go over this, make it more readable -- electric storm starting!)

THis seems to be one of the pitfals of academe, and one sees it even in fields like History. Even at this early phase of my training, the pressure to develope a subject that is "mine alone" is intense. Not doing so is thought to commit one to obscurity (and its associated hell of adjunct and community college posts) forever.

Exactly. Now put it in a highly competitive situation -- that is, a place where, to get into a doctoral program in that era, you had to have formed a habit of competition and cut-throat aggression, all couched in a tweedy veneer of collegiality. One of my best friends in those days, an historian, left the program not because (as they all cried in dismay) he wasn't brilliant, but because in that context he didn't have the cojones. Which is to say, he was a thoroughly nice person of thoughtful, humane ambitions.

I'm learning to divest myself of those qualities.

Well done, Hobit! Why the sad face? 'Cause you decided you were an intelligent human, not a cold, self-serving predator? Aw gee. What a loss to society!

But I can come close to being the self serving predator, I've found, without going to the extent of deliberately sabotaging others. I don't care about geeting a spot at an ivy. I would be quite happy at outer gopher flats community college, it that is what it comes to. I refuse to push my academic career to the point where I hate life. That is one reason I avoided the ivys.

So you're smart! But a friend of mine at UT has gone through precisely the same process. It's a mess. She's tenacious, but not a predator. And she more than survived, thank god.

It has to do largely with the character of the individual departments, or used to. I don't think predation necessarily a characteristic of the top universities. It can be of specific departments. And I think it's inevitable at any school or department at a university which people have to compete so hard to get into -- they bring the anger and resentment with them, I think. Into graduate level, anyway. Not sure about undergraduates...

Quick footnote: There is also real cruelty inherent in the money-grubbing which has to go on in universities at all levels. In my dictatorship, each person born in this country will have a pretty substantial trust fund from birth for use on education at any and all levels.

My god --- will wonders never cease to happen-----you are finally taking a "hard" look at reality-----congratulations.

The neo-cons should send UBL at least a "thank you " note. He and his merry band have made all of this possible with 9/II.

Fortuantely, at least among the Europeanists, CU Boulder is pretty mellow. I guess one of the Americanists eats her grad students alive, but I hope to never actually speak with the woman.
That's what kept me from applying to a couple of places I really liked (JHU and U of Chicago). No matter how nice the assets (i.e; library, funding) I don't want to spend the better part of a decade being treated like dirt. I've already been in the military, thank you!

The problem with conservatives in general and neo-cons in particular is that they don't like not knowing. They want to have everything neatly spelled out for them, stuffed into little boxes, everything black and white for all eternity without the chance of ever changing. That goes for morality, "this is right and that is wrong forever and ever", politics, where they have a serious case of 'us and them'-ism and pretty much every other area of their lives. They hate uncertainty. It makes them think too much. It's much better to have it all written down somewhere that they can believe in for all eternity.

A Master Plan. The rise of the Day Planner with everything from the condition of lats and the noon floss to market timing and oil change due and a note about who one slept with last night and how. An awful world which hit us like a ghastly dream in the early '80's. So much easier to concentrate on oneself and one's ambitions that it is to be concerned about the rest of the (evil) world.

trotsky gave birth to the neocon

Indeed, many of the current crop of evil genii flirted with Trotsky style marxism in the 1960s. Wolfy, Perle, (she truned me into a) Newt, Rove, Rice, etc....

Hobit wrote

Indeed, many of the current crop of evil genii flirted with Trotsky style marxism in the 1960s. Wolfy, Perle, (she truned me into a) Newt, Rove, Rice, etc....


Since you did not indentify this bit of poison as a personal opinion----what is your source?

Trotskyite Influences of the Neo Conservative Movement


Gee, sorry Percy. I forgot that many on the right are unfamiliar with anything but Faux, the NY POSt, the Washington Times,and the National Enquirer.

The ideas now known as "neoconservative" began boiling in the minds of a group of Jewish American Trotskyists in the 1930s and '40s. The Trotskyists originally hoped for the triumph of the socialist ideal on a global scale. Their views were defined by a notion of permanent revolution that would transcend nations and constantly expand to envelop the globe. This group "morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s," writes author and journalist Michael Lind in the London-based New Statesman magazine, "and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right" that we see today.

Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyist and "godfather" of neoconservatism, describes his early Old Left views in his Memoirs of a Trotskyist. As a student during the economic turmoil of the 1930s and early 1940s, Kristol was a proud member of the Young People's Socialist League, a Trotskyist group that hoped for a permanent revolution that would envelop the globe in the socialist ideal. In his autobiographical Reflections of a Neoconservative, he describes his early views as a "romantic passion" in which society was guided by an "intellectual and moral elite."

From the beginning, these budding neocons were scholars. Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and a host of others argued their positions in the obscure pages of the Jewish-oriented Commentary as well as in the neoconservative scholarly journal, The Public Interest, and the traditionally conservative National Review magazine.

But even as their worldview changed in response to the failure of socialist ideals, their Trotskyist mindset stayed consistent.

"It would never have occurred to us to denounce anything as 'elitist,'" Kristol wrote, describing his Trotskyist upbringing. "The elite was us - the 'happy few' who had been chosen by History to guide our fellow creatures toward a secular redemption."

As socialism dissolved into Communism and totalitarianism, Kristol and many other members of the Old Left became anti-communist liberals. They were fed a steady Cold War diet, which infused their already radical, revolution-minded worldview with an apocalyptic fervor.

But the 1960s saw the liberal culture move towards a New Left, ostracizing many in the process. The New Left was infused with an activist counterculture, opposing the Vietnam War and fighting for new civil rights. As the counterculture became more mainstream, the more radical, fringe elements of the Left were given louder voices.

Kristol strongly rejected the emerging views of the New Left, and he led the march away from the Left - Old and New - forging new territory more closely aligned with conservatism, but with a radical tilt. "Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young," he wrote in Memoirs of a Trotskyist. "The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable, it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment."

In the context of the Cold War, these refugees from the left continued with their hopes for a global revolution, but instead of the socialist revolution, they joined forces with the right to advocate the triumph of capitalism, which they unequivocally equate with democracy.

"It took the political madnesses committed in the name of the left to make conservatism not merely respectable but to many intellectuals deeply appealing," wrote Joseph Epstein in Dissent magazine in the early 1970s. Nathan Glazer, an adherent of this new conservatism, found himself asking, "How does a radical - a mild radical, it is true, but still someone who felt closer to radical than to liberal writers and politicians in the late 1950s - end up by early 1970 a conservative, a mild conservative, but still closer to those who now call themselves conservative than to those who call themselves liberal?"
The new conservatives in the 1970s were refugees from the left, yet they were ostracized by the right as well. They were united by their aversion to the moral relativism and anti-establishment views of the counterculture, and their new ideology came to be marked by a Cold War fury, a new permanent global revolution in which America is unquestioningly moral and right. The use of military might to conquer the world in the name of America was the modern manifestation of the Trotskyist ideal.