3. Neocon cock sucking bunch of "exceptionalists" and war-mongering political outlet of the Military-Industrial Complex.Evidently I am not the only one who doesn't see conservatism in the US. Bill Kauffman arrives to the same conclusion, of sorts, in The American Conservative yesterday.
I have long believed that the word conservative is sullied beyond reclamation, so my immediate answer to the question “What is American conservatism?” is “a Beltway-based racket exploiting the healthy instincts of decent Americans on behalf of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the Republican Party.” But that answer is confuted by this very magazine, founded as it was in opposition to the criminal Iraq war and animated and inspirited, then and now, by principles and precious things that had long been forgotten or repudiated by most of the American Right: peace, place, humility, community, federalism, the Bill of Rights. The conservative movement was poisoned at its roots—or, should I say, its rootlessness. After the death of the noble Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) in 1953, “conservatism” at the national level came to be defined, to a grossly disproportionate degree, by ex-communists avid to slay the god that failed them. The resultant movement subordinated domestic felicity and the gloriously idiosyncratic Little America to the frenzied promotion of what William F. Buckley Jr. described as an “instrument of totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores,” which he said we must accept “for the duration” of the Cold War. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, we did not return to being a “normal country,” as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN ambassador, had recommended, but instead sought out a dreary concatenation of new enemies to justify the warfare state. (Even now, bellicose opportunists have their eye on China, as the scare-by date of shoe-bomb jihadis is about up.)I state ad nauseam for years now that the so called American "conservatism" has very little to do with, broadly, conservatism which MUST be rooted in nationalism. There is no conservatism without a nation, otherwise there is nothing to conserve. The United States never became a nation and, inevitably, American conservatism was bound to plant itself into the increasingly liquefying ideological sand of "anti" something. Anti-communism, anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, anything "anti". Anything based on "anti" inevitably led to a hollowing out always porous content of the American conservative thought which, even in its better manifestations, still cannot resign itself to recognition of the real reasons of America's post WW II greatness, as well as to the reasons why it is no more.
America is not an idea, an abstraction, or a marketing slogan. It is our home, and the land we love above all others... Well, if conservatism doesn’t stand for home then it stands for nothing, and to hell with it.Yes, this is better, but it may be too little, too late, and yes--American "conservatism" doesn't stand for home, because it was born out of geopolitical opportunism of WW II. It was then that the windfall of benefits of "Arsenal of Democracy" and all fighting done away from the America's shores convinced many that this is the way things work. They don't. A historic one-off, an anomaly often known as luck is not a pattern--it is a single data-point on the graph. Inevitably, globalism and imperialism is what defines a supposedly American "conservative" thought and it never stood for home because it didn't have one. Some random separate epiphanies among the rank and file of "conservative" thinkers in the US are by no means indicative of a trend. A trend is always the same--American exceptionalism and imperialism, home, from sea to shining sea, be damned, and that is the essence of American "conservatism". So, to hell with it. And please, come up with a better "national" mythology. A present one is a joke.
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