Commenting on Rep. Liz Cheney’s resounding defeat in a primary election August 16 Seth Baron declares that “Liz Cheney’s neoconservatism is dead.”
I’ve been a bit confused by the term in recent years. Originally “neoconservatism” was coined to describe Jewish intellectuals like Irving Kristol who declared himself “a liberal mugged by reality.”
But it gradually turned into a pejorative to describe… what, exactly? As much as anything, it came to represent foreign interventionism and globalism that the writer, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, didn’t like.
And Liz Cheney, the neoconservative? If anything, I’d say she represents the shrinking part of the Republican party that shies away from the politics of educated class vs. the commoners, that imagines that Republicans can get along with Democrats. As in the old days.
Only, as I recall, in the old days Democrats were beating up on Liz’s dad and Liz’s dad’s boss George W. Bush, because. Because the current leader of the Republican Party is always a monster. Unlike the previous Republican leader for whom the Democrats now express a strange new respect.
Maybe what Liz Cheney and people like her want is just to get along with the guys in charge and not make any waves. I can understand that. I can also understand that the best way for them to get on with the guys in charge is to beat up on the deplorables/benighted ordinary middle class, the enemy of the educated ruling class.
Because there is no politics without an enemy.
Anyway, I say forget about the neoconservatives or neocons or whatever the current pejorative is. Don’t let us talk about dying, the dying remnant of the old Republican Party. Let’s talk about the party that is to be, the party of the ordinary middle class that just wants to live in peace, working and wiving and thriving, and getting along with the rest of the world.
For us, climate change is a lie; systemic racism is a lie; white supremacy is a lie; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a lie. Why don’t we all just get along?
Because we, the ordinary middle class, are the chosen enemy of the educated class.
I was viewing a video of folks in an Ikea store in Shanghai,China that was being locked down, because COVID. They were milling around, as people do at a moment of confusion. But I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking at the people, how they were dressed. How they behaved.
They could have been in an Ikea store anywhere in the US. They were dressed in what the Brits might call “bog-standard” western casual.
And how does President Xi dress? In a western suit. How come he doesn’t dress like a mandarin bureaucrat from Empresses in the Palace? Actually, I think it would be rather cool if he did.
My point is that everyone in the world dresses like a white westerner. All government is based on the western nationalist model. All cultural norms are western, even the anti-white-supremacist critical theory chaps and chapettes.
And the religion of wokism is a western religion, a narrative of good and evil, a narrative that says you are going to Hell unless you repent of your racist-sexist-homophobic sins. Years from now, scholars will say that wokism was a Christian heresy.
The politics of today’s progressivism is simply the latest version of the over/under political formula invented by Marx. The educated ruling class is the friend of the lower class — the “oppressed peoples” — and will fight the enemy to end the oppression of the oppressed peoples at the hands of the “white oppressors.”
Racism and anti-racism are both white western.
Environmentalism and the fight against climate change are both quasi-religious white western movements.
The fight against systemic racism is a movement of white western intellectuals.
And it is a lie.
The defeat of Liz Cheney is merely another defeat of the old order, of a Republican party that was conservative against the Democrats’ liberalism.
But politics and culture in the US is no longer conservative vs. liberal. It is educated class vs. commoner class. It is Anointed vs. Benighted.
I say that the educated class, the Anointed, is trying to do the impossible, just like the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, the Nazis, the FDR Democrats, and now the Wokey lefties.
The world doesn’t work by educated experts and moralists imposing a world-saving plan on the rest of us. That’s because the new idea, the new species, the new anything is not created by God in six days, or by Gaia in the Big Bang. The new emerges, as a new complexity, a new order, in a new and unexpected combination of simple elements into something more complicated. And nobody saw it coming.
That is what a political elite or a ruling class cannot stand. What do you mean, that politics has nothing to do with the case?
And that is why our current ruling class is going down to ruin and confusion. Because its doctrine of the wise educated evolved elite is a lie. Because the worship of political power is a lie. Because humans are not a power animal but a social animal. Because power destroys. Cooperation creates.
And the old order, like Liz Cheney, is heading for the exits.