The American Conservative : Hunger for Dictatorship

War to export democracy may wreck our own

Scott McConnell of The American Conservative (no "liberal rag," to be sure) magazine questions the motivations of the Bush administration and the neo-conservative movement (i.e., PNAC).

In recent days I've been trying to convince right-wing friends of mine (you listening, Howie?) that this administration is no more "conservative" than Barry Goldwater was "liberal." The neo-conservative agenda is stunningly radical in its drive to overturn traditional values, liberties, and balances of power in the name of--what? Freedom? Democracy? I don't think so. How about global capitalism?

The US Constitution, the enlightenment values upon which it was based, the standards of civic decency that once characterized public discourse--all take a backseat to the spread of US military power and global commerce. And traditional libertarian conservatism gets thrown out like the baby with the bathwater--and true conservatives get a black eye, to boot.

Some excerpts:

"Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

"Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism.

"...And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies."