A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
melon said:
No, but I don't blame people for mistaking "neocon" for "modernist" or just being plain-old "principled."
Many neocons were "leftist" (by 1940s standards) modernist academics who didn't take the 1960s and the arrival of postmodernism/relativism all that well. In particular, they tend to be heavily patriotic, and look at the aftermath of WWII and the Marshall Plan as evidence of America's greatness, where we slay an evil entity and use this moment to turn our enemies into powerful allies.
Fast forward to the 1960s, and these neocons perceive the Left as having lost all their principles. They take issue with words like "tolerance," because it implies that they'd have to tolerate people like Hitler if he were still alive; in other words, they believe that there are moments when it is perfectly acceptable to hate someone, and their modernist--and, by extension, futurist--tendencies are still intact. They want to see a world where it's always the end of WWII, and the U.S. is instrumental in overthrowing oppressive regimes and transforming a "Nazi Germany" into a powerful democratic, capitalist nation like today's Germany. It is, in many ways, the classic utopian fantasy of "world peace," coupled with the Trotskyite notion of "permanent revolution" to achieve it (although they would most vigorously disagree with the latter analogy here).
By the election of Ronald Reagan, these now-nominally Democratic neocons find a president who shares their ideas of "permanent revolution," and jump to the Republican Party, where they easily integrate and many become part of the presidential inner circle. It should be noted that Reagan, himself, had a similar background to these neocons. Reagan was a registered Democrat, and was even a stated admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, but, unlike the neocons who left, due to foreign policy and philosophical shifts in the Left, Reagan left, because he thought that they had become the party of "big government." Nevertheless, it didn't take much for Reagan and the neocons to adopt each other's passions, and this is probably why Reagan had a series of military campaigns and spent heavily on the military during his presidency.
But I digress, to a point. The reason one might try and interpret Bono's article here as "neocon" is because it's essentially "modernist/futurist" in scope. And, yes, neocons, at their ultimate core, are modernists too. But it's my belief that "neoconservatism" is defined much more narrowly on the basis of philosophy (modernism, infused with the philosophy of Leo Strauss) and all the other baggage I listed above.
At the core, I do think it is time for the Left to figure out what it stands for today, and to put in all the heavy lifting involved to justify it philosophically and logically. I do think that these vague, ill-defined notions of "tolerance" and "pacifism" don't always stand up to vigorous academic scrutiny, and that's where we get into trouble, as then we let all the fanatics do the defining for us, whether its hawkish neocons on one end or reactionary religious fundamentalists on the other. Nature, after all, abhors a void.
One of the very few posts that doesn't blur the line between "neocons" and the Christian right / Palaeoconservatives.