Jeff Jacoby describes himself as a conservative columnist. He has written for the Boston Globe as the house broken “conservative” since the early 1990’s. According to his Wikipedia page, he is “the region’s pre-eminent spokesman for Conservative Nation,” and a columnist who had “quickly established himself as a must-read.” Also according to Wiki, he takes a paycheck from the radical left-wing TV station WBUR, one of the many government run NPR affiliates in New England. He’s also been on the payroll of the Progressive cable outlet CNN.
It’s fair to say Jacoby is typical of Official Conservatism™ the last two decades, which is to say he is a neocon. There used to be time when there was a big enough distinction between Official Conservatism™ and the Trotskyites that migrated from the Left in the 70’s, but all of them are neocons now. Jacoby was gonzo for the Bush policy of invade the world – invite the world. He continues to say the Iraq War was a success and he is endlessly going on about the Czar and how Trump is a tool of Russia.
If opposition to the Soviets defined the neocons in the Cold War, opposition to Trump is what defines them now. You see that in this Jeff Jacoby column from the other day. The gist of the piece is to remind the reader of America’s past terribleness and then to tie that history of terribleness to the rise of Trump. You’re supposed to come away with the belief that voting for Trump is the same as forming a lynch mob and hanging some coolies. Just as all good thinkers look back with disgust at America’s past, future good thinkers will be revolted by Trump voters.
Logically, of course, this is nonsense. It is the fallacy of the undistributed middle. There’s nothing connecting today’s voters with the lynch mobs of 150 years ago. More important, no sane person would define America of the 19th century by these rare outbursts of violence. In every age, there are examples of people acting savagely to one another. That is the human condition. What we have here is a rather sleazy attempt to slime the people of the past, and by extension the heritage of everyone alive today, in order to disparage current Americans.
The implication is that discussing immigration is off-limits, because to do so risks being just as bad as those imaginary bigots that haunt our past. We can debate how much we bomb the Muslims, but we cannot have a public debate about how many foreigners we allow to settle in our country. Incinerating half a million Arabs over the last twenty years is perfectly fine, but hurting the feelings of would-be migrants from Mexico would make us worse than Hitler. It’s as if Americans don’t have a right to define what it means to be an American.
At the same time, neocons are forever prattling on about how America is not a blood and soil country. Instead it is a propositional nation. In other words, all you have to do is sign onto the bargain for what it means to be an American and you are an American. That sounds good, until they follow that with the argument that Americans don’t get a say in what it means to be an American. The proposition, according to guys like Jacoby, is that they get to use Americans as cannon fodder for waging pointless wars of choice and they also get to replace those Americans with foreigners of their choice.
You can be forgiven for thinking that guys like Jacoby really don’t like Americans very much. When he is not comparing us to blood thirsty, xenophobic murderers, he’s insisting we lack the moral authority to have a say in how the country is run. That’s what passes for conservatism these days. It is a laundry list of complaints about the American people. When they are not rooting for the death of working class whites, they are twisting themselves into pretzels in an effort to prove they are nothing like the savage Dirt People carrying Trump through the election.
It is a good reminder that neo-conservatism was always a Progressive heresy and never had roots in Anglo-Saxon conservatism. Modern Progressivism has curdled into a list of hatreds, offering nothing but an increasingly dark vision of society. The neocons are following the same path. Guys like Jeff Jacoby can only tell you what they are not, and increasingly that sounds like “not American.” To be a neocon today is to do little more than spew venom at normal Americans for not supporting wars of choice and unlimited immigration.
What we are seeing is the transformation of the neocons into neo-liberals. Maybe it is simply a return to their natural home, but the modern Right sounds pretty much like the Left, except they want to kill Muslims and reduce the tax on carried interest. They embrace the unhinged anti-racism that the Left now preaches and they fully embrace multiculturalism. Now that the Bush Crime Family has decided to back Hillary Clinton, the way is now open for the neocons to become neo-libs and take most of Official Conservatism™ with them.
Godspeed.
I was really slow to pick up on the complete triumph of neo-conservatism. During the Bush years, like an idiot, I’d defend the Republicans’ holy crusade to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and was confused when people would call ME a neo-conservative. “What are they talking about?” I’d think. “I was born conservative, in a conservative family, 57 years ago. I’ve never been anything BUT conservative. Neo-conservatives are people who used to be leftists who saw the light and converted – that’s not me.” But I didn’t realize that the whole “conservative movement” was being run by those former… Read more »
There were a lot of us. I still had a subscription to Commentary up until late last year.
I’m in that category, too, although not the right religion to be a true neocon. I also was behind the “invade the world ” meme, ( mea maxima culpa) although really was never behind the “invite the world” part, with the exception of hockey players and Swedish models. I tend to agree with the whole “propositional nation ” deal, except that there are some cultures and religions that can (or will) never assimilate. They are best avoided. The other problem is that we don’t have the cultural confidence of 100 years ago. If we are going to be a propositional… Read more »
Swedish models? Saab? Saabs have always been just too weird. especially that V4 model.
I was thinking more about the likes of Elin Nordegren and her identical twin sister. SAABs were fun cars- way too expensive to maintain, though.
A lot of us were not paying attention. John Derbyshire has talked a lot about getting talked into the warmongering stuff. Normal people tend to trust people who seem earnest and optimistic. As a result, we were all fooled.
That the neocons are STILL on the “Invade the world, invite the world” train, after all that’s happened in the past 13 years to completely discredit it, leads me to think in the “stupid or liar?” formulation, they are most certainly the latter.
The problem ultimately boils down to the fact that what makes up the mainstream right doesn’t win anything. The complaints about Iraq are valid but victory would have silenced a lot of it. But they couldn’t deliver it. And now its come to the point that they can’t win elections either. 2012 was the breaking point more than any war because it was an election that should have been won and instead we are living through the second coming of David Dinkins.
I think what pushed me to warmongering was the public unveiling of the A Q Khan network. I never asked myself how a hellhole like Pakistan was able to build large numbers of atomic weapons. Then suddenly, there was the answer: almost the whole of Islamic civilization, from Malaysia to Mauritania was funding, supplying, and enabling an Islamic bomb. I was willing to support anything that would degrade Dar al Islam’s WMD networks, even if it had to only a.very indirect effect. I can’t point to any one thing that pushed me away from the new-cons. Maybe it was just… Read more »
Personally, I never believed in, supported or bought into the BS about nation building. Oh Yes, we can name that tune “Democracy” in 3-5 years! Give me an f’ng break. Look how long we stayed in Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and other countries post-WWII and did we really ever get those nations/countries to become “Democracies?” Some, a variation maybe … but many … not really. More like putting lipstick on a pig (American brands, slang, Hollywood, etc.) but the underlying culture is still there. How do you tell someone they are now “free” when they haven’t they faintest idea what… Read more »
I agree, LP. I had no problem with the Afghan war: bomb the crap out of them until grown men bawl at the word “America”. I was still in that mood the following year, when the idea of going into Iraq arose. Then we waited, and waited, and waited… for Bush to launch his grand Armada of the Willing, with great pomp and ceremony, while the anti-war pukes got their wind back and began to take back the initiative. But when it FINALLY got going, it seemed to go well, until Bush began to see himself as the Apostle to… Read more »
I remember the beginning of the second (Bush Jr.) Iraq war very clearly because I was immersed in an intensive study of the US occupation of Japan at the time. At the outset, I supported the war as a calculated gamble, as the Bushies promise was to put an end to Islamist/Arab radicalism by transforming Iraq into a functioning secular state on the Turkish model. I recall thinking that this was a gamble, rather than a foregone conclusion, as the Bushies seemed to, because to my mind the only way that this could possibly work was if we turned Iraq… Read more »
Amen Brother! You too understand the “investment” that would have been required. Your statement “And then there was the decision to purge all Baathists from the government, meaning that Iraq would have no functioning administration for years.” states a fact that smart men knew even after Germany surrendered in WWII. Did the Allies kick all Nazi’s and German’s supporting the Third Reich out of the branches of government? No. They left it functioning, although under a new administration. And just why was a putz like Paul “whatzhizname” Bremer put in charge? He was a fricking dip”shit”lomat. He had shit-4-brains. I… Read more »
The Bush Crime Family is responsible for the confusion! They seem so rock-ribbed. Until you realize they are just secret globalists and poseurs; and not very bright ones at that.
When the common belief shifts from “With your Shield, or On it”, to “hire some barbarians and offer them citizenship”, your fate is sealed.
@ Emeritus – True enough. One only need look at Publius Quinctilius Varus and how hiring German mercenaries worked out for him. Suffice to say it worked out for us, but not so much for our Roman overseers. Arminius (Hermann the German) is now memorialized up on a hill to commemorate the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
We discovered in the 19th century that national identities CAN be constructed – e.g. Meiji Japan and Shinto, the cult of the Emperor, even very “traditional” Japanese stuff like sumo wrestling is, in any recognizable form, only about 150 years old. We had this ad hoc in the US with things like baseball (your post below), and organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic (Union army vets) pushing Memorial Day, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. Problem is, you can’t do this stuff ironically… and modern people don’t know how to be sincere, thanks to 60+ years of postmodernism in… Read more »
Germany, too. One theory that tries to explain the origins of WW1 and WW2 holds that the Germans built up this huge educational and informational machine to unite the principalities in the 1880s and 90s and that the machine and the synthetic memes it created metasticized into militarism and Nazism. I’m not as familiar with Japanese history but have always suspected that something very similar happened.
Actually, Germany was going very well up until WW1. We had 99% literacy which was better than France or the UK and a stronger industrial base. Then after WW1, we – along with everyone else in the world – enjoyed a fun filled, hyper inflated depression and economic collapse. Tag on Germany’s repayment to the Brits and French – thanks to the Treaty of Versailles (along with a loss of 13% of German territory) – and things just kept getting better and better. Then we added in a failed Weimar Republic (and don’t kid yourself, Bismarck did some very good… Read more »
But Karl, the shoah must go on!
“Only the Jew knew that by an able and persistent use of propaganda, heaven itself can be presented to the people as if it were hell and, vice versa, the most miserable kind of life can be presented as if it were paradise.” ~ Mein Kampf, The Collapse of the Second Reich
Bullshít… Commodore Perry forced Japan to trade with the West, Japan was an autonomous closed society… Then when the Japanese wanted more trade while they attacked their ancient Chinese enemies, the USA stabbed them in the back and refused to trade with them…
You seem to have some odd ideas about Japanese institutions and history. Belief in the emperor as a divine being goes back to the very beginning of Japanese history, two thousand years ago. Shinto is the original native religion, and predates the entry of Buddhism from China in the sixth century AD by centuries. Sumo I’m not as up on, but I’ve seen 18th century prints of sumo matches. The Meiji period (1868-1912) was simply the reign of the restored Emperor Meiji from the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1867 until his death in 1912, during which time Japan… Read more »
“There’s nothing connecting today’s voters with the lynch mobs of 150 years ago.”
___________________________
Strongly beg to differ! The Democratic Party is directly connected to the lynch mobs of by-gone eras! DIRECTLY!
DEMs were: the national “Slavery-is-okay” party in 1860; the Copperheads who wanted to settle the Civil War with slavery intact; the organizers of the Knights of the Golden Circle, e.g. the Ku Klux Klan; opposition to every effort to get rid of Jim Crow and desegregation; opponents of every Civil Rights act from the 20’s to the 60’s; indeed no more foul group exists than the DEMs.
Obviously, no one would defend murder, but on the whole, the legal exclusion of Asian immigrants from the U.S. was probably a good thing, at least for the American worker. It was also probably good for China, in the long run. As is the case with Mexico today, it’s possible for immigration to be an overall net loss for both the sending and receiving countries. What really funny about idiots like Jacoby is that they define America as a proposition nation, but they don’t even require that immigrants agree with the alleged propositions, and assimilate to American culture. They are… Read more »
The impression I get is that many Chinese that couldn’t make it to the States went to other parts of Asia. There are huge, long standing Chinese migrant communities in most Southeast Asian countries and in much of the Caribbean. They, like Germans and Jews, have long been a very mobile people. The Chinese diaspora is enormous and spans most countries. My in laws have intermarried with ethnic Chinese from Indonesia and Thailand and Jamaica.
One of the unique things about America is that anyone from anywhere can go there, get through the process of immigration and become and American. No one blinks when a non-white person tells you they are an American. Everyone just accepts that they just are. It’s very different here, and in most of Europe. We have German hyphenated Turks, Russians, Poles, Syrians, etc. but no German would consider them ‘German’ even if they could quote passages of our constitution in perfect German. The same is true to some degree in France, Italy and other EU countries. When one arrives at… Read more »
I think part of what’s going on in America is that question. What does it mean to be an American? The post-nationalist dreamers just assumed everyone would abandon their identity. Instead, everyone is now thinking about it and discovering that it is not all that clear.
Thanks to the Internet, Skype, and other modern communications its not only possible but easy to maintain daily contact with your previous culture after immigrating. In past years, immigration meant leaving your country of a origin behind. These days Choosing not to assimilate is painless.
The modern cult of anti-racism and the welfare state also enable non-assimilation.
It used to be that American meant you stood for the freedom to live as you chose including to be left alone. And mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services without constraint. And the knowledge of right and wrong as expressed in the natural law of the Christian religion. Now? I couldn’t tell you what this dump is or what it’s people are.
@ Fred – I completely understand your feelings. If you watch these videos from Germany, UK and the USA and then asked these people what makes them Germans, Brits and Americans, they wouldn’t be able to tell you either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvne-a6z6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgchTuaP7wY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5pwcjru6DU
Don’t forget that most basic right : the freedom to privately associate with whom you choose, including the right to exclude others of your choice! (especially women!)
Retaining control of US foreign policy is what drives Hillary’s flying monkeys… along with the millions Goldman Sachs and the Saudis have paid her... NATO is an illegitimate occupier of the German Fatherland, and the minute the white majority is armed in Europe, the Zíonist crowned heads of the EUSSR will fall… The banksters need a war desperately right now. They’ve tried so hard in Syria and it just hasn’t worked. Now they’ve got crazy Trump actually saying we should stay out of the Middle East and focus on our own problems, and people are listening… What’s a self-respecting globalist… Read more »
His purpose is to create a soothing fictitious relativity to the dichotomy. The traitor is a cuckservative. A card carrying member of the right wing of cultural marxism. A dutiful plant hiding behind a fig leaf of traditional conservatism. A seriously cunning deceiver. No different than the rest of the 5th column actors and agent provocateurs of the legacy media. Just a different flavor. His purpose is to represent a tempering political solice to the obvious cultural marxists in the media.
The Bush endorsement is the gift that illuminates the long con like no other. The Progressives have made an unforced error.
It is a move made out of sheer desperation. Why else wave their true colors so publicly? It is one thing to go cavorting around with BJ Clinton to all the do-gooder fundraisers for the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation, all in the name of humanity, but this is true desperation. I hope Trump has his security tight! All that matters to these people is money. And nothing will get in their way.
Money and power. Don’t forget power. The desire for power is psychotic.
I wouldn’t mind the “proposition nation” stuff if the people parroting that line took the idea seriously, and were willing to put some teeth in it. Indeed, that seems like a reasonable compromise on this issue: “We restrictionists will accept the idea that America is a Proposition Nation if you open-borders types will start actually enforcing it and getting rid of foreigners who are patently uninterested in our nation’s central Propositions.”
Unfortunately, it seems, for many open-borders types, open borders ARE the central Proposition, to which everything else is subordinate. So compromise is impossible.
Unfortunately we have new Propositions (the usual suspects) that a very different from the original, i e fundamental transformation.
There is an Aristotelian golden mean for just about everything. Revolutions are about achieving that mean once again after long periods of drifting away from it. The successful ones are those that stop somewhere near the mean and don’t overshoot too far. The trick is knowing when to stop, and being able to convince everyone else about your estimate.
(((Jeff Jacoby))) funny how that always seems to be the case. Coincidence?
“(((Jeff Jacoby))) funny how that always seems to be the case. Coincidence?”
(((Geo H Bush, Geo HW Bush, Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Juan McCain, Rupert Murdoch,
Kelly Ayotte, George Will, Rich Lowery, The Koch Brothers, Mitt Romney, etc, etc.))) funny how that always seems to be the case. Coincidence???
Confirmation bias much? Plenty of “open-borders” blame to go around.
All of those names are secret JOOOS!
I am sorry you didn’t get it Nedd, maybe next time. Happy Motoring!
Sorry if I ‘didn’t get it’, or I misunderstood the implication of your post, AT.
Karl H apparently thought the same thing that I did.
I’d be happy to hear an explanation of what you actually meant.
Thanks.
Hi Nedd, If I had to explain it to you, the explanation would not be helpful. Best regards
“Looked at from this point of view the apparent insanity of our government’s foreign policy is revealed as a piece of shrewd calculating logic, put into effect in order to promote the Jewish idea of a struggle for world-mastery.” ~ Mein Kampf, The Right to Self-Defence
All a Cohencidence goy.
Bolsheviks ((( Bernie Sanders )))… VS.
Mensheviks ((( Debbie Wasserman-Shultz )))
Mammonism and Bolshevism are Jéwish stepsisters… their Golden Calf has grown up to be a hollow Bronze Bull…
“When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.” (Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 1651)
I’m uncertain if America is really a “Propositional Nation”. But I do know the Soviet Union, of recent memory was explicitly a Propositional Nation, specifically the proposition of Internationalist Revolutionary Marxist-Leninism. And what did they do with those Slavs, Armenians, Uzbeks, and others who did not completely conform to that proposition? I think you remember what happens to those don’t agree – about thirty million of them. A Frenchman remains a Frenchman, and a German a German, regardless of politics. But in a propositional nation, other-thinkers forfeit their rights. I suggest Mr. Jacoby rethink before the Deplorable masses call the… Read more »
@ Rurik – I wonder if America suffers from too much diversity with all the hyphenated Americans. In Europe there are no hyphenated Germans or French or Italians. Generally speaking, the historical causes of division between people and nations here in Europe (both internally and externally) have been based on religion, not race.
Not much Christianity left in Europe. Even the Irish conflict was about nationalism and rival ethnic groups (native Irish vs Ulster Scots “settlers”) instead of religion. IRA/Sinn Fein has been secular socialist since at least the 1970s-and today they are vocal supporters of same-sex marriage. And I’m pretty sure the Serbs and Croats weren’t fighting over Christian doctrine. Some churches *do* play the role of prog cultural Marxist social clubs: http://listeninginthedesert.com/?p=6490 (…) Anthony Murphy, the editor of The Catholic Voice newspaper, had raised concerns about whether it was appropriate for two lesbians in a same-sex “marriage” to have such public… Read more »
Frankly, I’m surprised that neither Z nor any of the commenters mentioned the one true commonality of all *real* Americans: ancestry west of the Hajnal line.
Do tell!
That sounds very interesting King George.
The (((Neocons))) are all supporting Hillary, they’re the American (((elite))) the real power brokers.
Cucks, neocons, rink’s, the right wing of the the cultural marxists, none of them, journalists included, will never get to the bottom of any left or right wing scandal or corruption, never mind treason and felonies, but most of all what the cultural marxists are trying to do to our country, culture, and traditions, within the federal government and our states. It is why things are like they are. The whole purpose is to keep the truth hidden with half truths and cuck dissimulation. They not only know of what happen’s, been a part of it all and benefitted handsomely,… Read more »
Neo-conservativism was probably necessary for what it was originally, an intellectual path to let the increasingly post-1960s leftwing elites to muddle through the second half of the Cold War. It was an adaption for the 1970s. (Take a look at fiction to get a hint of where everyone thought things were going, basically co-dominion like the end of Watchmen.) The problem is that we’re close to 30 years out from the end of the Cold War and they don’t seem to realize this. As for Trump, I think a lot of high pitched shrieking is a mix of class resentment… Read more »
So, why did this half-wit Kennedy spawn trustifarian out GHWB_? My guess is that we need look no further than middle school for her motivation: “Hey, all the cool girls are supporting our Hillary, you should too_! (Otherwise you’d have to leave the cool girls lunch table)”. IOW, they really are that stupid. The better question is why did GHWB even say this, falling in with and supporting her idiocy, even if in semi-privacy_? His clan will not go unpunished in Texas, I’d warrant. Does he not know this_? Son GWB is at least smart enough to keep his mouth… Read more »
Left wing politics is a door to a room full of pussy and money. Billy boy took one look and leapt in dick first.
The elite/federal pol’s are proxy-war happy. Now they use the tactic on their own citizens in times of desperation. Shameful. Bullies, all. Didn’t ya love how Huma praised Hillary in a snarky hardy-har-har way about manipulating the Egyptians and Libyans. Well. We aren’t them. They better wake up, and soon. I trust they will when Trump wins.
Jacoby looks and quacks like a progressive, and his column is full of the usual progressive lies and omissions. Some perspective: In 1870, Los Angeles had a population of some 6,000, a village on the edge of a continent in a country just emerging from a savage civil war. China too was emerging from a civil war too (see Taiping Rebellion), and had a population of some 300 to 400 million (as large or larger than the US today). If China was allowed unfettered immigration to southern California, just how long would it be before the white inhabitants of Los… Read more »
Some more perspective: less than 30 years later the Boxers of the Boxer Rebellion in China would brutally slaughter well over 1000 Europeans, most of whom were missionaries, their children, and students. They would go on to kill thousands more Chinese who had converted to Christianity. The Boxers make the LA mob, with their 18 victims of their “ghastly eruption of lethal racism” look like a bunch of pikers.
But hey, who needs historical perspective when your point is to compel your readers to self-flagellate in the interest of open borders.
Check out Neo-Neocon for further support of this theory.
She’s a bore.
Gonna be fun to watch the “real liberals” stick the knife in the “neo-liberals” as soon as they get off the bus. Maybe the rest of us will get a party we can support in toto.
Finally! Someone who can use the word “neo-con” in a sentence without it sounding like misuse of the word “fascist,” wherein each of these words is actually synonymous with “scary,” “in muscular defense of the United States,” or “controversial” — where that one means “something Democrats oppose.”