“The Neocons Colonized the Zombie-Like Conservative Movement”

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Well-known conservative author and professor, Paul Gottfried, skewers the recent national conservatism conference in Washington, D.C. as “fake meeting of minds.” Gottfried lambastes the conference organizer, Yoram Hazoni as a neocon, and says the neocons “colonized the zombie-like conservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s.” At LewRockwell.com, Gottfried writes (abridged):

Given my credentials as a widely published and widely translated scholar on European and American political movements, some of my readers thought that I would be invited to this month’s conference in Washington on conservative nationalism.

That I was not asked to speak came as no surprise. The conference’s organizer and star attraction, an Israeli advocate of nationalism, Yoram Hazoni, is like his predecessor Yuval Levin, a neocon client.

From what I’ve seen of the program, most of the participants are the usual suspects. West Coast Straussians, lackeys of conservatism, inc. and professional Zionists like Daniel Pipes are all well represented at Hazony’s conference.

Hazony, who seems to be more of a neocon point man than a serious historian, produced a book on nationalism that makes obvious points about European nationalism.

I was amused to find paleoconservatives who took offense at Hazony’s sound contention that Protestantism was more useful than the Catholic Church in launching national movement.

Neither the Holy Roman Empire nor its pagan predecessor nor the Church of Rome did as much to lay the groundwork for modern nations as vernacular bibles provided by Reformers like Luther and Huss.

Since my enemies didn’t bother to invite me, I shall be less restrained in my comments. Hazony and his fake meeting of minds are needed in order to allow the neoconservatives to go on controlling the Right, including those who are not as docile as Rich Lowry and other familiar types at National Review.

The neocons colonized the zombie-like conservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s, after they reached the conclusion that their fanatical Zionism plus moderate left-of-center politics no longer gave them a winning hand on the Left.

Starting with George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, Democrats moved slowly but perceptibly in the direction of the Palestinian cause, and so the neocons took over what became conservatism, inc. and reshaped it in certain predictable ways.

In American politics, the captive or seduced conservatives would veer leftward and embrace an expanded centralized welfare state and all the civil rights and immigration legislation of the 1960s.

In Middle Eastern affairs, however, “conservatives” would be unswervingly Zionistic and attack all critics of Israel as anti-Semites while hurling them off the bus of conservatism.

Allow me in my nonage after being professionally marginalized and ruined by Hazony’s sponsors to reveal a truth that I dared not express until now.

My now deceased friends (like Murray Rothbard) who kept insisting that Zionism is an essentially leftist movement were right. Zionists have traditionally viewed the Western Christian world as the enemy of the Jewish people and as dangerously and even irrevocably anti-Semitic.

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