About Thought

Who are the Neoconservatives: The People who Engineered the Scond Gulf War

2005-10-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

The new Republican coalition of the late Twentieth Century garnered many highly talented and zealous recruits from the ranks of the neoconservative, people who were once liberal intellectuals and former leftists who joined conservative ranks in the 1970s and after. Many of them became conservative journalists or worked for the emerging network of conservative think tanks. Some who once espoused socialism became its determined critics. They were fiercely anti-communist, supported the Vietnam War, and were put off by the New Left, which opposed the war and took cultural positions the neoconservatives denounced as destructive. These refugees from the left and liberalism found it comfortable to ally with conservatives who still believed the Cold War was not over and that the USSR was an enormous threat to the US. The have been described by suspicious conservatives as "ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP…." 1

There was an unsuccessful neoconservative effort in 1976 to win the Democratic presidential nomination for hawk Henry M. Jackson. Most neoconservatives migrated to the Republican party.

While still liberals of different stripes, the neoconservatives -- moved away from a critique of capitalism and capitalist culture. The vast majority of them would eventually kick off all the traces of liberalism.

Eventually they who decided to privilege individualism and autonomy over the community. With time and the increasing rightward drift of the party, the Republican neoconservatives tended to show less and less interest in economic and social justice. As they became strong advocates of neoliberal economics, they adopted the view that leaving the poor deal with market forces was preferable to their old New Dealish positions. . They had concluded that liberal solution had not worked and described them selves as liberals who had been "mugged" by reality. 2

Neoconservatives become outspoken supporters of neoliberal economics and its Social Darwinian views of society and helping the poor be responsible for themselves. They were not adverse to some state assistance in guiding the poor toward economic independence. However, it took some time for many of them to turn their backs on the New Deal heritage. As late as 1983, Irving Kristol was defending the long-standing liberal position on welfare. In time, less was heard from neoconservatives about this However there is little evidence that the neoconservatives ever got over their distaste for libertarians.3

In the 1970s, there was a great upsurge of "backlash populism" or right-wing populism that swept up many of these former left-wing intellectuals in its wake. They became Neoconservatives. In the process, some of them accepted an anti-statism, for which some unorthodox forms of Marxism had conditioned them. Others employed anti-statist language while working to enlarge governmental and executive branch power as tools for the implementation of their plans. Neoconservatives of most stripes would gradually become somewhat less distinguishable from all but the most extreme elements in the New Right. Like the New Right, they believe they are justified no using any hardball techniques to get what they want, including dirty tricks and lies. Unlike many on the New Right, they believe in expanding the federal government, and there is evidence that over time they have converted Republican colleagues on the New Right to this view. Both neoconservatives have contempt for libertarians, and both have a tendency to reshape traditional views of the constitution to suite their purposes. While the New right believes that power should be exercised by a godly and moral elite, the neoconservatives expect power to be in the hands of an elite composed of highly educated individuals who are guided by their ideology.

Neoconservatives are essentially secularists who want to preserve what is best of the Enlightenment heritage. Most are skeptics but value religion as a guarantor of order and morality. Oddly enough, some prominent Roman Catholics are neoconservatives despite the view of the dominant neoconservative view of religion. The New Right had reason to be suspicious of the neoconservatives but over time they have worked well together. In temperament, they are not as different as might be expected, as both groups tend to produce zealots and ideologues.

It has been said that the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss was the spiritual godfather of the neoconservatives. He had a profound influence upon Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhorentz, William Kristol, and Gary Schmitt, leader of the Project for the New American Century. Strauss was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago for twenty-five years. He never accepted the label of conservative, but his thinking was to have a great appeal to conservatives. It was quite different from what constituted mainstream conservatives in his lifetime or after his death. His outlook was very critical of much in modern culture and was rooted in pre-modern thought
No doubt most neoconservatives have not read the works of Leo Strauss, but their thinking has been strongly influenced by him. Staussians seemed to view themselves as superior persons, perhaps because they possess esoteric knowledge and value ancient virtues Neoconservatives are Straussians to the extent that the fear the masses and democracy, believe in a government by an elite which should enjoy special dignity, accept the notion that the wise lead by telling noble lies, and insist that the worst thing that could befall the United States would be if its people no longer believed in their own superiority. 4

Straussian thought did not revere tradition, as did conservatives of the stamp of Edmund Burke. Though not religious, Strauss valued religion, along with patriotism, as necessary to hold states and societies together. His basic outlook was that pre-modern philosophers had found it necessary to say what they had to say "between the lines" to protect themselves from the masses and governments. Most of them had concluded that there were no truths, no natural law, and no gods. They saw morality as necessary for order but knew it was only based on customs and prejudices. Straussians share an esoteric approach to knowledge; knew that their basic beliefs should be shared with only an elite and believed that modern philosophy, in trying to address the common man, eventually exposed ordinary people to knowledge they ncould not live with comfortably. This led to nihilism and relativism, which Strauss and his followers deplored, and ultimately the wreckage of modern culture and the spawning of the New Left. The Straussians opposed moral relativism, but at root they were philosophical relativists. Strauss and his followers valued authority, heroism, and creativity and believe that democracy threatens these qualities. They placed a premium on truth and justice; some saw them as salutary myths and others think it possible to almost approximate them.

Strauss and his followers thought their mission was to work to salvage what they could of liberal democracy and the best of Western Culture, but they differed among themselves on accomplish this. He had contempt for the weakness of the Weimar Republic and taught that masses need strong leadership which is willing to deceive them when necessary. He believed that perpetual deception was necessary to give the people the leadership they needed, and feared the disorder that could flow from excessive dissent. He noted that the best way to insure a stable political order is to bring about unity through fear of an external threat and said such a threat should be manufactured if it did not actually exist."

Strauss’s teachings laid the groundwork for an aggressive foreign policy that was to include unilateralism, preemptive strikes, and frequent warfare. He taught that the "liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad." Given this situation, "to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic…." Democracies have a natural right to battle their barbarous opponents and have an obligation, as victors, to teach conquered peoples western democratic values. Strauss had a great influence on neoconservative thought, but it would seem that most of them overcame elements of his pessimism. If anything were to become very Wilsonian in their optimism over what America could accomplish in the world. 5

( Evangelicals and CAtholic Bishops should study this part.)
Strauss told his inner circle that religion must be used by "true wise men" to control the masses and lead them in the correct direction. Strauss claimed that religion was false, but its deception must be hidden from the people. Most neoconservatives Cons did not crusade against abortion or to restore prayer to the schools, but they developed many other themes to ingratiate conservative Christians. The Neo Conservatives found that by exploiting questions of promiscuity, drug use, rising crime, homosexuality, pornography, and assaults on traditional culture, they could activate fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. It did not matter that Strauss, himself, said the drug problem could be handled by handing out free doses on a daily basis.6

Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, William Bennett, George Weigel and and Michael Novak were representative of Catholic neoconservatives. These Catholic intellectuals who had once been sympathetic to distributive justice and had worried about how capitalism nurtured materialism and egoism. In time, some like Michael Novak distanced themselves from these social concerns of their church and became apologists for relatively unrestrained capitalism. For example, Fr. Richard Neuhaus seemed to distance himself from Catholic views about private property and held that progressive taxation amounted to theft. Novak and papal biographer George Weigel reconfigured Catholic teachings on just warfare to justify George W. Bush’s Second Gulf War and rejected John Paul II’s clear position on that conflict.7 . Because so many Catholics had distanced themselves from the natural law thought of their church by the 1970s, the thought of Catholic neoconservatives is almost indistinguishable from that of secular neoconservatives, except in respect to abortion. However these Cathjolics maintain that t life begins at conception, a view grounded more in natural law than in science. 8

Many of the Neo-Cons were Jewish, and their presence in the conservative movement would eventually move it into close alignment with the most militant elements in Israel. They were strongly attached to the Likud Party and its vision of a Greater Israel. In the 1980s, they had considerable influence but did not have their hands directly on the levers of power. They greatly overestimated the Soviet Union’s military power and worked hard to convince the Reagan administration to pursue the Star Wars ( the Strategic Defense Initiative) weapons system and vastly increase defense spending. They were convinced that this program brought an end to the Cold War. It may have contributed to the collapse of the USSR, but it is an open question whether the enormous expense and increased tensions were worth it. 9

The neoconservatives were to become analysts for conservative think tanks, cranking out material on foreign policy, economics, and how the liberals allegedly destroyed traditional American culture. In no time, they appeared to have forgotten that their former friends in the academy and among liberal intellectuals had often been the strongest critics of consumerism, hedonism, and materialistic values. Their new job was to manufacture materials blaming these and other problems on liberals, and they did it well. Although they fit the profile, Neo Cons quickly became proficient in cranking out polemics against the so-called "New Class" of elitist intellectuals who were allegedly out to soften American foreign policy and undermine foreign policy. The gist of their argument was that these people were "elitsts" who somehow looked down on the views or ordinary folk. In truth, it was the Straussian neoconservatives who were the self-conscious intellectuals who were determined to manipulate the unwashed masses. The new conservative think tanks were established in order to create a "counter-establishment." Over time they have succeeded in doing this, but they are not places where independent scholars can do their best to serve their country, regtardless of party politics. Rather, in the words of Fareed Zakaria, they turn out "lots of predictable polemics and little serious analysis."
The Neo Cons were activists by nature had needed an identifiable enemy. By creating the "New Class" myth, they provided the necessary enemy– those in the literati, academy, and media who disagreed with them. Later, when even they acknowledged the end of the Cold War, they threw themselves into a war against the remnants of American liberalism. Among their leaders were Michael Novak, James Q. Wilson, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett. Mark Lillan of the University of Chicago noted in 2002 that the neoconservatives were animated by " a purely political passion to challenge ‘the intellectuals.’" Maintaining that liberal intellectuals have abandoned scholarly standards, the neoconservatives believe themselves justified in the "cavalier use of sources and quotations" and any kind of charge against liberal intellectuals, including treason, bad faith, and cowardice.

The neoconservatives generally claimed to believe believed in fixed, absolute principles – something they shared with their less sophisticated political allies in the evangelical churches and far right. This tendency toward anger and self-righteousness has spread so widely among conservatives, that very few conservatives were heard to question the inconsistent and clearly political decision of the Supreme Court in 2000 to stop the counting of votes in Florida and effectively give the presidency to George W. Bush. Had the shoe been on the other foot, most Democrats would have let partisanship get the better of them, but it is likely that a significant number of them would question what the high court had done. Conservatives came to possess a certainty lent itself to zeal, self-righteousness, and passion. The liberal outlook was more pragmatic and nuanced in nature and less given to the anger and passion that fuels winning political campaigns. 10

Their work, and that of others, in the conservative think tanks enabled Conservatives to present their ideas in manner that made appear new and attractive to voters. The triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was partly attributable to their hard work on the ideological front. Very few voters have highly developed ideological perspectives, but there has been an increasing tendency for voters to locate themselves somewhere along the liberal/conservative spectrum. 11 By 2003, their publications included the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary, The New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. They also write many syndicated columns and contribute to many magazines.12 The efforts of neoconservative writers and activists most probably account for the decision of more voters to identify with conservative outlooks than liberal ones. To the New Right, the Neoconservatives were suspect because they were highly educated, eastern urban dwellers and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the Neo Cons served the New Right well by exploiting religious and cultural issues and helping to bring the Christian Right into the conservative coalition.
Neoconservatives used the pages of Commentary and The Public Interest to defend the Vietnam war and advance their aggressive anti-communist policies. The Vietnam War began the gradual destruction of foreign policy bipartisanship in the United States. In foreign affairs, the neoconservatives tended to take a Manichaean viewpoint, seeing only "good" and "evil" and this attitude persisted after the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Even with the collapse of Soviet power, the neoconservatives were to eventually convert most of their Republican allies to a unilateralist, assertive, crusading approach to foreign policy. On the other hand, the neoconservatives quickly embraced modified laissez faire economics. Indeed, their conversion to conservatism was often related to the appeal of market fundamentalism and their disillusionment with the welfare state.

In foreign affairs, the neoconservatives were impatient with the gradual, moderate approach of those who pursued containment as the basic strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. The neoconservatives were anxious to more directly confront the Soviets and to deploy American power to reshape the world to conform to American ideals. Neoconservative intellectuals had contempt for Henry Kissinger, who worked for accommodation with the Soviet Union. They were hawkish, critical of deterrence, and inclined to exaggerate the power of the Soviet Union. They were convinced that theirs’ was a righteous cause and that any many means were justified in battling Communism. Though they were highly moralistic, their policies were amoral. Since President Richard Nixon opened relations with China and pursued détente, there was a tendency for politicians and writers to believe the Cold War was on the way to being ended. One reason they so disliked Jimmy Carter and called him an "isolationist" and "appeaser" is that they understood that the Georgian was pursuing Nixon’s policy of defusing the Cold War. It t is doubtful that many liberals grasped this. They followed Norman Podhoretz in warning that the United States was about to be "Finlandized" into economic and political subordination to the Soviet Union. In the eighties, they eagerly worked for Ronald Reagan because he harped on the evil of communism. Working for him, they called the right-wing Contra thugs in Nicaragua and Angola’s Jonas Savimbi "freedom fighters."13
Typical of the Jewish Neo-Cons, was Paul D. Wolfowitz who worked was to have a strong influence on Republican military and foreign policy in the administrations of the Bushes. While at the University of Chicago, he became the protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, a hawkish geo-military thinker who would later become a bitter critic of détente.14 He had been pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since 1979 and eventually fashioned a doctrine that called for a U.S. war to overthrow Saddam as a first step in remodeling the region to make it safe for Israel. In time he would exert enormous influence. Because the Neo Conservative were urban and intellectuals, they were not entirely accepted by the New Right.15 Eliot Abrams, Norman Podhorentz’s son-in-law was another influential Neo Conservative who served in the Reagan administration and was convicted of lying to Congress. He was to direct White House Middle East policy for George W. Bush. Perhaps the most influential neoconservative foreign policy spokesman was Richard Perle who worked with Donald Rumsefeld in the Ford Administration to damage the Salt II Arms Treaty. Richard Perle, known as the "Prince of Darkness," became another key advisor in the second Bush administration. AS Assistant Secretary of Defense, he played a major role in persuading Ronald Reagan to spend vast amounts on defense and to launch the so-called Star Wars defensive missile system. Perle and other neoconservatives occupied second and third tier positions in the Reagan administration. James Baker, Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, was uncomfortable with their foreign policy moralism and grandiose designs and "couldn’t wait to sweep [them]out ." Their moralism would later be called "hard Wilsonianism."

Perle and other neoconservatives believed that the end of the Cold War gave the United States a golden opportunity to reshape the Middle East. While working for the Reagan administration, he discovered to be assisting an Israeli arms manufacturer. By the 1990s, he came to oppose the Israel-Palestine peace process, used his influence with Israel to scuttle Bill Clinton’s Camp David Peace Conference, and advised Israel to set aside talks with the Palestinians and concentrate overthrowing the Iraqi government and reconfigure the political dynamics of the region. 16 Once in power, Wolfowitz urged the administration to give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians. 17

At the end of the First Gulf War, neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz believed that George W. Bush muffed an opportunity to oust Saddam Hussein. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, working for then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney wrote a paper entitled "Defense Planning Guidance Defense" stating that the United States should pay less attention to the opinions of allies and be more willing to use force and use force to gain its ends in the world. They were assisted by Zalmay Khalilzad, who was then the Bush administration’s ambassador to Iraq . This paper embodied what came to be known as the Wsolfowitz Doctrine. Secretary Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, his undersecretary for policy, looked to the day when the US would cash in on its military preeminence to reorder the world along the lines of American democracy and values. They looked forward to a permanent military presence on six continents in order to prevent all "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." These views conflicted with the outlook of the senior Bush and the paper put was aside. 18 Their proposals were considered rash and extreme at the time, but these views were to become the nucleus of the Bush Doctrine, which was enunciated in 2002.

Richard Perle is a key architect of neoconservative foreign policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and attends meetings of the editorial board of the Jerusalem Post. Perle is a close friend of David Wurmser, another AEI scholar, known for his hawkish, pro-Israel views. Other Neo-Cons to operate out of the AEI were Michael Ledeen and Irving Kristol. Allies Matthew Sculy and John Shattan are well positioned in the White House and Lewis Libby is Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff. Prize-winning London based journalist John Pilger considered Perle a dangerous person who thought about "total war" in the 1980s against the Soviet Union and later applied the same approach to Iraq. Perle became head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Council under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s chief advisor in the administration of George W. Bush and is credited with foreshadowing the administration’s new defense doctrine of pre-emptive threats and strikes. Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense. 19 In the second Bush administration, Wolfowitz’s unilateral militarism found eager supporters in an administration shaped by traditional deep- southern militarism.20

`Perle and the Neoconservatives used the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to push the United States into invading Iraq in 2003. After no weapons of as destruction were found in Iraq, Perle brushed aside the questions of WMDs and praised the administration for getting Iraq in time. Next on his agenda were North Korea and Iran, whom he saw states that sponsored terrorism.21

The neoconservative hawks found strong support coming from the New Right, with the exception of Patrick Buchanan and his followers. In foreign affairs, the neoconservatives and religious right frequently found common ground. Frequently, members of the Christian Right had supported so-called foreign policy fundamentalists who were impatient with restraint in the use of force against Communism. The foreign policy fundamentalists of the 1960s and 1970s were impatient with foreign policy professionals who seemed to be too concerned with complexities, nuances, and desire avoid a unilateralist foreign policy. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State, could be classified a foreign policy fundamentalist. He once stunned Howard Baker and Michael Deaver by talking about bombing Cuba, saying "We can make that fucking place look like a parking lot!" Neoconservative hawks shared this impatience and were idealists who believed that the United States should be more willing to use its power to transform the world to come closer to US ideals. Their concerns converged most frequently in the Middle East. The Christian Right had theological reasons to protect Israel, and many of the Neoconservative hawks were Jews and very pro-Likud.

Overlooking the already greatly deteriorated state of the Soviet Union, they saw the Reagan defense program as a "Hail Mary pass" that worked. They also saw George H. W. Bush’s victory in the 1991 Gulf War as another bold stoke for which they deserved much credit. These successes reinforced the idea that by just "leaning forward", in Wolfowitz’s words, the US could make great positive changes in the world.22 As the Soviet Union imploded, neoconservatives saw a golden opportunity for the United States to deal with its remaining enemies. Charles Krauthammer wrote a column entitled "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," in which he spelled out the neoconservative doctrine of "a unipolar world whose center is a confederated West" led by the sole superpower, the United States. The term "unipolar" did not survive, but neoconservatives continued to build on their vision of the United States using its power to reshape the world.23

Many neoconservatives were members of "the Vulcans," the team Condoleezza Rice assembled to tutor George W. Bush in foreign affairs. Rice was not a neoconservative, but neocon hardliners managed to make a convert of George W. Bush. Many of their views could be found in an influential policy paper which would become an outline for Bush foreign policy. In September, 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) released "Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, forces, and Resources for a New Century." It called for a regime change in Iraq, which would make that country a key American base for effecting other changes in the Middle East, where there was to be a permanent US military presence in several countries. The authors believed that corrupt and undemocratic governments in the Middle East bred terrorism and that it was necessary to replace these regimes with democracies in order to combat terrorism. For this reason, changing regimes in Egypt and Jordan was also desirable. When Joshua Micah Marshall asked Richard Perle about upending the regime in Egypt, Perele responded, "Surely we can do better than Mubarek." The occupation of Iraq was to be the first of a series of victories in "multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." It indicated that getting U.S. troops into the Gulf area "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The position paper also recommended reviving a biochemical weapons program, the creation of a Star Wars type missile defense system, increased defense spending, and repudiation of the ABM treaty. It was critical of the old policy of deterrence and noted that past Pentagon plans for a war against North Korea did not include force requirements for entering that country and removing an abhorrent regime. The United Nations was portrayed as a potential rival and obstacle. Martin Perez, publisher of The New Republic, and James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, were connected to this think tank. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and his mentor Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsefeld, Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz were also associated with with PNAC. The report was rewritten for the National Security Council in 2002. Robert Kagan and William Kristol were among those who founded PNAC in 1997. Bill Kristol, son of a founder of the neoconservatives, is sometimes called a "mini-con," suggesting that the second generation neoconservatives lacked the profundity of their fathers.

PNAC had a staff filled with people who had been with the Committee for the Present Danger, which wanted to win the cold war, and Friends of the Democratic Center, which worked hard to support right-wing elements in Nicaragua dnd El Salvador. PNAC founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which worked with Condoleezza Rice to dvelop plans to educate Americans about the danger Iraq posed to US security. Perle headed a committee of eighteen that recommended reemphasizing the peace process and looking more toward the eventual democratization of the Middle East to solve Israel’s problems in the region. Douglas Feith, one of the drafters, was to become Under-Secretary for Policy in the Bush Pentagon. The PNAC white paper reflected views expressed in an earlier position paper that was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Middle East" by a team led by Richard Perle. They wanted Bibi to stop pursuing policies in accordance with the Oslo Accords and focus on weakening Syria and working to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They believed that Turkey and Jordan would work with Israel in working toward these goals. 24 Pre-emptive action against potential terrorist states was also urged in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Neoconservatives in 1998 wrote a letter to President Clinton demanding preemptive action against Iraq. When Clinton bombed Iraq for four days he was criticized by many Republicans for taking aggressive action and trying to distract public attention from his sex scandal. 25

There were other Republican elements that saw a an attack on Iraq as desirable because it would reduce energy problems. The extent to which a concern for a rapidly growing dependence on Arab-controlled hydrocarbons influenced neoconservative policy is unclear. The Baker Institute, which was not a neoconservative operation, produced a report for Cheney energy task force noted in April, 2001 this energy problem and added that Iraq was "a destabilizing influence to …the flow of oil to international markets…." The Cheney task force recommended "military intervention" to eliminate this threat to U.S. security.26 It is possible that Bush was not "duped" by the neoconservatives. It may be more likely that traditional conservatives exploited "the neoconservatives’ ideological arsenal to advance his preferred set of policies than visa versa."27

The Neoconservatives were within the mainstream of modern American foreign policy to the extent that they genuinely want material prosperity, democracy, and freedom for other peoples. Even their belief that this is the moment for the United States to move decisively to make the world better is in line with the call for an American Century that was heard after World War II. However, their insistence upon preemptive action is a radical departure, and their unilateraliism and scorn for international cooperation are sharp departures from decades of American policy. 28 The hawkish neoconservatives were in a position to have a great influence on public opinion. William Safire had a New York Times column, and Krauthammer repeatedly pressed for war in his Washington Post column. Robert Bartley was editor of The Wall Street Journal. A network of Perle friends was well positioned in the think tanks. Meyra Wurmser was at the Hudson Institute and had founded The Middle East Media Research Institute, which turned out to be financed by Israeli military intelligence. Her husband, David Wurmser headed Middle East Studies at AEI.29

Some of the neoconservative policy advocates were followers of the political philosopher Leo . They seemed to be unscrupulous, manipulative, and perfectly willing to manufacture information to support their goals. They were idealists whose conduct suggested that they believed that great truths needed to be protected by an army of small lies. Unlike their teacher, however, they were optimistic about the future of democracy, especially if the nation’s affairs were in their hands. They were able to use the terrorist attack on the United States to persuade the president and his chief advisors employ their positions as the Bush Doctrine and to use 9/11 as a justification for an attack on Iraq. Liberal critics saw a successful Straussian conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy, but it may have been just as likely that Bush and Rumsfeld used the neoconservatives and Straussians for their own ends. It should also be remembered that there was not a great deal of difference between neoconservative and Straussian views and the position of foreign policy fundamentalists and unilateralists. 30

On September 11, 2001, terrorists launched an horrific attack on the United States, which gave the neoconservatives a golden opportunity to implement their policies. Nine days later, neoconservative leader Bill Kristol, son of Irving Kristol, published an "Open Letter to the President" in the Weekly Standard, a magazine founded with $10 million Rupert Murdock donated for the creation of a neo-conservative magazine. Kristol demanded an effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power due to his hostility to U.S. interests and possible links to terrorism. By removing him, the U.S. would be establishing a "safe zone" in the Middle East. He also called for retaliation against Iran and Syria because they had backed Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that had repeatedly attacked Israel. Forty-one neoconservatives signed the letter, including William Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, Midge Decter and her husband Norman Podhorentz, Deputy Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Jean Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Frank Gafney, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman. The latter was affiliated with the Center for Strategic Studies, and Kagan wrote for the Weekly Standard. Tom Donnelly of PNAC joined the chorus of those calling for an attack on Iraq, noting that this time a half million troops would not be necessary.

The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg used the so-called Ledeen Doctrine to justify an attack on Iraq. Former Pentagon official Michael Ledeen was described as believing that "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." Ledeen had taught at Washington University and also assisted Lt. Colonel Oliver North sell arms to the Ayatollah. In his book The War Against Terror Masters, Ledeen identified the countries that should be attacked, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Ledeen revealed a bit of the Neoconservatives Jacobin streak, stating "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad." It was necessary to destroy enemies "to advance our historic mission" because they "have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions…and names them for their inability to keep pace." On September 24,2002 Michael Ledeen wrote in The London Times that "The real foe is Middle Eastern tyranny" called for regime change in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority as well as Iraq. After the Second Gulf War, he put Iran and Syria on the future hit list, saying "No one I know wants to wage war on Iran and Syria, but I believe there is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them." The Neo-Cons saw a successful war against Iraq as the first step in bringing democracy to the Middle East and moving decisively against Israel’s enemies. Lwedeen once claimed, "Americans believe that peace is normal, but that’s not true. Life isn’t like that. Peace is abnormal." James Woolsey would later tell a UCLA Republican audience that the United States was involved in "World War IV" and said it would last " considerably longer than World Wars I or II." He spoke strongly of forcing Syria into line with US policy.At about the same time, Wolfowitz was telling a congressional committee that "we need to think about our policy in respect to a country [ Syria] that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals." When the UN failed to back Bush’s invasion of Iraq, conservative circles began to hum with plans for replacing it.

Perle caused a great stir when he brought Laurent Murawiec to the Pentagon Policy Council on July 10, 2002 to suggest that the US attack Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as Iraq. He was a Rand Corporation analyst who had also worked for Lyndon La Rouche. Murawiec identified Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent of the United States. Perle was on recoprd as saying "Surely we can do better than Mubarak."
Though most of the leading neoconservative hawks had no particular expertise in the Middle East or Islamic affairs, they were behind President Bush’s drive in 2002 and 2003 for war against Iraq. They were brilliant people campable of concocting brilliant schemes that sometimes worked; the problem was their impatience with detail and the opinion of other people and nations. They adhered to a domino-like theory that the dictator’s fall would bring democracy to much of the Middle East. They played a major role in Bush’s successful efforts to transfer fear of Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. A major long-term triumph for these neoconservative hawks was the Bush Doctrine, which was unveiled September 20, 2003. The roots of this aggressive foreign policy go back to a position paper Wolfowitz, and his deputy I. Lewis Libby, wrote for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. These ideas were more fully fleshed out in a paper issued by the Project for the New American Century in September, 2000. The Bush Doctrine envisioned a new American empire global, in which the United States would act as a world policeman and impose its will by force when necessary. It committed the United States to use force to accomplish its objectives and justified preemptive strikes against enemies who could damage the United States and its interests. In effect, Bush was saying that the rest of the world must accept American judgments about when its interests are so threatened that it must use force preemptively. It later developed that the intelligence claims the US used to invade Iraq in 2003 were so flawed that the administration had squandered much credibility elsewhere in the world. The doctrine’s logic was faulty in that it was argued that other nations must not resort to preemptive war, but it was a noble venture when the US undertook it. Critics charged that it was fashioned by zealots who saw no limits to U.S. power and were intent on militarizing U.S. Foreign policy.

The authors of the doctrine see no problems in unilateralism and the U.S. throwing its weight around so long as its intentions were good. National security professionals in the State and Defense Departments were infuriated by the "cowboy tactics" these people recommended. The national security establishment saw force as a last resort, and preferred to use it only in concert with allies. Moreover, they worried about unintended consequences of rash actions and thought that, though getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, feared that the aftermath of a war could create great problems. They were of the opinion that Clinton has put Saddam "in a box" and believed that the UN inspections further neutralized the Iraqui dictator. Those who take this position maintain that Saddam would not supply terrorists with weapons because he knows what the consequences would be. Moreover, it is unlikely that he would attack a U.S. ally. They note that it was unclear in 1990 whether the U.S. was committed to Kuwait before Saddam invaded. 31
In 2002, it soon clear that Bush had made up his mind the U.S. must go to war with Iraq, but it not quite clear why the matter had become so urgent. At West Point’s spring, 2002 commencement, Bush argued that the war against terrorism made it necessary for new thinking about defense and noted that the U.S. "cannot put our trust in the word of tyrants." It would soon become clear that he thought it necessary to turn away deterrence and containment and move toward preemptive action against preceivedc enemies, among whom was Iraq. In a major address before the American Enterprise Institute in March 2003, the President echoed the PNAC position paper in justifying his call for war. He saw the creation of a democratic Iraq, which would lead to the transformation of the region and the solition of the Israeli-Palestininian problem.32

The enunciation of the Bush Doctrine in September, 2002 marked the triumph of neoconservative foreign policy. The Bush administration sent a position on national security strategy to Congress on September 20, 2002 in which the Bush Doctrine was enunciated. This submission is required by law, but this was no ordinary paper. This "National Security Strategy for the United States" outlined a bold and somewhat aggressive stance that downplayed the long-standing doctrine of containment and announced that the US must have the right to preemptive strikes and war against its new enemies, terrorist states and terrorist organizations. It was reasoned that the new foes were able to easily attack the United States with various weapons of mass destruction. The point was to engage in "preemptive deterrence" ("anticipatory self-defense) before the enemy had developed the capacity to attack the US or its friends. This approach has the advantage of surprise and the use of a smaller force. Among the disadvantages of preempticve deterrence are straining long-standing alliances and setting a precedent for other nations to use the same doctrine. It announced that the United States would never again allow another state to equal it in military power, and claimed the right to use its power to advance the cause of freedom anywhere in the world. It proclaimed that there is "a single sustainable model for national success," and it was comprised of democracy, free enterprise, and democracy. It is left to the United States to define these terms. It was not completely clear if free enterprise meant unfettered capitalism and opening other countries to the ministrations of the International Monetary fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. However, in discussing lower taxes and pro-growth regulatory policies in messianic terms, it left little doubt that the Washington Consensus policies of the IMF and World Bank were to be applied everywhere.

Its discussion of economics was couched in the terms of a closed intellectual system; there was no room for doubt or discussion. It is possible that the authors of the document saw 9/11 as a reaction against American economic policies. Around the time of that tragedy, trade representative Robert B. Zoellick suggested there were "intellectual connections" between opponents of US globalism and terrorists. In the same vein, Bush said "The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and we will defeat them by expanding and encouraging world trade."
The document appeared at a time when the administration was preparing public opinion for a preemptive strike against Iraq. However, much more was involved. It justified and placed in perspective the unilaterial foreign policy the Bush administration had been following since its inception. The foundations for this sharp departure from American was a repudiation of the traditional policy of the first Bush, who was committed to multilateralism and international institutions. He accepted the view that America was strongest when it was leading international efforts. Wolfowitz and the other designers of the Bush Doctrine may well have been operating out of genuinely utopian instincts, believing others would not react adversely to American unilateralism when they saw that it produced good results. 33 The Bush Doctrine assumes that lasting peace is a world so ordered as to be friendly to American values and enterprise and preservation of the US position as sole superpower. The US was to assume the roles of "high-noon sheriff and proselytizing missionary." One observer thought that it was only the logical extension of the general American belief that God gave the US a special role in history and that it had every right to be Number One. He noted that a few radicals and intellectuals objected, and that the new Bush Doctrine "commands broad assent in virtually all segments of American society." 34

These foreign policy doctrines represented a form of militant foreign policy fundamentalism, and they provided a convenient means for the U.S.to short-circuit international law and the United Nations Charter. The Bush Doctrine reflected the impatience of its framers with international criticism and the gradualism and care required to implement containment policies. At a more fundamental level, it was another aspect of the New Right’s cultural wars. It was designed to restore the old doctrine of Manifest Destiny and remove the deep shame that attended the evaculation of Saigon. It was a frontal attack on all those who thought America was in danger of doing sometime wrong. It would vanquish moral relativism and restore moral authority and the imperial presidency.35

While the neoconservatives succeeded in gaining great influence in shaping United States foreign policy in 2002, their greatest success was in turning out position papers for foundations and articles and books that persuaded people to accept conservative criticisms of liberalism. The essential strategy of the conservatives in battling the "liberal establishment" was developed in a vast network of think tanks, lobbying agencies, legal foundations, and journals that employed thousands. These institutions were largely manned by bright, articulate, and zealous neoconservatives. They even forgot about the damage an unrestrained market could do to society and the poor. They proclaimed the glories of the market and the cult of efficiency and prescribed them for peoples everywhere, forgetting that different cultures have distinct ways of arranging their economic affairs. In the end, they transformed Americanism into a rigid ideology, and seemed willing to support affronts to the human spirit in its name. Russell Kirk sadly remarked : "They aspire to bring about a world of uniformity and dull standardization, Americanized, industrialized, democratized, logical."

THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL

2005-10-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

A conservative intellectual revival in the 1950s provided the springboard for the reinvigoration of the Republican party in Twentieth Century. It was spurred by the works of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley , Jr., especially Kirk’s The Conservative Mind , which appeared in 1953. His his incisive criticisms of liberalism, socialism, and the welfare state provided powerful arguments that later conservatives would employ. Yet Kirk and many of his followers professed a worldview that differed significantly from that of the new conservatives who would follow them in the late Twentieth century. Kirk’s thought was anchored in a flinty traditionalism that valued premodern virtues and questioned modernity’s materialism, excessive individualism, and equalitarian tendencies. There was a certain resistance to new developments and ideas until they had been tested, shaken down, and become old and generally accepted. Kirk distrusted ideology and saw classical, laissez-faire liberalism as a modern ideology. Kirk shared with the new conservatives of the late 20th Century a strong discontent with the world as it was presently arranged, but their veneration of laissez faire economics, acceptance of materialism, and ideological bent were foreign to Kirk. Unlike the neoconservatives who would come to dominate his political party, Kirk knew that free markets were a means to certain ends and not the ends themselves. He had contempt for the term "individualist." For him, an ultimate goal was genuinely a humane society distrusted those who looked at society mainly from a first person perspective.

Young William F. Buckley, Jr., who founded the National Review in 1955, was much more inclined to embrace materialism and build his thought on the operation of the free market His goal was to build a unified conservative movement around free market thought, and by 1964, NR had 90,000 subscribers. In 1960, he founded Young Americans for Freedom, which would be the source of many conservative leaders. Buckley’s efforts and the work of Frederick von Hayek at the University of Chicago since 1950 contributed significantly to the subsequent revival of neoliberal thought The use of the word "liberal" in this sense is a reference to the classical liberalism of the Nineteenth Century, which was to form the basis for late Twentieth Century conservative economic and political thought. Their fundamental premise was that the economy thrives when government interference is minimized. Epistemological purists object that neo-liberalism and conservatives are mutually exclusive terms for many reasons, but the fact is that in everyday discussions, the revival of political conservatism is traced to the emergence of what is called neo-liberal thought. 1 It has been a long time since anyone who advances neo-liberal thought would accept that label. It becomes even more confusing because the people who most often advance it are the political neoconservatives, people who abandoned the left and became political conservatives. Moreover, the word liberal came to have such a bad reputation, that these people wanted avoid the use of it in any form.

Buckley’s outspoken libertarianism reflected more the thinking of 18th century materialists than the pre-Enlightenment heritage. However, the neoliberals’ thought relied on reconstructed classical liberalism, and in time Buckley’s pronouncements moved in that direction. Neoliberal economic philosophy was to be thoroughly materialistic and based on rational self-interest, which Kirk deplored. While Kirk distrusted anything that smacked of egalitarianism, the new conservatives built a mass following with a form of right-wing populism that denounced so-called elites and generated intense anger and even hatred of liberals . Theirs was a very ideological approach to politics, while Kirk’s was rational and somewhat eclectic.2

The revival of conservatism as a political force in the United States began in Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful quest for the presidency in 1964. The Goldwater movement laid the foundation for the revival of conservatism and the growth of neoliberalism. Both gathered momentum in the 1970, due in part to deteriorating economic conditions. In the last third of the Twentieth Century, competition had begun to damage the position of the working class in Europe and the United States. Moreover, it made it more difficult for governments to fund social safety net programs and for industries to provide benefits they had promised unions through collective bargaining. These pressures fueled the revival of so-called market economics, essentially the revival of economic theories popular in the United States from the late Nineteenth Century through the 1920s. This is also called , in its political and economic manifestations, "neoliberalism," because it represents in many ways a return to the classical liberalism of the Nineteenth Century, which valued extreme individualism, dog-eat-dog economic practices, and little concern for those who fell by the wayside in life’s race. The neo-liberals claimed to believe in laissez-faire economics and were very critical of the accommodations conservatives had made to New Deal policies in earlier decades.

These economics were the forerunner of Reaganonomics. The neoliberals glorified competition as the supreme arbiter of economic success and much more, and in time this belief in a rather unrefined social Darwinism came to guide their foreign policy with the proclamation of the Bush Doctrine in 2001, a blunt assertion that the United States, due to its enormous power, had the right to do whatever it wanted in world affairs. It was a frank assertion that the US was committed to pursuing American supremacy .

They were also called laissez-faire conservatives, but the emphasis should be upon their rejection of acceptance of the core of the New Deal. For some, belief in laissez faire often carried over to moral matters and the relationship between the individual and the state. In time, however, their alliance with cultural and religious conservatives would require them to downplay these notions. Conservatives denounced the redistributionist policies that began with Franklin Roosevelt as immoral and planned to make them work in reverse. Their intellectual forebearers had founded the Liberty League in the 1930s. One of its chief goals was to fight tax increases because progressive taxation placed the heaviest burden on those with the greatest ability to pay taxes. 3 Their problem was that they were accurately perceived as a group of rich men bent on undoing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They wrapped themselves in patriotic rhetoric, but few missed seeing their true nature. The conservatives of the late Twentieth century did not repeat this error. Through their propagandists and think tanks they not only presented themselves as patriots and defenders of the values of ordinary Americans, they continually developed the theme that criticism of policies that benefitted the rich represented class warfare, which was a serious threat to American political institutions. tHEIR STRATEGY WAS SO EFFECTIVE THAT BY 2005, IT COULD BE ARGUED THAT A MAJORITY OF aMERICANS SHARED THEIR VIEWS. fOR THAT REASON MANY dEMOCRATS IN THE hOUSE AND SENATE FELT OBLIGED TO VOTE WITH REPUBLICANS ON MANY ISSUES.

Next to reducing taxes, the most important ingredients of the revived conservative gospel were opposition to economic regulations and a demand that taxes be lowered. It was argued that the regulations in the massive Federal Register drive up consumer prices and make producers, "unable to compete meaningfully against one another in the marketplace, compete instead federal favor." 4 Liberals and conservatives disagreed over how much regulation was necessary. Though not credited with this belief, the fact was that liberals too believed in the free market, they simply thought it worked best when regulated. The reenergized conservatives wanted far less regulation, and some wanted none. When Congress deregulated the savings and loan industry, Ronald Reagan spoke for many when he said ,"All in all, I think we’ve hit the jackpot." The sweeping deregulation led to massive misconduct in the industry and to a huge federal bail-out. Nevertheless, these3s events did not diminish enthusiasm for deregulation. 5

The economy should be self-regulating it was claimed, even though this meant that it would be regulated by large corporate interests to the disadvantage of consumers, laborers, and consumers. It was argued that a self-regulating economy worked best when unions possessed little power. The American version of conservative economics assumed that economics was an exact science like physics and that the behavior of millions of people acting in the economy "could be reduced equations much like those that capture the laws of thermodynamics." No conservative would have said that in essence man was made for economic laws, but this was an inherent assumption. Its advocates overlooked the fact that economic statistics " are a slag heap of samples, interpolations, and just plain guesses…."

Market fundamentalists professed that increasing the minimum wage would always dampen entrepreneurial spirit, price the unskilled out of the labor market, and depress the economy. Even when careful studies demonstrated that increasing the minimum wage had none of these effects. They adhered to their version of economic orthodoxy. Conservative economics did demonstrate that beyond a certain point, guaranteed jobs, benefits, and wages, did retard economies, and most liberals, when pressed, had come to accept this as an empirical fact. The problem was that for most conservatives, market fundamentalism had become a matter of political doctrine rather than a useful tool for addressing human problems.6
Market fundamentalism, a resuscitated version of the laissez -faire economics of the Nineteenth Century, is based on the premises that economic actors have perfect information and that competition exists. When markets are incomplete and information is not good, the model does not work well.

Many traced the causes of the Great Depression substantially to forces that grew out of insufficient information and competition. Historical experience has demonstrated that a certain amount of government regulation has been needed to compensate for market failures and sustain economic growth. Among them were administered prices, underconsumption, and overaccumulation. In the United States, the latter was manifested by large amounts of money not productively invested by the wealthy. Administered prices usually occurred when there was excessive concentrations of market power, and unregulated competition usually contributed to this. Many industrialized countries rejected so-called free market policies because markets in the Twentieth Century could not be free, and their malfunctions created great inequities and social problems. Rather, efforts were turned toward finding out how much government intervention was need to make the markets function well and remedy economic inequities and social problems. It was these government interventions that the market fundamentalists insist upon reducing or eliminating. The market fundamentalists have incorporated into their creed a deep commitment to "trickle-down economics." It is the belief that by benefitting those at the top of society, everyone else will eventually benefit. The reverse side of position is that if someone must bear economic pain for the benefit of society, it is those at the bottom. Of late, the justification for trickle-down economics is that "a rising tide lifts all boats." When "trickle-down" economics were applied in Nineteenth Century Europe, pauperism grew. Likewise, when this approach was deliberately applied in the 1980s in the United States the economy grew but those at the bottom experiences a sharp decline in income. Those who believe in trickle-down economics believe in it as though it were a religious faith. There is almost no data to support it. 7
It was postulated that as economies mature economic inequalities diminish and adverse environmental consequences of production also declines. Environmental problems will be resolved as these economies toward a service orientation, which would require the use of fewer natural resources. It is also hypothesized that tat free economies offer strong incentives for the invention of technologies that would waste fewer resources and do less harm to the environment .Hence, these ameliorating technologies would be potentially highly profitable.8

High taxes, it was argued, prevented very creative individuals from producing wealth, and these taxes often resulted in transferring income to the undeserving poor. The tax cuts the conservatives offered uniformly were designed to benefit the rich. They complained that the rich paid too much in taxes. In the late Twentieth Century, the share of income taxes paid by the riches generally increased while the percentage of income taxes paid by the lower half of taxpayers decreased . In 2001, the top 1% of taxpayers earned above $372,000 per year and paid 25% of all taxes. People-possessing assets worth $1 million or more was hardly confined to this 1%. Those earning $72,000 or more constituted 20% of taxpayers and were paying 68% of taxes. Conservatives show little interest in the question of comparative ability to pay taxes as most of them came to reject the principle of progressive taxation. They were also alarmed that non-defense spending increased dramatically since 38% in 1955 to 83% in 2001, largely due to the growth of entitlement programs. They argued that the high taxes paid by the rich penalized success and that the increase of entitlements eroded the character of the recipients and corrupted the political process because recipients were inclined to vote to keep the benefits coming. 9

In 2002 R. Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush’s chief economic advisor, admitted that Republican tax cuts were designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of society. Moreover, he claimed that the rest of society should pay more in taxes. Hubbard believed that a modest loss of tax revenue would encourage savings, which , in turn, would be invested in productive economic facilities and accelerate technological change. 10 The political calculus associated with the tax cuts dictates that the taxes of ordinary families not be reduced appreciably because it is important that they continue to resent taxation, not think of government as a friend, and remain potential recruits for the new majority Republican theorists sought to build. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal argued that raising the taxes of these "lucky duckies," whose tax rate is relatively low, would be political beneficial by getting their "blood boiling with tax rage."11
Republicans reasoned that tax cuts favoring the rich facilitate investment in productive facilities, but another reason for taking this position was a belief that the wealthy pay too large a proportion of federal income tax revenue. In the late Twentieth Century, the share of taxes paid by the riches generally increased while that paid by the lower half of tax payers decreased. This development was matched by growing assets and income gaps between rich and poor.

In 2001, the top 1% of tax payers earned above $372,000 per year and paid 25% of all taxes. People possessing assets worth $1 million or more was hardly confined to this 1%. Those earning $72,000 or more constituted 20% of taxpayers and were paying 68% of taxes. Conservatives showed little interest in the question of comparative ability to pay taxes as most of them came to reject the principle of progressive taxation. They were also alarmed that non-defense spending increased dramatically since 38% in 1955 to 83% in 2001, largely due to the growth of entitlement programs. They argued that the high taxes paid by the rich penalized success and that the increase of entitlements eroded the character of the recipients and corrupted the political process because recipients were inclined to vote to keep the benefits coming. 12
By 2002, conservative rhetoric on the subject of taxes sometimes seemed almost hysterical. When the Senate in 2002 briefly considered a one-time capital gains tax on people who give up their citizenship for tax purposes, Senator Phil Gramm claimed the proposal came "right out of Nazi Germany." When the Senate considered means of preventing corporations from rechartering themselves abroad for tax purposes, Daniel Mitchell, head of the Heritage Foundation, called it the "Dred Scott tax bill," calling it a slave tax.13

When the George W. Bush administration prepared its 2003 tax cuts, it instructed the Treasury Department to prepare data demonstrating why low-income workers should carry more of the tax burden.14 Until then, Republicans were unwilling to address the question of shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people in order to give the rich tax relief. These tax cuts are designed to end progressive taxation and what is considered the unjust redistribution of income that they facilitate. The Bush tax cuts were more designed to starve government than to reduce marginal rates. As Grover Norquist, a leading conservative theorist, said, "The goal is reducing the size and scope of government by draining its lifeblood." The context was different when Ronald Reagan cut taxes. Marginal rates were high then, and his primary purpose was to slash them. A secondary goal was "starving the beast," in the words of his budget director David Stockman.15 In the last analysis, the goal of conservatives like Norquist is to eliminate the graduated income tax and replace it with a single rate flat tax or a tax on consumption. They claim that either approach will unleash the forces of economic growth.16

Assisting the poor was seen as counterproductive because it dissuaded them from becoming industrious. It was claimed that they interfered with the free operation of market forces in creating wealth and spreading prosperity. Representative Dick Armey wrote, "Congress…had spent the past sixty years constructing a state of public dependency." Armey and other neoliberals saw the Democratic Party as the "Big Government Coalition," that retained its power through a variety of handouts to dependent groups. This tougher attitude toward the poor was consistent with a stedady decline in voluntary benevolence."

However, after the GOP became the governing party in 2001, it quickly lost much credibility as the party committed to small government. Even leaving out consequences of homeland security efforts, government expanded at a dizzying pace under George W. Bush. Some Republicans were critical of this development, but their comments were somewhat muted and there were no threats of rebellion within the party. One of the most remarkable thing about the George W. Bush Republicans was that they came to embrace big government, suggesting that "big central government would look a whole lot better to Republicans when they got control of it." Once in power, their friendliness to federalism diminished as their central government interfered with state efforts to experiment with pollution control, deal with some health issues, and address the problem of obtaining lower cost prescription drugs.

Republicans saw liberal efforts to alleviate the problems of poverty as useless attempts to solve problems by throwing money at them. Indeed, they claimed that the Aid for Dependent Children program hastened the moral collapse of America by encouraging single parent families among the poor. Conservative attacks on liberal efforts to alleviate the suffering of the poor were relentless and played a central role in partly defining liberals as foolish people who had too much compassion and too little common sense. They were especially successfully in attacking Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, claiming that "liberals fought poverty, and poverty won." Growing acceptance of the conservative gospel was reflected in more than election results. Over time, the public commitment to assist the poor declined sharply. By 2003, the nation’s attitude toward the poor and hungry had shifted dramatically. Very few members of Congress then thought it was politically safe to champion the hungry. In that year, less than 20% of New York City’s home-delivered meals program was funded by federal dollars. In 1983, the U.S. government’s share was 80%. By 2003, the nation’s attitude toward the poor and hungry had shifted dramatically. Very few members of Congress then thought it was politically safe to champion the hungry. In that year, less than 20% of New York City’s home-delivered meals program was funded by federal dollars. In 1983, the U.S. government’s share was 80%.17
The anti-tax thrust of conservative thought found a growing receptive audience after it became apparent that it was becoming increasingly difficult for ordinary people to make ends meet. In the 1950s, many came to see the United States as potentially a permanently affluent society. There would be modest downturns, but overall Americans could afford to compassionately address social problems by wisely spending part of tax money generated by annual economic growth. By the late 1970s, this vision had faded, and a decade later economic insecurity characterized much of the middle class. In these new circumstances, people were less willing to pay taxes to help others, and they sought scapegoats for the increasing economic insecurity they faced.

The new conservatives believe that poverty cannot be abolished and that political liberalism breeds statism. Market fundamentalism or neoliberalism is opposed to government spending as a means of stimulating the economy, and it recommends tax cuts for individuals and corporations to promote economic growth. It supports free trade, opposes welfare spending, regulation of business, and vigorous enforcement of labor law. Neoliberals believe that welfare does not work and does not encourage people to take charge of their lives. It "consists of the weary paying of protection money " to encourage the unhappy and poor not to harass the prosperous. 18

The arguments of the revitalized conservatives appealed to people who were experiencing more and more difficulty sustaining their standard of living. From 1970 to 1997, the percentage of people earning from $20,000 to $75,000 a year diminished from 57% to 47% of the population. Almost six out of ten whites surveyed in 1995 said they were unwilling to pay more taxes to help poor minority people. A former Vista volunteer spoke for the majority in saying "I can’t afford to support illegitimate babies, women with five abortions, and poor people who don’t want to work. Right-wing talk show hosts learned to capitalize upon this resentment of the poor. .Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh called people on welfare the "dependency class, " and New York host Bob Grant called the city’s African American mayor, David Dinkins "the men’s room attendant"19

Many market fundamentalists have incorporated a "supply-side" orientation that defies classical theory and essentially is the opposite of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Law, which states that supply is finite and cannot outrun demand, which is infinite. Jean-Baptiste Say claimed "Supply creates its own demand." Production keeps the economy going and generates consumer demand. Put the products on the shelf, and people will buy them. Supply-side economics was based on the work of Arthur Laffer and was publicized on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal since 1974.. Laffer had little influence on professional economists, but had a profound impact upon neoconservative politicians and writers. The basic idea was simple: government revenues were supposed to increase as taxes were lowered. The supply-siders argue that they can effectively combat stagnation by stimulating demand. They advocate accomplishing this by making funds available to producers to increase output. This will, in turn, stimulate demand. George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981). According to George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty (1981) , supply side economics were the answer to all the nation’s economic problems. "Supply creates its own demand….," and the entrepreneurs are best at jobs. To encourage them to create jobs, the money supply must be increased and taxes reduced. Thus, "To help the poor and middle classes, one must cut the taxes of the rich." By pumping more money into the economy, new jobs would be created and the goods produced would be snapped up by people with money in their hands due to increased employment.

Government was blamed as the creator of inflation. The supply- siders practiced a form of Social Darwinism, seeing the rich as the best and most productive products of social evolution and showing little interest in those at the bottom of the social heap, those who failed to adapt and thrive. They opposed the minimum wage, claiming it would prevent small employers from adding to the payroll. At base, they thought people should have enough initiative to move beyond minimum wage jobs. Their arguments were successful in for two decades in reducing the buying power of the minimum wage as effort adjust it for inflation were usually fought off. By keeping the minimum wage lower, they were able to slow the increase of wages in general. 20

Followers of John Maynard Keynes believe that it is more important to stimulate demand by seeing that the mass of consumers have the ability to consume more goods. The supply-siders saw the Keynesian approach as inefficient because the poor and ordinary people spend most of their money on basic commodities and do not save significant amounts in banks for large purchases. For these reasons, they insist that tax cuts must be designed to benefit the wealthy, who, they claim will, directly or indirectly, invest it in more productive capacity. Unlike the neo-classical economists, they are not greatly concerned about balanced budgets or deficits. However, they insist that their approach will eventually generate much more tax income and generate surpluses. In the Reagan years, many Republicans who had voted for supply-side tax cuts were greatly alarmed by the resulting deficits and tried to correct them. By the time of the second Bush administration, there was little evidence that any significant number of supply-siders worried about deficits. Much of the prosperity of the later Reagan years was due to massive spending on the military ( military Keynesianism).21 By then, the two political parties appeared to have reversed positions on the subject of deficits. Supply side economics has had few backers in academic ranks, and it may well be that some of the politicians who adopted it , with its naive optimism, simply needed theoretical cover for their plans to shrink government by depriving it of funds. On the other hand, the neoconservatives, who became the most dedicated advocates of neoliberal economics, may talk about shrinking government but actually were committed to an activist government. The parts of government they would shrink were those that served Democratic constituencies. Indeed, they were perfectly capable of expanding government when they thought it would garner votes, and they did so in 2004 by adding prescription coverage to medicare. The Republicans of the 1950s were concerned with curbing spending and reducing deficits. By 2004, these concerns were low priorities. When the Republican House passed a 2005 budget that continued unbridled spending and an enormous deficit, only nine Republicans voted against it. 22

In the Clinton years, the Democrats adopted Treasury Secretary David Rubin’s Crowding out Theory and believed that this accounted for the great success of Clinton’s economic policies. At a simple level, it was held that large deficits made it harder for businesses to borrow money ad acceptable interest rates. Short term interest rates may not always be adversely effected by large government borrowing, but the crucial long term rates are. Republicans, on the other hand, came to see the Clinton era prosperity as a mere "blip" and to maintain that deficits did not injure the economy. A clear advantage of Rubinomics was that it reassured markets that the federal government was attempting to adhere to fiscal discipline.

Moderates and many conservative Republicans ridiculed Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics, but this approach to economics becamed fixed Republican doctrine by the time the second Bush assumed the presidency. . Supply siders believe that supply creates its own market; it is the opposite of demand side. Democrats and even many Republicans had believed that the lesson of the Great Depression was that workers needed enough money to keep the economy humming through consumption. George H.W. Bush called it "Voodoo economics," and John Anderson saw it as "economics with mirrors," and Senator Howard Baker likened it to a "riverboat gamble." Nevertheless, it became the Republican cannon under Reagan and the cornerstone of George W. Bush’s domestic programs. Belief in supply-side economics has more than a bit of a religious quality to it, and supply-siders are known to direct their anger at fellow Republicans who do not endorse new form of Republican economic orthodoxy. Peter G. Peterson, an old-style Republican who long served the party, complained that his colleagues had come to see deficits as "a sort of fiscal wonder drug" and reminded his readers that the tax cuts of the 1980s boosted the debt "from 26% to 42% of G.D.P." By the second Bush administration, Republicans craft tax cuts with "sunset provisions" so that revenue losses would appear to be minimized. Of course, the plan was to repeal the sunset clauses later. In late 2002, George W. Bush appointed John Snow Secretary of the Treasury and Stephen Friedman as chief economic advisor. Both were denounced for "deficit phobia" and not being "one of us" by supply side true believers. The appointment was a shrewd political move as the new appointees were placed in the position of having to sell a supply-side tax reduction program to some who doubted its wisdom.23 The ridicule of "deficit phobias" signaled a new position on deficits. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said that nations and individuals can "live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time." When his policies created enormous deficits, Republicans found various ways of blaming them on Democrats or minimizing their size. As late as the speakership of Newt Gingrich, Republicans were pressing for a balanced budget amendment. 24
Related to supply-side economics is the concept of the wealth effect developed by Michael Palumbo. This Federal Reserve Board economist claimed that the great stock market boom of the 1990s created a boom fueled by consumer spending. He pointed out that the increased spending and saving was done by the wealthiest households, which were benefiting by great increases in stock values. Polumbo argues that increasing spending by low income people is far less effective. His bottom line is that by stimulating the rise in stock market prices the economy will also be substantially boosted. This theory underpinned George W. Bush’s call to end taxes on dividends. 25

Market fundamentalism’s advocates preferred the term free market economics, but the word "free" is often not warranted. Most versions of market liberalism did not oppose various forms of corporate welfare and the continuation of some important tariff barriers. Nor did they address the problems of monopolistic and oligopolistic power, which made markets unfree. Some Republicans addressed these matters in the 1970s and a few, such as Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan, have raised these concerns in recent years. Some market fundamentalists oppose agricultural subsidies that largely benefit huge agribusiness corporations. However, there is concern about the many ways government assists business. For example, the Department of Defense funds a great deal of industrial research and development, playing in some ways the same role as Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry.26 Similarly, the Star Wars programs were largely about subsidizing the development of high technology for the use of American industries. 27Advocates of the so-called free market seldom complain about airline subsidies, corporate bailouts, export subsidies, or the use of the CIA for industrial espionage. Some market fundamentalists oppose agricultural subsidies that largely benefit huge agribusiness corporations. Some market fundamentalists have even expressed concern about the ways government assists business. However, the great majority of them show no concerns about the various ways government assists the private sector.

Conditions in the late Twentieth Century were right for a revival laissez-faire economics and its related political doctrines. Changes in the global economy generated conditions conducive to the resurgence of conservatism in the late 20th century. Corporate profits began to lag after 1965, and American began to experience intense foreign competition. The squeeze on American corporate profits was resulting in attacks on employee wages and benefits as more foreign goods entered the American market.28 The loss of good-paying industrialized jobs had begun well before the 1970s , as had increased foreign competition. The City of Chicago lost 59% of its industrial jobs between 1947 and 1984. 29 After 1973, the substantial rates of growth would be rare, leaving nothing for rerdistributionist policies and less for sustaining welfare state policies.30 The high inflation and weak economy during the Carter years also led many to conclude that liberal economics had failed and that the time had come to try Republican remedies.31 Given these circumstances, many accepted conservative arguments that American industries could not prosper unless workers benefits were reduced and corporate taxes were reduced. To make America, a lean, tough competitor, many accepted arguments that the nation had to reduce the size of government and the safety net it provided. Environmental legislation and governmental regulations of business were seen as potential threats to maintaining jobs.
Thatcherism was the British form of neoliberalism. Both Thatcherism and the ideology of the new American conservatives exploited deeply rooted historical feelings and identities and expertly played on the anxieties, fears, and threatened identities of many people. The new conservatives’ ideology was simplistic and based on a great deal of false information, but it was disseminated with such skill that it eventually dominated the terms of discourse. It offered people an explanation for unwanted changes in American life, identified objects for anger and rage, and promised change. It also provided people with reasons to feel good at the expense of others. They could see themselves as exemplars of the traditional American work ethic and as far superior to those who living off of welfare.

Writing in 1992, William Greider accurately assessed the situation: "The contemporary Republican party seems brilliantly suited to the modern age, for it has perfected the art of maintaining political power in the midst of democratic decay."32 Distrust of government had grown to the extent that a pivotal faction of the Democratic Party, the New Democrats, kept themselves in office by distancing themselves from the old liberalism of Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and agreeing with Republicans on welfare and much economic policy. There is no simple explanation for the decline of liberalism. In The Strange Death of American Liberalism, Professor H.W. Brands argues that Americans traditionally distrusted government and only accepted liberalism when then needed a powerful government to deal successfully with the Cold War. He writes, "It is not too much to say that without the Cold War, liberals would never have achieved the success they did." The Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal bred deep disillusionment with government and a rejection of liberalism and a reversion to a traditional skepticism about what government can accomplish. 33 Modern liberalism took shape early in the Twentieth Century, when progressives began to argue about whether active government was necessary to address contemporary problems, The debate was settled in favor of positive government in the New Deal. There is much to recommend Brands’ analysis as a means of explain liberalism’s long dominance, and it helps explain its sharp decline. However, other factors were involved in end of liberal dominance. For many, the Vietnam war underscored the bankruptcy of liberalism. Likewise, the implosion of the Cold War paradigm prepared the way for conservative ascendancy, but many factors explain how this came about and why a mutant form of conservatism would replace liberalism as the political outlook that claimed the most adherents by the turn of the century.

The program offered by neoliberals in the United States was a form of radical bourgeois capitalism, but it is doubtful that large numbers of people acquiesced because they saw this as the only way to for the nation to compete in the modern world. Conservative economics was an ideology rather than the result of empirical, scientific analysis. Commenting on this approach to economics, John Kenneth Galbraith said, "Conservatives need to be warned that ideology can be a heavy blanket over thought."34 Despite the flaws that could be ascribed to the thought of the conservative revival, there could be little doubt that it sprung from careful intellectual effort, and, the neoconservatives– converts to conservatism and market economics– would become very effective propagandists for this outlook. However, conservatism only became the dominant political outlook after attention focused more on cultural than economic matters. Most secular conservatives were concerned about the damage deteriorating moral values could do to society; but their’s was metaphysical at root. In grew out of concern for first principles. Threats to traditional morality were to rally religious conservatives to Republican standards; and this was to make the Republicans the majority party and conservatism the dominant political outlook. The secular conservatives and religious conservatives had very different temperaments and political instincts, but they would succeed in fashioning an effective political alliance.

Derrida, De Man, Fish and Deconstruction

2005-02-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

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Jacques Derrida, the father of the movement, based partially based his thought on his understanding of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Derrida announced that "A text remains…forever imperceptible." In the same passage of "Plato’s Pharmacy", the French philosopher insists that "reading and writing are one." When we write something we convey unintended meanings mand do not really say what we intend. Derrida argues that writing came before speech, and his most famous statement was that "there is nothing outside the text." Using similar logic, he argued that there was no thought before language. For him, words refer nothing other than other words. Words do not refer to anything beyond language. Because of the imperfect nature of language, a person can only have a fragmentary view of self and cannot even be alienated in the way Marxists claim. Derrida was trained as a philosopher, and this approach to literary criticism was meant to be much more. It was to be an new epistemology , the impact of which was expected by many to rival that of Immanuel Kant’s so-called "Copernican Revolution" in thought. Given the extreme instability of meanings, it is difficult to see how this approach permits the construction of an epistemology. It leaves no room for belief in the continuity of history.

American linguist Stanley Fish argues that real meaning does not exist and it is inevitable that people will misunderstand texts. People only think linguistically; therefore, nothing can exist for us outside of language. The lounge chair in one’s living room only exists because it is different from the CD player, the bookcase, and the fireplace. It exists because it is different from other things that are described by words. However, there is no lounge chair beyond language nor can one be imagined beyond the structure of language. Everything depends upon the structures of language. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, he raised some hackles by suggesting that there was no universal standard for evil or defining a terrorist. Some respondents wondered whether Hitler, Pol Pot, Jim Jones , timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden could be viewed as anything other than major evil-doers. Fish also called for careful reflection on what drove the "terrorists" to such murderous action, even though there was very little inclination then to consider the legitimate complaints of the Islamic fundamentalists.

Derrida noted that meaning can only exist temporarily within the framework of words. For this reason, he insisted that there can be no original signifier like God, Reason, or History. As for human beings, there is a difference between the self and what the self thinks about itself. Only the latter can be known because it exists in words. Thee existence of the former, the self, does not exist as a verifiable, objective reality. For that reason, theology and metaphysics no longer have foundations. By the same token, he disparages all political philosophies and outlooks because they are built upon illusory metaphysics of spirit, that posits some higher or ultimate authority, be it God or reason. Suggesting that all politics is some sort of muddle, the deconstructionists leave us with no useful tool in battling racism, economic exploitation, sexism, or any number of other evils. Deconstructionist thought also fells all metanarratives with no regrets because it believed that they invariably restrict freedom and individuality. By denying the value of "totalizing narratives" they unleash fluidity, free expression, and subjectivity. Of course, deconstruction, built on flimsy linguistic insights, has become itself a "totalizing narrative." In history and the social sciences, deconstructionist criticism most frequently focusses on ideas focussed around the concept of democracy. All to often, they rightly note, scholars have exaggerated the extent of democracy in American society. John Adams, the second president, was probably right when he suggested that true democracy will probably never exist. Yet, far more democracy exists in 2002 than did in Adams day, and many more Americans aspire to create a democratic society.

The deconstructionist critique of knowledge has reduced the value of education. It is impossible not to wonder how professors who accept decconstructive postmodernism can take education very seriously. Jean-Francois Lyotard acknowledges the decline in education’s stature and diminished legitimacy of knowledge. He attributed these developments to the failure of modernity and education’s continuing attachment to that mode of thought.
Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the most persuasive defender of philosophical rationalism, which is antithetical to deconstructionism. He argued that linguistic ability was built into the structure of the human mind and was innate, not grounded entirely in culture. The mind, he maintained, existed separately from what people said and did. There was also a link between the mind and the outside world about which it formulates thoughts and words. The opposite premises are more congenial to deconstructionism. Chomsky dismissed deconstructionism as incomprehensible, noting that its advocates cannot describe it with sufficient clarity to communicate with others about it.

Critics of deconstruction "have accused deconstruction of subverting objective standards of literary explication and evaluation, of blurring the distinction between criticism and imaginative literature…and of engaging in a generally self-indulgent, irresponsible style of writing that undercuts the scholarly and educational aims of academic discourse." Other than retorting that there are no objective standards, the deconstructionists have done little to answer these charges. Their worldview is a self-protective one, geared to avoiding domination by ideas, institutions, or those who claim authority. In the process they abandon any search for truth and or exploration of the pïwers of human beings, other than pleasure seeking.
Belgian-born Paul de Man, a professor of comparative literature, played the most important role in bringing Derrida’s deconstructionist views to the United States. Americans found deconstruction a powerful device for liberating themselves from a great deal of received wisdom, but their admiration for the Belgian diminished somewhat in they learned in the late 1980s that that he had written for Nazi publications. Americans learned from Derrida that words and texts do not describe the world; they refer only to themselves. they are self-referential. They questioned the value of all sources of knowledge and decided that since philosophical metaphysics and ethics no longer exist, it is also impossible for history to exist. For them, everything was interpretation and there was no way to find one interpretation any better than another.

De Man, whose work strongly underpins American postmodernism, wrote favorably about Nazism and even voiced anti-Semitic sentiments when he was a Belgian journalist. Fritz Stern has suggested that Nazism grew in an atmosphere of "cultural despair." This term accurately reflects much of Heidegger's thought as well as much of today's postmodern thought. De Man came to the United States, passed himself off as a refugee from the Nazis, taught at Yale and was appointed a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He recruited many to Derrida's view that it is impossible to find meaning in written language. Everything, Derrida and De Man taught, was nothing more than interpretation. Since texts lacked stable meaning, everything in the literary word was a game and in chaos. No two readers understood the same paragraph to mean the same thing. Nietzsche said everything was interpretation, but he did not mean this. The deconstructionism of Derrida and De Man appealed to many because it offered a tool for dismantling traditional and conservative systems of thought. It was an even more potent wrecking tool in the hands of fascists and their kin to use against liberal ethics, leftist philosophy, and social justice thought in general. All of them rest upon the twin views that truth is accessible and that justice is definable. At his 1984 memorial service, De Man was defined as that rare authentic person: "In a profession full of fakeness, he was r%al." His Nazi past was unearthed soon thereafter as well as the fact that e had abandoned his wife and three sons, had stiffed many creditors, and had probably been involved in fraudulent business dealings.
Michele Foucault, a French philosopher, who considered himself an "archaeologist of knowledge," may have been the famous intellectual in the world at the time of his death in 1984. His work would become the most important part of the postmodernist canon. His work was to underpin the New Criticism approach to literature and epistemology, which superceded and absorbed deconstruction. The historian Paul Veyne said Foucault was "the most important event in the thought of our century. He has been portrayed as the representative man of the Twentieth Century; that is most unlikely, but he was in some ways the representative postmodern intellectual. Some saw in his experiments with gay sadomasochistic sex that inspired in him unusual courage and ethical adventurousness. Many learned from him that mere tolerance was a sign of a reactionary viewpoint since it simply meant that someone was putting up with deviations from conventional morality. His views about sexual gratification endorsed the notion that sexual emancipation would somehow help bring an end to capitalism and hasten the creation of an utopia. Praise of the "will to gratification" had been a key element of the counterculture of the 1960s. His political ideas seemed to run the gamut of anti-establishment causes. He thought Stalin’s USSR was preferable to Truman’s USA and was an enthusiastic supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. Noam Chomsky, an American radical, thought Foucault’s concelt of justice was "throwing open every prison and shutting down every court."

Foucault and the the Nature of Knowledge

2005-02-18T17:34:00.000-08:00

Michele Foucault, a French philosopher, who considered himself an "archaeologist of knowledge," may have been the famous intellectual in the world at the time of his death in 1984. His work would become the most important part of the postmodernist canon. His work was to underpin the New Criticism approach to literature and epistemology, which superceded and absorbed deconstruction. The historian Paul Veyne said Foucault was "the most important event in the thought of our century. He has been portrayed as the representative man of the Twentieth Century; that is most unlikely, but he was in some ways the representative postmodern intellectual. Some saw in his experiments with gay sadomasochistic sex that inspired in him unusual courage and ethical adventurousness. Many learned from him that mere tolerance was a sign of a reactionary viewpoint since it simply meant that someone was putting up with deviations from conventional morality. His views about sexual gratification endorsed the notion that sexual emancipation would somehow help bring an end to capitalism and hasten the creation of an utopia. Praise of the "will to gratification" had been a key element of the counterculture of the 1960s. His political ideas seemed to run the gamut of anti-establishment causes. He thought Stalin’s USSR was preferable to Truman’s USA and was an enthusiastic supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. Noam Chomsky, an American radical, thought Foucault’s concelt of justice was "throwing open every prison and shutting down every court."
Foucault honestly acknowledged the tremendous impact experimentation with drugs was having on contemporary thought and speculated that these experiences could have a greater impact upon society than had the thought of scientific socialists. Using marijuana and Hashish in the 1960s, he did not use LSD until 1975. He noted that it allowed him to understand his sexuality and praised the experience as comparable to "sex with a stranger." Medieval mystics knew there was more to know than ordinary, waking consciousness revealled and they practiced contemplation to experience the presence of divinity and learn more through trans-normal consciousness. Postmodern people often realize there must other and deeper ways of knowing and experiencing. Foucault’s experiments with drugs and self-selected sex tortures were ways of achieving psychic emancipation and deeper understandings and experiences. Some might persuasively argue that Foucault’s sexual experimentation with whips, gags, clamps, handcuffs, and the like represented more a quest for oblivion than insight because he was fascinated with death and imagined "suicide festivals" in which death and anonymous sex were somehow blended. Like Nietzsche, Foucault was concerned with recovering the Dionysian dimension of being human, and he related the oblivion of sexual desire with the oblivion of death. In his last days, he sought what he thought was the extreme, ultimate or "limit experiences" by either risking deadly infection or , some say, knowingly spreading AIDS in San Francisco clubs and bathhouses. In his The History of Sexualty, he acknowledged that "Sex is worth dying for."
Foucault assiduously cultivated the impression that he was another Nietzsche, but his emphasis upon experiences could lead to the conclusion that there was a significant difference in the two men. Nietzsche saw nihilism as one experience but sought go get beyond it. Foucault seemed content to loiter at that stage. Nietzsche warned about decadent Romantics who got stuck there , suffered from "the impoverishment of life" and "sought redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness." The latter seems to describe Foucault.

His works provided reasons reason to distrust society and culture. Influenced by Nietzsche and Karl Marx, he studied "the mechanisms of power, the effects of truth of if you like, the rules of power and the power of true discourses...." His great insight was that ideas were instruments for getting and keeping power. He thought it essential to unearth the epistimes or deep structures of knowledge, and in so doing, the structure of society will be revealed. In Madness and Civilization, he claimed that Seventeenth Century French doctors conspired with the power structure to define as insane behavior that questioned the status quo or threatened to loosen the aristocracy’s grip on power and privilege. People who had been marginalized by society-- nonconformists, the disillusioned, and naysayers were potential leaders of social and cultural change and had to be locked away. Previously, and now in contemporary America, the inane are permitted to wander the streets, muttering to themselves. As part of the bargain, the precursors of today's psychiatrists became one of the first group of experts who would comprise a growing privileged class as society developed toward modernity. Modernity would require many experts who had organizational and surveillance skills and could keep the system running smoothly. Others who have studied the treatment of the insane question Foucault’s chronology and the meaning of what he found. Madness , they insist, became a public question with the rise of democratic and egalitartian societies. The insane were now seen as other human beings, not Others. As other human beings, they deserved care . Foucualt here questions the tyranny of experts and chips away a bit at one of the foundation stones of postmodern culture, the therapeutic viewpoint. Historian Christopher Lasch also questioned the great impact /f therapeutic thinking, calling it ""paternalism without a father." Foucault and most other deconstructive postmodernists detested anything smacking of fascism. Nevertheless, in refusing to offer and explain any of their own metaphysical assumptions, they have offered readers few constructive ideas. By refusing to say anything good about the liberal state, which made possible their work, they have not provided much guidance in distinguishing between liberalism and fascism. Their merciless attacks on the Enlightenment project and liberalism could well open the door for some to fascism. It is not difficult to see how Martin Heiddeger and Paul De Mann were attracted to Nazi doctrines. Postmodern readers of Foucault and other postmodernists may not see enough reason to resist political persuasions that would undermine liberal and humane policies and institutions.

Studying prisons, he argued in Discipline and Punishment, that it became necessary to imprison many more people in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, when the fabric of social cohesion was strained by rapid economic change. Crime was previously handled in large measure by execution, the humiliation of corporal punishment, or transportation to colonies. Now it was necessary to incarcerate people so that they could be restrained, reeducated, and turned into the kind of citizens the ruling elite desired. Even reform ideas, he insisted, were instruments of power -- often shrewd efforts to shore up the hegemony of an elite. Often social critics acquired gained new knowledge and used it to assert power over others and improve their social standing. He also studied the genealogy of morals and came away a moral relativist because he was convinced morality was simply an instrument of power. This was not a matter of indifference to him as he had suffered for his sexual orientation. Not surprisingly, he proclaimed the end Western, liberal, humanistic man. Bourgeois man's ideals had been self-serving fakes designed to continue class, educational, and professional privilege. He especially hated professionals, in part because his father had been a prominent physician.
Foucault shared with other French Intellectuals a disillusionment with politics and most organized, left-wing political action. The suppression of political protests the Warsaw Pact countries and Nikita Khruschev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes against humanity contributed to their disillusionment with Marxism. Jean-Francois Lyotard noted that the discovery of what happened at Auschwitz and the French government’s assault on the New Left in 1968 contributed to their contempt for parliamentary liberalism and disbelief in "rationality as life’s and society’s guiding force…." He believed that "’Auschwitz’ refutes speculative doctrine."" Despite their despair, Foucault and others have spoken out against abuses of human rights, but their lack of faith in long-term political activity may well have made it easier for conservative forces to largely dominate political discussion and policy in the West in the years after 1979. Lyotard was not only critical of the economic doctrines that led to the economic crises of 1911 and 1929; he explicitly criticized the new "market" economics that began to appear in the 1970. Nevertheless, postmodernism’s distrust of economic metatheories probably helped the New Right politicians who falsely claimed that their so-called "market" economics simply meant letting economic operate without human interference. The postmodern attack upon traditional normative frameworks may have cleared the field for the dominance of market-oriented value systems and political outlooks. A strong case can certainly be made for this in respect to the United States and United Kingdom, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair ’s surrender to classical economic premises has cut the ground out from other those who would dissent against materialistic values and inhumane social policies. Blair and Clinton represented what has been called "Third Way" thought.

In the last third of the Twentieth Century, competition had begun to damage the position of the working class in Europe and the United States. Moreover, it made it more difficult for governments to fund social safety net programs and for industries to provide benefits they had promised unions through collective bargaining. These pressures fuelled the revival of so-called market economics, essentially the revival of economic theories popular in the United States from the late Nineteenth Century through the 1920s. This is also called in its political and economic manifestations, "neolibneralism," because it represents a return to the classical liberalism of the Nineteenth Century, which valued extreme individualism, dog-eat-dog economic practices, and little concern for those who fell by the wayside in life’s race. Their fundamental premise was that the economy thrives when government interference is minimized. Globalization and the attendant popularity of so-called market economics led to a rightward shift in the politics of Europe and the United States. Social safety nets were trimmed, and unions weakened. When liberals governments took power, they did not restore lost benefits or try to restore the power of labor. They were led by men like Tony Blair and bill Clinton, advocates of a "middle way" that accepted many of the demands of the market-oriented reformers. Some in Europe came to wonder "what’s left of the left." Before his death in 1997, philosopher Isiah Berlin noted that the left was about dead because it had no major project. The collapse of the Soviet Union has sounded the death knell of socialism. The great power of competitive economic forces and driven back efforts to further tame capitalism. All the Left could hope for was to preserve some of its previous gains. In frustration, it has fallen upon itself Europe in pointless quarrels. In England, some burn up their energies assaulting a useless but still-popular monarchy. In the United States, the Greens after 2000 have set out to punish the Democratic party for not halting the inevitable. In Europe, much more of the social safety net has been preserved, and the unions retain considerable power. In the United States, the there was less union power and a far weaker social safety net to protect in the first place, and the right has been far more successful than in Europe in damaging both. On the economic front, no bright shining goal beckons the left. Global economic forces have effectively removed that possibility. What remains for it is the hard work of insisting that public social policy be inspired by true compassion and considerations of human dignity.

Middle Way thought began to emerge after the collapse of socialism in Europe in the 1980s. In that decade the British Labour Party self-destructed, the French socialists proved themselves inept, and the Swedish socialists lost ground after the assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The left began to lose its identity in that decade, and the process was completed in the last decade of the century. The collapse of the USSR in the late nineties, reinforced the theme that the "left" had collapsed." Third Way advocates assume that the old left in Europe, and the old American liberalism, cannot be revived. They accept the dominance of a revived "free market" ideology and the reaction against big government. This has been accompanied by acceptance of many opinion leaders that the Western welfare state apparatus had become too expensive to operate in view of mounting global economic competition. Third Way politicians do not attempt to restore economic democracy or social welfare benefits that were cut by Margaret Thatcher and others. Their goal is to limit the ways new policies hurt people. The chief architect of Third Way thought is Anthony Giddens, a British sociaologist.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, the theorist of postmodernism, partially blames modernity for hatching right and left-wing totalitarianism. Modern republicanism, he argues, made popular support the basis of legitimacy. Hitler proved that clever theatrics and appeals to ethjnic identity were very potent tools in winning public approval for a monstrous regime. The communists, accomplished the same end of appealing to class interests. Modernity promised universal liberation, and socialism capitalized on that theme. Lyotard’s argument overlooks the fact that the fascists drew much support from anti-modern currents in their respective societies. This French philosopher does not join some deconstructive postmodernists in suggesting that modern science lacks the means of representing reality. Like Immannuel Kant, he distinguishes between practictical reason and cognition in realm of ethics. In these respects, his thought is fairly close to postmodernity.

Lyotard, like other postmodernists, argues that capitalism is the product of modernism but requires no metanarrative to justify itself. It relies upon facts and seems to get along as well with despotism as other forms of government. Because it requires to conceptual framework to exist, it cannot easily be attacked. He criticizes its "pseudorationality and performativity" but thinks its dominance will buy time for people to find effective ways of resisting totalitarianism in the future. This view is naïve in many respects and minimizes the social and political problems that attend the dominance of unfettered capitalism. Moreover, postmodern thinking denies the possibility of constructing a normative framework that permits effetive criticisms of
Late capitalism. Lacking a well developed normative framework, the postmodernists effectively legitimize existing forms of domination. He wrote that "The doubt cast on ‘reason’ springs not from the sciences but from the critique of metalanguage…." Lyotard was concerned with the way culture has shaped and distorted value-laiden language. Unlike Some postmodernists, he does not use deconstructive arguments about the Problems inherent in using imprecise language to question to value of modern science. He repeatedly points to Auschwitz to prove the utter failure of modernity and necessity of beginning anew in developng ethical concepts. The individual would be best to approach reading and these concepts as an autodidact, resisting the meanings culture has assigned these words.

Postmodern thinkers have shown great interest in fostering ethical behavior, liberating the marginalized, and proclaiming the dignity of "the other," but their denial of universal truths hampers these efforts. Their approach to what can be known, has led to a rediscovery of pragmatism, particulary in the works of Richard Rorty. Lyotard maintains that there must be a preserving and privileging the concept of justice, but he is not quite sure how to do it.
It is argued that the preliterate Greeks were able to appeal to a sense of justice before the emergence of Socrates’ logocentrism. The individual should rely upon this basic perception of justice and other values when approaching written material.This kind of justice is bettter than accepting one that is alien to the reader.

Foucault battled many injustices in his lifetime, but he left no intellectual framework with which to construct barriers against fascism. Nietzsche, opened the door to fascism by equating politics with destruction and violence. Foucault’s failure to see much difference between liberalism and fascism in effect left a door open to fascism. The postmodernist contempt for the humanitarian instincts of the Enlightenment project has led to a disdain for politics and a failure to see involvement in progressive political movements, however flawed they may be, as the best way to resist domination by conservative and even fascist forces. The current power of the New Right in much of the industrialized world may be partly attributable with this disdain for politics. Despite the intentions of postmodern thinkers, postmodernism has tended to underpin and integrate with the neoliberal laissez-faire political and economic thought of late capitalism.
Foucault was a deconstructive postmodernist whose work did not inspire much hope for making sense of life or improving society for the better. Foucault insisted that our thought patterns are heavily influenced by culture and it was impossible to think outside the framework of our time
periods. He doubtless thought his mission was to help liberate individuals from oppressive ideologies and powers by exposing how every idea and institution could be and was used as an instrument of power. Foucault would deconstruct knowledge without denying that meaning can be extracted or that it is necessary to acquire a great deal of knowledge. He was critical of experts, but he insists that those who criticize them must first acquire at least as much knowledge and learning as the experts possess. He is no educational minimalist! His quarrel was not with rationality so much as uncritical acceptance of ideas and usages and he offered a rational way to begin to cr)tique and understand ideas, culture, and society. His moral relativism will not contribute to building a healthy democracy or even pave the way for the leftist causes he championed. At least he did not champion mere sentimentality over what he thought were rational judgments. Though he despised Christianity and was happy to proclaim the end of bourgeois, liberal society, he knew that critics of the West had to understand it thoroughly.
Unfortunately, some who claim to be influenced by him link him with forms of intellectual shallowness and irrationalism that postmodernism has often spawned on this side of the Atlantic. Many of the early relativists possessed strong minds, advanced persuasive arguments, and never denied the need for careful thought and thorough study. Now that relativism has become part of postmodern culture, it has had the effect of encouraging an intellectual superficiality that drains all events and ideas of significance.
People who have never heard of Nietzsche, Derrida, or Foucault are convinced that the one absolute truth is that everything else is relative. The relativism that Nietzsche and Foucault thought would gift people with spiritual freedom has made most advocates of relativism followers and conformists. To be anything else would demand too much thought and respect for ideas for their own sake. Relativism has formed a barrier to seriously engaging with ideas and allowing some to penetrate and possibly transform us.

Martin Heiddeger-- Wrongheaded Genius

2005-02-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

Postmodernism has been strongly influenced by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). He worried that humankind would be dominated by its own creation, technology and was very critical of modernity and liberal democracy. Modernity’s preoccupation with individualism was corrosive and he rightly saw modernity leading to relativism and pluralism. He saw these developments as threatening social cohesiveness and making it difficult for individuals to seek or attain nobility and greatness. Modernity’s assault on hierarchy, he feared, reduced opportunities for heroic virtue and the flowering of high culture. He believed that self-denial was valuable, saw the difference between self-interest and the moral good" and saw courage as a very attractive virtue. He rightly complained that modernity promoted self-interest rather than self-sacrifice, and that it offered few incentives for courage His complaints about modernity were very similar to those of Nietzsche.
. Modern rationalist society, he charged, was preoccupied with creature comforts and material welfare. Modern society, he insisted, lacked the means of addressing people's spiritual needs and placed too much emphasis upon public relations and public opinion. Though many postmodernists favor a somewhat anarchistic democratism, he questioned the value of democracy. Heidegger a'reed with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that western, Judeo-Christian culture h!d self-destructed. Heidegger called for careful study of western intellectual history so that it can be demonstrated that the so-called great books were only the products of given cultures and time periods and that they reflected the limitations inherent in rational consciousness. Though he saw historical studies as essential¬ he thought all of Western history was the "history of an error [objectivity]." Western man, he thought, made the great mistake of thinking objective truth was possible. This meant all morality was grounded in specific cultures and societies; none have deeper meanings that transcend cultures.
Heidegger acquired much of his distaste for modernity from his very traditional Roman Catholic background. He studied to become a Jesuit priest, but gave up on Catholicism because it focused too much on universals and eternity and too little on history and historical process. He thought it was more important to attend to the here and now and real existence. To do that, one needed to carefully study change over time and culture is continually reshaped. In Heiddeger’s being-centered philosophy, there is nothing that proves God exists. Yet he admits the possibility that God could exist.
He briefly thought he could learn something from Protestant thought about learning of higher things and the nature of existence by focusing on the hear and now. This was because some Protestant thought was built on the idea that faith and Christianity must have a transformative effect that grips its believers and the way they go about life. He thought maybe this was essentially the same as gaining access to humankind’s "primordial" experience of being. Deciding that Protestantism offered no help here and that it was also ill-conceived, he moved on to other approaches. At this point, one could argue that his work became at least as anthropological as it was philosophical. In time, he thought that there could be some inkling of the question "What is? 9Being)" by listening to the verbalizations of others. It was in the words of the poet that we, in some mystical way, get the best answer to the question. The painter Paul Klee took a similar approach, believing that the impersonal universe somehow communicates its essence to us through the art. This might represent a sort of "mysticism with nobody there." Because it was concluded that the existence of God could not be established through science or rigorous logic, the best remaining option seemed to resort to a near-mystical process in order to find meaning to basic questions of human existence. It might be added that some serious pornographers have argued that a golden age of understanding the nature of being might best be ushered in by unleashing elemental forces through pornography.
Heidegger turned to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to unearth and understand the essence of being. Husserl thought they were timeless but neither psychological nor metaphysical. Husserl his teacher, did think that our intentional experience of the 7orld is somehow rooted in ideas that people have had over time. Heidegger, moved away from the belief that national and nonrational thinking could somehow be tied to common ideational experience. He thought they were rooted in something that was prereflective, being itself.
In Being and Time (1927), he is saying that previous philosophical thought has largely gone down the wrong path because it has not tried to get at the basic problem of being itself. Man makes the mistake of trying to understand the world by using received ideas based these flawed investigations and cultural evolution. To be authentic, a person must reject received culture and the idea that there is self-evident truth. It is necessary to start from scratch. In some ways, his rejection of the Christian God is a metaphor for his argument that people must cut loose from received ways of understanding the world and begin the effort anew. People should accept that they are thrown into existence and must come to terms on their own with what they can make of life and the fact that they will eventually die. In their "Being-toward-death" it would be helpful if people could transform the community into an authentic collectivity. That would mean breaking with received culture, building a community culture that is consistent with the primordial experience of being, and finding a "hero" leader. His was a radically individualistic philosophy, but it also offered greatest fulfillment through community. The linguistic community, particularly the volk, offers the best approach to getting at the meaning of being. This can best be approached through the self-understanding of a people, as expressed through historical experience. Deeply immersed in the life of the folk, the individual could have a "moment of vision." He seemed to think that Being, Time, History, and even fate, could be the same thing. Briefly the rector of Freiburg University, thought that it was possible for a folk to find its spiritual mission and that universities would, of necessity, serve that mission. In so doing, there would be no further need for debates over academic freedom because these institutions would be more than "knowledge services" or providing mere "scholarly education." Karl Jaspers, a Heidegger student, fretted that his mentor, in turning his back on reasoned discourse, was placing his persuasive powers and prestige "in the service of magic."
Later in life, he had less to say about finding authenticity through collective endeavors. He seemed to think individual could made progress alone and was concerned that technology would prevent the individual from discovering authentic being. He increasingly demanded that technology not get in the way of "letting beings be." This position left no barriers to the glorification of subjective experience, something for which he had faulted modernism. Before any progress could be made, there must be a dramatic departure from existing culture and norms; "widespread destruction was required before anything of lasting value could be built." In taking this position, and in accepting nihilism as a starting point, he joined Nietzsche in laying the foundation for postmodern thought.
Heidegger agreed with Nietzsche that "God is dead," but he eventually concluded that the revitalization of civilization depended upon the emergence of some sort of new god. In 1966, he told an interviewer "only a god can save us now." This absent god cannot be thought into existence; the best people can do is seek him. It is doubtful that many postmodernists would join him in this quest; many accept the term "pagan" to describe their outlook. Heidegger opposed universal moral standards, but unlike many American postmodernists, Heidegger saw emphasis upon narrow individualism, moral relativism and the banalization of values as signs of a dying civilization. For the same reason, he thought that the contract theory of the state, in part because we it meant a "a detachment of the human of the human being from the community." This concern predisposed him to accept the Fuehrer concept.
Max Weber noted that the modernity had disenchanted the world, and Heidegger thought that enchantment, though not from religion, was necessary if humans were to find the meaning of existence. Otherwise, life would be hopelessly impoverished. Heidegger welcomed the Nazis because they presented a golden opportunity to re-enchant the world.
He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 and repeatedly praised Hitler and Nazi ideals. He hoped he could lead the Leader's (Hitler) thinking, and was deeply disappointed when he did not become the party’s official philosopher. In a 1935 essay, he referred to "the inn%r truth and greatness" of National Socialism and said that the Soviet Union and the United States were "metaphysically the same." When the essay was reprinted in 1953, he let these passages stand. Even after World War II, he praised Nazism as a great but misdirected cultural movement and made comments offensive to Jews. He saw the authentic life as a continual effort to deal with the meaning of being, and, for him, there was no clear distinction between action, thought, and character. Traditional philosophy was dead, he declared, because it did not explain the nature of being. In sweeping away the work of other philosophers, he laid the foundation for postmodernism, but placed at its core a haunting silence because he failed to answer the Being Question.
A partial answer is that being is becoming; it is activity -- especially committed activity-- in which we define what we are. It helps to understand being and becoming in relation to the last great act of life: death. These views fit well with those of the existentialists, who saw life as the process of defining ones self and seeking authenticity. However, their idealism, strenuous efforts to define what was moral, and tendency to battle social evils were not in accordance with his philosophy. The mind, he thought, could neither completely absorb nor shape what existed outside it, and our mental efforts will seldom produce certainties. The best thing the mind can do is to encounter and negotiate with that which is outside it. In the last analysis, this meant accommodating ones self to much of what one cannot change.

European Roots of Postmodern Thought and Culture

2005-02-15T16:08:00.000-08:00

by Don Swift

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche , who proclaimed that God was dead, had a profound impact on both modernists and postmodernists. He meant God was dead both because people simply paid no attention to him and because there weas so much evil in the world that the notion of there being a God was unfathomable.
This left western humankind adrift between a civilization and one that was yet to emerge. In proclaiming that God was dead, he was arguing and celebrating the discovery that men no longer believed in Him. This proclamation was somewhat premature, but he clearly foresaw the coming of post-Christian Europe and the moral vacuum that would accompany its emergence. Albert Camus suggested that in Nietzsche "nihilism [ nothingness] became conscious for the first time."
Nietzsche did not think nihilism would be something permanent and called it a “a pathological transitional state.” His assault on traditional values involved much more than an attack on Christianity. He fired the opening salvos in the attack on the Enlightenment project. He saw the Enlightenment as another form of fidelism, and ridiculed its belief in progress and fixed truths. Nietzsche thought that all truth was contingent, and worried that the masses -- the great "herd"-- could not live with this, and he feared that morals would gradually perish. He welcomed this development only in the sense that he thought that others would eventually replace values based on religion that would be more consistent with human nature. A new person would emerge -- probably first in the United States, who was a decadent nihilist weakling who had no understanding of life but was quick to tell you that "In the past, all the world was mad."
He was concerned that liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and modernism had all but snuffed out man’s atavistic instinct to struggle for recognition. It was this drive, he believed, that enabled people to shape their own morality, to pursue excellence, and exercise their creative powers. Modern conditions restrained this impulse and unleashed human desires and emphasized reasoned calculations. Bourgeois man aspires to little more than confortable self-preservation. At best, they pursue economic gain rather than glory. He wanted “my Dionysian world” where man again responded to his instincts and desires and said “This world is the will to power … And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides.” However, only superior creatures would be able to respond to this craving to exercise power. because “egoism belongs to the nature of the noble soul.” Nietzsche saw Socrates as an historical villain because he opposed Dyonesian revelry and people’s quest to accept illusion. Socrates further erred by insisting that possessing knowledge is a virtue and that something cannot be beautiful if it was not intelligible. Nietzsche went so far as to say that “truth is ugly.”
To Nietzsche, the masses would wallow in the empty meaningless of nihilism until a race of Overmen emerged to create a new culture; yet, he also suggested that only a superior being should create a law only applicable to himself. These supermen would possess a “master morality” that would resemble that of noble “uncaged beasts of prey.” These noble beasts “savor a freedom from all social restraints and might come away from admittedly despicable acts “exhilarated and undisturbed of soul.” Their conduct would reflect the prime human characteristic and motive, the will to power.
His praise for “blonde beasts”, contempt for Christian morality, and glorification of violence and power made him particularly attractive to the Nazis, but it must be noted that he opposed anti-Semitism and would not have condoned their monstrous actions. In noting the need for a new morality to replace Christianity and in exulting the will over reason, Nietzsche laid out the philosophical agenda of the Twentieth Century and planted the seeds of postmodern culture. Nazism and Stalinism were to represent the triumph of the will above all other considerations. This line of thought has made it possible to reduce some people to the level of mere things. The Nazis scrapped history, aesthticicized politics, adopted a barbarous irrationalism, and “staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories.”. These are all tendencies that can be found in postmodernism. Certainly, most postmodern thinkers have tried to avoid these pitfalls, but the fact remains that exultation of desire and the will above all else sweeps aside restraints to rise of totalitarian philosophies and states.

Nietzsche was both a father of modernity and postmodernity. He understood what Hegel meant when he said that modernity can be seen as “Good Friday without Easter.” While there was much optimism about humankind’s prospects while he was alive, both he and Hegel knew that the rationalism, skepticism, and scientism of thir age would erode the Christian heart of Western culture. Without it, there was no solid basis for proclaiming the dignity of man, for pursuing liberalism, or identifying good and evil. Believing with Schopenhauer that true life is pure will, he was not surprised by the dog eat dog tactics of capitalism. Anticipating postmodernity, he saw that the Christian civilization would eventually be replaced by the age of the autonomous individual, in which the strong would do as they wished and even prey upon others. These people, by their own efforts, could evolve into gods. He toyed with the idea of a future in which the strong would rule and their slaves would go about their tasks in equanimity because their lives were enveloped in illusions.

Despite his remarkable ability to identify cultural trends, he was very much a man of his times. He feared democracy, scorned shopkeepers, and thought that women should be considered possessions. Nietzsche feared the moral vacuum that would exist in the period between the collapse of Christian civilization and the construction of new values by his overmen. In the age of nihilism, the herd would be better off adhering to the values of discredited Judeo-Christian culture. There are useful myths that the herd should accept; "We have a need of lies ... in order to live." If there is anything like truth, he held, people could not live with it.
Nietzsche feared creeping mediocrity and saw the coming of many people who were the opposites of his Ubermenschen. His name for this contemptible being was “the last man”, someone who lacked ambition, was preoccupied with health matters and life’s little pleasures.” The last man is incapable of despising himself, and in his age, “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse…..” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the people shouted “Turn us into these last men!” The death of God was fo be followed by an age of anomie, in which people experienced meaninglessness, rootlessness, despair, and angst. Nihilism would afflict many with spiritual torpor and debasement.
For Nietzsche, there were no facts, only interpretations. As William Butler Yeates expressed it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." While he attacked conventional morality, saying “everything praised as moral is identical in essence with everything immoral,” he did not advocate much of the conduct then called immoral. He wrote that “I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged….” His quarrel was reasons advanced for supporting conventional morality. Nietzsche sneered that “truth” was “a moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphism”, and this view was eventually to become the fashionable in today’s institutions of higher learning.
Michel Foucault once wrote that the best tribute to Nietzsche’s thought was “use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.” This is precisely what will happen to the work of both these writers in this essay. Each possessed great sociological insight. Neither saw the emergence of nihilism as an unmixed blessing. Neither believed in God, but both thought the Deity was permanently locked into our grammar and. Foucault thought “God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak.” That line is pregnant with possibilities. They meant this only in a linguistic sense, but there might be a deeper truth here. Paul Tillich’s contended that God is the ground of being. It can be argued that without God as the basis of life and existence, there can be no way of giving life meaning and coherence. Aristotle saw God as a necessary mechanism for sustaining being. Socrates knew that being or life meant little unless it was the good life.
In saying with Tillich that God is the ground of being, we adopting this Socratic understand . This makes the purpose of life pursuing the good life for ones self and society. Tillich knew that the two were the same and spent most of his energies in pursuit of the Kingdom of God. Modern relativism is based more on linguistic than philosophical argument. Earlier forms of relativism relied heavily upon formal logic and very high standards of proof, which made it difficult to find meaning in anything or find systematic explanations for complex matters. The linguistic approach is even more devastating. Its first premise is that sign systems have no reference to reality; that makes nihilism almost inevitable. .