# Ask the Neo-Con **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 28, 2004, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306 "2004-07-28T18:57:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/1 "2004-07-28T18:57:22Z")
I’ve seen on these boards what seems to be misrepresentations of what neoconservativism is, and what neoconservatives believe. It seems like a lot of people are careless when using the term. Hence, this thread, where I try to clear up any questions or misconceptions about neoconservatives and the neoconservative movement that you might have. The official disclaimers apply. I don’t represent the movement, I don’t have Irving Kristol’s home phone number, and any opinions expressed are strictly my own, unless I attribute them to somebody else. I can just promise I’ll do my best. ---
**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/2 "2004-07-28T19:05:31Z")
Well, first of all, if the opinions are your own, and you don’t speak for anyone else, why take on the label as though you do? Why not say, “Ask Captain Amazing”? I’m not being snarky, I’m being sincere. It seems implicit in the thread that you are speaking for a label, a set of people of like beliefs. But then, in your OP, you say you aren’t. Which is it? ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/3 "2004-07-28T19:14:45Z")
What’s a neo-con? How do they differ from just regular old cons? Who is considered the starter of the movement? How many of you are there? Where do you live? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/4 "2004-07-28T19:17:42Z")
> [@Stoid](#): > > It seems implicit in the thread that you are speaking for a label, a set of people of like beliefs. But then, in your OP, you say you aren’t. Which is it? Whenever there’s a thread like “Ask the X” (Ask the Gay Guy, Ask the Mormon, Ask the Trout Fisherman, etc.), there’s the danger that some people could take what the OP says to be representative of all gay people, Mormons, trout fishermen, etc, and obviously, no one person can speak for an entire sexuality, religion, or whatever. My beliefs are neocon beliefs, and so I’m speaking for them in that sense. However, I’m not an official representative of the neocon movement, and there might be issues that other neocons might disagree with me about. That’s all I meant by that. ---
**Author:** ![Genghis\_Bob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/45deac/32.png) [@Genghis\_Bob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Genghis_Bob)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/5 "2004-07-28T19:22:32Z")
I have the same questions as Stoid: if you’re not speaking “for” Neoconservatism, is it just your perception of it, and if so, how valid is it? What’s the source of the information you’re about to give us? That said, I’m curious: Why neocons? What particular tenets of, um, paleo-cons do you disagree with, and why? Do conservatives go too far? Not far enough? In what particular areas of policy is conservatism so deficient that it was necessary to “create” a new political identity? ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/6 "2004-07-28T19:28:02Z")
1- What happened to the conservative interest in balanced budgets? Do you feel comfortable with the record deficits being rung up by the Bush administration? 2- Would your position on gay marriage change if one of your children was gay? 3- Do you think that government should be based on Christianity and would you feel differently if you were not Christian? 4- Do you care what consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes? 5- Do you believe in evolution? ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/7 "2004-07-28T19:33:41Z")
Excellent idea for an OP and I’m probably one of the transgressors re the use of the term. Since the word “neo-conservatism” is (apparently) many things to many people why don’t you begin by stating the core tenets of your neo-conservative philosophy. [Here is a Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_%28United_States%29) that attempts a broad brush overview of the neo-con perspective. Is it accurate? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/8 "2004-07-28T20:04:48Z")
> [@Genghis Bob](#): > > Why neocons? What particular tenets of, um, paleo-cons do you disagree with, and why? Do conservatives go too far? Not far enough? In what particular areas of policy is conservatism so deficient that it was necessary to “create” a new political identity? I’ll try to answer your question, and hopefully, **Shibboleth** ’s question with it. Neoconservativism tends to differ from traditional conservativism in a few areas. The first, really big one, is on foreign policy. The old conservative movement tended to be really isolationist, and really didn’t worry about things like human rights. So, you have people like Pat Buchanan, for example, who don’t just say we shouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq, but say we shouldn’t have even entered WWII. And you’ve got people who say that we should ally and trade freely with countries regardless of their human rights record…that we don’t need to pressure them to improve it. Neocons disagree with this. We say that there are certain basic rights that are universal and that governments have an obligation to protect, like freedom of speech, of religion, etc., and that it’s our responsibility to make sure that governments do that. The other big difference is harder for me to spell out, but traditional conservativism tends to really poke its nose into people’s personal lives. It focuses a lot on things like abortion and making sure gays don’t have rights, and those sorts of social issues. Neoconservativism doesn’t really focus on that. We’re not libertarians, but you’re also not likely to find many neocons who care very much what you do in bed or who you do it to, so long as you’re not hurting anybody. We’re also not so big on the whole “states rights” issue or the “federal government is bad” thing, the way that a lot of conservatives stress. ---
**Author:** ![Rashak\_Mani](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ea666f/32.png) [@Rashak\_Mani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rashak_Mani)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/9 "2004-07-28T20:06:44Z")
Well I don’t know if you answered the other thread… but here goes: 1. What changed in your neo-con mentality with the Iraq debacle ? 2. When Bush loses the election will neo-cons stop being a major force in the Republican party ? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/10 "2004-07-28T20:16:26Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > 1- What happened to the conservative interest in balanced budgets? Do you feel comfortable with the record deficits being rung up by the Bush administration? I’m not a big fan of deficit spending, and would like to see the budget balanced, although the Iraq war does make that difficult. However, I am disappointed that the President and Congress are running up such large deficits. It’s not fiscally sound and will hurt us in the long run. > [@](#): > > 2- Would your position on gay marriage change if one of your children was gay? No, I’d still be in favor of it. > [@](#): > > 3- Do you think that government should be based on Christianity and would you feel differently if you were not Christian? I’m not Christian, and while I agree with some Christian moral teachings, I don’t think the government should be based on it. > [@](#): > > 4- Do you care what consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes? As long as they close the curtains and I don’t have to subsidize it, not generally. > [@](#): > > 5- Do you believe in evolution? Yes. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/11 "2004-07-28T20:43:39Z")
> [@astro](#): > > [Here is a Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_%28United_States%29) that attempts a broad brush overview of the neo-con perspective. Is it accurate? I think it’s reasonably accurate. I think it does gives Trotsyism more influence in the developments of neoconservativism than it deserves, though. Of the major neocons, only Kristol was ever really a Trotskyist, and by the time a lot of the other neocons mentioned in the article, like Kirkpatrick, Wolfowitz, and Pearle, became Schachmanites, Schachman had split from Trotsky altogether. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Love](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Dr.Love](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Love)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/12 "2004-07-28T20:45:30Z")
What politician(s) do you feel best represent your views? What political views would make you most likely to vote or not vote for a particular candidate? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/13 "2004-07-28T20:57:26Z")
In terms of candidates, I really liked John McCain. I like some of what Senator Lieberman has to say too. In terms of what issues I find most important in a candidate, I’d like to see one committed to a strong defense and increased military spending, support for Israel, and a principled and tough foreign policy. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/14 "2004-07-28T21:20:05Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > 5- Do you believe in evolution? IANANC, but where did you get the idea that neocons do not accept the scientific fact of evolution? Are there many prominent neocons that even tak about evolution? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/15 "2004-07-28T22:09:35Z")
Okay, **Captain,** I’ll take a position and you try to refute it. My thesis: **Neoconservatism is heretical and despicable by the standards of modern American conservatism.** What is modern American conservatism? I just read a fascinating new book, _The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,_ by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). This book provides the most comprehensive and impartial account I have yet read of the American conservative movement, and its gradual rise to power over the past four decades. The authors are British, and have the advantage of looking at the whole thing with an outsider’s detachment. Their thesis is that the late conservative ascendancy results partly from America’s uniquely conservative political culture, and partly from a process of conservative organizing, and alliances and synergies between different conservative factions (economic libertarians, traditionalists, religious conservatives, big-business interests – and foreign-policy neoconservatives), which has been going on steadily since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Yet, the authors are at pains to point out, modern American “conservatism” means something rather different than what earlier generations understood the word to mean. From their introduction: > [@](#): > > The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed. > > But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: **a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism.** Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” > > To simplify a little, **the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three.** The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not. > > If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another. > > The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting. > > As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold. But while above is a pretty good description of most streams of modern American conservatism, it does not describe the non-mass-based, purely intellectual-elite movement we call “neoconservatism” – because, while neoconservatism is indeed progress-oriented and patriotic, it is also fundamentally **statist** and **elitist.** In the June 2004 issue of _Harper’s,_ Earl Shorris published an article: “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception.” His thesis is that the worldview of the neocons is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and ‘60s (and on whom The Master wrote a column last December – [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031212.html](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031212.html)). Strauss’s thesis is that all great philosophical texts contain “hidden meanings.” Philosophers and intellectuals cannot and should not write clearly enough say what they really mean – cannot because it is too dangerous (Strauss was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, which experience influenced his thinking all his life), and should not because true wisdom is the proper province of an elite. Strauss was also an aristocratic elitist and a natural-law theorist. From Shorris’ article: > [@](#): > > **WISE MEN TELL NOBLE LIES** > > The President of the United States told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. His secretaries of defense and state made the same assertions. They claimed to be telling the kind of truth that enables good countries to go to war against evil ones. . . . > > One of the great services that Strauss and his disciples have performed for the Bush regime has been the provision of a philosophy of the noble lie, the conviction that lies, from being simply a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy. The idea’s provenance could not be more elevated: Plato himself advised his nobles, men with golden souls, to tell noble lies . . . to keep the other levels of human society (silver, iron, brass) in their proper places, loyal to the state and willing to do its bidding. Strauss, too, advised the telling of noble lies in the service of the national interest, and he held Plato’s view of aristocrats as persons so virtuous that such lies would be used only for the good, for keeping order in the state and in the world. He defined the modern method of the noble lie in the use of esoteric messages within an exoteric text, telling the truth to the wise while at the same time conveying something quite different to the many. > > For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that “free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction,” this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon. > > **ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL** > > William Kristol has written that "Strauss, by way of his students, is in large part responsible for making the thought and principles of America’s founders a source of political knowledge and appeal, and for making political excellence more broadly a subject of appreciation and study. America’s founders thought it self-evident that all men are created equal, and yet increasing inequality has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration, as it was of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Donald Rumsfeld’s primary task under Ronald Reagan was to rid the country of the Great Society programs of the early 1960s. Irving Kristol, an early Straussian, advised Reagan and Rumsfeld and their staffs of the need to stop coddling hungry children, educating the poor, and helping the aged, the infirm, victims of prejudice. The current Bush Administration works more boldly toward inequality. It has adopted a tax system suggested by Grover Norquist, another Straussian, a man who publicy compared the inheritance tax to the Holocaust. > > Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the Great Books Program, said, “The best education for the best is the best education for all.” In 1959, Strauss wrote that “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” In one sentence he had stated his elitism and his distaste for what he called the vulgarity of democratic society. Three years later he made the ruling elite permanent: “We must not expcet that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and privilege of a minority.” Arrogance follows elitism. It leads to cruelty, the capability, even the desire, to use people, to make them into things. No follower of Strauss can agree with Kant’s description of human dignity: man is not a means but an end in himself. The Straussians assign dignity to the few, and those who are deprived of dignity cannot pursue happiness. The study of Strauss’s work does lead to thinking about the Founders: not how they would agree with Straussians but how they would oppose them. > > **DEMOCRACY IS THE RULE OF THE UNWISE OVER THE WISE** > > Plato believed that the wise should rule – and who could quarrel with that? But who then decides among competing wise men, and what should be the limits of the wise statesman’s power? It is instructive to listen to Strauss: “It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects.” Strauss explains that this would result in the subjection of what is by nature higher to that which is lower. His reading of Plato comes down to this: true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs. Seen in this light, the Bush Administration’s public claim to be bringing “democracy” to Iraq, all the while working to ensure that elections do not take place, takes on new meaning. > > **NATURE ABHORS A CONTRACT** > > Long before the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration – goaded on by Wolfowitz, Kristol, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and others on the right – had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. Bush seems to have had a personal vendetta, but the others had more philosophical reasons. There was nothing Machiavellian about the attack. It was based on principles the planners derived from natural law. One suspects that President Bush, with his simplistic messianic mind-set, was attracted to this line of reasoning: The natural law in the very heart of human beings, the innate ability to know right from wrong, took precedence over mere convention. And so the Bush regime flouted the contract that was agreed to when the United States joined the United Nations; it flouted the U.S. Constitution, which is also a contract, by attacking without the required declaration of war by Congress; and it disregarded the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in other secret detention camps around the world. > > The administration’s wise men held up Strauss’s version of natural law as the model, dismissing contracts as mere laws of men. Natural law, interpreted by Bush’s “wise counsels,” gave the President permission to launch a pre-emptive war through an appeal to the higher power. Natural-law theory assumes that men seek the good and that by asking the perennial questions – what is virtue? what is justice? – they will come to wisdom. Straussians, like Kristol, hold that the Founding Fathers espoused natural-law theory, saying that natural law was both divine and self-evident. But the Founders were concerned with inalienable natural rights. After much debate in their convention, they wrote a contract. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/16 "2004-07-28T22:26:06Z")
Where did people get the idea that neoconservatives are fundamentalist Christians? The founders of neoconservatism are Jewish, and most are secular people. Those who are religious seem to me to be religious from communitarian principles (religion is good for the kids, provides a social framework, fosters values that make good citizens, etc). Why do you think people have this misconception? Where does it come from? Is it just laziness? People who think “neo” means “very”? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/17 "2004-07-28T22:36:47Z")
Interesting. **Captain** , your summary and your responses to posters definitely paints a different picture from the image I had of neoconservative politics and those who subscribe to their tenets. a) Do you feel the liberal media misrepresents what neocon politics is about? b) Do you feel the conservative media misrepresents what neocon politics is about? c) Should we have invaded Afghanistan long before 9/11 just to oust the Taliban and their historical idol-wrecking, woman-oppressing, religious totalitarian ways? What’s your take on how we’re doing on the Afghanistan-rebuilding front? Are freedom and democracy right around the corner for the Afghanistanis or is the Taliban, and possibly even Al Qaeda, oozing back into power over there? d) What’s your take on this George W. Bush fellow who is currently occupying the Oval Office? In what ways do you consider his administration’s stances and activities to be in keeping with neocon philosophies? In what ways an affront to them? ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/18 "2004-07-28T22:46:09Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > IANANC, but where did you get the idea that neocons do not accept the scientific fact of evolution? Are there many prominent neocons that even tak about evolution? I think he’s confusing neo-cons with paleo-cons…so maybe there is something good that will come out of this thread. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought neo-cons pretty much dissasociated themselves from the religious/moralistic stance of the older conservatives, and were more concerned with foreign involvement of the US. Also, my impression was that the fiscal policy of the neo-cons was a lot looser than that of the old style conservatives. Those would be my questions for the Captain…how close are my impressions of the movement? -XT ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/19 "2004-07-28T23:09:05Z")
Would you believe there’s a group of neoconservative socialists? Sort of. In 1972, the American Socialist Party – historically anti-Soviet, and distinct from and fiercely opposed to the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA – split over the question of whether to support the Vietnam War. The antiwar faction went on to form a reconstituted Socialist Party USA ([http://www.sp-usa.org/](http://www.sp-usa.org/)) and the Democratic Socialists of America ([http://www.dsausa.org/](http://www.dsausa.org/)). (The DSA is ideologically similar to the SPUSA and differs mainly in organizing tactics – the SPUSA is a genuine political party that runs candidates for office, the DSA is more of an educational organization). The prowar faction became the Social Democrats, USA ([http://www.socialdemocrats.org/](http://www.socialdemocrats.org/)). Fast-forward to the present, and it turns out that the SDUSA also supports the Iraq War. (The SPUSA and DSA, needless to say, are flat against it.) In fact, if you review their site, you will see that the Social Democrats share with the neocons a vision of exporting democracy to the whole world by force of American arms – the main difference being that the SD’s conception of “democracy” seems to include more emphasis on labor unions. By the way, the SPUSA, DSA, and SDUSA **all** are members of the Socialist International ([http://www.socialistinternational.org/main.html](http://www.socialistinternational.org/main.html)). ---
**Author:** ![iwakura43](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de0a6/32.png) [@iwakura43](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iwakura43)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2004, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306/20 "2004-07-28T23:17:06Z")
**Captain Amazing** , are you an imperialist? Neoconservatives seem to believe in a strong-armed form of foreign policy. Should America use its military power to extend its influence into not just foreign affairs, but _foreigner’s_ affairs? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-neo-con/257306.md?page=2)