via the Conservative Blog for Peace
This is in evidence by the most frequent complaint heard at Tea Party rallies, about the war against “American exceptionalism” – how this rather obscure Marxist concept became the religion of the American right is a topic for another day and perhaps another author. My long-time readers may recall my invoking this article, the last ever published by Irving Kristol, which I consider a smoking gun in understanding neoconservatism. He laid out frankly his arriving at the conclusion in the 1950s that European welfare states were unfit to destroy communism and extend the global democratic revolution, and therefore it must be done by some sort of military-industrial complex heavy “democratic capitalism”.
My own worst nightmare for myself is becoming some sort of political neocon. In fact, it may be the real reason why I find myself so a-political in places. (Though I think that I have the sensibility of a European social democrat, if a very particularly left-wing one). The fallen Trotskyist-turned-capitalist-militarist became so disgusted with Stalinism that he wanted it defeated by any means necessary. Max Shachtman, a once collaborator with Trotsky, even backed the U.S. military effort in Vietnam. And it goes without saying that Irving Kristol was once a young Trotskyist himself.
Trotskyism is a theory of extremes, and Trotskyists are often accused of being agent provocateurs, and no better than bratty anarchists in demonstrations. Neoconservatism is in part an intellectual result of such strange ideological fickleness; when rhetoric itself drives theory, and not the other way around. In this case, it proved useful to the ruling class. There is a sort of delicious irony involved in some intellectually sloppy Catholics trying to baptize American exceptionalism in the name of inculturation. Indeed, most spend their time trying to graft an icon of Mammon onto one of God in a rather grotesque portrait.