Neoconservatives Are Ascendant in Donald Trump's America

[dajoki]

Neoconservatives Are Ascendant in Donald Trump’s America
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/82877

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“Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion,” Wertheim writes. “The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post.”

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Within Trump’s cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration, Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that “leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies.”

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Which brings us to neoconservatives’ suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the “next best thing” to a foreign dictator: “an enemy within.” His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have allowed them to “reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America.”

“More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these neocons into their fold,” Wertheim observes. “Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the ‘axis of evil’ as George W. Bush’s speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by warning of ‘this hour of liberal peril’ in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal in an effort to “broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,” a curious rationale given that Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change the op-ed page’s lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist.”

Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party’s leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim’s conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.

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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/01/02/return-of-the-neocons/

[Renew Deal]

1. In the short term it's political alliance

But people are going to have to start picking sides. Either the Republican Party goes to long term Trumpism and we keep the Wilson’s, Frum’s, and Rubin’s of the world, or they internally eradicate Trumpism and some go home.

I don’t think it’s guaranteed that Wilson, Frum, and Rubin go back to the Republican Party. Here is the big question... How do we deal with endorsements and advice from Wilson, Frum, and Rubin when it comes to presidential politics? It’s as much in their interest to be rid of Trump as it is ours. Do we listen? Do they have a say? It’s going to get weird before it settles.

[Progressive Jones]

2. The NeoCons are trying to glom onto the Democratic party. Don't let them in!

With the GOP being controlled by radical fringe, right wing ignoramii, the NeoCons need a new host party.
I understand the universal desire among normal, fully evolved humans to rid us of all things Trump, but anywhere right of center is not good. We don't need that kind of cancer in the Democratic party. Trump can be put in his place without the help of NeoCons.

[dajoki]

3. I agree n/t

[roamer65]

4. I am old school Henry "Scoop" Jackson neocon.

Henry Jackson was a good, staunch social liberal. A New Dealer through and through.

Nothing good has ever come it out of Russia and nothing ever will. I am hard core anti-Russian.

They are coming back to the Dem Party because we are turning back to anti-Russian.

The modern batch of so-called neocons are a perversion of the original neocon movement.

FUCK DUMP, PUTIN and RUSSIA.

[Polybius]

5. "Nothing good has ever come it out of Russia and nothing ever will"

That isn't very nice. Many good people came out of Russia, including my g/f. Tetris also came out of Russia. The government is what sucks about it, not the people or geography/nature.