Was Carl Schmitt Right After All?

Since I came online, I’ve been involved in or watched a lot of fights and really bitter campaigns. Over Israel/Palestine, neoliberalism (not the recent tempest in a teacup but the great neoliberalism wars of 2011), Charlie Hebdo, campus speech codes, labor unions and Wisconsin (that was fun!), Occupy, Jacobinghazi, libertarianism. Not just fights where the obvious suspects lined up on the obvious sides but where friends took opposite positions or desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to avoid taking a position at all—if for no other reason than to avoid alienating someone they cared about.

But nothing I’ve seen online (this is entirely impressionistic) has been as divisive, acrimonious, emotional, as the Clinton/Sanders race. Not just among partisans of the two candidates but also among leftists who reject the entire premise of this intra-Democratic contest.

It makes me wonder whether Carl Schmitt wasn’t right after all:

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

In political theory, we often take that “political” to be a free-floating site or signifier. The political need not be located at the level of the state or involve government at all; it is merely the force field of this antagonism.

But for all our fancy talk about “the political,” it may be the most old-fashioned form of electoral politics that rouses the “most intense and extreme antagonism.” It may be this oh-so-familiar, almost pedestrian contest for state power that is indeed the site of the political.

36 Comments

  1. John Maher May 10, 2016 at 11:29 pm | #

    Have you read Hanna Arendt’s annoying critique of Schmitt? Your penultimate paragraph seems to reference her separation of the political and the economic spheres. She was dead wrong. So the answer may be oversimplified to “yes” but the discussion is more interesting than the answer. The post also recalls Heidegger’s discourse on the proper/improper (eigentlich/uneigentlich), which also differentiates the political and the material, and where the two merge in Schmitt. Maybe for old Carl it meant living a cosmopolitan life in Spain after the war.

    It is all at the margins.

  2. zenner41 May 10, 2016 at 11:43 pm | #

    I think that the Bernie/Hillary jousting match is perhaps 80-90% Internet-driven. My memory may be failing, but I don’t recall any intramural battle on the U.S. Left as bitter in tone as this one. (I’m not old enough to go back to the Thirties, but no one is any more.) But every since the Internet came on the scene, there have been countless squabbles featuring verbal nuclear exchanges over the tiniest things.

    It seems that something about the Internet, probably the fact that it’s so easy to type out any thought that comes into one’s head, expressed in any extremely violent language one can muster, and just push the “enter” key without seeing the people one is squabbling with on the other side of the country, or the world, that encourages the escalation into a mad rage, which can continue for days and days and consume 50 or 100 pages if it were printed out.

    It’s very easy to fall into a vicious circle which seems endless.

    • aab May 11, 2016 at 4:58 am | #

      I don’t understand how social media can be driving it. Yes, trolling is a thing and yes, the Clinton campaign is paying to throw mud. But I deal with those guys, and on their own, they’re insignificant.

      What’s driving the intense hostility is a real, very significant schism. On the one hand is an enormous group of people who sees brutal levels of corruption and propaganda that is destroying the majority of the country and the globe. On the other is a powerful elite, determined to hold on to its power by any means necessary. Brock’s social media trolls are nothing compared to what CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times has been doing. Clinton is a horrendous candidate. She lies, on video, taking two diametrically opposed positions in the course a couple of weeks, infuriating those of us opposed to her. Yes, that emotional response is inflamed because thanks to You Tube and sharing, she can’t say one thing in Iowa and another in West Virginia and keep the rubes from finding out. But it isn’t the distribution method causing the problem.

      I see a country that is literally killing my family and any hope for its future, just from greed and incompetence. A Clinton supporter apparently sees a glorious country where things are getting better all the time, everything bad is due to those mean Republicans, we help all those ignorant colored people in foreign countries find the path to democracy and life in Greenwich/Boston/Manhattan is grand. Those two points of view exist completely separate from what happens on social media — except in as much as Sanders’ supporters and leftists generally feel less isolated now and Clinton supporters are being herded and propagandized by Facebook as much as traditional media. But the disenfranchised would still be angry and despairing, and the comfortable would still prefer to see only what soothes them rather than face the truth of how much their comfort is built on the misery and exploitation of others.

      The difference is driven by stark income inequality, stark dysfunctionality up and down the system that is crushing at least 80% of the population while enriching the top, and the demographic phenomenon of a new generation which has nothing to lose and just happens to be even bigger than the Boomer generation. These are all structural conflicts. Blow up the Internet tomorrow, and they would still be there.

      The problem is not social media. The system is reaching a breaking point. There was no social media in Paris in 1789.

      • zenner41 May 11, 2016 at 10:01 am | #

        There is a lot of working-class pain, no doubt. But how is it working out politically at this point? Many of the workers expressing radical sentiments are apparently equally prepared to vote for Bernie or Donald.

        Personally, I like to take an empirically-based, realistic view of politics. Unless Bernie can win over a lot of superdelegates, Hillary will be the nominee, whether the people who hate her like it or not. Then the choice for the raging working class will be Hillary or Donald. And is Donald a real working class hero? Not in my humble opinion. But there actually is a good chance that he will win.

        • tribalypredisposed May 11, 2016 at 5:31 pm | #

          Doubtful that Donald is a real working class hero. On the other hand, Bill Clinton’s time in office gave us the largest increase in income inequality in American history, as well as some horrible welfare cuts and “trade” agreements that hurt us badly and the repeal of Glass-Steagal, so it is pretty absurd to assume that Hillary Clinton would be better than Trump for the raging working class. There has been a lot of patronizing clucking about the poor and working class being fooled into voting Republican and close to no realization that they would be equally or more duped to vote for Clinton. It is rational to pick the wild card who may well screw you over the known quantity that will absolutely without question screw you.

          • jonnybutter May 11, 2016 at 9:35 pm | #

            There has been a lot of patronizing clucking about the poor and working class being fooled into voting Republican and close to no realization that they would be equally or more duped to vote for Clinton. It is rational to pick the wild card who may well screw you over the known quantity that will absolutely without question screw you.

            Yes, exactly.

            The patronizing cluck has been pretty thick. I notice it’s OK for BO to have assassination lists, and wipe-ass the 4th amendment, not to mention intimidate whistleblowers and the rest of it, but when GW Bush did similar….well, you know.

            Obama is the real problem here – Sanders has/had to run against HRC without running against Obama. Kind of impossible.

          • zenner41 May 11, 2016 at 9:59 pm | #

            I’m really puzzled by the number of “leftists” who are coyly hinting that maybe Trump might be the best candidate for workers. They never come out and actually say that in so many words, of course, because that is absurd on the face of it.

            I also continue to maintain that it is a clear matter of fact that there is no effective working-class party at this point, so in terms of electoral politics, the choice is between the Democratic Party candidate (crappy as she or he may be, and while I like Bernie a lot, he has plenty of faults too) and not voting. Of course, anarchists will not vote on principle, but I don’t see them accomplishing an awful lot these days either.

            We just don’t have any good ways forward to choose at this point. I think we should just be honest about that.

          • jonnybutter May 11, 2016 at 10:54 pm | #

            I’m really puzzled by the number of “leftists” who are coyly hinting that maybe Trump might be the best candidate for workers.

            Assuming you’re talking at least partially about triballypredisposed, I don’t see where they even coyly said that Trump would be the best candidate for workers. What they said was that it was rational for the ‘raging working class’ to vote for a wild card over a bad known quantity. Doesn’t mean it’s the best idea, necessarily. But it is rational. To put it in perhaps more palatable terms, it’s not irrational to do so.

        • Samuel May 14, 2016 at 9:27 pm | #

          All this leftwing canonization of Sanders, fails to recognize that Hillary Clinton is millions of popular votes ahead of him; significantly, due to votes from women, Hispanic, and African American voters, while Sanders fills stadia with enthusiastic, mostly white, college age enthusiasts, along with some number of old liberal retirees. Bernie for bombastic “Rock Star”, Hillary for calm, cool, functioning President.
          Trump has famously appealed to a white, lower-educated, disaffected demographic, for whom demagoguery and dog-whistle racism substitutes for substance, and has little chance of overcoming his heavily embedded negatives.
          Barney Frank, Todd Gitlin, John Lewis, Paul Krugman, etc, etc, are, by backing Hillary Clinton, making the logical choice for the best shot at effectuating the most amount of actual progressive change in the real world of divided politics in which we live.

          • jonnybutter May 14, 2016 at 10:32 pm | #

            Wow, Samuel, you convinced me. I never thought of it in terms of our best shot at effectuating the most amount of actual progressive change in the real world of divided politics in which we live.

          • Samuel May 15, 2016 at 3:10 am | #

            Wow, I am not surprised that you have not thought of it in those terms, given your myopic obsession with Saint Bernard and your apparent pathological contempt for Hillary Clinton.
            However, a significant number of broader and smarter minds than your’s, some of whom I cited, have given it full consideration, and reached the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is the logical choice for those of us interested in actual progress, rather than the ineffectual bombast of your favorite septuagenerian socialist senator from Vermont.
            Cast your vote for whomever, or don’t vote, but it is pretty clear that in a Clinton versus Trump contest, the sane people will vote for Clinton.

          • Donald May 16, 2016 at 1:36 pm | #

            There are good reasons for feeling contempt for Clinton. We spent years hearing liberals and lefties condemning Bush’s Iraq invasion and then we see the Democrats cheerfully last non guy behind one of the most militaristic candidates on the Democratic side. I can understand and endorse voting for Clinton as the lesser evil, but when people like Krugman brush off her support for Iraq, then what that shows me is that much of the moral outrage about Iraq was nothing more than partisan posturing. Many of Clinton’s supporters seem either dishonest, deluded, or simply right-leaning.

            I could go on and talk about her speech to AIPAC, her position on Honduras, her flip flopping on trade agreements and so on, but won’t. The point is that you have to be dishonest or deluded to pretend that there are no good reasons for disliking Clinton.

          • Donald May 16, 2016 at 1:37 pm | #

            Okay, my IPad did some weird spell correcting there. I meant to say that Democrats are lining up behind an extreme militarist.

  3. Roqeuntin May 11, 2016 at 12:19 am | #

    Meh, we’ve been itching for a good dust-up like this for a while. What generally seems like unity and stability is actually a circuit of conflicting groups and interests which just happen to coincide for the time being. Most of what now is considered the left side of the spectrum in the US was forged out of opposition to the presidency of George W. Bush, disparate groups with different aims who don’t necessarily have much in common and in some cases don’t like each other at all. It goes back much further than that, of course, back to when the Clintons (and lets face it, this election is 100% about the legacy of the Clintons) decided to turn the Democratic party in to Republican-lite.

    But the crux of what I’m trying to say is this: the resolution of the last conflict lays the foundation for the next one. WWII was more or less set up during Versailles. The Civil War was a direct result of how the US Constitution was written (from slavery to the fight of States Rights vs Federalism). Each political coalition formed contains the basis of its eventual undoing in its very foundation. So to bring it all home, the current conflicts within the Democratic party of 2016 are a direct result of the coalition it brought together post-Carter or more accurately post-LBJ. LBJ’s Great Society was the last serious attempt at social democracy in the US in the 20th century, the bitter end of the New Deal coalition.

    The same could be said of the New Deal coalition itself, obviously. The brutal racism, particularly but not exclusively in the South was always there, lurking just beneath the surface, ready to blow the whole thing wide open. To me, that’s what politics is about. Trying to understand these forces, the shifting of the tectonic plates, all these vectors pointing in different directions.

    • John Maher May 11, 2016 at 11:12 am | #

      Well said about the dust up. Every organic political ecosystem involves organic change and the pattern here is purges and bloodletting, alignments of convenience with polar opposites, coopting of values, and a new normal. We are observing this now n the american scene, yet is the inevitable corporate interest prioritization in terms of further wealth stratification really at stake here? If humans are social animals as well as political and economic ones, then social does not always mean either a static political doctrine or a realpolitik. Instead, I suspect that Schmitt, my fave for cynical political insight along with Foucault and Maestre, would agree. Get out the long knives but better to sharpen them.

      • Roquentin May 11, 2016 at 11:33 am | #

        Full disclosure: I’ve never read so much as a single word Schmitt wrote and have no frame of reference.

        • John Maher May 11, 2016 at 11:45 am | #

          Therefore you are unbiased by reference to the primary source. Awesome insight!

    • graccibros May 11, 2016 at 12:14 pm | #

      Roquentin:

      Your main comment reminds of two grand analogies for the building level of political intensity. For years now, in looking at the growing distances between the Republican Right and the old “economic” left, evidenced by the deliberate destruction of the majority rule principles inside the operations of Congress – some have called it a form of treason – distances which the Democratic Centrists strive mightily to downplay in their search for amiable compromise and an ever more distant “consensus” as they too move away from this old “economic” left – I am called back to two periods on different continents; the 1850’s in the United States, when it all broke down, even the rise of the compromising Lincoln being too much and his election leading to succession in 1861…and of course, fueled by the rise of Trump, a Weimar like scenario without the Brown and Black shirts actively beating up people in the streets – only mild echoes of this at the rallies.

      The overall economics of our situation are best laid out still, whether Jacobin magazine likes it or not, by Karl Polanyi’s the Great Transformation, the absolute disagreement between left, right and center on the nature of the allowable “interventions” into an underperforming economy with rising suicide statistics (we’ve had two reports since late 2015 on this) and the other symptom of mass shootings belying the gloss both Bill Clinton and President Obama want to place on our international “economic standing”…at times Sec. Clinton joining in to deny American decline. This glossing serves to block out working and lower middle class pain for the top 20% income group which Thomas Frank has reminded us has moved from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party. That 20%’s values and inclinations are left out of the too simplistic, however useful, 1% vs the 99%. Add to this the Michelle Alexander findings in “The New Jim Crow” and the Harvard Law Review article from April of 2015, Policing and Profit and we have further documentation of what is fueling much of the discontent in the bottom 60% of society- which does not clarify what direction it takes politically, or which is the more apt historical analogy. Right now I’m leaning towards a milder Weimar version since I can’t find the contemporary equivalent to Bloody Kansas. And it may not resolve itself until whomever wins in 2016 has to face the next financial crisis with a Congress without Consensus on means or ends, the logical political expression of a society without solidarity.

      For the benefit of Corey’s readers who asked me about it, and wished me luck, I have completed the essay I promised on the terrain of Alexander’s work and the HLR article: The Rape of Justice: How Neoliberalism Destroys Equal Justice Under Law. Here at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/04/09/1512979/-The-Rape-of-Justice-How-Neoliberalism-Destroys-Equal-Justice-Under-Law

      • graccibros May 11, 2016 at 12:48 pm | #

        I neglected to add an additional complexity: I have written before that in the history of the American left since say, 1970, the First Earth day, the “ecological” left has eclipsed the “economic” left in overall political power. In 2016, however, despite the work of James Hansen in reminding us, along with the great wildfires near the Tar Sands operations in Western Canada, like the suicide reports and Michelle Alexander’s work in the social/racial/economic realm, that we have deep and pressing environmental troubles, ecology is barely registering in this election. But I place it under Polanyi’s categories of the “double movement,” and the contest over “interventions” in the economy. To show you how much power the Right has in defining what is allowed or not, remember that no matter how much Centrists and the ecological left tried to dress up either a carbon tax (which professional economists claim is the “neutral” way to do things) or sophisticated carbon credit trading schemes as being “market friendly,” the Right rules them out of bounds, either as a disguised “tax” (which has some truth) but the deeper ground is that they are interferences with what the Right still believes is the answer to all our problems: leave the genius of the market alone.

        I’ve always felt that the two great branches of the left, the economic and the ecological can meet with increasing mutual power, in a place called FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, especially at the table set for the very first Right, that to a job…and that this is also helpful, not legally, but economically, to “Black Lives Matter,” but to my amazement, even Bernie Sanders, who touts the Second Bill apparently fears to call for the “Right to a Job” alongside his call for “The Right” to Medical care. It’s one of the things we can’t get him to “elaborate” on…and the dynamics within the Democratic Coalition, the seven great branches, mean that “universals” like the two I cite here, run afoul of the subjectivities of one or more of the seven “streams…” the intensity of the feminist support for Hillary, and the black voting patterns for her and against Sanders, reminding us of the difficulty of saying anything to the Democratic Party that doesn’t lurch all over the policy map, sapping intellectual coherence and any semblance of “authenticity.” Is that one reason, or his own limitations, that Sanders clings to script so tightly?

  4. PatinIowa May 11, 2016 at 6:27 am | #

    For context, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

    1968 was partly a Democratic argument, which the party mostly won, mopping up by walking away from McGovern in ’72.

    Plus la change…

    • zenner41 May 11, 2016 at 10:05 am | #

      Well, we all are certainly wishing there were a real workers’ party instead of the D Party, but when are we going to build this real workers’ party, instead of talking about it constantly? And exactly how are we going to do it? I have yet to hear any answers to these questions that make any sense.

  5. graccibros May 11, 2016 at 9:09 pm | #

    I think there was a Jacobin article about the last attempt I know of…Tony M.’s efforts…if it didn’t come out of the circle around the late Michael Harrington and his left Labor friends, don’t know where it would have come from…or today? Wendell Berry? Just kidding…not a national movement type of guy. Jill Stein and the Green Party…?

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/tony-mazzochi-mark-dudzic-us-labor-party-wto-nafta-globalization-democrats-union/

  6. graccibros May 11, 2016 at 9:58 pm | #

    Having just read the article, I’m very curious as to why the old Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee didn’t come up for mention, even after it merged with NAM and became the Dem. Socialists of America. I say that because Harrington orbit included most the more daring labor leaders of the day who were not afraid to break with the AFL-CIO, going for Kennedy over Carter and beyond. But perhaps they couldn’t make the leap that Tony M. did, envisioning the break with the Dems. The interesting thing to me is how much the Labor party strategy resembles the dialogue within the old DSCO as I encountered it in the 1970’s before the merger. This was a major theme of M. Isserman’s bio of Harrington, “The Other American”: that DSOCers never developed a clear organizational identity or a mission that was stronger than the members daytime jobs as regular union officials or organizers for specific unions, teachers, esp. college teachers, social workers…as I recall the meetings, we had a preview of the Sanders problems, very few black members…and also a preview of things to come, from feminists: Harrington, on the night of the party celebrating DSOC’s founding, got pulled into a room off the main party and was read the riot act by feminists who pointed out there were no women speakers…I’m sure there must be someone in New York up on DSA history that can fill us in on their relationship to the Tony M attempts with the Labor Party. Michael Harrington died on July 31, 1989, so he was not present for the founding efforts. But I’m sure he knew Tony M.

  7. Will May 11, 2016 at 10:16 pm | #

    If you are right, Corey, then this fall is going to be something else.

  8. Edward May 13, 2016 at 8:53 am | #

    The Democratic party will spend more time and effort destroying the left then they will opposing Republicans, especially internationally where left wing social movements are attacked by the United States. Domestically, the Democrats have destroyed such left wing politicians as Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich. Politically, I would say Clinton is more or less a neoconservative, It makes sense to me that she has burned the butt of many Democratic voters who are fed up with the neoconservative abuses of this country. An interesting series of articles has appeared at counterpunch.org examining the allegations of voter fraud against the Clinton campaign in this primary:

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/09/hillary-clinton-versus-bernie-sanders-taking-election-fraud-allegations-seriously-part-1/

    Besides the purging of McKinney and Kucinich, the Schmidt quote makes me think of the antagonism between the American socialist parties, between the Syrian and Iraqi Baathist parties, and between ISIS and Al Nusra.

  9. Edward May 13, 2016 at 9:09 am | #

    Actually, another example of Schmidt’s thesis could be the 1968 Democratic convention and the war of the establishment Democrats against the McGovern campaign.

  10. Steve White May 15, 2016 at 1:05 am | #

    Unless you believe a Trump presidency is acceptable, the only rational choice is Clinton. Is she perfect? No. But Jesus isn’t running this year. Don’t cut off your nose to spit you face. Electing an overt racist with minimal experience is a disaster. Clinton may not be great, but she is far less dangerous.

  11. LFC May 15, 2016 at 11:10 pm | #

    Contrary to what Edward wrote, Clinton is not a neoconservative. Neoconservatism is a word with a particular history and set of connotations, as most people looking at this thread probably know. It is not a synonym for ‘reactionary’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘interventionist’ (even though neocons are hyper-interventionists). HRC’s main interests, despite her term as Sec of State, have always been in domestic policy rather than foreign policy, which itself sets her apart from the neocons. I wrote a longer comment on this but apparently it was too long for the comment box or something, so I’ll leave it at.

    • LFC May 15, 2016 at 11:11 pm | #

      correction:
      …leave it at that.

    • graccibros May 16, 2016 at 2:05 pm | #

      LFC:

      If Hillary Clinton is not a Neoliberal, both in matters of Foreign Policy and domestic policy, I don’t know where to place her. To reinforce the point, today’s (May 16th) NYTimes carried the announcement of her “appointment” of husband Bill to head her economic policy public campaign:
      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/us/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-economic-plans-kentucky.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

      I’m about half-way through Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal,” have finished on the case of Bill Clinton being a Neoliberal thoroughly in economics, joining the Right to attempt to gut Social Security, his welfare “reform,” his deregulation of finance, telecoms and anything else he could get his hands on…you can claim his full employment record in 1998-2000 as proof he’s a genius, but Joe Stiglitz doesn’t back it up, and the disasters that followed in the oughts flowed right out of Clinton’s program of letting markets loose. I place President Obama clearly in this camp: where reforms were achieved, esp. in healthcare, it was on the pleasure of the private sector. Between these 4 four terms of Clinton and Obama, “Equal Justice Under Law” was destroyed at the top, and the bottom of our society. That neither Michelle Alexander nor the Harvard Law Review Article “Policing and Profit” ever named Neoliberalism as the cause – both said it was all due – rise of Jim Crow and mass incarceration to race prejudice…overlooks a lot of each work’s internal evidence on how anti-tax fervor and privatization pushed the poor both into prisons and into the more informal “debtor’s” prisons, or matrixes.

      The very fact that so many different federal regulatory agencies failed to do their job in 2007-2009 is proof that the regulators shared a common world view with the private powers to be regulated – that markets were divine, and that Wall Street knew them the best, were the seers of the market – is proof that something very systemic was already in place. Those who dissented, like Brooksley Born at the CFTC, were fired (forced resignation). She was a good friend of Mrs. Clinton at the time but nobody has asked Hillary what she thought of those who fired her – forced her out at the silent acquiescence of Bill – or perhaps at his urging, although I haven’t seen that discussed anywhere. That would be Summers, Greenspan and Rubin. Rather than being exiled, Summers came back to be the head eco advisor to Obama, and then headed the Shared Prosperity Commission in 2015 that was the policy background for Hillary’s Presidential bid. It does not venture into anything too New Dealish esp . on labor market reforms, no CCC or WPA, despite all the work to be done. Summers is now traveling the world trying to convince the powers that be in Europe and the World economic institutions that lack of demand is the problem, the cure for Secular Stagnation, the term coming from New Deal economists – but that “association” has been dropped for the more obfuscatory language that Summers prefers.

      If you believe that the essence of Neoliberalism is that markets are still quasi divine, that “only the private sector can create jobs,” that privatization is better than public employees for all of society’s tasks, that labor markets must be flexible, and that de-regulation is still the dominant norm (despite Dodd-Frank, and that’s a long discussion, since Congress punted an enormous number of rule making tasks to the agencies involved, hundreds of rules, many still to be written) and that free trade is still a wonder – notice how Obama clings to it…Clinton was very late to see the political winds blowing on it….from an anti-neoliberal direction…

      One last thought on the power of neoliberalism: there is a spectrum of intensity for the beliefs. No matter how the liberal side of neoliberalism tried, is still trying to dress up global warming corrections to be market friendly – a carbon tax or a carbon trading system, the more conservative branch of neoliberalism won’t buy it.

      I invite you to explore these issues further in my long essay here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/04/09/1512979/-The-Rape-of-Justice-How-Neoliberalism-Destroys-Equal-Justice-Under-Law

  12. LFC May 15, 2016 at 11:18 pm | #

    p.s. Based on its opening paragraphs, which I read just now, the Wiki article on neoconservatism is stylistically probably a rambling mess (there’s even an editorial box at the top saying it’s ‘disorganized’), but it’s also probably accurate enough on the basics.

    • Edward May 16, 2016 at 3:32 pm | #

      LFC, Robert Parry lays out the case that Hillary Clinton is a neocon in this article:

      http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/66904/yes-hillary-clinton-is-a-neocon

      • graccibros May 16, 2016 at 3:43 pm | #

        Although some may make a sharp distinction between Neoliberalism in economics, and neoconservatives in foreign policy, I would maintain that almost all neocons are Neoliberals in economic policy, and the proof was in the Constitution we handed Iraq under Bremmer. Who dissented from that – under either heading?

      • LFC May 16, 2016 at 4:32 pm | #

        @Edward — thks for the link.

        @graccibros — even if all neocons are neoliberals in ec. policy, that does not mean that all neoliberals in ec. policy are neocons. e.g. All cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats. I think ‘neoliberal’ is the broader — and somewhat vaguer — of the two terms. YMMV, and we may have to agree to disagree on this.

      • Samuel May 17, 2016 at 12:36 am | #

        Smirking Chimp says it all

  13. graccibros May 16, 2016 at 8:55 pm | #

    LFC, I agree with you; I would not reverse my first sentence to then say that all Neoliberals in economics are neocons in foreign policy, and I think Andrew Bacevich is a good example of that, based on what I’ve read of his writings.

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