Today we are lucky to have a guest contribution to WorkingDefinition. In the following essay, Nate describes what makes Neocons tick and what we, as responsible and progressive Democrats, can do to counter their disproportionate influence. Enjoy!

On the Highroad to Irrelevance: Rebuilding the Democratic Party

Introduction

The term neoconservative is often used to describe the Bush administration. To many Democrats the term neoconservative is an insult, and rightfully so, an epithet, thrown as Bush himself throws the term “Massachusetts politician,” meaning a weird mixture of born-again Christianity, a smug self-satisfaction and an almost dangerous confidence that anything America touches will doubtlessly turn to gold. This is not too far off the mark but it fails in the major point that it is unable to uncover or unlock the secret of what makes neoconservatism so attractive to so many Americans.

We would best begin by defining our terms. While neoconservatism is the guiding philosophy of the Republican party, neoconservatism is not Republicanism; in fact I do not believe that it would be stretching the truth to say that neoconservatism is now operating in the burned-out shell of the Republican party the way certain parasites burrow into the brains of caterpillars and then take over their bodies – the caterpillar is no longer in control, but it still looks like a caterpillar. Therefore, as we read research and write, we would do well to understand that while they are currently synonymous, Republican and neoconservative do not mean the same thing.

One of the apostles of the neoconservative doctrine is commentator Irving Kristol. Kristol’s collection of essays: Neoconservatism: an Autobiography of an Idea provides an excellent explanation of this dichotomy. Kristol, whose two primary fears in life seem to be lesbians and African-Americans in that order, suggests that from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt until the early 1990’s, the Republican Party in the United States was largely dead. Dependent on raising the banner of anti-communism and fiscal responsibility Kristol states that the Republicans merely looked like miserly fear-mongers in the face of the high ideals of Democrats and as such made no progress, representing a minority in the House and Senate.

For Kristol, neoconservatism was the parasite that burrowed into the nearly defunct Republican party and gave it new life, the life that has given the party the wherewithal to capture all three branches of the United States government in a mere twenty years. At some level this understanding of neoconservatism existing inside the shell of the Republican Party can be comforting to Democrats. People who vote Republican believing they are voting for fiscal responsibility and small government may eventually realize that they are actually voting neoconservative thus causing a major rupture in the Republican ranks, but this supposed rupture might easily come too late to prevent an irreversible sea-change in American life and government.

The foregoing being said, it begs the question: if Republican doesn’t mean Republican anymore, and instead means neoconservative, why do people still vote for Republican candidates? Shallow pundits such as Anne Coulter would suggest glibly that anyone who doesn’t vote Republican (meaning neocon in this case) is a) unpatriotic, b) brain-dead, c) gay, d) an environmental nut, or e) all of the above. Alas for Coulter and her ilk their simplification of neoconservatism for a radio audience merely serves to highlight their own stupidity. The fact is that neoconservatism is a highly complex doctrinal system based on intense and perhaps fevered readings of history and classical philosophy with an emphasis on Socrates and Aristotle.

In my own work as a consultant for the non-profit sector I am often asked by struggling organizations “we do such good work, why don’t people want to fund us?” Often times we return to them with the same solution: “do only those things which directly advance your mission; package and clarify your work for funders.” If we can for a moment imagine neoconservatism as an automobile, the success of the doctrine becomes clear in short order; yes it has a complex supply line, yes building it is a lengthy and involved process, but with a coat of well-lacquered paint anyone can tell you it’s a car. Taking the automotive analogy one step further, the hiding of neoconservatism within the Republican Party also helps to explain the doctrine’s success. Neoconservatism has enough parts drawn from classical Republicanism to appear very similar, almost indistinguishable to last year’s model such that a casual observer won’t be able to tell the two apart until he’s been driving long enough to read the fine print under the clock on the dashboard.

Continue reading →

When diversity is only skin-deep
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist August 12, 2004

GEORGE W. Bush was scourged for giving a speech in 2000 at Bob Jones University, an institution that used to ban interracial dating. Trent Lott was compelled to resign as Senate majority leader in 2002 after he toasted Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 campaign for president.

Given that recent history, no presidential candidate would even think of appearing before any association organized on the basis of race, right? Republican and Democrat alike would shun any group whose members demanded preferential treatment for those of their own skin color, right? If a candidate did agree to address such an audience, it would only be for purposes of effecting a “Sister Souljah moment” — i.e., of making it clear that he emphatically rejected their racialist mindset. Right?

Wrong.

Last week, both Bush and John Kerry appeared before the “Unity: Journalists of Color” convention in Washington, D.C. Unity is an amalgam of four racial/ethnic organizations — the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian-American Journalists Association, the Native American Journalists Association, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists — and it exists primarily to bleat about the lack of “diversity” in the media.

The overriding theme at Unity conventions is always the same: White people have too many jobs, especially the best jobs, in journalism. On the eve of last week’s conference, it trotted out a study showing that “only” 10.5 percent of reporters, editors, and columnists in the Washington press corps are nonwhite. This it denounced as an “absymal lack of diversity,” intolerable in a nation with a nonwhite population of 30 percent.

A media outlet with no minorities in its D.C. bureau is guilty of “dishonest journalism,” fumed Unity’s president, Ernest Sotomayor, “because it . . . means the media company is satisfied with providing its readers or audience a skewed view of the news.”

But the argument is entirely illogical. Why should the Washington press corps, or any other occupational subgroup, be expected to exactly match the racial composition of the nation? Surely the relevant comparison is not to the percentage of nonwhites in America, but to the percentage of nonwhites in journalism. According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, minorities account for 12.5 percent of journalists working for daily newspapers. So why is it “abysmal” that a comparable proportion of journalists in those papers’ Washington bureaus are minorities as well?

And just how does the race of reporters and editors determine whether they produce “a skewed view of the news?”

Unity claims that “journalists of color bring different and necessary perspectives to their work.” Where is the evidence to prove it? Would two graduates of journalism school, both of them the product of (say) a suburban, middle-class upbringing, report a Senate hearing or a presidential press conference differently just because one of them is Scandinavian-American and the other is Japanese-American? The notion that race is a proxy for thought and belief is as odious as the Nuremberg Laws and South Africa’s former Racial Classification Law and has no more business in American journalism than they do.

It would be nice to report that Bush and Kerry used their time at the Unity podium to condemn the organization’s obsession with skin color, and to remind the journalists in the room that true diversity, the only diversity worth fighting for, is intellectual diversity: the diversity of minds.

But there was no “Sister Souljah moment” last week. Instead, Bush and Kerry pandered shamelessly, telling Unity’s racialists exactly what they wanted to hear.

“I will do my part to bring more diversity into the media,” Kerry assured them. “As president, I will expand opportunities for people of color in the media by appointing FCC commissioners committed to enforcing equal employment and ensuring that small minority-owned broadcasters are not consolidated into extinction.”

Bush spoke the next day. “You believe that there ought to be diversity in the newsroom,” he said. “I understand that. You believe that there ought to be diversity on the editorial pages of America. I agree. You believe that there ought to be diversity behind that managing editor’s desk. I agree with that too.”

Neither candidate rose to the occasion. What the convention should have been told is that it is neither moral nor progressive to view the world through a racial prism. Unity’s “journalists of color” should have heard the blunt message that journalism does not need more reporters and editors of color. It doesn’t need more white journalists, either. What it needs are men and women of talent and integrity — adults who have no interest in a “diversity” that is merely skin-deep. Bob Jones University has abandoned its benighted fixation with color. It’s time American journalism followed suit.

Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.