Encroaching Neoconservative Totalitarianism

Today we face the crisis of NEOCONSERVATIVE FASCISM.

This crisis can be read through its myriad symptoms.

One symptom is the rise of xenophobic and authoritarian individuals and philosophies within our formal structures of government.

Today in The Wall Street Journal I read that the Anti-Defamation League and Muslim groups throughout the US are in strong opposition to a proposed aide for US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, a vehement neoconservative:

Don Nissenbaum (2108, June 2-3). Pick for Bolton Aide Draws Criticism. The Wall Street Journal, p. A4.

"As a conservative analyst, Mr. Fleitz has called for the US to declare war formally on a broadly defined global jihad movement; suggested that most mosques in the US are incubators for subversion or violence; and denounced some interfaith dialogue efforts in the US as a move by 'stealth jihadists' to undermine the country's democratic values"

In my book, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (2008) I describe alignments and clashes between:

a) the neoliberal economic and political logic on the one hand
b) the neoconservative logic on the other hand

Although both logics of rule promote "free markets," the neoconservative logic lapses into fascism because of its romance with authoritarianism, its preference for older forms of sovereign force.

In my book, I describe how the ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired the American neoconservative imagination, shaping its foreign policy goals and strategies.

I warned that the combination of forceful government infused with xenophobic exceptionalism would result in the rise of fascism.

The appointment of John Bolton as America's National Security Advisor crystallized neoconservativism in US foreign policy. The appointment of Fleitz would take us further down this path.

It is a dangerous trajectory that will produce a totalitarian society and likely result in global annihilation of humanity (read the Left Behind Series for the most extreme road map)

Below find some excepts from my book (here):

Within the contemporary United States, Christian conservative, neoliberal, and neoconservative foreign-policy principles, practices, and problems of government  find legitimacy in appeals to racialized constructions of origins and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

In particularly, the precepts of America’s Manifest Destiny blend with Straussian political precepts in neoconservative approaches to domestic and foreign policy. 

As Norton (2004) argued in Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, the Straussian-influenced neoconservative policy agenda has directly shaped U.S. intervention in the Middle East, engineering its policy toward Israel, and its efforts toward regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq (see also Drury, 1999; Postel, 2003).

Students of Strauss, such as Harvey Mansfield, instructed Francis Fukuyama and William Kristol, while another student, Joseph Cropsey, taught Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky (Norton, 2004). Within the academy, within conservative think tanks, and within the political apparatuses of the second Bush administration, these neoconservative thinkers and activists have endeavored to remake America and the world according to neoconservative and neoliberal principles of government (see Chapter 6).

Neoconservative governmentalities favor the use of military apparatuses to supplement market and philanthropic-based technologies of global government. In effect, neoconservatives favor reinvigorating older conceptions and practices of sovereignty.

Conservative Christians’ belief in “End Times” theology, as recently narrated in the Left Behind novels (see Standaert, 2006), has fostered support for neoconservative policy initiatives in the Middle East and unilateral support for Israel. The series, conceived by religious activist Tim LaHaye, sold over 70 million copies over the last decade (Standaert, 2006). 

Its paranoid depiction of a United Nations controlled by the forces of evil contributes to conservative Christians’ support for unilateral policy agendas and hostility toward secular approaches to global government.

Neoconservatives have cynically appealed to Christian conservative anxieties and paranoia when peddling policy initiatives….

….Totalitarianism and fascism take hold when populations organized around common articulations of national or racialized identity are mobilized by fear and anxiety. Yet, even while liberal rights are stripped, the liberal imagination cannot readily come to terms with creeping totalitarianism…..