The Neoconservative persuasion

My post below elicited good responses. I am usually exhausted by the self-referential and semantically muddled nature of most political discussions...but I perceived a sincere and genuine attempt at clarity by most participants, so I want to elaborate a few points.

• Below I mostly elaborated the Neoconservative separation from the rest of the Right. My overall point is that contrary to the perceptions of many insular Leftists/liberals/Democrats, Neoconservatives are the moderates in the Republican/Right movement.
  


• There are obviously cleavages in the Neoconservative movement. As noted below, someone like Francis Fukuyama is hard to pin down. A Japanese American with an undergraduate degree in Classics and the son of a Congregationalist minister who is a self-described Aristotelian, he defies many of the sociological parameters that help define the bounds of Neoconservatism. His relatively optimistic outlook expressed in books like The End of History or The Great Disruption leaven his more conventional caution as expressed in Our Posthuman Future. The Fukuyama-Krauthammer affair highlighted that Neoconservatism is not a monolithic movement, rather, it is about individuals guided by broad principles coming to specific conlusions.
  


• Since 9/11 foreign policy has loomed large, and so the most muscular and "Jacksonian" aspect of Neoconservatism has manifested itself, but we are in this republican experiment for the long haul. Though I am not one who thinks Iraq has been a success, neither it is an inevitable Gotterdammerung.
  


• I am not sure that the Neoconservatives are even particularly partisan. After all, Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have been a founding member of the movement, but remained a life long Democrat, and managed to receive an 85% rating from the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. It guess it comes down to this: is William Kristol or David Horowitz the archetype of a Neoconservative? I would argue that Kristol is more typical, a partisan, but one who ultimately puts principles on public display, even if they contradict the party line. Kristol has even frankly admitted that if he had to pick between the isolationist Right and centrist interventionist Democrats (ie; The New Republic) as allies he would prefer the latter over the former.
  

 
Now, there was a suggestion below that it is fine for the Democrats to use the term "Neocon" as a smear to win elections, just as Republicans have used "liberal." This is not totally without merit, the republic has been characterized by political acrimony since at least the 1796 election. Our relatively narrow-window of historical memory allows us to forget that there is nothing new about down and dirty campaigning, that hooliganism is as old as the Roman republic.

That being said, many would assert that the Roman republic was doomed by its expansion after the wars with Carthage, in IT parlance it did not "scale" well. When the American republic was founded it had only two and a half million inhabitants, and only one out of ten white males could vote. Today, we have 300 million inhabitants, and over 120 million votes were cast in the last presidential election. I will be frank in that I fear for the scalability for the republican system. For all the instabilities and faction that characterized the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, I wonder if perhaps the political system was more robust because it was not as extensive, and, because the information networks were not as tight and superluminal.

That is why I worry about the hyperfactionalism that can characterize the system, the debasement of language, communication and the obstacles to discourse that are fostered by short term election considerations. Misuse of language in and of itself is not necessarily the death of a political system, but in confluence with a growing niche existence fostered by targeted marketing, self-selected residential habits and the atomization that is the byproduct of the modern world, perhaps we should reconsider trading in the possibilities of future amity for short term acrimony in the interests of victory. Defeat has always been followed by reformulation and repackaging by the "loyal opposition" in this country, but this is not a human universal, in many nations defeat is followed by purges and pogroms, explaining the violence and ferocity that characterizes intercine faction through history. The buffering and dampening influence of community, locality and trans-social institutions that bind us across the chasms of faction seem less robust, at least in comparison to the gargantuan demographic expanse of our polity. The daily ties that bind seem to be diminishing as a proportion of our experience of life. The historical memories of republican glories have been diluted by hyperawareness of injustice and inequity that characterized the pre-modern age.

The illness that I am alluding to can not be cured by one act, one decision, rather, it will be ameliorated only individual acts of small consequence summed together into a greater whole. A proper and accurate characterization of those who one disagrees with seems like a small and tenable step.