The Neoconservative Passion for Alexis de Tocqueville

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Neoconservative doctrine was written by academics and based on the writings of scholars, from Plato to Aristotle, Locke to Rousseau, and everything in between.

But one of the scholars often quoted, is Alexis de Tocqueville, a nineteenth century political thinker, who like many shaping the minds of young neocons, was born into wealth as a member of the aristocracy.

And he wrote of poverty as a man who had never known it, only observed it, yet his 1835 Essay on Pauperism, is used to justify the right's reluctance to help the poor.

What Tocqueville saw as a basic problem, was the definition of poverty.

"Among civilized peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty... In a country where the majority is ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, who thinks of giving clean clothes, healthy food, comfortable quarters to the poor? The majority of the English, having all these things, regard their absence as a frightful misfortune; society believes itself bound to come to the aid of those who lack them.... In England, the average standard of living a man can hope for in the course of his life is higher than in any other country of the world. This greatly facilitates the extension of pauperism in that kingdom."

So poverty is a state of mind? A comparative?

If our poor people are better off than the poor in central Africa, are they really poor?

Imagine going to your boss and asking for a raise and she tells you that you are already overpaid when compared to workers in Third World countries.

But workers in Third World countries aren't spending $1.30 a litre for gas to get to work, or 8 bucks for a box of cereal.

The definition of poverty has to be relative to how the rest of the population lives.

I'm not a socialist, and don't believe that if one family has a wide screen TV, then all families should have a wide screen TV.

However, I do believe that in a country with such vast natural resources as Canada, that everyone should be clothed, fed and housed. And everyone should have equal access to healthcare and education.

Neoconservatives do not.

David Frum is right when he says that government should never protect us "against the miseries caused by idleness", but is wrong when he says that only the indigent, or most destitute in society should be given handouts.

Remember the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

Neocons believe in the power and responsibility of the individual. Striving for equality will only bring those better off down to the level of those with very little. And they use that philosophy to justify pandering to the rich and ignoring the poor. A plantation mentality where the rich, (whose wealth is proof that they are smarter and more deserving than most), will in turn, take care of the poor.

What rot.

But it's that rot that determines Stephen Harper's actions.

“These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity”. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.”(Stephen Harper, The Bulldog, National Citizens Coalition, February 1997)

I'm very concerned with the approaching perfect storm in Ontario. A Harper majority (with a cabinet of many ex Mike Harris disciples), Harris protege Tim Hudak, (whose wife Deb Hutton was Harris's gatekeeper), as premier of the province and Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto.

Like most neoconservative governments, Mike Harris's created the highest number of homeless people in the history of our province. And what was worse, he didn't care. One of his henchmen, Jim Flaherty, simply suggested that we throw them all in jail.

And if a person froze to death living in their car, at least they had a car.

Ford is already talking about selling off public housing in Toronto. Maybe he hopes to drive the poor out of his city, but will only drive them into the streets.



Hudak wants to eliminate or drastically reduce the public service, suggesting that because they make a good wage, small businesses can't compete with government in the labour market. What the fool doesn't realize is that those good wages keep many small businesses afloat.

When Mike Harris ran Ontario, we had a Liberal government federally. When Brian Mulroney was prime minister, we had Liberal and NDP governments in Ontario.

If Hudak takes Ontario, there will be no counterweight.

It's absolutely terrifying.

My Conversation With Irving Kristol on Welfare and Wages

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The late Irving Kristol (d. 2009) was a self-proclaimed Straussian and by his own labelling, the "Godfather of Neoconversation". He wrote a series of essays and books that became the basis for the movement.

In one he discusses "welfare" or "relief" and why he finds the concept absurd. I would like to challenge Mr. Kristol, because I find his arguments absurd.

Leo Strauss often had "conversations" with Plato, or at least at times his challenges and insights read like conversations, so I would like to converse with and challenge Irving Kristol.

I realize that he was an intellectual and certainly out of my league, but I'm going to invoke Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing."

There is too much compliance to what we are told is good for us, and not enough thinking. Because when you break it down, it's pretty simple.

We are continually transferring huge amounts of money to a government who is supposed to be using that money for the betterment of all citizens, and instead are using the money for the betterment of a chosen few.

And that is something, I "think" about often.

Essay on Pauperism

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance. " - Stephen Harper (1)

Irving Kristol begins his musings on welfare by invoking Alexis de Tocqueville's, 1835 Essay on Pauperism. Tocqueville asks why, in the most "opulent" nation in the world [England], was there such an extraordinary problem of "pauperism".

Concluding that too much public assistance can create idleness, he and Kristol also see a problem with the definition of poverty or pauperism. To the peasant, the ultimate goal was to have enough to eat. There was no desire to accumulate wealth. The only concern was survival.

However, in a modern city, the standards were different.

... in an "opulent" society, the idea of poverty itself undergoes a continual redefinition. The poor experience not only the need for a guaranteed minimum; they also suffer from what a modern sociologist would call "relative deprivation." Tocqueville puts the matter this way: "Among civilized peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty... In a country where the majority is ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, who thinks of giving clean clothes, healthy food, comfortable quarters to the poor? The majority of the English, having all these things, regard their absence as a frightful misfortune; society believes itself bound to come to the aid of those who lack them.... In England, the average standard of living a man can hope for in the course of his life is higher than in any other country of the world. This greatly facilitates the extension of pauperism in that kingdom." (2)

So the definition of poverty in the city, is different than that in the country.

The reasons for that, at least when this was written almost two centuries ago, was first off that those living in poverty in the city, had no land to work for food. But also their impoverishment was visible to those who took so much for granted.

How can you live conscience free, in a society with so much disparity?

The Welfare Explosion

The next body of work that Kristol critiqued was Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. He calls their book "simpleminded", and "so crude in a quasi-Marxist way, that one is embarrassed to summarize it."

He scoffs at the notion from Piven and Cloward, that "Relief arrangements [under capitalism] are not shaped by the impulse to charity ... [they are] created and sustained to help deal with the malfunctions inherent in market economies."

Poverty in a modern society is often created by unemployment, and unemployment is often created when the "market economy" is in turmoil. The first to be cut by the corporate sector, during hard times, is the labour force, which creates a downward spiral.

The misguided notion that by giving more money to the corporate sector, jobs will be saved or created, has been proven over and over to be a myth. When companies were bailed out at the beginning of the latest "downturn", much of the money was used to give bonuses to executives and to buy up other companies that had gone bust.

Unemployment is still high, yet headlines in financial sections of newspapers, repeatedly include the words "record profits".

Piven and Cloward also wrote:

Relief arrangements are usually initiated or expanded in response to the political disorders that sometimes follow from the sharp economic downturns or dislocations that periodically beset market systems. The purpose of relief-giving at such times is not to ease hunger and want but to deal with civil disorder among the unemployed. (2)

Revolutions are often ignited by the lack of bread, real and metaphorical. And since Canada's crime rate is now at the lowest in our history, could this be why Stephen Harper is so intent on building more prisons?

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" - Ebenezer Scrooge

So My Dear Mr. Kristol. This is What I "Think"

“These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity”. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.” - Stephen Harper, (The Bulldog, National Citizens Coalition, February 1997)

Tocqueville also wrote that "There are two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of life." The basis of Neoconservatism or Libertarianism, is that everyone should look after themselves. But how can you find work when you have no clothing to wear, no food to eat, or no roof over your head?

Maybe if we take care of the first incentive, the second one will have a better chance of prevailing. We can always find money to give to Big Business or war, so there is no excuse not to channel a bit to our nation's disadvantaged, who might actually want to get out of the cycle of poverty.

Apparently the NDP and Conservatives are negotiating terms for the acceptance of the January budget. NDP finance critic, Thomas Mulcair, wants "future corporate cuts to be more targeted to ensure companies are investing in jobs and productivity."

"Future corporate tax cuts"? What happened to the NDP? Those terms should have been compulsory 50 billion dollars ago. From the day that Stephen Harper invited his corporate backers to slurp from the public trough. That is our money and we don't want "corporate tax cuts" that promise so much and give so little.

That money could have gone, and should be going, to actual job creation. If the NDP buy into this, they are going to lose most of their base.

Maybe they need to read Linda McQuaig's column: The growth of extreme inequality in Canada

The massive upward flow of income has largely been invisible to the public, even though it may well amount to the most significant change in Canadian society in decades. The impact on Canada's social fabric is huge and likely to grow. Recent research -- particularly the work of British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett -- shows that less equal societies almost always have more violence, more disease, more mental health problems, higher infant mortality rates, reduced life expectancies, as well as less social cohesion. The effects are most pronounced at the bottom, but are evident throughout the society.

Or John Grace's review of the new book, Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that he wrote for the UK Guardian.

They say, it's not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off. Because it's not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor.

That is the only issue that the NDP should be raising. Not what to do with "future corporate tax cuts".

Irving Kristol speaks of the fact that welfare payments were based on the poverty level, which means that they are at the same as the lowest wage earner's income. But the problem is not the amount of "relief" but the fact that wages are so low. There's no reason for it.

And if he felt that this meant that people wouldn't work, as a result, he might want to think about a national childcare plan, because often those on assistance are single parents, who can't work for poverty level wages, and pay someone else to look after their children while they work.

He also felt that welfare took away a man's masculinity: "... welfare robs the head of the household of his economic function, and tends to make of him a "superfluous man." And he suggests that if single mothers are paid to raise their children, they will stay single or get rid of their male partner.

Notwithstanding the inequality of that notion, the problem again relates not only to unemployment, but the ability of people to work. Food, clothing, shelter and childcare. Those needs must first be met.

And jobs paying higher than the poverty level, provide revenue from income tax, that can go to helping others to abandon their pauperism.

Yes, there will always be cheats, just as there will always be Big Business demanding more and more of our tax dollars, in some perverse sense of entitlement.

So my dear Mr. Kristol. Neoconservatism is failing society, but thanks for playing. And to my dear Mr. Mulcair. Give your head a shake.

"Courage, my friends; 'tis not too late to build a better world." - Tommy Douglas

Soures:

1. Full text of Stephen Harper's 1997 speech, Canadian Press, December 14, 2005

2. Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, By Irving Kristol, The Free Press, 1995, ISBN: 0-02-874021-1, Pg. 43-49

One-Eyed Shieks and Holy Wars. How we Got it so Wrong

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

U.S. President Obama has come out this week suggesting that gains are being made in Afghanistan, though the progress is fragile.

In other words, they have no idea what they're doing.

U.S. intelligence supports my assessment.

The Americans drew the Soviet Union into invading the country in 1979, giving them their Vietnam, and are now caught in an unwinnable war that has gone on longer than the Soviet occupation, and threatens to continue for several more years.

15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed against about 1,000,000 Afghans, between 1979 and 1988.

And when you look at the rate of casualties in the American led invasion of Afghanistan, as represented by the chart below, we sure aren't fairing much better. And these are just the coalition forces. Thousand more civilians have fallen.


If the Americans wanted to give the Soviets their Vietnam, to weaken their military build up, they are getting it back. And while Stephen Harper has Canada trapped in the Afghan underworld, his answer is that he will now be directing the war himself, from the safety of his office. Rick Hillier calls it "crap!" I agree.

So How Did we Get it so Wrong?

The end of the Second World War brought on the Cold War, and the world's super powers spent enormous amounts of money building up an arsenal of advanced weaponry, in what Hannah Arendt described as an "apocalyptic chess game".

The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. Hence, warfare—from time immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes—has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all its glamour. (1)

It was a spy war as they all kept a close watch on each other, no one really wanting to use their weapons in what would have been a "universal suicide".

But this created another problem, because as the super powers became both omnipotent and impotent, smaller nations were left virtually unrestricted in the game of one-upmanship.

... in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are "underdeveloped," and because technical superiority can "be much more of a liability than an asset" in guerrilla wars. What all these uncomfortable novelties add up to is a complete reversal in the relationship between power and violence, foreshadowing another reversal in the future relationship between small and great powers. (1)

So the threats did not necessarily come from countries with nuclear capabilities, but from small groups "able to upset the strategic balance", by launching attacks that cost them very little.

And this bears an ominous similarity to one of political science's oldest insights, namely that power cannot be measured in terms of wealth, that an abundance of wealth may erode power, that riches are particularly dangerous to the power and well-being of republics. (1)

And since many of these new "armies" were stateless, who could the super powers wage war against? The CIA kept track of known terrorist cells, and did their best to keep them contained, but it was still presenting a huge problem for the military-industrial complex.

They had enormous weaponry but few targets, that allowed their use on any large scale.

Enter the Neoconservatives and Their "War on Terror"

In his 'Battlefields of the 1980s', General Andre Beaufre points out, that only "in those parts of the world not covered by nuclear deterrence" is war still possible, so the challenge for the Neoconservatives was to wage war in areas unrestrained by "nuclear deterrence".

But how to get Americans on board. They had already interfered in the affairs of the oil rich Middle East, but needed something bigger.

An enemy. A face. And fear.

Then 9/11 provided the perfect trifecta, though it was only the catalyst. The planning for this had been taking place for several years beforehand, when Bernard Lewis adapted Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, into a blueprint for war.

And through clever messaging, the American Neocons were able to sell the notion of an enormous Jihad. One launched by "savages" who had to be destroyed or their entire country would be demolished.

They "didn't start it", but they were sure going to finish it. Eyes lit up, keyboards clicked away and the landscape was awash in yellow ribbons. Meanwhile, the Bush administration used homey rhetoric to reach the masses, knowing that few intellects would find their theory of a massive Jihad against America logical.

Not that terrorism isn't real, but there are other ways of keeping it contained, without the senseless slaughter of so many.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Though Osama Bin Ladin went to his grave in 2001, denying any involvement in 9/11, he became the face of the war. Every now and then an actor would come out and make another tape, to keep fear at just the right level. It didn't make Bin Laden any less dead, but who was going to question?

However, even before Bin Laden became a household name, the Jihad against America had a leader. Omar Abdel Rahman, also called the "One-Eyed Sheik". He was apparently behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, which at the time, was not considered the work of a mastermind.

However, it did prove to be an embarrassment for the CIA and others, especially when the person who allegedly planted the bomb, returned to the rental agency requesting a refund because the van he rented blew up. (2) I know there's a lot more to that story, but suffice it to say they were not that organized.

But that didn't stop the Bush Administration from linking this incident to their notion of a massive Jihad.

In neoconservative Andrew C. McCarthy's book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, we see just how they created a powerful enemy from several smaller "underdeveloped" ones, by using myths and creative language. And yes I do on occasion read books by neocons. It's the only way I can get inside Stephen Harper's head. (have you seen the movie Jacob's Ladder? It kinda' looks like that in there. I scream a lot)

He starts out complaining that the government's main focus after the 1993 incident, was handling the fall out. Aghast, he questions why, after "the most brazen attack against the American homeland since Pearl Harbour had taken place". (3) Really? Since Pearl Harbour?

He then fancifies Rahman, who was indeed a horrible man, and currently in prison with no chance of ever being released. But to equate him those who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour, is a bit of a stretch.

But then McCarthy reminds his readers of the seriousness of the situation. Intelligence and containment wasn't enough. This was "war".

In terms of actual national commitment, such wars translate into a somewhat higher priority than the dogged pursuit of tax cheats and corporate fraudsters. To be sure, jihad differs from Wars on Drugs, Poverty, Disease. Incivility, Intolerance, Greenhouse Gases, or whatever the next Flavor of the Month may be. Jihad, after all, actually does involve warfare: real bombs, real victims, and real death. But the distinction is lost when the side that declares only rhetorical war is exclusively on the receiving end of the blows ... (3)

America was the "victim". They had been taking all the blows, and never fought back. So forget all the other nonsense. Pardon the corporate fraudsters (as George Bush did). Forget about poverty, disease and Global Warming (as George Bush did). Heck you could even forget being civil to each other.

Every waking moment and every red cent had to be put into fighting this Jihad. (as George Bush did)

And where did it get them? Iraq is in a mess and Afghanistan has been taken over by the criminal element. They are still chasing ghosts, while all but ignoring domestic problems, that are spiralling out of control.

And to top it off, the Jihadists are more powerful than ever, because the invasion has only increased the recruitment.

Again, Neoconservatism is the god that failed and we need to rethink this war.

Sources:

1. On Violence, by Hannah Arendt, Harvest Books, 1970, ISBN: 978-0-15-669500-8, Pg. 3

2. He wanted his money back: Insistence on a Refund for a Van Led to the Arrest of Blast Suspect, by Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, March 5, 1993.

3. Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, By Andrew C. McCarthy, Encounter Books, 2008, ISBN: 13-978-1-59403-213-4, Pg. 5