Neo-cons as inheritors of the progresive tradition?
This will be controversial amongst the left-wing progressives, but I can’t help thinking that the progressive movement planted the seeds for the neo-conservative international interventionist agenda.
The core of the progressive movement was ‘new freedom’ or ‘new liberty’ which was a wordplay to reverse the liberal view.
The liberal view is that force is not allowed except in retaliation of the use of force against you or your property. This was the basis of freedom and liberty (not that this was followed all the time by politicians). The change the progressive movement brought about was to allow the use of force against people ‘for their own good’. Force should be allowed to bring ‘freedom’ which is the state brought around by the use of force. (As an aside, this is the origin of the current use of liberalism in the US - force used for a person or community’s own good is thought to be justified).
The neo-conservative international policies can be characterised as interventionism in the affairs of foreign states to bring what they view as freedom.
Where’s the difference between the progressive and neo-con view then? Apart from the area over which force is used? The progressive uses force against the individual and community, the neo-con against another state. The logic and thinking however is the same - force is justified if the end is to be called freedom.
Is it any wonder that Tony Blair, a product of the progressive tradition in the UK, went along with the US in the ill-fated adventure in Iraq? Especially after he’d seen the relative success of intervention in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
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May 21st, 2007 at 11:33 am
Liberals, “progressives” and neo-cons are all focussed to some degree on emancipation.
The most difficult question that emancipation throws up is the degree to which one may use force to free oneself, or others.
Most of us sympathise with the use of force to throw off a colonial aggressor or to oust a dictatorship. My plans to liberate myself from oppressive taxation by bombing HMRC would be frowned upon (especially by Mark Valladeres!).
When it comes to freeing other nations from their own, home-grown dictators, however, the angst really sets in. Do we invade Afghanistan to rid it of the Taliban? Or Iraq to rid it of Saddam? Even if it means going along with George Bush and Tony Blair? Will lead to civil war? Will destroy our reputations internationally?
Or do we leave the Sudanese to emancipate themselves over the corpses of a third of a million Darfur innocents?
This is the stuff of which nightmares and protest marches are made.
May 21st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I think this is a reworking of a now well-established argument i.e. that the familiar left-to-right political spectrum is insufficient, or even entirely redundant. The left-wing ‘progressive’ who wants to boss you around for your own good is no different from the right-wing ‘traditionalist’ who wants to boss you about because God told him to; the moral equivalence is absolute.
This applies to foreign policy too. The whole concept of ‘liberal interventionism’ is problematic, not to say deeply flawed.