This long and fascinating piece by James Piereson, appearing in the WSJ, inadvertantly documents a hugely important shift: the move from foundation support for libertarianism in the 40s-60s to neoconservatism today. This has been as disastrous as it as been effective.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/3641/from-libertarianism-to-neoconservatism/
From Libertarianism to Neoconservatism
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Agreed Walter. Notice something else – that shift from libertarianism to neoconservatism is accompanied by a shift away from an investment in ideas to a sort of anti-intellectualism. If you read that piece closely, you can see that thsese two moves are really one and the same. The investments in libertarianism were investments in ideas and intellectual activity, knowing that ideas move the world. The more recent shift to neoconservatism is both a move toward the “practical” and political, as well as a rejection of the importance of the intellectual.
The results, I’d say, are tragically obvious.
Well sure, Steve. Like all duplicitous feudalists, the neo-con-men want serfs to make important life-decisions based on emotions instead of intellect.
Of course! Emotions are easily manipulated, while reason and logic are not.
Austrian economics is unpopular among statists for much the same reason. It lets observation and reason interfere with idealism and political dogma.
The article is certainly interesting – and offers many useful ideas to people sympathetic to liberal (rightly understood) thought in countries where the prospects for liberty are still (and always have been) bleak, like Latin America. However, it would have been interesting to hear something about the influence of Christian religious revival in the “shift” from classical liberalism to neoconservatism in American conservatism (I know that is a little redundant).
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