Michael Kinsley thinks he’s nailing the neocons: they criticized Jimmy Carter’s attempts to promote freedom and democracy in the 70s, and what are they doing now but promoting freedom and democracy? While Kinsley does note that there’s no more Cold War, he doesn’t say a word about the global war on terror. And as Steven Hayward has demonstrated, Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign all too often led him, especially after his presidency, to embrace groups and individuals who actually were part of the problem we now face.
In any event, until Kinsley offers us a more realistic strategy for waging the global war on terror, I’m not buying his critique of the neoconservatives.
Not the same thing. Old Peanut Breath thought nagging evildoers who run other countries would make them see the neo-Wilsonian light. Latter-day demo-distributors figure getting the incumbent repressors evicted or shot is a better method. Sam Adams would agree.
So...
What’s the point again? The anti-democracy-promotion neocons he refers to do not seem to be very strong influencers of contemporary foreign policy. So, if he’s saying people that used to be called neocons are different than people who are now called neocons, so what?
Maybe his point is that the term, "neocon" is, ultimately, as meaningless and flexible as "liberal" has come to be.
If so, I agree.