I was once a neocon: Why neoconservativism failed is still in the working stage. It has ballooned up to 14 pages and hovers at 11 pages now; I'm aiming for a concise, taut, and well organized 8 pages at most. I don't think Steemers want to come to Steemit to read books in one sitting.

I have been promising an article on the ideology of neoconservativism, and WHY it failed in reality, for about two weeks now. Obviously, the holidays have taken up some time, but there are two things that really interfere with the completion of the article:

• The first is that some of the ideas I was attempting to summarize really lead to interesting tangents...bam, there is another 5-10 articles to read, or a book to skim through, and then the critiques of those points of view.
• The second is a little more destructive of time: the organization of the paper grows and shrinks (mostly grows) as I gain a deeper understanding of some of the ideas, and whether or not they should be included. As an argument becomes "too much to add", I have to reorder other points.

The TLDR of the article

Although I am still writing it (and re-writing it, and deleting, and re-adding....etc), I will make my main point now. Neoconservativism failed because at heart it is a Utopian ideology in which the power of government can be used to "fix" people. See my blog Utopia ALWAYS leads to Dystopia for a generic argument against Utopian thought.

Americans died to bring "democracy" to people who didn't want it, and then were told to sit back while a worse threat arose from the ashes, armed by our own politicians

Some of the tangents I am still running after, and deciding how much should be included:

• Neoconservativism has been primarily influenced by American Jewish political thought, from primarily the Left, but also from the Right.
• Most of the original "first school" of Neoconservativism were leftists who were "mugged by reality" when recognizing the danger of leftist thought...too bad they didn't fully think through the Utopian nature of their ideology. But then again. leftism appeals to our Utopian nature (which most of us do have)
• Jews have a tendency to lean left politically. You would think that after the National Socialists of Germany and the Communists of Russia, that any sane Jew would run away screaming from the nearest leftist. However, there are some religious and cultural reasons that lead to this tendency. There isn't room enough to discuss Johnson's A History of the Jews and Tzedakah but that discussion would be illuminating.
• Following from the Jewish identity component of the ideology, there is a valid question of how far neocon policy has favored Israel at a cost to America. I am going to note this in the article, but I'm not going into a lot of detail, as the question is a hot-button issue, that for many defines the entire neocon position. I am not going to take a position on the issue...at this time ;> It is certainly important enough to discuss, but that is for another time.
• The neocons have long claimed antisemitism was behind criticism of their ideology. There was a point in time where I bought into this fully. The neocons' behavior in this last election in support of the leftist corruptocrat Clinton gave me some very specific examples where some neocons flat out lied in antisemitic claims (that's the leftist in them coming out, snark!). Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, and Donald Trump were the primary targets of this dishonesty. FWIW, Trump's daughter married a Jew, converted to Judaism, and gave Trump little Jewish grandbabies....I'm suuuure Trump is plotting concentration camps.
• Intervention and preemptive strikes are components of neocon policy, but that does not mean that any given use of these tools is a neocon decision; occupying a country and trying to "democratize it" are. A great deal of criticism of neoconservativism is based from an isolationist viewpoint. Threats to the United States should be dealt with in their countries, not ours; the neocons and isolationists ignore this central point, or rationalize justifications to support their ideological positions, not to honestly identify security threats. Intervention is not necessarily neocon!
• From my own perspective, assassination should be the main foreign policy tool the United States uses against security threats, but that is an argument for another time ( I'd have about 50 books written by now if I wasn't such a lazy ass)
• There is quite a bit of overlap in the concepts of globalism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism. I had started to try to suss out the full definitions and boundaries between the concepts, but the academic tendency to use vague definitions to make their own point is making it hard to show how these concepts have driven our policy in tandem for some time. Now, the results of these policies have obviously been failures, but assigning the most likely factors in that failure becomes harder to do when Professor Gobbldygook starts reassigning the meaning of words so that his thesis comes out true [a digression for scientists, mainly social scientists...a negative result to a proposition is just as valuable in the search for truth as a positive result is...dumbasses]

Now that feels good. A lot of the above has been written in, and written out, of the post. Seeing it on the page in it's own context kind of relieves me from trying to jam it into the other post.

I've been holding off on more fiction until I get the article done; since my fiction has had the better payouts, I'm a little frustrated that this is taking so long to complete ;>