Re: the Kerry smear and its antecedents (#40545)
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra on August 24, 2004 at 5:27 PM

Hi Irfan.

I just wanted to focus on one small part of your post here. You write:

BTW, as an Objectivist, don't you find it problematic that the phrase "neo-conservative" has now come to function as an epithet a la Leonard Peikoff's conception of an "inherently irrational idea" (from "Fact and Value")? Peikoff at least limited that idea to a fairly small set (fascism, Communism, etc.) Reading Objectivist/libertarian critics of the war, one gets the ideat that they've become hyper-Peikovians: it is not merely error, but outright evil to be a neo-conservative nowadays.

I, personally, would not consider it "outright evil to be a neo-conservative nowadays." Certainly not by definition. :) I'm sure this will sound like, "some of my best friends are neocons..." --- but the truth is that I have learned a lot from neocon writers (and even quote some of them), just as I have learned a lot from their intellectual predecessors who came out of the left.

Speaking only for myself, however, I've been very disappointed with those Objectivist commentators who, early on, jumped on the Bush bandwagon with little or no understanding of the neoconservative premises that were driving that bandwagon. (Some Objectivists, in fact, extolled the virtues of the neoconservatives---take a look at Robert Tracinski's praise for the "breathtaking" neocon vision---without any understanding of the neocon's Wilsonian internationalist, left-wing intellectual roots.)

Over the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time "checking" those neoconservative premises, making them transparent so-to-speak, because I believe them to be fundamentally in error.