Clinton Democrats Are Literally Neocons

Caitlin Johnstone
Extra Newsfeed
Published in
5 min readJun 3, 2017

“Literally” is one of the most misused words in the English language today, but that is not the case with the headline of this article. I am not claiming here that pro-establishment Democrats are figuratively neocons, and I do not mean to say that they are hecka-hella-kinda-sorta like neocons. I say literally because the Democratic party is now quite literally an overwhelmingly neoconservative party in every way that matters.

At the time of this writing, the so-called “March for Truth” is currently underway, a demonstration in which establishment liberals attempt to leverage Trump’s unpopularity with the left to get true leftists and progressives onboard with their Russiagate conspiracy theory. The stated goal of these demonstrations is to draw attention to their demand for an investigation into the possibility of Trump’s collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election, but it’s unclear how they plan on bringing more attention to something which already gets unlimited ad nauseum coverage on all media every single day of the motherfucking week. I’ve heard it speculated that their demands include extending the Rachel Maddow Show to six hours in length and adding an eighth day of the week for more #TrumpRussia coverage.

As these brave warriors of the McResistance don their pussyhats and prepare to project their inner childhood wounds upon an icy potato patch on the other side of the planet that they never spent any percentage of their day thinking about until less than a year ago, I am reminded of an interesting article I read a while back by award-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry titled “The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow”. Parry details how most members of the “neocon royalty family” Kagans moved away from their traditional allies in the Republican party as Trump knocked them down one-by-one in the last election cycle, and began aligning with Hillary Clinton and the “liberal hawks”, whose agendas aligned beautifully with their own. These elites of the neocon think tanks were already pointing their omnicidal ideology at full-fledged collaboration with Clinton and plotting ways to bring the liberal base on board with neoconservative foreign policy once Clinton and Trump emerged as the clear presidential frontrunners.

Parry writes:

With Trump in the White House, Official Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment was down but far from out. The neocons were tossed a lifeline by Democrats and liberals who detested Trump so much that they were happy to pick up Nuland’s fallen banner of the New Cold War with Russia. As part of a dubious scheme to drive Trump from office, Democrats and liberals hyped evidence-free allegations that Russia had colluded with Trump’s team to rig the U.S. election.

Did you know that neoconservatism originated in the Democratic party? And did you further know that one of the foremost positions of these early neoconservatives was to push for a harder, anti-détente foreign policy toward the USSR? These people used to be leftists, then, uncomfortable with the influence of the hippie movement on the political left and their anti-anti-Soviet Union rhetoric, found themselves moving further and further to the right until they found themselves being called “neo-conservatives” by their former peers. “Neo” means new; they’re called what they’re called because they weren’t always aligned with the political right.

So all that has happened is that the neocons have come back to their home party. This Russophobic, interventionist ideology swung into the Republican party in the seventies and eighties, and now it’s swung almost all the way back, and it’s somehow managed to infect most of the Democratic party in the process.

Have you recently found yourself wanting to vomit as one of your liberal friends says something like “Gosh, I never would have believed I’d agree with Dick Cheney on anything, but he really makes sense here” or “It’s exciting that we’re finally able to come together and agree on a few things with people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham”? They act like it’s some kind of ideology-transcending unification in the face of great evil, but nothing could be further from the truth: in reality, they’re finding themselves agreeing with the neocons lately because they themselves have become neocons. They are the same ideology, and they have become the evil.

Establishment liberals are now literally neocons. Their “socially liberal, fiscally moderate” domestic policy is functionally identical to the “moderate conservative” domestic policy Republican neocons have always held, and the foreign policy they’re being duped into backing could not be more neoconservative if you gave it a bad haircut and named it Paul Wolfowitz. The inching toward “humanitarian” regime change with Syria, the senseless escalations with a nuclear superpower in Russia, all to the cheerleading of Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats, means there’s no reason to stop calling these people anything other than what they are.

There’s a term “neoliberals” being thrown around a lot on the true left as a pejorative for establishment liberals, but it doesn’t point at the disease we’re all trying to purge ourselves of very accurately. Neoliberalism is a school of economic thought, and it dominates American economic policy with the full support of both parties. So while it is technically accurate to call Clinton and Obama neoliberals, it’s also correct to apply that label to Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. Establishment liberals may be neoliberals, but they are also neocons, and in my opinion that’s the more important ideology to focus on since, as Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has rightly said, neoconservatives have “an ideology of world supremacy” which has made them “the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed.”

It doesn’t get any more dangerous than escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower, and this Russiagate nonsense has been used to manufacture public support for troop buildups in Syria and along the Russian border, as well as for a proxy war in Ukraine, and there are a million tiny moving parts in each of those conflicts which could go wrong at any minute and lead to something horrific. It is entirely likely that there will be yet another provocative gas attack in Syria, which NATO powers are already saying will mean full-scale military intervention in Syria, and there is already ample reason to believe that not only was the sarin gas attack in April a false flag launched by someone other than the Assad government, but that the 2013 attack was as well. Russian troops are still conducting operations in Syria with the goal of preserving Syrian statehood.

The correct response to all things Russiagate and anti-Russia is “I am so sick of your neocon agenda.” The sky is blue, a spade is a spade, and establishment liberals are neocons. Let’s call them what they are, and stop them. We need to find a way to purge the world of this toxic mind virus once and for all.

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