Digby: Noble Neocons

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



Noble Neocons
Submitted by Digby on December 6, 2007 - 9:48pm.

Like virtually everyone else on the liberal side of the spectrum I've been greatly intrigued by Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine," which posits that economic elites practice "disaster capitalism" around the world by taking advantage of the disorientation caused by crisis. It's a very coherent and compelling thesis that gives many of us, for the first time, a framework from which to understand globalization, preemptive war and massive government failure, among other things.

But one of the things that I've found puzzling is the idea that the human motivation for this elaborate regime is plain old greed. Klein addresses this concern in a recent post on her blog:

Since I began touring with my book The Shock Doctrine, I have had a number of exchanges like this, revolving around the same basic question: When hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle-down effects will build equitable societies--or are they just deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate feeding frenzy? Put bluntly, Has the world been transformed over the past three decades by lofty ideology or by lowly greed?

A definitive answer would require reading the minds of men like Dick Cheney and Paul Bremer, so I tend to dodge. The ideology in question holds that self-interest is the engine that drives society to its greatest heights. Isn't pursuing their own self-interest (and that of their campaign donors) compatible with that philosophy? That's the beauty: They don't have to choose. Unfortunately, this rarely satisfies graduate students looking for deeper meaning. Thankfully I now have a new escape hatch: quoting Alan Greenspan.

His autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, has been marketed as a mystery solved: The man who bit his tongue for eighteen years as head of the Federal Reserve was finally going to tell the world what he really believed. And Greenspan has delivered, using his book and the surrounding publicity as a platform for his "libertarian Republican" ideology, chiding George W. Bush for abandoning the crusade for small government and revealing that he became a policy-maker because he thought he could advance his radical ideology more effectively "as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer" on the margins. Yet what is most interesting about Greenspan's story is what it reveals about the ambiguous role of ideas in the free-market crusade. Given that Greenspan is perhaps the world's most powerful living free-market ideologue, it is significant that his commitment to ideology seems rather thin and perfunctory--less zealous belief, more convenient cover story.

...(snip)...

I have written a bit about Randism here at The Big Con, (even in the context of "The Shock Doctrine") and wondered how much of this thinking has permeated our culture over the years. I think it's significant, and agree with Klein's pithy definition of Randism. But I don't agree that greed alone is what motivates disaster capitalism, even if Alan Greenspan is a high priest of Randy Conservatism. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/noble_neocons?tx=3