Cold and hot, light and dark, liberal and conservative, these are not opposites: they are the ends of continuous spectra that gradually blend from one to another. In politics we pick a position somewhere on that spectrum that suits us, and that position may differ depending on which individual issue is being discussed at the time. We should all distrust the individual whose point of view is consistently right or left on every question, because that is direct evidence that it is ideology, not a consideration of public good or even enlightened self-interest which guides his thought. I have no problem with honest liberals or conservatives because I know that I will be to the right or left of them on other questions.

But I do have a problem with the growing political philosophy we now call, fairly or unfairly, for lack of a better term, neoconservative. This is not a philosophy which arises from opinions on how governments or economies should be organized, its origin is psychological and emotional. The neocon sees himself as part of an entrepreneurial elite, the class which deserves the respect and rewards which should be denied to all those who are not creative and dynamic like they are. They view the rest of us with contempt, as either government bureaucrats, parasitic intellectuals, filthy Bohemians, worthless drones, or mere consumers and employees. They feel the same way about you and me as the Communists felt about the bourgeosie, or the Nazis felt about the Jews.

Of course, the neocon rarely runs his own business; real businessmen are too busy competing against other entrepreneurs or struggling with the demands of the market and meeting a payroll to engage in endless, tiresome partisan harangues. The most toxic neocons are the ones who find themselves as consumers and employees and who feel the need to blame someone for their undeserved demotion to that contemptible state. It's always someone else's fault, never their own. They believe that their system is a meritocracy, and since they are not too successful in it, they cannot accept the obvious alternatives: either it isn't one, or they don't have any. That's why they are so bitter, they are too good to have to work for someone else. And if it only wasn't for the (insert the minority or philosophy of choice here) they wouldn't have to--we'd all be working for them.

The neocon is often likely to be a failed businessman, or someone who has never entered the marketplace himself. This is why there are so many of them in the right wing institutes and think tanks that have been coalescing on the body politic like lichens on a rotting stump. They are as far as one can be from the captains of industry they idolize. They increasingly populate the very organizations they love to despise, the media, academia, press, and now, government. The very pundits who love to tell others to "get a job" rarely have the power to hire anyone themselves, and they're just as scared of losing theirs as the rest of us are. They feel they are better than that. And they are always ready to blame others for their inability to achieve their own entrepreneurial fantasies.

This politics of envy (an epithet they have the audacity to use against their critics) is not limited to neocons, we first saw it in the French Revolution, or perhaps even earlier during the English Civil War. It is the hatred and envy expressed by those who seek power, directed, not against those who already have it (their role models), but against those who they fear are able to deny it to them (their rivals). These are the Jacobins and Puritans of the modern world, they include both the Communists in Russia, the Maoists in China, and the Fascists in all their European and American incarnations.

The politics and economics may differ, but the psychology does not, the common denominator is to remake the world in the image in which they feel they are best equipped to prosper. It manifests itself by an all-encompassing program which extends into every facet of life and which must be prosecuted by any means necessary until all who oppose them are silenced. Their wrath and invective is not limited to their ideological opposites, it is also lavished on those who might be their allies but are not sufficiently zealous. Listen to the rhetoric, it is always the same, we are right, this is the way God (or Mao, or Marx, or Hitler, or Reagan) says it has to be. And those who do not agree must be traitors.

Yes, like all those others, the neocons are always so bloody patriotic and those who oppose or even question them are always treacherous subversives. The neocon considers himself the only one who works for a living, or who has a moral compass and spiritual values, the only one who loves his country or his family, the only one who dislikes paying taxes and wants to punish criminals, the only one who values freedom or is willing to fight to preserve it. It is only the neocon who is victimized, abused and misunderstood; it's what gives him the right to do whatever is necessary to prevail against those who are weak and cowardly and deserve to be humiliated. It is everyone else who is flawed and incomplete and corrupt and evil. It is the neocons who never stumble, who never err, who somehow manage to rationalize every shortcoming, from the honest mistake anyone might make to the most obscene and hideous crimes. They reek of the self-righteous indignation of the justly persecuted.

"Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell."
Edward Abbey