Flagpole Syndrome

I’m generally congenial to the alternatives which have arisen to National Review, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, but the habit of some among them recycling palaeotrash tropes which were asinine twenty years ago and remain so today is distressing. (For starters, there is no such thing as a ‘neocon’).
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Nearly 30 years ago, Thos. Fleming made the baffling decision to make his publication the press agent for violent Serb particularists (and was rewarded for it with a 70% decline in audited circulation). In the last dozen years, it’s been the mode in that sect (more on the street level than among people who have to put their names on it, to be sure) to be stooges of Vladimir Putin (often incorporating blatant and demonstrable falsehoods into their discussion). Antic Jew-hatred is also common in that strand of discussion, though, again, not among people who put their names on it.

What Washington said at the time made sense. The end of the 18th century wasn’t much different from its beginning.
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In terms of our productive capacity, we were at best a second-tier power and were protected by a pair of oceans. Another element that may have weighed on his thinking was the unfortunate effort of Revolutionary / Napoleonic France to conquer continental Europe.

Slightly off topic.
Flagpole syndrome is *exactly* why ad orientem has always been a bad idea. Anybody in the pews that believes in the Real Presence will gaze at the tabernacle “flagpole” in a way that is neither appropriate nor healthy for a man’s ego.

I always heard that a “NeoCon” was a somewhat reformed Trotskyite who advocated for big business and overseas expansion/domination. The “Trotskyite” part came from the former proclivities of some of the founders of the movement, Kristol, Podhoretz, et al.
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You always heard that from idiots. The term ‘neo-conservative’ was propagated by Peter Steinfels in a book published in 1979 about a collection of journalists and academicians who were disaffected leftists of one sort or another. This was not a novel phenomenon. The crew Wm. Buckley assembled in 1955 was also laden with disaffected leftists, most prominently Whittaker Chambers. George Nash in his history of post-war starboard journalism (published in 1976) had a short section on Irving Kristol and a few others. These people were admirers of Henry Jackson and later Ronald Reagan, no more inclined toward ‘overseas expansion / domination’ that the modal viewpoint within both parties during the period running from 1948 to 1968 or the modal viewpoint in the Republican Party from 1968 to 1992.
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A number of them had belonged to a discussion circle at City College of New York ca. 1939 whose leading spirit was Seymour Martin Lipset; most (not all) in that circle were Trotskyists at that time, but had long since ceased to advocate any sort of unconventional politics. Sidney Hook maintained an interest in Marxist philosophical discussion and there was a small set of ‘Schactmanites’ associated with a remnant of the old Socialist Party. That’s as close as you get to ‘somewhat reformed’ Trotskyists among them. The most prominent among them were Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Joseph Epstein. Kristol abandoned Marxism in 1942 (and had explained why in print) and at the time of Steinfels writing was a Republican voter with a 14 year history as a promoter of critiques of liberal social policy. Podhoretz was considered something of a radical between 1963 and 1968 but otherwise had never had any association with unconventional political outfits or perspectives. Joseph Epstein was a quite ordinary Democratic voter who had once worked for a Great Society era agency down in the Ozarks but was primarily a literary scholar who abandoned the left around 1977. They had their differences with other people associated with starboard opinion journalism but were, in the late Cold War period and after, mainstream Republicans. There was a small corps of opinion journalists who found them objectionable for one reason or another. These were associated with the Rockford Institute but included a few others. Some of the more vulgar among them painted a rather lurid portrait of their activities and generated witless memes which you can see in Mr. Posobiec’s remarks.

Clinton-
We are making exactly the same point.

The fact that you got upvoted more than I did just shows that *you* made the point better than I did!

Thanks for the assist.

Art Deco: Another thing that you can add is that the French and Russian revolutionaries ended up at each others throats in power struggles. IIRC the French revolutionaries went completely off their rockers like the left is doing.