I heard Medved on the radio a few days ago ranting about the recent meeting in Tehran between Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Supposedly during the course of the meeting Ahmadinejad held up a US dollar and proclaimed, “This is worthless.” Medved saw this as a perfect opportunity to compare Ahmadinejad to - you guessed it - Ron Paul!

The neocons’ hatred of Dr. Paul knows no bounds.

The neo-cons and their fellow travelers feel renewed energy since we are winning the Iraqi War for the second or third time in nearly five years.

I doubt he will be able to keep kosher next year.  Or am I wrong about “Crow”?

It is truly sad that the “good authority” was not able to knock some good sense into the Good Mr. Medved’s addled head back there in Palisades High School.

Medved is one sick puppy! He want’s so bad to be pulled up to the
big league and get to write for Bill Kristol, so his insanity
can be read as official neocon doctrine.

Well, Medved is full of manure, but I still think you can draw a straight line from Mather to Wilson to W.

The Pilgrims weren’t leaving a Catholic Europe behind of course, but a Protestant Europe.  For the Pilgrims, England wasn’t tolerant enough, and Holland was too tolerant.

Edmund Burke was thinking of the Pilgrims when he said, “dissent not satisfied with tolerance is not conscience but is instead ambition.” In other words, the Pilgrims wanted to be in charge of their own society.  If only that was true of their descendents today, we wouldn’t have the problem of Neocons and their ideas in high places. 

Whatever Neoconism is, it isn’t descended from the Pilgrim’s original Protestantism, that dissidence of dissent.  And whatever flaws the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of America had, they were minor compared to those of the current ruling class.

What a wonderful little post!  In a few short paragraphs you (and Mr. Watson) get to the heart of a problem the media cannot seem to articulate - or refuse to.  I had no idea the rewriting of our history by that crowd had become so blatant.  This is worse than Dennis Designated Driver Prager hosting an entire show on how those who question Lincoln’s motives and tactics during the Civil War are as bad as those who question Bush Jr. today: un-American extremists who deny idealism and goodness. 

I see a Giuliani Administration with Medved, Prager and Bennett playing propaganda ministers, air brushing over inconvenient unpersons like John Randolph and Barry Goldwater, and leading a drive to have Junior added to Mount Rushmore.  Mike Caliendo can host the unveiling the same night Kristol, now Undersecretary of Defense, nukes Berlin.

BTW, I hope some readers of this site caught Judge Napolitano at the Reason Magazine gala on CSPAN.  He delivered an impassioned speech on Constitutional history that could cost him his job at Fox.  It was the most fun I’ve had watching CSPAN since Berlusconi addressed Congress.

sebastian- prager is the WORST

@Michael Morris:

“Well, Medved is full of manure, but I still think you can draw a straight line from Mather to Wilson to W.”

The question isn’t one of drawing lines of descent; it’s of imputing doctrines of the present day back on the Pilgrims and Puritans--and doing so to justify the destructive doctrines of the present day.

The thing is, I predict that some paleoconservatives and others who opposed current neocon foreign policy, and normally think that Kagan’s books are worse than worthless, will nonetheless praise this one--pointing out, of course, that they don’t agree with Kagan’s foreign-policy prescriptions but arguing nonetheless that Kagan has correctly laid out the history.

But if Medved has properly characterized the book (which I haven’t yet seen), then Kagan hasn’t.  There’s plenty to criticize the Pilgrims and Puritans for; but blaming them (or praising them, as Medved does) for directly inspiring the current neocon crusade is ludicrous, as John Watson has pointed out even better than I did.

“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all"--but Adam bears only the most minor responsibility for my personal sins.  So, too, the Pilgrims, with regard to the neocons.

““In Adam’s fall, we sinned all"--but Adam bears only the most minor responsibility for my personal sins.  So, too, the Pilgrims, with regard to the neocons.”

I agree. 

Michael Medved is by far one of the most annoying of the neocons.  Well, he may be tied with Bill Kristol.  Both have effeminate, whining voices that they (attempt to) utilize to sound like George C. Scott in the movie Patton to sound the cries for war (but end up sounding like Pee Wee Herman). 

I remember back in the heat of the Senate immigration debate, when I was listening to the radio in my car, Medved was labeling the callers (who wanted immigration restrictions) as “neonazis” and “racists,” which is not surprising since now he’s calling Ron Paul supporters “neonazis.”

Medved subscribes to the Bill Kristol school of patriotism:  endless U.S. aid to defend the borders of Israel, while simultaneously supporting the open-borders, Third World invasion of the U.S.

He should go back to giving mediocre reviews to B movies.

Powell was correct when he called these folks ‘the crazies’

Jesus was for eternal war, building empires and exploiting humans for profit, who knew?

....was to create an ideal society that the corrupt world would be forced to admire and, ultimately, emulate it”

Well the neo-kooks certainly emulated the corrupt part rather well.

Anyone want a copy of a picturee of my wife and me ,at a right to life dinner,with Michael Medved.Mike you can’t be prolife and for unjust undeclared wars.

The image of a shining city on a hill that provides the model for others’ salvation misses Puritanism’s key idea:  the most important task of each person is to save his/her own soul. Everything else is secondary to that.  In this sense, Puritanism was both extremely inidvidualist and extremely selfish.

Puritanim’s social effect stemmed from what people had to do to save their souls:  to overcome highly asocial sins/ personality traits such as pride, envy and hatred, and to inculcate prosocial traits such as humility and forgiveness.  Early modern theologians were well aware of the beneficial effects this personality change brought to society, but they regarded that as a side-effect.

Acknowledging and overcoming one’s own faults does not feel pleasant, and many people tried to avoid this part of religious morality by focusing on correcting the morals of others.  I.e., those people remained proud, vain, quarrelsome and greedy, but they believed themselves to be virtuous, because they tried to eliminate these—and other—flaws from people around them.

Puritans knew well this “avoiding my faults by saving others” personality.  These people were thought to be an example of the “seeing the mite in other person’s eye but not the beam in their own” type, and they were classified as a common and dangerous subcategory of hypocrites.  This is very probably where Puritans would have placed the neocons and their interpretation of the city on the hill idea.  The formerly all-important focus on one’s own personal morality is totally missing from that interpretation.

From glomming on to his little brother’s book, “The Golden Turkey Awards”, back in the 70s (whatever happened to lil’ bro, anyway?), to politically-correct movie critic, to shameless shill for socialist capital; Medved thy name is Chickenhawk, for when destiny called your Name Medved, your hearkened instead to the Ghost of Gym Class, who sifted you and kicked you in the ass. Thus thy name is Chickenhawk. Selah!

One quibble about the column: there is no line connecting the Calvinistic Pilgrims to W Wilson’s ,etc. policies. The Pilgrims were extremely inward-looking, to the point of constantly wrestling with faith in their own salvation. The name “pilgrim"…

Thus they were too occupied to consider fulfilling well any Great Commission with prejudice. They didn’t even like going into the woods.

Puritans: technically Lutheran Anglican, practically Calvinists, same traits. That’s why they were easily shunted aside by the impuritan Anglican Church shortly (by 1705?).

If you’re just DYING to pin Protestantism to some holy warrior attitude which the Roman Church has had since Charlemagne’s Saxon crusade, through Unam Sanctum days and up to the Russian Commission of Fatima (Operation Barbarossa and beyond), you can find it in Luther’s siding with the princes during the Peasant Rebellion which the Lutheran Prussian state used as justification of a modern warrior caste and a permanent standing army.

It’s really a mirror image of the same Jewish/Leftist idea that America is a imperialist, militaristic, violent nation.

Back when this guy was facing the draft and the prospect of going to Vietnam in the War of Containment with Soviet Communism, America was BAD and EVIL. 

But now, when the war is for Israel and the liberal elistist vision of turning Mideast culture into a sort of a Walt Disney movie, and the Fundamentalist Islam into the equivalent of the Unitarian-Universalist Church of What’s Happening Now, well...this scum is glad that the working class white men he hates are out there dying for him and his vision of “Democracy”.

Speaking of the Puritans (and Thanksgiving), H.L. Mencken was so turned off by their brand of fanaticism that he allegedly avoided the traditional Thanksgiving trappings and would instead eat spaghetti at a local Italian restaurant in his hometown of Baltimore.

H.L. Mencken was so turned off by their brand of fanaticism that he allegedly avoided the traditional Thanksgiving..

The Catholic way is to celebrate Thanksgiving in a Catholic way. There are a lot of good things about Thanksgiving but no good good in hateful snobbery.

Grace builds upon nature…

Timber,
When it comes to H.L. Mencken’s thinking on fanaticism, please read his “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche” (1908).  Look especially to the end of the book, where Mencken discusses the different moral implications of Christianity and Darwinism.  Among other things, Mencken guotes favorably a suggestion of exterminating blacks as the solution of US racial problems—this at a time when Hitler was still a schoolboy! 

More generally, Mencken did not see the struggle between Christianity and science to be about what created things, God or evolution, but about the moral implications of Christianity and Darwinism.  These he saw culminating on the one side in Nietzsche’s master race of supermen crushing all opposition, and on the other side in the self-overcoming and self-sacrificing humility idealized in Thomas a Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ.”

This dualism is interesting, because we can look at Mencken’s argument with the wisdom of hindsight:  what became of the Germans who idealized Darwin and Nietzsche, and what became of the Puritans who idealized Kempis?

Unfortunately fools like Medved and Kagan now own
the “respectable” American Right, and I’m not sure how
we can change this situation, given the disparity in
resources. I also don’t think that Scott did
me a favor by providing this egregious example of
neocon idiocy just as I was about to eat dinner.
Perhaps I should have waited before until later before
looking at his blog. Unless I’m mistaken, Medved
recently attacked poor Ron Paul as a Nazi or
as the good friend of one.

Kari,

If your anecdote about HL Mencken really is true, it’s amazing how he changed.

According to Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s biography, Mencken was one of the first publishers to publish African-American writing in a mainstream publication (The American Mercury), he tried to establish a publication dedicated solely to African-American literature at a time when it simply was not done, and he was so vehement in his criticism of lynching that the parts of Maryland where it happened tried to organize a boycott of his newspaper; the state legislature hadn’t forgiven him years later.

Mencken wasn’t PC by the standards of our day, but by the standards of HIS day during the course of his life - his work with Nietzsche was at the very beginning of his life - he revealed himself in word and deed to be extremely progressive as far as race relations were concerned.

sc,
There is no doubt that in “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche” Mencken eagerly embraces racism and the Darwinian interpretation of a struggle between races.  I also have the impression that Mencken’s popularity declined in the 30s, because he started expressing opinions regarded as too favorable toward Hitler and the nazis.

More generally, you raise an excellent point in noting that many influential writers change their views.  Treating these writers—including Mencken—as a single entity thus can lead to massive misunderstanding.  A person who says he likes Mencken and has in mind Mencken’s racist writings is something very different from an admirer of Mencken who focuses on his progressive efforts.

I don’t believe Mencken ever called Hitler anything more favorable than “charlatan”.  I believe his offense, to those who took offense, was in describing FDR in similar terms.

Your raise interesting points. 

The belief in a struggle among races, was widespread, perhaps even the conventional wisdom early in the 20th century.  Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote tracts that you and I would deem virulently racist.

Mencken had done everything he could as a foreign correspondent in Berlin to try to stymy America’s entry into the first World War.  He was literally on the last train to leave Berlin for Switzerland before the outbreak of hostilities, and corresponded with the Kaiser after the war was lost.

It appears that in this case, old habits died hard.

Tom K,

Unless I am extremely mistaken, Marion Rodgers completely corroborates your account.

Irving Babbitt, who was a severe critic of German kultur was nonetheless an equally or even more severe critic of Woodrow Wilson and American intervention against Germany in World War One than was Mencken.  The fact that Mencken didn’t want the US to go to war against Germany, in either World War, does not establish that he was sympathetic with Hitler.  The vast majority of American’s agreed with Mencken’s position on US involvement in both wars.  Thus, Mencken’s position could not have affected his popularity with the general public only with the elites. 

BTW, Mencken actually voted for FDR in 1932, although he changed his mind of course when it became obvious that the old style Democrat platform of 1932 was inoperative.