Beware! If your comment on the Denver Post forums pulls the curtain back too far, they will remove it and issue you a warning.
This happened to me when commenting on Denver Post house ‘conservative’ Mike Rosen.
Rosen was sensationalizing a Post picture of two gays kissing. Now hyper-sensitivity to gays is pretty standard Evangelical territory. But the thing is, Rosen is not an Evangelical. He’s not even religious. He’s an atheist… or at least an agnostic “spiritual free agent” as he describes himself.
Rosen is, on the other hand, a true believer in neoconservatism. His philosophy is pragmatism. His economics are corporatist. His ideology is imperialism (he refers to it as “exceptionalism”). Like all neocons, he is a self-described “social moderate”, meaning he cares little about people’s lifestyle choices.
So why is Mike feigning concern over two gays kissing?
Because neoconservatism is, as Cato’s C. Bradley Thompson puts it, “an intellectual technique defined by pragmatism”.
Neocons do not care about promoting a Judeo-Christian morality. Intellectual heirs to Leo Strauss, neocons do not accept any objective morality. To Strauss and the neocons, there exist no “natural rights”, either. To them rights are fluid concepts. Rights and morality are determined by those who rule. And if there is one thing neocons want, it is to RULE (or “govern” as they soften it). Rosen, for instance, chides constructionist Constitutionalists on the grounds that the Constitution means “whatever the Supreme Court says it means” (ie right and wrong is determined by those who rule).
Neocons abide by only one principle: to accumulate power.
Strauss, the grandfather of neoconservatism, was also an atheist. But he recognized the utility of religion in shaping a cultural hegemony and enforcing order. Neocons view Evangelical Christians as tools to achieve their goal of full spectrum, cultural, political, and economic dominance. What they refer to as “hegemony”.
In addition to their submit-to-authority nature (see Romans 13), Evangelicals are afflicted by an Armageddon complex. This makes them vulnerable to the Straussian doctrine of ‘foreverwar’. They are the perfect “useful idiots”, as Lenin would call them– naive propagandists and advocates for a neocon, imperial, police state movement of which they do not fully grasp.
I imagine behind closed doors, the atheist neocon elite hold Evangelicals in utter contempt, regarding them to be little more than superstitious members of the vulgar masses (as Strauss and Plato called them) who have been domesticated and can be called upon to show up at the polls without fail… just beat the war drum against Muslims and an army of bloodthirsty, psuedo-Christian voters will materialize en masse.
Now the Post is an undeniably progressive (Statist) publication. There is no inequity, no injustice, no “market failure” in the world that their editors do not believe can be righted by some benevolent government force or edict.
Libertarians hold the complete opposite view. They believe most of the world’s injustice is caused by asymmetrical power concentrated in the paws of a government plutocrats.
Rosen, like all neocons, is the former… a statist, albeit a right wing variant. Sharing a statist ideology with the post, he cannot provide much beyond superficial rebuttal to the Post’s progressive policy prescriptions.
And that’s the way the Post likes it.
There are no libertarian voices at the Post, or any other of the dominant progressive mass media, because libertarian ideas are dangerous and subversive to the hivemind establishment. Neocons, on the other hand, are safe… the melody may be different, but their big government notes harmonize all too well in the grand, statist tune.
Any libertarian who manages to pull back the curtain on the establishment ideology too far will be marginalized with insults or even silenced altogether. In the mean time, as democrats like Obama evolve, they look more and more like neocons with their usurpations of civil rights and foreign interventionism. And neocons look more and more like democrats with their bailouts, softening on welfare and immigration, and on economic central planning. Both parties are merging into one political monolith with the only significant resistance coming from libertarians and some on the radical left.
We are witnessing the seminal stages of a great political struggle… perhaps the greatest in human history: collectivism vs. liberty. The Post can embrace alternative views and facilitate dialogue and debate in this emerging new world order, or it can continue to propagandize for the big government establishment by censoring dissent.
What’s it gonna be Denver Post?
