The War Party is running scared – and with good reason. Writing in the Washington Post, neocons Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly are in a panic that the rising “tea party” movement, which upended the Republican establishment at the polls, is about to abandon “the defense of freedom” in faraway Afghanistan in favor of rescuing what’s left of our freedom closer to home:
The neocon mandarins of AEI are fighting a rearguard action against those “many young-gun conservatives” who are “from another school.” Yes, they are indeed from another school – they are Old School conservatives, who think the concept of “big government conservatism” is an oxymoron, and who aren’t fooled by the Pletka-Donnelly funny numbers which tell us “defense is not the source of the deficit.” Government spending is the source of the deficit, and of the economic crisis currently shaking our world – and military spending, including veterans’ benefits and the “defense” portion of the interest on the debt, accounts for 54 percent of all federal spending.
We can’t have an empire, and a balanced budget at the same time: it is one or the other. A return to fiscal sanity means we need real change in our foreign policy. That’s what the battle for the conservative soul is all about. The neocons are counting on their evaluation of the tea partiers as “Don’t Tread on Me nationalists” rather than “budget balancers,” but this calculation comes up short when one takes into consideration the central meme of the tea party movement: that it’s the federal government which is treading on us all and sucking the life blood out of the economy – while the Pletkas and Donnellys grow fat on corporate contributions and government contracts.
What’s important to note here is that there is a widening split on the American right, between the ultra-nationalist “big government conservatives” who have dominated the movement since the days of Arthur Vandenberg, and the “Old Right” which is so old that it’s new, and is making a comeback in a major way, much to the chagrin – and panic – of the neocons.
