Rodney Croome . gay advocate

Gone with the wind

Is neo-conservatism dead?

My no-longer-quite-so-new Brazilian friend Alex, generally keeps his political views to himself.

When asked what he thinks about public policies, his response is usually concise and cool.

But at the weekend he surprised me with a sudden outburst inspired by a story in the Mercury.

"Why is John Howard giving 10 million dollars in US hurricane aid when he only gave 2 million for Tasmanian devil research and there’s no money at all to stop platypuses dying."

With all the long-vowelled, Latin indignation he could muster he declared the aid "ridiculous!"

If A’s comparison between animal research and natural disaster relief seems a bit odd, spare a thought for his predicament.

Because there is not enough funding for the vital research he is doing as part of his post grad course, he has to work in a supermarket all day Saturday and Sunday to make enough money to live and pay his Uni fees.

That’s right, he slices ham in a deli to pay for the privilege of saving our iconic native animals from extinction.

Also remember that A is from Latin America, a continent painfully aware that the US is too rich and powerful for its own, and everyone else’s, good.

On top of all this I imagine he was contemplating how quickly Australia’s 10 million would be squandered on untendered, uncompetitive, over-priced, jobs-for-the-boys re-building contracts (if it wasn't being given to the Red Cross).

Sorry if this sounds cynical, but it’s what’s happening in Iraq, and it’s what you would expect from a Government too incompetent and over-committed to rescue its own citizens from live-threatening disaster.

It’s no surprise that ordinary people the world over are angry when they read statements like this from Walter Maestri, a Louisiana emergency management chief, quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in June 2004, about why the US Federal Government stopped funding reconstruction of New Orleans sinking levees.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

What is a surprise is that conservative commentators who have stuck by George W Bush through thick and thin, who have defended his stand on Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, the UN, not to mention terrorism and Iraq, have suddenly abandoned him.

Examples include David Brooks.

Some commentators are going so far as to predict that Hurricane Katrina marks the end of neo-conservatism altogether.

The demise of neo-conservatism is hardly a new idea. In his own way, John Ralston Saul has written a book about it.

But what is new, is that conservatives themselves are drawing the curtains and turning off the lights.

Take Martin Kelly...

"The collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Wall in East Berlin had on Soviet Communism; for when hacks and fulminators like John Podhoretz are openly criticizing the president, the Great Leader, the ideology is on the way out. And hopefully all of those who urged the ideology on, myself included, will have a long time to consider the error of our ways."

(A better historical parallel than the end of Stalinism would have been the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. This "natural disaster" also had some help from human incompetence, occured in the world's wealthiest state, exposed the prejudices of rulers against the ruled, and discredited market-driven economic and social policy. Best of all, many Americans recall the Famine like it was yesterday.)

Even Catholic, arch-homocon, Dreadnought agrees that neo-conservatism is, or should be, dead.

"I love America. I still think George W. Bush is a good man and true. But if this is the fruit of neo-conservatism, throw the lot out the window, that tree is poison."

Dreadnought’s disillusionment is not as shocking as it appears.

There’s evidence dating back months of his growing discomfort with conservatism Whitehouse-style; the lack of compassion, the intemperate zeal, the elitism, judgementalism and anti-intellectualism, the disdainfulness and narrowness - what he would probably call "the Calvinism" at the core of the contemporary US Republican Party.

DN has his Benedictine ideology to fall back on. That’s fine for him. But what about the rest of the world? Where will those millions of people caught in the web that neo-conservatism has spun for 20 years turn now?

This is a pivotal moment for social progressives.

They can lead the US world out of its malaise with a vision of justice and equality or they can stand by and let cynicism debilitate western culture like it did post-Soviet Russia.

They can return to what they do best: opening human hearts and imaginations to new ideas, frontiers, hopes and dreams, or they can fall back on the hectoring, nit-picking and straight-jacket ideologies that saw them lose to neo-conservatism in the first place.

If the doom-saying conservatives are right, there hasn’t been a better opportunity for social renewal for 40 years.

The question now is where, how and with whom will it begin?