I think the neocons are really getting off easy when we give them the benefit of their "vision" thing. There is nothing I can find in anything they have written that distinguishes them in any way from the multiplicity of like-minded garden variety intellectuals that precede them. There is no genius in their words.

If they possess "genius," it is not in their thinking or their prescriptions, but in the execution of their plans.

They are criminals in thought, intent and action. Among them, they have been directly involved or complicit in crimes of the highest order. If they have any courage, it is the courage exhibited by those who have burned their bridges and have no way to return the way they came.

To date, they have not been held accountable. Not in the least. Libby is a small fish.

It is important not to treat the neocons as something adjacent or ancillary to the Republican party but as what they are, an ideological component that is critical to the perceived success of the Republican party agenda. These are the "masterminds", are they not? Cheney, Perle, Feith, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. were part and parcel of a pattern of deceit that took us into a war of aggression and has led us to commit one atrocity after another in the name of democracy. The neocons cannot separate themselves from what Bush has wrought and neither can the Republican party.

Simply put, the neocons are criminals and should be thought of as such and treated as such. They are playing to win. They have to win.

As McNamara said,

LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

That is what we are dealing with here - war criminals who see the difference between morality and immorality as the same difference that exists between winning and losing. They have to win and will do everything in their power to keep us in Iraq as long as it takes for them not to be perceived as "losing the war."

The words "democracy" and "neocon" occupy opposite ends of a dialectic.

They are master propagandists. I think they have absolutely nothing to do with democracy. The things they write and say remind me not of anything democratic, but of statements like this:

It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.

-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 01 Aug. 1923

The post in which you quoted:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

just fired off a huge lightbulb inside my head.

Years and years ago I thought I would end up a theoretical sociologist. But I didn't. I did other things involving private sector jobs such as urban planning and IT. Even so, several ideas have stayed with me and your comment has brought them fully into the foreground.

While in school and as a result of my studies I came to believe the following:

1. That the social order results from the interaction of two basic observable phenomena: congregation and segregation.

Congregation is the tendency of individual organisms to form one or more groups.

Segregation is the tendency of organisms in groups to form hierarchies.

These two forces are countervailing and innate to any social order.

2. That the formation of groups is never static but diverges from fewer groups into more groups or converges from more groups into fewer groups over time as a result of the interaction of these two fundamental forces, and

3. That both individual and group behaviors are indicative of the social dynamic resulting from the interaction of the countervailing forces of congregation (i.e., group formation) and segregation (i.e., heirarchy) at a given point in time.

This thinking put me into direct conflict with several of my professors who were Marxists in their philosophy and teaching and others who were poststructuralist or existential in their philosophies.

Because I believed both congregation and segregation to be fundamental and always present in any social order, I never believed that perfect communism or socialism could work. Neither did I believe that perfect libertarianism was possible for the same reason. I do not believe it now. Nor do I believe that absolute monarchy is possible in any society having a strong middle-class. The abject poor do not engage in revolutions. But an educated, monied and disenfranchised middle-class most certainly will. In fact, I believed and continue to believe that any communist state, no matter how well-intentioned, must always evolve to a hierarchy, even to the point of a monarchy or dictatorship. Whether it is benign or totalitarian is purely a function of the value system of the ruler or ruling class. Conversely, I have always believed that an educated and informed (i.e, middle-class) populace will always resist any attempt to create a unitary rule, especially if that rule dispossesses a disproportionate number of the population. The greatest threat to a unitary government is its own people.

What your reference points out is the presence of the "conservative" (i.e, hierarchical) force at all times and in all societies. To equate this with contemporary U.S. politics as conservatism, provides a ready way to understand conservatism's role and limitations in our society.

The same holds true for liberalism.

I have always believed that the framers of our Constitution understood the need to segment power so that neither conservatism nor liberalism would completely dominate society.

But that is what has come close to happening with the rise of conservatism in the guise of our current corporate, political and religious aristocracy.