The Neocon Roots Of GOP Statism, Part 1

The causes of personal liberty, free markets, small government, peaceful international commerce and overall capitalist prosperity have taken a severe beating in Washington during recent decades, and the ultimate culprit is not hard to identify. To wit, these causes need a champion in the contest of governance within the nation’s two party system—an arrangement which the US Constitution more or less ordains owing to single-member winner-take-all congressional constituencies.

But today there is no Opposition Party worthy of the name—only a bipartisan uniparty conjoined in the endless aggrandizement of the state.

To be sure, that proposition would come as news to GOP party operatives and even to a goodly share of the MAGA grass roots. They genuinely do believe that they are on the side of the people versus the bureaucrats and careerist elective politicians, and are therefore doing god’s work as the non-statist party in the enterprise of democratic governance.

Overwhelmingly, however, they are not because they have been infected with the virulent statist disease bivouacked on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. We are referring, of course, to the Warfare State and the neocon/hegemonist foreign policy which animates it.

Plain and simply, the latter is not based on the empirical facts of national security. There are no true threats to the liberty and security of the American homeland anywhere on the planet today that even remotely justify the nation’s $900 billion defense budget proper, and the $1.3 trillion total cost if you count the foreign aid/security assistance complex and the deferred cost of unnecessary wars embodied in the $250 billion Veterans compensation and health care budget.

That kind of mega-threat ended when the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history in 1991. Today, Russia’s $1.8 trillion GDP is a veritable joke when arrayed against the $45 trillion of GDP resources embedded in the US and the balance of NATO, including, apparently, the $600 billion GDP of Sweden, which is now to become the 31st NATO member, so as not to be the odd man out in all of Europe.