Parece que eu era um pouco pessimista, segundo se pode ler pelo comentário de uma leitora crítica, ou cética de meus propósitos, ao final.
Bem, nunca se pode contentar a todos, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
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terça-feira, 11 de fevereiro de 2014
Relacoes internacionais, como profissao e como oportunidade - um texto PRA, mas de 2006
Muita coisa mudou, desde então, mas um leitor deste blog me relembrou deste texto, aliás postado novamente alguns anos depois, no site MundoRI.
Parece que eu era um pouco pessimista, segundo se pode ler pelo comentário de uma leitora crítica, ou cética de meus propósitos, ao final.
Bem, nunca se pode contentar a todos, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Parece que eu era um pouco pessimista, segundo se pode ler pelo comentário de uma leitora crítica, ou cética de meus propósitos, ao final.
Bem, nunca se pode contentar a todos, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
segunda-feira, 10 de fevereiro de 2014
Os idiotas vao herdar o mundo? - Luiz Felipe Ponde
LUIZ FELIPE PONDÉQuem herdará a Terra?
Folha de S.Paulo, 10/02/2014
A sociedade secular moderna está condenada. E por quê? Por uma razão muito simples: as mulheres seculares (sem prática religiosa cotidiana) não querem ter filhos. Quando têm, têm um ou dois no máximo.A emancipação feminina tornou as mulheres inférteis por escolha. Estranho? Nem tanto
A emancipação feminina tornou as mulheres inférteis por escolha. Estranho? Nem tanto, vejamos.
Quem herdará a Terra? Os religiosos fundamentalistas cristãos, judeus e muçulmanos. Suas mulheres têm muitos filhos, e as nossas não. Para as nossas mulheres, filhos só depois dos 35, depois da pós, com maternagem terceirizada caríssima. O individualismo moderno nos deixou a todos estéreis e histéricos.
Não, não estou criticando a vida secular nem defendendo a vida religiosa radical. Parafraseando o dito popular, "não é política, imbecil, é demografia".
Nós, seculares, que em grande parte temos simpatia pela teoria evolucionista, esquecemos que seleção natural é demografia. Podemos ter muitas ideias de como o mundo deve ser, mas os fundamentalistas têm mais bebês. E quem decide no final das contas é a população de bebês. Mulheres férteis implicam civilização poderosa.
Essa é a hipótese do livro escrito pelo canadense Eric Kaufmann, professor de política da Universidade de Londres. Claro que os "progressistas" o criticam e acusam a ideia de ser propaganda fundamentalista --como é comum em nosso mundo em que a inteligência cedeu lugar às políticas da difamação.
As suspeitas de que riquezas e conforto (causas culturais e econômicas, e não biológicas) diminuem a fertilidade feminina estão presentes desde a Grécia e Roma (Cícero já falava disso). Adam Smith, no século 18, chamava a atenção para o fato de que o "luxo e a moda" tornam o sexo frágil desinteressado na maternidade.
Já por volta do ano 300 da Era Cristã, os cristãos somavam 6 milhões, enquanto no ano 40 eles eram uns poucos hereges coitados. Logo conquistaram o Império Romano. E não só por conta das mulheres romanas serem vaidosas, ricas e interessadas em sexo, mas não em filhos (exatamente como as nossas). Os homens pagãos eram mais violentos e menos atentos a mulheres e filhos enquanto os cristãos eram do tipo família.
O fator fertilidade não é o único, claro, mas é um fator que em nossos debates inteligentinhos não tem sido levado em conta com a devida reverência.
Enquanto as mulheres seculares hoje têm cerca de 0,5 filho por mulher pronta para maternidade (a partir dos 15 anos), as religiosas (no caso aqui específico de grupos como evangélicos fundamentalistas, amish, menonitas, huteritas e judeus haredi ou ortodoxos) variam de 2,1 a 2,4.
No caso do Estado de Israel, por exemplo, a cada três crianças matriculadas no jardim da infância, uma é haredi. Depois do Holocausto, os haredi eram uma população quase insignificante. Em países do leste do mundo, como Japão, Coreia do Sul, Cingapura, Austrália e Nova Zelândia, o quadro é muito próximo do Ocidente moderno.
A medicina, o saneamento, a tecnologia e Estados mais organizados diminuíram a mortalidade tanto das parturientes quanto das crianças. O efeito imediato foi o crescimento populacional na geração dos "baby boomers". Mas, já no final dos anos 60, as mulheres americanas, canadenses e europeias ocidentais começavam e declinar em fertilidade.
Por quê? A causa são os "valores" seculares. Nós investimos na vida aqui e agora e na realização de desejos imediatos. E, para piorar, as universidades ficam publicando pesquisas dizendo que casais sem filhos são mais felizes. Além de não termos filhos, ainda fazemos passeatas para matá-los no ventre das mães com ares de "direitos humanos".
Família cansa, filho dá trabalho, custa caro, dura muito. Os seculares escolhem não ter filhos, os religiosos escolhem tê-los.
Mas não é só a fertilidade que coloca os religiosos em vantagem. Os grupos mais fechados detêm uma alta retenção da sua prole: colégios comunitários, shoppings, redes sociais, colônias de férias, casamentos endógenos, calendários festivos, baladinhas de Jesus (ou similares). Sempre juntos.
Enfim, a pílula vai destruir a civilização que a criou. Risadas?
Comentário recebido:
Giselle deixou um novo comentário sobre a sua postagem "Os idiotas vao herdar o mundo? - Luiz Felipe Ponde...":
Concordo com a conclusão do Pondé, mas não com as premissas. Se a sociedade secular precisa de filhos, deve assumir o custo (ou parte dele). Da maneira como está hoje, o custo está todo com a mulher e nenhuma mulher inteligente o quer assumir.
Terei filhos no dia em que a sociedade me der:
a) creche, próxima à minha casa ou trabalho, com horário suficiente para cobrir o meu tempo de trabalho, o meu horário de almoço e o meu tempo de deslocamento casa-trabalho-casa (de 8hs às 17hs não me serve, este é o meu horário de trabalho);
b) escola com o mesmo horário da creche, já que crianças de até 16 anos não podem ficar sozinhas em casa de acordo com o ECA sob pena de abandono de incapaz;
c)alguém pode me dizer por que cargas d´agua as escolas fecham nas férias por 2 meses no verão e 15 dias no inverno? Eu só tenho 30 dias de férias! Vou fazer o que com as crianças no período? Pagar colônia de férias? Ou deixar com a empregada? (aqui, sou absolutamente favorável aos direitos das domésticas, muitas tratadas como se fossem móveis, mas para fornecer esses direitos, é preciso que a sociedade forneça alternativas);
d) licença maternidade suficiente para educar um filho com seriedade sem ficar atabalhoada de tarefas e colocar o meu casamento em risco tentando dar conta do filho, do trabalho e do sono - não são os filhos que acabam com o casamento, é contexto da vida moderna e corrida atual, em que a mulher simplesmente não tempo para o marido. Aliás,por que conceder às mulheres aposentadoria 5 anos mais cedo se a gente precisa desse tempo para educar meus filhos antes? E no mais, nossa expectativa de vida é maior.
d) saúde. Nem digo gratuita. Digo disponível. A falta de pediatras é crônica até para quem pode pagar. Pediatra não faz exame caro, é só consulta mesma. O que eles ganham não compensa. Os médicos preferem outras especialidades.
Enfim, do jeito que está hoje, as mudanças que eu teria que fazer na minha vida. O custo, financeiro e de oportunidade - deixando de viajar, de estudar e de tocar projetos profissionais - simplesmente não comporta filhos.
Minha mãe me criou com ajuda de vó, de tias, de empregada, de amigas, gente que podia ficar comigo? Como o trânsito de hoje, não posso contar com ninguém!
Se a sociedade quer filhos, que dê às mulheres condições. Teismo e ateismo: o equivoco logico fundamental de um filosofo - NYT
Este filósofo comete um erro fundamental, mas muito comum nesse tipo de debate.
O teismo é tão amplamente disseminado na humanidade, que este filósofo crente (pois ele é um crente, antes de ser teísta) coloca todos os não crentes num mesmo saco indistinto e os chama de ateístas, ou seja pretende defini-los de forma apriorística e arbitrária, aliás totalmente indevida para um filósofo, sob uma noção que subsume a condição normalmente aceita dos crentes em um deus qualquer, e aqueles só podem ser referenciados por essa negação, como se alguém devesse necessariamente se posicionar positivamente sobre o que é uma crença, não um argumento racional (como deveria ser a posição e a postura fundamental de um filósofo).
Por essa e outras razões, eu não me defino como ateu, pois seria uma contradição nos termos, e sim como um não crente, ou um irreligioso.
Não me cabe "provar" uma coisa absurda, que é a não existência de deus, e sim cabe aos crentes racionais provar os fundamentos empíricos de sua fé.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”
Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?
Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound.
Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.
In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.
G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?
A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.
I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.
G.G.: But isn’t there also plenty of evidence against theism — above all, the amount of evil in a world allegedly made by an all-good, all-powerful God?
A.P.: The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low. But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.
G.G.: But when you say “good theistic arguments,” you don’t mean arguments that are decisive — for example, good enough to convince any rational person who understands them.
A.P.: I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.
Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.
G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument?
AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.
G.G.: But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?
A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.
Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.
I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.
G.G.: O.K., but in any case, isn’t the theist on thin ice in suggesting the need for God as an explanation of the universe? There’s always the possibility that we’ll find a scientific account that explains what we claimed only God could explain. After all, that’s what happened when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. In fact, isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?
A.P.: Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.
As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.
G.G.: So, what are the further grounds for believing in God, the reasons that make atheism unjustified?
A.P.: The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’ssensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.
G.G.: If, then, there isn’t evidence to support atheism, why do you think so many philosophers — presumably highly rational people — are atheists?
AP: I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t have any special knowledge here. Still, there are some possible explanations. Thomas Nagel, a terrific philosopher and an unusually perceptive atheist, says he simply doesn’t want there to be any such person as God. And it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, there would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.
Basically, these come down to the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism. This desire for autonomy can reach very substantial proportions, as with the German philosopher Heidegger, who, according to Richard Rorty, felt guilty for living in a universe he had not himself created. Now there’s a tender conscience! But even a less monumental desire for autonomy can perhaps also motivate atheism.
GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.
AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.
GG: Why is that?
AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.
But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief thatProust is more subtle than L’Amour.
GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?
AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.
But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.
GG: Why do you say that?
AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.
GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.
AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.
Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.
GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.
AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.
Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.
But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.
So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.
This interview was conducted by email and edited.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.
Perguntar nao ofende: salarios e contratos
O que você acharia, caro leitor companheiro (deste blog entenda-se), se você tivesse um contrato de trabalho de R$ 10.000,00 (dez mil reais), mas que o governo se apropriasse de 70% desse valor, lhe deixando pouco mais de mil reais para viver, um mês inteiro?
Respostas e comentários para quem fez e para quem suporta os contratos, uma iniciativa que representa uma bela soma sob qualquer critério.
Aliás, a Constituição determina que qualquer acordo gravoso deve passar pela aprovação do Congresso Nacional.
Isso se fez?
Duas perguntas inocentes, portanto...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasil-Cuba: amizades complicadas - Mary Zaidan
Para Cuba, com amor
Ramona Rodriguez. A cubana que fugiu do Mais Médicos de Pacajá, no Pará, criou um enrosco sem tamanho para o governo Dilma Rousseff. Reacendeu críticas ao extravagante contrato em que os irmãos Castro se apropriam do grosso dos salários dos médicos exportados e deu xeque-mate à legalidade do programa, carro-chefe da campanha do ex-ministro Alexandre Padilha ao governo do Estado de São Paulo.Contas publicadas pelo jornal O Globo revelam que o Mais Médicos reforçará os cofres da ilha em R$ 713 milhões ao ano, 77% do valor destinado ao programa junto a Cuba. Só 23% ficam com os profissionais importados.
Criou ainda uma encrenca jurídica.
O ministro da Justiça, José Eduardo Cardozo, apressou-se em dizer que Ramona poderá perder o visto de permanência no país e a licença para atuar como médica no Brasil. A tese é frágil. Ancora-se na medida provisória que sustenta o programa, que pouco vale se confrontada à Constituição. Aliás, se o Brasil conferir a Ramona um improvável asilo, ela pode passar no Revalida e exercer a profissão como qualquer médico estrangeiro.
Ramona Matos Rodrigues, médica cubana que abandonou o Programa Mais Médicos.
Foto: José Cruz / Agência Brasil
Foto: José Cruz / Agência Brasil
Para o governo, ficar com Ramona é um problema. Incitaria novas dissidências. Embarcá-la de volta pode ser ainda pior. Até porque, sabe-se, a ditadura cubana não a pouparia de retaliações, que acabariam reveladas pela mídia. Não à toa, ela teme por seus familiares, em especial pela filha, também médica.
É tão verdade que mesmo no Brasil Ramona já é vítima de detratores. Ela foi acusada de bêbada e devassa pelo deputado José Geraldo (PT-PA), que inscreveu nos anais da Câmara trechos indizíveis da carta repugnante do presidente do Conselho Municipal de Saúde de Pacajá, Valdir Pereira da Silva. De nível tão baixo que o PT deveria se envergonhar e pedir solenes desculpas.
Para completar, blogs engajados divulgaram a versão de que Ramona só queria mesmo encontrar o namorado, em Miami, e que tudo não passou de uma farsa instruída pelo líder dos Democratas, Ronaldo Caiado (GO).
A previsão é de que o Brasil receba mais de sete mil médicos cubanos. Hoje, 5.378 já estão operando a um custo de R$ 925,86 milhões por ano, isso sem computar transporte e moradia. Repita-se: mais de três quartos disso fica com o governo de Cuba.
Embora o governo Dilma afirme que só decidiu importar cubanos porque não conseguiu preencher as vagas do Mais Médicos com brasileiros e outros estrangeiros, Ramona foi treinada há dois anos para vir para o Brasil. Fez parte de uma farsa.
E faz parte de uma massa que sustenta, com o seu trabalho, a ditadura que ela já demonstrou que não quer. Mas que o governo do PT apoia. Com unhas, dentes e dinheiro. Muito dinheiro.
Mary Zaidan é jornalista. Trabalhou nos jornais O Globo e O Estado de S. Paulo, em Brasília. Foi assessora de imprensa do governador Mario Covas. Atualmente trabalha na agência 'Lu Fernandes Comunicação e Imprensa'. Escreve aqui aos domingos. Twitter: @maryzaidan, e-mail: maryzaidan@me.com
Os pensadores que influenciaram a direita americana, republicana (que nao deve ter lido a metade)
16 Great Conservative Thinkers Who Helped Shape Republican Ideals
Conservatives are a diverse lot. Even so, there are similar foundations in their thinking. These many politicians, social philosophers, authors, and activists share certain core beliefs. In essence, they echo down the centuries, firmly holding onto traditional attitudes and values and remaining wary of change simply for change’s sake.
Here are 16 of the great conservatives, intellectual stepping stones leading to the present day.
Known for centuries in China as the Model Sage for Ten Thousand Ages, Confucius, like modern-day conservatives Russell Kirk and T.S. Elliot, stressed the “permanent things” of society. His term wu-ch’ang, or "Five Norms," represents: jen, “humaneness;” I; “righteousness;” li, “ritual,” “ceremony,” “proper deportment,” etc.; chih, “sagacity,” “wisdom;” and hsin, “trustworthiness.”
Confucius promoted social stability and family values (shades of George H. Nisbet) along with humility, honesty, modesty, studiousness and social duty. The Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” also appears in his great work, “The Analects.”
Chinese communists originally despised Confucianism and did everything they could to eradicate what they viewed as a philosophy from the days of feudalism that encouraged social inequity and interfered with social justice. Modern China has rehabilitated his reputation, however.
Granted, modern women find Confucius a bit too conservative, with his belief that a woman’s allegiance should pass from father to husband to son. But his immense influence on the history of Asian thought cannot be denied.
Marcus Porcius Cato, foe of Julius Caesar and defender of the republican principles of civic virtue, was renowned for his strong opposition to luxury, believing that Hellenic (Greek) culture threatened Rome. Like his fellow Roman, the great orator Cicero, Cato believed one should both know and restrain oneself.
As censor, Cato scrutinized the conduct of candidates running for office and of military generals. He urged the Romans to destroy its trading rival, Carthage, ending every speech and conversation with the words “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed). He wrote several books, one a manual on how to run a farm.
Incidentally, today’s Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., is named not after Cato but after “Cato’s Letters,” a series of 144 inspiring and influential political essays written in the 18th century by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who appropriated Cato as a pseudonym.
Long before Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, there was the more fundamental Social Contract of John Locke, an English philosopher and physician who was one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. In the Social Contract, people must knowingly agree to live and work together. If any party at any time breaks the pact, then other members of community may choose to remove the dissenter or dissolve the union altogether.
Liberals believe Locke is the Father of Liberalism because he laid the foundation for liberal epistemology (how we know what we know). Conservatives believe he is the Father of Conservatism because he founded a natural law political philosophy, which assumes that one has an innate nature and values.
Libertarians also like Locke. To Locke, property is acquired by exercising one’s labor over it. His conception of government is one of limits, with the rule of law dampening the impulse to tyranny. However, though the individual in Locke’s worldview has rights, those rights are also bound by social duties and responsibilities.
Locke’s defense of the English Declaration of Rights in 1689, with its right of free speech, right to bear arms, and freedom from taxation without representation, inspired the American colonists to regain these rights nearly a century later. As more than one political philosopher has pointed out, the American Revolution was basically a conservative event, a thunderous way to recover rights that had been brushed under the rug by King George III and Parliament.
Unlike his brethren of the idealistic Enlightenment, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke — considered the father of modern conservatism — saw limits to human reason. His distrust of pure democracy is echoed today in the Electoral College, that last protection against unbridled public rule. Indeed, Burke was perfectly at ease with the idea of a monarchy and classed society. Moreover, he felt that both Church and State draw their inspiration from the same divine source and are in a sense inseparable. Thus, he rebuffed the idea of a social contract, believing that government derives its authority from ancient innate principles of virtue, articulated in religion, tradition, myth, and folklore.
As philosopher Jesse Norman wrote, Burke didn’t believe in small government but “slow government,” infused with unpretentiousness and humility, always pushing for reform rather than radicalism and revolution.
Despite his disbelief in the ability of unbridled individual freedom to bring personal or social happiness and his fear of liberalism’s trappings, Burke hated injustice and any abuse of great power. He was against oppression of the American colonies and the exploitations of the East India Company in India. He rejected military adventurism and argued for the phasing out of slavery.
American revolutionary Tom Paine hated Burke, viewing him as a defender of the privileged and opponent of free individuals, but Burke was admired by such later political greats as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Germany’s supreme dramatist and poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reinvented himself, reigning in his youthful romantic, revolutionary spirit and remolding himself as a conservative and classicist. As he expressed it: “Everything that liberates the spirit without a corresponding growth in self-mastery is pernicious, ” and “The classical I call the healthy and the romantic the diseased.”
Great British thinkers such as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Arnold were all swayed toward conservatism by Goethe’s powerful writings.
Among America’s Founding Fathers, Hamilton was perhaps the most conservative and nationalistic. One of New York’s leading attorneys, he wrote half of the Federalist Papers and put America on a sound financial footing with a Treasury that assumed state debts as well as debts owed by the national government. He set up the Bank of the United States to make liquidity in financial markets possible, and founded the Federalist Party, to boot.
Simply to list Hamilton’s achievements would take an entire book.
A Harvard French literature scholar and eccentric genius, Babbitt was heavily influenced by Edmund Burke. In the 1890s he and Paul Elmer More formulated what became The New Humanism, opposing the emotional, intuitive tenets of Naturalism and Romanticism. They instead called for classical ethics, morality, systematic reason, and universal conservative values. Novelist Sinclair Lewis denounced the New Humanists in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, having not-so-coincidentally named the narrow-minded, philistine title character of his 1922 novel “Babbitt” after Irving Babbitt.
Babbitt went on to write such classic conservative works as “Democracy and Leadership” (1924).
For Babbitt, the world was not a series of accidents, but had a transcendental purpose. Individuals are born with certain natural rights, which the government should protect, particularly property rights. Morals are not relative but absolute in his world.
Babbitt was an educator for more than 40 years, and he believed that civilization’s most crucial act is the education of its children. As Prof. Robert C. Koons wrote of Babbitt’s idea: “All other social and political practices, whether the scope of civil liberties, the worship of gods or ideals, or the distribution of benefits and burdens, are merely the epiphenomena of the cultural ethos created by education.”
An American writer and editor who was a confessed courier for Russian spies, Whittaker Chambers is seen here testifying before a Senate Judiciary Internal Security Subcommittee, in New York, Aug. 16, 1951, about Red infiltration in America.
Chambers’ five rolls of photographic film known as the “pumpkin papers” (because they were hidden in a pumpkin field) both catapulted anti-communist Congressman Richard Nixon to fame and sent U.S. State Department superstar Alger Hiss to prison for three and a half years in 1950.
Later, in 1952, Chambers wrote the book “Witness,” to immense acclaim. A masterpiece of its kind, it is partly autobiographical and partly a polemic against communism. Ronald Reagan would later claim that reading this book spurred his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican. (Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.")
Chambers edited and wrote for William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine from 1957 to 1959. His final book, "Cold Friday," was published posthumously in 1964. A strangely prophetic work, it correctly predicted that the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellite states would revolt and eventually bring down the communist system.
Eric Hoffer, the jovial “longshoreman philosopher” and author, delivered a memorable, scathing attack on the anti-individualist aspects of Socialism and Liberalism in his first, most famous work, "First Things, Last Things" (1951). Hoffer continued the diatribe in his "The Ordeal of Change" (1963).
In “The Temper of Our Time” (1967) he warned that America should avoid foreign interventions, though he did initially support the Vietnam War.
Hoffer is not actually considered to be a strict conservative, however, since he remained apart from any particular political ideology. But he was fascinated by how people adopted political ideologies and came under the spell of mass movements and fanaticism. He thought that a lack of personal self-esteem was responsible and that an adherent of one strong ideology could easily switch to another, such as Trotskyites becoming neoconservatists.
Dr. Milton Friedman, seen here shortly after winning the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics, taught for 30 years at the University of Chicago and had the ear of several U.S. presidents. Friedman revealed weak points in the previously sacrosanct economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, popularized “supply-side economics,” created the doctrine known as monetarism, and in general championed an unfettered free market.
Following his death in 2006, some professors and students at the University of Chicago opposed the naming of a new institute after Friedman, saying the association with the economist's hands-off economic prescriptions was increasingly troubling amid the global financial meltdown of the time.
Uncompromising philosopher, founder of the Classical Liberal movement (today called libertarianism) and central figure of the Austrian School of Economics who mentored the Nobel Prize winner Friederich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises was an implacable foe of authoritarian governments in all its forms: Nazism, Marxist Socialism, and so forth. He also opposed overwhelming coercive regulation and antiquated tax codes.
Mises influenced many economists, along with novelist Ayn Rand, who popularized classical liberal economic ideas with her best-selling writings.
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, historian, moralist, social and literary critic, and author of fiction. Barry Goldwater proclaimed him the greatest thinker of the age. He’s seen here with Ronald Reagan.
2013 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Kirk’s masterful dissertation at St. Andrews University in Scotland, which appeared as the acclaimed 1953 book, “The Conservative Mind.” It was heavily influenced by Edmund Burke and espoused traditionalist conservatism. St. Andrews recently sent the manuscript of the dissertation — two leather-bound volumes of 1,500 pages and 1,000 pages — to The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, a nonprofit education organization based in Mecosta, Mich.
Annette Y. Kirk, Kirk's widow, is President of the Center and continues his legacy. Today she quotes her late husband’s view that the best reformer is one who “combines an ability to reform with a disposition to preserve; the man who loves change is wholly disqualified, from his lust, to be the agent of change.”
Interestingly, Kirk viewed libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and was suspicious of neoconservatives. He also worried that “democracy” would be transformed into a sort of secular pseudo-religion.
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Barry Morris Goldwater was America’s leading conservative politician, espousing small government, free enterprise, and a strong national debate. Although not a political philosopher per se, one of the reasons we include him here is because of his immensely popular book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which appeared in 1959 and by 1963 had sold 100,000 hardback and 400,000 paperback copies.
Ironically, the book, Goldwater’s literary monument, was actually ghostwritten in 1959 by two people: Conservative activist and Catholic writer L. Brent Bozell Jr., who was married to Bill Buckley’s sister, Patricia, worked with Stephen Shadagg, Goldwater’s Senate campaign manager and “alter ego” who was chairman of Arizona's Republican Party and had written most of Goldwater’s newspaper columns for him. Bozell and Shadagg drew upon Goldwater’s many columns to craft the book, which some critics viewed more as a manifesto than a treatise.
Known as the publicity-shy “godfather of neoconservatism,” Kristol was a political commentator who helped revitalize the Republican Party following Barry Goldwater’s1964 presidential defeat and laid the foundation for the coming of the Reagan presidency. He influenced everyone from William F. Buckley to David Brooks.
Starting in 1965, Kristol’s magazine, The Public Interest, attacked the “welfare state” and the idea that government social policies could bring about positive change. He condemned welfare programs as creating a culture of dependency and assailed affirmative action because it fostered social divisions and hurt its supposed beneficiaries.
Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative? “A liberal mugged by reality.”
A leading, fiercely neoconservative pundit who edited Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, Podhoretz has long advocated the exercise of American military power in dealing with problems abroad, particularly when it comes to the “Islamofascist” subset of the Islamic world in defense of Israel. Needless to say, he sees Iran as a tremendous threat and likens the U.S./Iran situation to Europe’s pre-World War II appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Podhoretz has called President Obama an “anti-American leftist” who aims “to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II.” Podhoretz has advised politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani and is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Contemporary American conservatism will probably never see another author and commentator the magnitude of William Frank Buckley Jr. In 1955, he founded National Review, a publication that heavily influenced the conservative movement. He reached millions more people, however, by hosting 1,429 episodes of his TV show, “Firing Line,” from 1966 until 1999. He was the author of more than 50 books, and like many pundits, he had a newspaper column; interestingly, he was also the author of spy novels.
If the most uninformed member of the American public heard the word “conservative” it was likely the image of William F. Buckley that came to mind. ... As for Buckley himself, he alternated, calling himself by turns a libertarian or conservative.
© 2014 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
NewsMax, Monday, 18 Nov 2013 02:43 PM
Here are 16 of the great conservatives, intellectual stepping stones leading to the present day.
1. Confucius (551–479 BC)
Known for centuries in China as the Model Sage for Ten Thousand Ages, Confucius, like modern-day conservatives Russell Kirk and T.S. Elliot, stressed the “permanent things” of society. His term wu-ch’ang, or "Five Norms," represents: jen, “humaneness;” I; “righteousness;” li, “ritual,” “ceremony,” “proper deportment,” etc.; chih, “sagacity,” “wisdom;” and hsin, “trustworthiness.”
Confucius promoted social stability and family values (shades of George H. Nisbet) along with humility, honesty, modesty, studiousness and social duty. The Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” also appears in his great work, “The Analects.”
Chinese communists originally despised Confucianism and did everything they could to eradicate what they viewed as a philosophy from the days of feudalism that encouraged social inequity and interfered with social justice. Modern China has rehabilitated his reputation, however.
Granted, modern women find Confucius a bit too conservative, with his belief that a woman’s allegiance should pass from father to husband to son. But his immense influence on the history of Asian thought cannot be denied.
2. Cato the Elder (234–149 BC)
Marcus Porcius Cato, foe of Julius Caesar and defender of the republican principles of civic virtue, was renowned for his strong opposition to luxury, believing that Hellenic (Greek) culture threatened Rome. Like his fellow Roman, the great orator Cicero, Cato believed one should both know and restrain oneself.
As censor, Cato scrutinized the conduct of candidates running for office and of military generals. He urged the Romans to destroy its trading rival, Carthage, ending every speech and conversation with the words “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed). He wrote several books, one a manual on how to run a farm.
Incidentally, today’s Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., is named not after Cato but after “Cato’s Letters,” a series of 144 inspiring and influential political essays written in the 18th century by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who appropriated Cato as a pseudonym.
3. John Locke (1632–1704)
Long before Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, there was the more fundamental Social Contract of John Locke, an English philosopher and physician who was one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. In the Social Contract, people must knowingly agree to live and work together. If any party at any time breaks the pact, then other members of community may choose to remove the dissenter or dissolve the union altogether.
Liberals believe Locke is the Father of Liberalism because he laid the foundation for liberal epistemology (how we know what we know). Conservatives believe he is the Father of Conservatism because he founded a natural law political philosophy, which assumes that one has an innate nature and values.
Libertarians also like Locke. To Locke, property is acquired by exercising one’s labor over it. His conception of government is one of limits, with the rule of law dampening the impulse to tyranny. However, though the individual in Locke’s worldview has rights, those rights are also bound by social duties and responsibilities.
Locke’s defense of the English Declaration of Rights in 1689, with its right of free speech, right to bear arms, and freedom from taxation without representation, inspired the American colonists to regain these rights nearly a century later. As more than one political philosopher has pointed out, the American Revolution was basically a conservative event, a thunderous way to recover rights that had been brushed under the rug by King George III and Parliament.
4. Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
Unlike his brethren of the idealistic Enlightenment, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke — considered the father of modern conservatism — saw limits to human reason. His distrust of pure democracy is echoed today in the Electoral College, that last protection against unbridled public rule. Indeed, Burke was perfectly at ease with the idea of a monarchy and classed society. Moreover, he felt that both Church and State draw their inspiration from the same divine source and are in a sense inseparable. Thus, he rebuffed the idea of a social contract, believing that government derives its authority from ancient innate principles of virtue, articulated in religion, tradition, myth, and folklore.
As philosopher Jesse Norman wrote, Burke didn’t believe in small government but “slow government,” infused with unpretentiousness and humility, always pushing for reform rather than radicalism and revolution.
Despite his disbelief in the ability of unbridled individual freedom to bring personal or social happiness and his fear of liberalism’s trappings, Burke hated injustice and any abuse of great power. He was against oppression of the American colonies and the exploitations of the East India Company in India. He rejected military adventurism and argued for the phasing out of slavery.
American revolutionary Tom Paine hated Burke, viewing him as a defender of the privileged and opponent of free individuals, but Burke was admired by such later political greats as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
5. Goethe (1749–1832)
Germany’s supreme dramatist and poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reinvented himself, reigning in his youthful romantic, revolutionary spirit and remolding himself as a conservative and classicist. As he expressed it: “Everything that liberates the spirit without a corresponding growth in self-mastery is pernicious, ” and “The classical I call the healthy and the romantic the diseased.”
Great British thinkers such as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Arnold were all swayed toward conservatism by Goethe’s powerful writings.
6. Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
Among America’s Founding Fathers, Hamilton was perhaps the most conservative and nationalistic. One of New York’s leading attorneys, he wrote half of the Federalist Papers and put America on a sound financial footing with a Treasury that assumed state debts as well as debts owed by the national government. He set up the Bank of the United States to make liquidity in financial markets possible, and founded the Federalist Party, to boot.
Simply to list Hamilton’s achievements would take an entire book.
7. Irving Babbitt (1865–1933)
A Harvard French literature scholar and eccentric genius, Babbitt was heavily influenced by Edmund Burke. In the 1890s he and Paul Elmer More formulated what became The New Humanism, opposing the emotional, intuitive tenets of Naturalism and Romanticism. They instead called for classical ethics, morality, systematic reason, and universal conservative values. Novelist Sinclair Lewis denounced the New Humanists in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, having not-so-coincidentally named the narrow-minded, philistine title character of his 1922 novel “Babbitt” after Irving Babbitt.
Babbitt went on to write such classic conservative works as “Democracy and Leadership” (1924).
For Babbitt, the world was not a series of accidents, but had a transcendental purpose. Individuals are born with certain natural rights, which the government should protect, particularly property rights. Morals are not relative but absolute in his world.
Babbitt was an educator for more than 40 years, and he believed that civilization’s most crucial act is the education of its children. As Prof. Robert C. Koons wrote of Babbitt’s idea: “All other social and political practices, whether the scope of civil liberties, the worship of gods or ideals, or the distribution of benefits and burdens, are merely the epiphenomena of the cultural ethos created by education.”
8. Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961)
An American writer and editor who was a confessed courier for Russian spies, Whittaker Chambers is seen here testifying before a Senate Judiciary Internal Security Subcommittee, in New York, Aug. 16, 1951, about Red infiltration in America.
Chambers’ five rolls of photographic film known as the “pumpkin papers” (because they were hidden in a pumpkin field) both catapulted anti-communist Congressman Richard Nixon to fame and sent U.S. State Department superstar Alger Hiss to prison for three and a half years in 1950.
Later, in 1952, Chambers wrote the book “Witness,” to immense acclaim. A masterpiece of its kind, it is partly autobiographical and partly a polemic against communism. Ronald Reagan would later claim that reading this book spurred his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican. (Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.")
Chambers edited and wrote for William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine from 1957 to 1959. His final book, "Cold Friday," was published posthumously in 1964. A strangely prophetic work, it correctly predicted that the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellite states would revolt and eventually bring down the communist system.
9. Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
Eric Hoffer, the jovial “longshoreman philosopher” and author, delivered a memorable, scathing attack on the anti-individualist aspects of Socialism and Liberalism in his first, most famous work, "First Things, Last Things" (1951). Hoffer continued the diatribe in his "The Ordeal of Change" (1963).
In “The Temper of Our Time” (1967) he warned that America should avoid foreign interventions, though he did initially support the Vietnam War.
Hoffer is not actually considered to be a strict conservative, however, since he remained apart from any particular political ideology. But he was fascinated by how people adopted political ideologies and came under the spell of mass movements and fanaticism. He thought that a lack of personal self-esteem was responsible and that an adherent of one strong ideology could easily switch to another, such as Trotskyites becoming neoconservatists.
10. Milton Friedman (1912–2006)
Dr. Milton Friedman, seen here shortly after winning the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics, taught for 30 years at the University of Chicago and had the ear of several U.S. presidents. Friedman revealed weak points in the previously sacrosanct economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, popularized “supply-side economics,” created the doctrine known as monetarism, and in general championed an unfettered free market.
Following his death in 2006, some professors and students at the University of Chicago opposed the naming of a new institute after Friedman, saying the association with the economist's hands-off economic prescriptions was increasingly troubling amid the global financial meltdown of the time.
11. Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973)
Uncompromising philosopher, founder of the Classical Liberal movement (today called libertarianism) and central figure of the Austrian School of Economics who mentored the Nobel Prize winner Friederich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises was an implacable foe of authoritarian governments in all its forms: Nazism, Marxist Socialism, and so forth. He also opposed overwhelming coercive regulation and antiquated tax codes.
Mises influenced many economists, along with novelist Ayn Rand, who popularized classical liberal economic ideas with her best-selling writings.
12. Russell Kirk (1918–1994)
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, historian, moralist, social and literary critic, and author of fiction. Barry Goldwater proclaimed him the greatest thinker of the age. He’s seen here with Ronald Reagan.
2013 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Kirk’s masterful dissertation at St. Andrews University in Scotland, which appeared as the acclaimed 1953 book, “The Conservative Mind.” It was heavily influenced by Edmund Burke and espoused traditionalist conservatism. St. Andrews recently sent the manuscript of the dissertation — two leather-bound volumes of 1,500 pages and 1,000 pages — to The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, a nonprofit education organization based in Mecosta, Mich.
Annette Y. Kirk, Kirk's widow, is President of the Center and continues his legacy. Today she quotes her late husband’s view that the best reformer is one who “combines an ability to reform with a disposition to preserve; the man who loves change is wholly disqualified, from his lust, to be the agent of change.”
Interestingly, Kirk viewed libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and was suspicious of neoconservatives. He also worried that “democracy” would be transformed into a sort of secular pseudo-religion.
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13. Barry Goldwater (1919–1998)
Barry Morris Goldwater was America’s leading conservative politician, espousing small government, free enterprise, and a strong national debate. Although not a political philosopher per se, one of the reasons we include him here is because of his immensely popular book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which appeared in 1959 and by 1963 had sold 100,000 hardback and 400,000 paperback copies.
Ironically, the book, Goldwater’s literary monument, was actually ghostwritten in 1959 by two people: Conservative activist and Catholic writer L. Brent Bozell Jr., who was married to Bill Buckley’s sister, Patricia, worked with Stephen Shadagg, Goldwater’s Senate campaign manager and “alter ego” who was chairman of Arizona's Republican Party and had written most of Goldwater’s newspaper columns for him. Bozell and Shadagg drew upon Goldwater’s many columns to craft the book, which some critics viewed more as a manifesto than a treatise.
14. Irving Kristol (1920–2009)
Known as the publicity-shy “godfather of neoconservatism,” Kristol was a political commentator who helped revitalize the Republican Party following Barry Goldwater’s1964 presidential defeat and laid the foundation for the coming of the Reagan presidency. He influenced everyone from William F. Buckley to David Brooks.
Starting in 1965, Kristol’s magazine, The Public Interest, attacked the “welfare state” and the idea that government social policies could bring about positive change. He condemned welfare programs as creating a culture of dependency and assailed affirmative action because it fostered social divisions and hurt its supposed beneficiaries.
Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative? “A liberal mugged by reality.”
15. Norman Podhoretz (born 1930)
A leading, fiercely neoconservative pundit who edited Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, Podhoretz has long advocated the exercise of American military power in dealing with problems abroad, particularly when it comes to the “Islamofascist” subset of the Islamic world in defense of Israel. Needless to say, he sees Iran as a tremendous threat and likens the U.S./Iran situation to Europe’s pre-World War II appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Podhoretz has called President Obama an “anti-American leftist” who aims “to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II.” Podhoretz has advised politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani and is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.
16. William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008)
Contemporary American conservatism will probably never see another author and commentator the magnitude of William Frank Buckley Jr. In 1955, he founded National Review, a publication that heavily influenced the conservative movement. He reached millions more people, however, by hosting 1,429 episodes of his TV show, “Firing Line,” from 1966 until 1999. He was the author of more than 50 books, and like many pundits, he had a newspaper column; interestingly, he was also the author of spy novels.
If the most uninformed member of the American public heard the word “conservative” it was likely the image of William F. Buckley that came to mind. ... As for Buckley himself, he alternated, calling himself by turns a libertarian or conservative.
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